THIS IS THE final episode of season 3 of Ludonarrative Dissidents, and what an amazing way to end things. We played seminal story-game The Quiet Year with two fantastic guests: designer Avery Alder, the creator, and Dr Emily Friedman, the world’s foremost scholar of actual-play and recorded game experiences, and who is currently Public Humanities Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Em uses The Quiet Year in her teaching but has never had the chance to talk to Avery about it, so we were overjoyed to be able to put them in the same virtual room for this. The whole thing was a privilege and a pleasure and fantastic fun, and a brilliant finale to the (groan) two and a half years this season has taken to complete.
Because each session of The Quiet Year has the creation of a map at its heart, this is a video episode and is hosted on Youtube. You should still be able to enjoy and understand it without seeing the map, we mostly describe what we are drawing as we go. Video and audio were recorded with Restream, which is also the tool we use for our livestreams. The episode is about three hours long.
We analysed The Quiet Year back in episode 9 of season 1 and as you’d guess we liked it enormously. It is not a long document but it is perfectly assembled and has become the ur-text for an entire style of indie RPG design.
The Quiet Year is available as a PDF download or in print form, and I urge you to get the boxed version if the shipping costs are not going to destroy you. It is a beautiful artefact, complete with tiny skulls and all, though you can play perfectly well with just the digital version.
- Avery’s website, Buried Without Ceremony, where you can buy physical copies of The Quiet Year and her other amazing games including Monsterhearts, Ribbon Drive and Dream Askew.
- Emily’s website, describing her work and where you can find more of it.
- Owlbear Rodeo, the virtual tabletop we used for the map in this episode.
- The Quiet Year at DriveThruRPG
No conventional episode notes for this one, except one quick thing: Ross mentioned a beach in France where Garfield phones washed up for thirty-five years. Eventually this was tracked to a shipping container that was stuck in a fissure in the coast. If we need a metaphor for this episode, and the season, and human life on earth, surely this is perfect: how long do we continue to put up with this koyaanisqatsi, a way of life that calls for another way of being?
It’s been a great season. Thanks for listening, thanks to all our guests and backers and supporters and the members of our Discord. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this podcast or these notes has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and chat about it on our friendly Discord.
If you click on any of the above links to DriveThruRPG and buy something, Ludonarrative Dissidents will receive a small affiliate fee. You will not be charged more, and the game’s publisher will not receive less, it’s a win-win-win. Thank you for supporting the podcast this way.