Players: Erik, Jerome, Sam, Mo, Evan.

Setup: a pretty straightforward post-collapse thing around a river delta in Southeast Alaska. The collapse had happened within living memory. Initial scarcities: oil, medical supplies, water-bottles. Abundance: fish.

This was a super-contemptuous Quiet Year; the group was still divided by a lot of political/religious attitudes from before the collapse, as well as very divided opinions about the roles of the elders, religion, violence and technology.

Apparently we had a lot of unstable space-junk in orbit; there was already a crashed space-station lying around, and over the course of the game two major facilities got turned into smouldering craters. Other terrible things included mysterious seething stuff from underground that poisoned the fish, a possibly-related plague, fractious and well-armed military neighbours, and bears. Food sources were very boom-bust. There was a strong sense, particularly around midsummer, that this had turned out to be a particularly awful location, and there were lots of inconclusive attempts to relocate. Particularly early on, we had a lot of, uh, less-than-super-useful projects going on, plus a lot of really nasty events and Discoveries.

I aimed a few Discussions at broad-ranging cultural questions ('What is best in life?', 'Who was the greatest hero of the Former Age?', 'What shall we teach our children about the Collapse?'); previously I've mostly seen Discussions about very specific issues like 'What should we do about this crime' or similar. I think this did a good job of enriching our sense of the community, at the cost of making people tip their hands rather significantly about the factions they represented.

(Side-note: is it more interesting to keep people guessing about your faction for as long as possible, or to make things clear early on?)

By the arrival of the Frost Shepherds, we had sealed off the Pipe of Mystery Muck, significantly diminished the power of the remnant military, and developed rabbit-farming for food and basic herbal medicine. On the other hand, we still had a scarcity of oil, the elders had all packed up and left, the fish stocks hadn't recovered from mystery pollution, and the as-yet-uncured plague had devastated fertility. Also, the odds of total obliteration by falling space-junk are probably pretty high.