What it is
The Quiet Year is a collaborative map game about a community trying to survive one fragile year. Play focuses on what the community needs, what it builds, what it misunderstands, and what the map slowly reveals.
Table reference
The Quiet Ones Rules
A living reference for how we are playing The Quiet Ones. Where it comes from, and how it differs from its inspiration.
Public scope
The Rules
Overview
What is The Quiet Year?
How it matters here
The Quiet Ones uses The Quiet Year ruleset with minor tweaks for our table. The map, failures, names, ruins, fears, and unanswered questions from this game can become history for whatever comes after.
Opening reading
The Beginning of the End
A feeling rung out across the world.
It came quietly at first, in dreams and in pauses between conversations, in hushes after arguments. People from different roads, different homes, different griefs, and different lives began to feel the same impossible pull. Not toward safety nor glory. Toward a singular place.
Some arrived with carts, bringing their whole library or collections. Others arrived with nothing. Some came alone. Some came with the last people they love. None of them could explain why they had come, not fully. But when they stood together at last, beneath the same wide sky, they found that each of them knew the same name.
The Quiet Ones.
Something is coming, or maybe has come. Perhaps the world already knows it and is pretending not to. There is unrest beyond this place: governments trembling, old loyalties breaking, rumors moving faster than truth. But here, for reasons no one understands, there is one year.
One quiet year.
A year to build. To remember. To argue. To plant. To mourn. To make something worth saving, even if salvation is not promised.
No one knows what The Quiet Ones are. No one knows what will happen when they arrive.
But all of you came here.
And now the map is empty.
Setup
Before the first card
The deck
The game is built around a year of fifty-two weeks. Each card represents one week and is drawn by the active player on their turn. The prompt is read aloud and resolved before the community takes its weekly action.
The seasons
There are four seasonal decks. Winter contains the possibility of a sudden ending: The Quiet Ones card. When it appears, the game ends.
Roles
Who we are
Represent the community
We care about the community from above rather than embodying specific characters. When we speak, we may be representing one person, a faction, a habit, a fear, or the mood of many people at once.
Introduce dilemmas
We also bring pressure to the table. Cards, discoveries, and projects give us chances to introduce problems, opportunities, and moral questions, then return to caring about how the community survives them.
Terrain
Sketching the place
- Begin with a brief discussion of the general terrain and habitat. Keep it fast: a forest, a rocky coast, an old mining camp, a wet plain, a half-abandoned district.
- Each player adds one local terrain detail and sketches it onto the map.
- Draw rough, simple shapes. Leave plenty of blank space for later additions.
- The community should be large enough to matter on the map, roughly one third of the page. Unless we decide otherwise, assume about sixty to eighty people.
- At this point, pause the reading and sketch together.
Resources
Starting resources
Choose what matters
- Each player names one important resource for the community.
- A resource can be material, social, environmental, or protective.
- Examples include clean water, food, shelter, fuel, medicine, safety, tools, trust, or access to a route.
- Once a resource is named, it matters to the story.
Abundance and scarcity
- As a group, choose one named resource to be in abundance.
- All other named resources begin in scarcity.
- Record those lists clearly.
- Represent abundance or scarcity on the map with symbols, drawings, or absence. Avoid writing words on the map when a symbol can carry the meaning.
Expectations
How to approach play
Players speak for the community and its tensions, not only for one personal character.
The map is a shared record. If something matters, draw it, mark it, name it, or leave a visible absence.
The goal is not to solve everything. Some details should survive as mysteries for later stories.
When the table disagrees, make the disagreement visible in the fiction. The map can hold contradictions, contested names, and disputed borders.
Changes
Our version
- The tone leans toward folk horror, vanished infrastructure, soft apocalypse, and archival uncertainty.
- The map should stay intimate enough to change by hand.
- Names, symbols, ruins, taboos, routes, and failed projects can become part of the ongoing record.
- Do not rush to identify the hidden threat. Preserve traces, witnesses, and consequences before naming causes.
- When a prompt would reveal too much too early, answer through omen, local behavior, altered geography, or a missing record.
Basic unit
The week
The active player draws from the current season, reads the prompt aloud, chooses how to resolve it, and follows any special instructions.
Project dice count down by one. If a project reaches zero, it is completed and the map is updated to show the result.
The active player takes one weekly action: discover something new, hold a discussion, or start a project. The detailed action reference lives on the Turns page.
Resources can change whenever the fiction demands it. A completed project or card prompt might remove a scarcity, create a new one, or establish an abundance.
Handoff
What the year leaves behind
Places
Keep locations with strong emotional weight, odd geometry, repeated symbols, or practical use for future expeditions.
Names
Carry forward family names, vanished workers, local saints, informal titles, and people blamed for things they did not fully control.
Failures
Failed projects are excellent ruins. Preserve what was attempted, who opposed it, and what was left unfinished.
Questions
Unanswered questions should remain useful later. That means you are creating a world with memory, not a puzzle with one answer.