Stories of Winter

 

The stories of winter can be some of the hardest to achieve. With a focus on gloom, despair and ennui, they're basically like playing out a waiting game. Winter comes after the fall of autumn and before the rise of spring. In autumn there is still the struggle to maintain relevance 

The only game I can think to have achieved this adequately is "Polaris", where politics plays out in a cold dark wasteland at the edge of time and space. This happens as immortal elves from a fallen age live in a frozen wasteland of night, awaiting a new dawn that has not come for years/decades/centuries, in the shadows demonic entities threaten the elves, and risk the final fall before a new spring can rejuvenate the land. It's a dark and slow game, highly ritualised. It needs the right group of players to pull off successfully (I've tried it, and even though I thought it had potential, it could have gone better and felt like there were some missteps along the way).

The thing about winter stories is that they often feel like a waiting game. It's often tempting to skip over them, and bring back a new spring. However, the power of the winter story can come from the way it punctuates and provides pacing for the other stories around it. A story that goes from sprint to summer to autumn then skips straight to spring again loses a lot of the impact about what makes those seasons special. To appreciate the movement in the world, sometimes you need to consider the moments of stillness.

I'd even consider a run of game sessions where most of the sessions were winter, with only occasional bursts of activity to really focus on a sense of ennui and hopelessness in a setting. However, I'm not sure how popular a game like that might be.  

Winter Stories 

In Warhammer 40k, the faction most suited to telling the stories of Winter are probably the Necrons, a vast army of silent and deadly terminator-styes robots who have lingered in slumber for longer than most recorded histories. These hordes occasionally wake from millennia of slumber to protect their ancient fortresses and technologies able to destroy suns of a whim, or distort the fabric of the universe. Their time in the world is long gone, but they wait for the moment when their relevance will be needed again. At the time of the 41st millennium, that time has not yet arrived... so en masse they wait, individual units and detachments may protect the hive, but the slumbering continues.

 

If most post-apocalyptic stories tend to be tales of spring (welcoming a potential new hope), and most apocalyptic stories tend to be autumnal (watching the fall of civilisation), there's often a winter period between the time of the fall and the time to start again. Mad Max 2 sits fairly firmly in that category. The first movie sits in a slow collapse of civilisation, but the second movie established that things got a lot worse before focusing on survivors who haven't quite got hope yet, their just doing what they can against the force that strive to drag them down further. 

 

A movie that could easily be considered a winter tale could be the 90s classic, "Clerks". It certainly covers the bases of boredom, ennui, and the feeliing that there are interesting things happening elsewehere, they just aren't happening here where the story is being told. Yes, there's story, but it's more of a character development piece. It's the breathing room that you don't usually get when there is remorseless action driving the narrative.

 

Personally, I like the idea of taking a temporary break from the action to give a story time to breathe.