You may have heard of The Quiet Year if you are a fan of The Adventure Zone podcast. It was used as a prologue to Ethersea, setting the stage for the entire adventure.

Perhaps it was a natural disaster, or the tensions between nations that left scars too deep to heal. You have scattered across the lands without a place to call home, until now. The remains of your community, only a few dozen strong, have found a place to start over. The Shepherds will bring Winter soon enough, but until then you can spend The Quiet Year preparing, exploring, gathering resources, and rebuilding what you can as the weeks quickly pass by.

This is your opportunity to create a new settlement filled with struggle, victory, failure, and a history that will give you inspiration for as many characters and stories as you want. Your imagination is the only limit. Arrive at your next game with a unique and richly detailed place where your character grew up, a place that inspired and molded them into the adventurer and hero they are destined to be.

But What Exactly is The Quiet Year?

The Quiet Year is a storytelling map-making game, focused on a single community and their immediate surroundings. Like most world building games, the narrative comes first, and the core of what we create is the story of a new settlement. A deck of cards is used to produce prompts through Spring, Summer, and Autumn as the players plan and make choices in hopes of being prepared for Winter, where the game can end at any time. The Quiet Year is great for players of all levels who enjoy improv, creative writing, or telling stories, as well as those that enjoy collaborative worldbuilding and deep lore.

What I Provide:

Upon sign up, please send me a message using the “Contact” button or through the RPG Club Discord so I can get you access to The Quiet Year Player Guide as well as the full rules. I will act as Moderator, drawing cards, taking notes, and guiding players through the turns. We will use Zoom for video and audio, and Whiteboard Online for sketching the features on a map, which will be saved and stored in a public Drive folder for everyone to access later.

What You Need: 

A webcam, a mic, and your creativity.

This one-shot is expected to run 3 hours depending on when the King of Spades is drawn during Winter.

Please feel free to reach out to me with the “Contact” icon above so I can answer any questions you may have.