Player-facing summary
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
Only player-facing rules live here
Overview
What is The Quiet Year?
How it matters here
The Quiet Ones is a prelude inside Stellar Dawn. The map, failures, names, ruins, fears, and unanswered questions from this game can become history for the larger campaign.
Setup
Before the first card
Agree on the community
- Name the settlement, refuge, station, caravan, or hidden district.
- Define what the community has too little of and what it has in uncomfortable abundance.
- Draw three ordinary places, one beloved place, one dangerous place, and one place everyone avoids explaining.
Choose the pressure
- Decide what recent event made survival feel possible again.
- Decide what larger force will eventually end the year: winter, evacuation, discovery, invasion, collapse, or something stranger.
- Write one rumor that is probably false and one fact that everyone wishes were false.
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 Stellar Dawn.
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 community may be planetary, orbital, or ship-adjacent, but the map should stay intimate enough to change by hand.
- Names, symbols, ruins, taboos, routes, and failed projects can become canon in Stellar Dawn.
- 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.
Procedure
Session flow
Open Foundry or the shared map space, review tone expectations, and make sure everyone can see the current record.
Draw from the current season, resolve the prompt in the community's voice, update the map, then choose one clear action for the community to take.
Record new map details, projects, scarcities, discoveries, disagreements, and unanswered questions as they emerge.
Update the session log, save the current map image, and decide what should remain public, hidden, or unresolved.
Handoff
What becomes campaign history
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 become clues, rumors, route hazards, faction secrets, or artifacts in the main campaign.