Twilight Song

Humanity thought they would go on growing, building forever into the bright blue sky. Now they know that’s not true, but they’re left with this: a twilight time of peace. All the time they need to live well, see children and grandchildren grow up, and understand the new world rising to take their place. When dawn comes, they may have vanished—or made a new place for themselves in the new light of day. For now, in these years, there is an opportunity to be together.



Who are you, then? You live alongside humanity, but you’re different—immortal. Maybe you’re a lab-grown or artificially-intelligent child of humanity, or perhaps you’re something older or stranger that came out of the dark into the twilight. You live like them and with them, but time doesn’t draw the same lines on your face. You’re a chronicler, guide, witness, explorer, friend—this is your own immortal life to live as you see fit.

Twilight Song is a map-making and story-telling game set in the twilight decades of humanity’s era. Together, you'll tell the story of an immortal narrator living among humans in this time of change, wonder, and quiet loss.

It takes gusts of inspiration from the pastoral sci-fi manga Yokohama Shopping Log by Ashinano Hitoshi, about a robot living in and exploring a world inhabited by the fading remnants of humanity, and its rules are derived from the map game The Quiet Year by Avery Alder, about a community struggling to survive and build anew in a post-collapse world—reworked to tell the story of a narrator and world on the other side of the collapse.

First you sketch your narrator's home and community on the map, adding a few landmarks and remnants of the past and then you sketch your what sort of person your narrator is. What sort of life do they lead? What habits, traditions, or rituals have they left behind? Maybe they'll take them up again, or make a new way of life.

When ready, you tell their story by narrating short episodes of their life. You'll draw cards to find story prompts on the Season Oracle, with events to play out and questions to answer, then choose:

• Open Your Senses to life around you,
• Learn Something about the world and its people,
• or Make a Plan for everyday rituals and little adventures.

At each year's end you advance the story by anywhere from one night to a whole generation, carrying on until the deck runs dry and the game ends.

This game comes in three versions in the .zip archive:

• a full-colour 26-page rulebook and a separate, print-friendly file including the oracles and a play summary
• a Mobile Play Resource with both oracles and a rules summary
• .txt files of the rules and oracles for screen readers
• playingcards.io imports for Twilight Song

If you're looking for a darker expansion that you can play as a standalone scenario or use to introduce moments of darkness into the original game, look no further than Midnight Signal: a pastoral weird horror playset for Twilight Song!