After playing The Quiet Year a little more, I have a couple observations that the table made for those games.
1) The contempt tokens, as written, were mechanically irrelevant. They only slightly mattered to the fiction.
2) Scarce and abundant resources are likewise mechanically irrelevant. They too only slightly mattered to the fiction.
These are the house rules to The Quiet Year that my table now uses.
1) Contempt Tokens
These are an interesting idea, and as written, they are meant to introduce interpersonal / political conflict into the narrative of the community. I think this is a good idea, but the problem, is that in every case, used as written, my table has found them lacking in punch. You drop contempt on a project on the map? Good for you. Have a cookie and we will just go on with what we were doing.
Our Hack
We decided that when a Contempt token is placed on any project on the map, that project pauses and cannot continue to completion until the Contempt is resolved in the fiction. What we found this does, is escalate the conflict and demand stronger factional commitment. A resolution must be made, and the factions fight harder for what they want. This can be by violence, or by bargaining with another project, but it does accelerate the story.
2) Resources
This is also a game about scarcity in the wake of a war. The problem, is that after initially stating the scarcity or abundance of these things, they cease to matter. Clean drinking water has been declared scarce? The first round of play may introduce a distilling project, but after that, it might well be forgotten, or even if it somehow does not get completed, or gets destroyed, there seems to be no real impact on the subsequent events if it is not addressed again later in the game.
Our Hack
At the beginning of each player's turn, a cost or complication must be addressed related to one scarce resource. A cost might add one to the count down dice for a project as it is slowed down, or a complication might be the loss of a character or thing in the fiction due to the scarcity of the resource. If, for instance, drinking water is scarce, if a well is not dug to get it, building a new wall around the village will take longer as everyone struggles with thirst. By making this a rule at the start of each player's turn, it forces the community to have to confront it more aggressively, and put those scarcity problems more fully into play from the outset.
