dismallyOriented

Hello! It's been a hot minute since the last one of these. In hindsight, session-by-session updates was never going to be sustainable. However, as dedicated table notekeeper, I do have a nice big document I can hammer into a full-mission update. We'll do this in sections: player character intros, an NPCs reference section, and then the sessions themselves.

First, player characters. We're running the "Magpies" crew type, a party based around engineering, salvage, and demolitions work. Songs for the Dusk features crew playbooks, so that any given party has a "class" of its own, with a missions specialty. Ours was demolitions, hence the party name of "Crashers" and our home base, which we dubbed "the Crashpad"

On the roster, we have:
- Marl, the Aegis (it/she) - the team bodyguard, an ex-military wilderness guide who ran escort and protection missions for people in remote locations. It is a quadrupedal crab-like robot with shield-shaped legs and armor plating that it can swap in and out for different missions
- Yara of Nowhere, the Scholar (she/her) - An owl-esque person with feathers and big eyes (enhanced by her glasses). Scholars are the general nerd and research class. Her player came up with the organization "Nowhere", a semi-secretive order which preserved the infrastructure of the internet and archived digital knowledge through the apocalypse and into the current times. All formally inducted members of Nowhere have access to a set of accounts and digital permissions that allow them to hack into systems from the Radiant Era
- Quentim Parable, the Charter (he/him) - my guy, bog standard human, a former traveling caravan merchant who stayed in town to help during a time of struggle and has failed to notice that he no longer intends to leave. The most concise way to describe Charters is the "logistics & support" class. All of the abilities are themed around Blades in the Dark-style flashbacks, planning ahead, and giving mechanical advantages to the rest of the crew. It's very "all according to keikaku" and I love it so much
- Gail, the Scrapper (it/she) - the team techie, a bat-like person with a prosthetic left leg, and a dragon therian. She came to New Haven in the hopes of learning how to become a dragon. Gail is the hardware person to Yara's software expertise, and she has a toolkit full of Fun Gadgets and a lil dragon buddy-bot named Byte
- Morena "Momo", the Witch (she/they) - a New Haven native, a human with green-tinted skin and gold-speckled eyes from a childhood case of dragonpox. She works at the town library, and was granted some small mobile DIONE nodes that can function as her familiars. They take the shape of animal-themed jewelry that can spring into action when needed



( NPC reference )



( Mission 1 Summary )

ghostqueens has been running a Songs for the Dusk campaign for me, metamour, and a loose collection of other friends. Earlier this month we finally met for the first session, a round of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. It's a map-drawing and worldbuilding game, where you use a deck of cards to play out one year in the life of a community, before the Frost Shepherds arrive in winter and end everything. The deck is split out by suits, one for each season, and each card is a prompt describing what happens each week of the titular year.

It's a game I like a lot; I'll be bringing a copy with me to a new year's eve party I'm attending next week. It's been a fun way to get everyone used to being at a table together, and riffing off of each other's ideas. We've managed to make a really Songs-ass community

Highlights

- Our town borders the Resolution Lake in the Meridian Valley. Both of these are part of the existing SftD setting. It’s flanked by a swamp, and there’s another tech restoration community living in a canyon to the north of us, who have settled into caves in the canyon walls.
- A large potentially pre-Radiant pump station lies at the edge of the lake - it’s old, abandoned, and completely untouched by nature even after centuries. There are a lot of other underground caverns and passage to an underground portion of the lake
- the oldest community member is Distributed Intelligence One, aka DIONE. She is an AI who was stolen from unknown previous creators/owners.
- other notable fauna include the crocodiles who live in the lake (one of which has gone and laid a whole nest in the middle of our town), and a large pack of wolves who are a eusocial hivemind

We're only 10 weeks into Spring, because one of our players couldn't make it, and we want to make sure it has a chance to play in the starting season before we move on to Summer. But mannn I'm so excited to find out more about our lil town and to keep playing in this setting together. DIONE is everyone's favorite NPC already (including passerby I've told about the campaign), one of the players wants to make her familiar an active mobile node, and her maintenance needs are an Immediate good hook for our crew (Magpies, techies and scrappers). It's gonna be real fun to figure out how each of our players fits in with the community and what each of our social connections are.