Asks the Earth notes

Some Winter cards are hard to make work early on, because they rely on problems having been established earlier in the game. For example, the one about a project to ensure comfort through Winter – I didn't really have a good idea of what to do with that one because our community was made of hardy nomads and we'd already established that they didn't want to/couldn't raid the sick refugees for supplies.

Really liking some of the implicit characterisation here. I really enjoyed saying that all the angry buzzing of Winter was just a prelude, since we're “more passive and introspective” then, and things like seeing the refugees with white flags as marauders or “I am tired” during that one discussion before the reunification are great too.

Two versions of 'ancestors' – the technologically-advanced people who built all the now-ruined stuff on the steppe and the more mythologised warrior-horde.

I'm considering what would work better – the Colossus attacking us, or just straight up leaving. Does our community even matter in the grand scheme of things, even with all their delusions of grandeur?

Wow, we've gotten really fucked up since Spring started. I almost considered having None activate the Colossus and enslave us to flip the tables and help make them more sympathetic, since right now our big names and lines of thought are bloodthirsty glory-hounds, xenophobic cultists, and law-obsessed outcasts. Azad, Monkh, and Sarangerel seem to be the only probably-reasonable people left, and even they're part of our culture.

Holy shit, what a turn-around. At first I thought it was a little severe for ibntumart to use the machines as the unattended problem, and in such a vicious way (since we also had the snake-things that could've made trouble, and the robot situation was already scary and problematic), but then I drew that card and it all fell into place. And just when I was thinking how great and unusual it was for the community to be able to go where it pleased, due to their horses!

It struck me immediately after I made the post that maybe I should have had Azad take Munkherel away, since he's the man-with-the-plan so often, but then I figured it'd be more interesting to see what happened with him and the machines anyway. [later: well, nothing, but then things turned out very differently to how I was expecting]

This is the first time I think I've seen the apocalypse happen DURING a game rather than before (or after).

I notice that we're being pretty fast and loose with the oracle prompts sometimes. I suspect it's because a lot of the Winter ones assume prior developments and a lot of the Spring ones are for setting up the world, so we had to improvise a bit in those seasons, and the attitude stuck with us.
Really digging the kind of halfway status we've given the horses. They're both a resource (one that's changed multiple times) and community members, having been the subject of the 'disease spreads through the community' and 'the strongest among you dies' cards, as well as being the ones to prompt the peaceful reunion. This compared with the slaves, who're implicit resources and never counted as people.

Now that's a fuckin curveball right there.

Interesting outcome from re-arranging the seasons – the 'cold winds drive out your enemies' card was shifted to the final season, so the threatening force stayed around for longer.

I thought it was interesting that we never really mentioned the Jackals. In previous games they've been sought out, come back, or otherwise cast a shadow on the community. It's perhaps telling of how commonplace wars were for our community. [later: on reflection, there's a different interpretation of the one mention of the Jackals. None spoke a variant of their language, but not as a first language. The fact that the community recognised that might mean we had relatively close contact with the Jackals, close enough that we could tell when someone speaking their language wasn't a native speaker.]

Looking back, I really like how the two key problems – the disagreement over laws and the Colossus – menaced us over time. It took over half a season for laws to turn from something we discussed into an issue that tore the community apart. Meanwhile, we had our first hints that the Colossus was a threat in the middle of Spring, turned fully against it at the end of Spring, faced it down and fled twice, made plans to evacuate if it came for us, and then it finally came alive in the middle of Summer. Even then, it only reached us in the latter half of Autumn, just before the end of the game. The rules of the game – the limited progress each turn – really help to build problems and threats over time.