After a few trials and errors with The Deep Forest (DF), I've found three tricks that really help make it work for our Seattle Story Games settings, re-written here from my original What We Played summary.

1. Avoid Treating it as just The Quiet Year + Monsters
A lot of people are familiar with the original game The Quiet Year (QY), so it's easy to use this short hand, but I've noticed that this sets the wrong tone. Avery is explicit in her summary of the game that she wrote DF to explore what happens when groups of people begin to recover and re-define their cultural identify in the midst of decolonialism.

The point of Taboos and Adoptions is to identify the things and ideas from the oppressing society that these communities are choosing to either integrate into their cultural identity and make their own or they choose to reject as not being part of the identity they want to follow.

This is very different in tone and intent than QY despite the two games being very mechanically similar.

2. Cut the Deck in Half
The Quiet Year and The Deep Forest are really long games. Instead, only keep 6 cards for each season. This makes the game much shorter and has the added benefit of keeping the prompts that you pull from the Oracle different and fresh each time.

3. Steal the Microscope Palette
It doesn't work for every game, but it works very well for DF, and it helps establish some of the general themes and setting up front. Here's how it works:

• Take an index card and put two columns on it: 1) Things I WANT to see in the game, 2) Things I DON'T want to see.
  
• Pass the card around the table and have each player add 1 thing to either the I WANT or the I DON'T WANT list; feel free to discuss and elaborate on each item for a minute or two if you need to get on the same page.
  
• You can also choose to "Pass" and not add anything. Once a Player does this, the palette goes one last time around the table.
  
• An alternative way of ending the palette is to just pass the card around the table twice.