The Quiet Year as initial world-build

So I recently played a game called The Quiet Year, and initially thought that it could be a great starter for AW.  In a sentence, the game is a post-apocalyptic map building game that creates an area, some characters that inhabit it and conflict within.   I think this game could create an awesome shell that the MC and players can create together.

I've played AW quite a bit, but The Quiet Year only once.  Does anyone have more experience with it, and have any thoughts?  I feel like this could be a really beneficial tool to the initial fleshing out of your game.  If you want to check it out:

http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year/

I've played The Quiet Year a number of times, and one of my gaming buddies did exactly what you suggest - used it as the precursor step to his AW campaign. The only caveat is that everyone needs to be more or less on the same page; The Quiet Year imposes no restrictions on the settlement whatsoever, so you can throw in some really random shit if you were so inclined, and that doesn't always make for the best world-building experience. Don't get me wrong, sometimes random inspiration is totally cool.  Other times it is not.

One of the things that The Quiet Year is great for, however, is explicitly deciding what your particular scarcities are.

Aside - as an example of just the kind of random oddity that is occasionally awesome, one of the players in one of our TQY games threw "hats" into the mix as one of our fundamental scarcities. As in, our settlement did not have enough head-coverings. The way this ended up working out in play was that there was a religious belief popular in the settlement that held that it was disrespectful to God to go bare-headed, and much of the conflict in the settlement ended up being centered around this (very conservative) religious viewpoint and a more progressive outlook common amongst the "young folk." It ultimately turned out to be totally awesome, even though the initial suggestion of "hats" was decidedly random and very much tongue-in-cheek.

I think the main point of interest/concern is that The Quiet Year is not a game that has much to say about violence and AW is a game where violence is central and necessary to the setting. I don't know if I have ever played a game of TQY that would have made a straightforward AW setting, for that very reason. It's not that games of the Quiet Year never involve violence (they usually do), but when I imagine an AW-style apocalypse it generally includes pervasive violence on a level people are unlikely to introduce into a reflective game like TQY.

This might be a non-issue depending on how your group plays either game; my own play of AW tends to include less overt violence (but so does my play of TQY, so the gap remains about the same.) And as mentioned, having the players decide up front that this is the plan will make it much easier to ensure that the world of the Quiet Year includes sufficiently apocalyptic & violent elements. An alternative of course is simply to assume that the coming of the Frost Shepherds ushers in an era of violence and desperation, so that the community of TQY becomes a sort of golden-age-within-the-apocalypse that has been lost, or even a model for the pre-apocalyptic world.

It's kind of interesting because my game of TQY was at a convention, so going in, I really had no idea what the end game would be.  In the back of my mind I was thinking, "Ok...at the end of our year, the year of peace will be over.  Then the shit will hit the fan, so we have to be ready," whereas everyone else was thinking about how to build and maintain a functional community. 

At one point, there was a 2nd group that we were sharing our abundance of pineapples with.  I know there isn't a ticker that says, you have 5000 pineapples, but I thought it was unfair for us to freely give pineapples to these people that were not giving us anything in return.  No one else really cared because we had infinite pineapples.  However, if those people knew that at the end of the session we would have to deal with the "others" exploiting our pineapple wealth, I think they maybe would've acted differently.  I'm hoping that people will think with a imminent pre-apocalyptic mindset....Like the guy that builds an underground vault that is filled with food-stores and a gun cache, and not the boy scout that self-sacrificially helps the elderly and dies in the first 20 minutes of the apocalypse. 

Totally great idea... if one of you AW players wants to be a hardholder. TQY is so much about 'building a community' that it wouuld sort of suck to abandon that built community for the wider, vaguer world in which it is embedded. In that useage, TQY is basically just a brainstorming tool... which isn't a bad thing, but the awesome map you just finished is a great focusing element you don't want to chuck aside.

I demo TQY a few times and, boy, does it get varied in convention play! One of our games in no way coulod have gone on to be a setting: The Frost Shepards were the final dissolution of a planet in a massive gass band (think Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring meets Gorillaz videos). Definitely apocalyptic... but also terminal, barring some kind of wild incluion of Lady Blackbird setting elements (airships; complex navigation).

My final point would be to ask if TQY is setting up the apocalypse or is it already post-apocalypse? That seems impoprtant for players to agree upon at the onset. Likewise, will TQQY characters transition into the AW characters, or are they simply ancestor, or are they Legends... or completely forgotten?

[This reminds of threeads about How To Host a Dungeon setting up a dungeon-crawl game... but that is another message board!]

I kind of thought it would be in that place where the apocalypse has occurred, things are unsettling, but they haven't totally gone to pot.  I'm going to start a campaign doing this here pretty soon and I think that is what I will present. 

One question I would like feedback on is if I should have the world-building session first, or should I have them pick characters first?  Would them having their archetypes chosen detrimentally influence the process or would it make the social aspect of TQY more interesting.  I also wonder if it would more naturally create relationships/conflict between PCs by working together or sabotaging each others plans...

I think it depends pretty heavily on how you see the transition between the games happening, what you think your players will be most into, etc.

That caveat aside I would absolutely definitely 100% not have players pick characters before playing TQY, were I doing this. But the fact that this is so clear to me suggests that we might just have very different notions of how the two games would interact, how the fiction would pass from one to the other, etc.

For example I would strongly suggest that all of the PCs in the AW game are members of the first generation of the community to be born after the arrival of the Frost Shepherds, to discourage players from trying to insert their future characters into the fiction of TQY.

I feel pretty strongly that the Quiet Year works best when social groups and dynamics are emergent from the map and the situation; trying to impose specific personalities (or even classes of personality) from the AW playbooks prior to that process of discovery seems like a waste of the game.

I also want my play of TQY to allow me to move fluidly between different community perspectives; I don't want to be worrying about which of these voices that I am temporarily taking on might be 'my PC' later on, and I similarly don't want to be tempted to assume that other players are becoming similarly entrapped by this expectation of future protagonism. And this is ignoring simple logistic complications like one player accidentally killing off the person another player was thinking they wanted to play later on.

Even if the goal is a much tighter continuity, I don't see much upside to pre-selecting playbooks; I guess the main concern would be that someone ends up wanting to play a book that has no obvious place inside the community & situation that are developed in TQY, but that seems like a problem with tons of easy solutions, most of which are likely to add interesting twists and introduce new dynamics to the situation -- which is what you're going to want to be doing anyways, as you move from one game to the other.

But just generally my goal would be to keep the doors as open as possible for unexpected transitions between the two worlds. Maybe after the TQY plays out the players decide they want to _play_ the Frost Shepherds, maybe the way things go down in TQY it's obvious that Brainers have some really specific social niche, or that it doesn't make sense for there to be a Driver, or whatever. Shutting down those possibilities before playing out the first of the games seems to undermine the potential of the experiment.

I agree with pretty much everything Daniel Wood said. :)

One extension, RE playbooks 'not fitting' after you've played TQY: You could always have folks use Contempt to signal vetoing of an addition that would obliterate the validity of a playbook (or spend Contempt to push a playbook back into viability with a Personal Project). HEll, it's a 'better' use of Contempt than in TQY as written! ;)