![]() The other, Roots and Flowers, is a solarpunk hack of John Harper’s Lasers and Feelings, which will soon be available on Role. “And I hope that by imagining this not at all impossible future, I am a Maker, and that by imagining any futures at all, it is Made.” “Every day as I imagine myself embarrassing my now 2-year-old kid to their peers in teenagehood I realize I feel hope,” Caetano writes in the itch.io notes for Maker. One, Maker, is a solo journaling game about imagining impossible futures. ![]() Two of those games came from creator and game master Gabriel Caetano. In 2021, creators Jo Walton and Eric Stein held the Applied Hope jam, a game jam focused on RPGs, zines and more focused on solarpunk and utopias. Mechanically, Return to the Stars creates space to do so with in-game space for downtime and reflection, and in-between session options for creative tinkering to enhance future sessions. ![]() Coming up with the mission is an important cornerstone of character creation, and Sabalauskas said in a geek-culture-oriented, abundant society where people spend their time “wondering if the third reboot of Yuri on Ice in the 24th century was the best” or sitting by the pool while robots bring you margaritas, finding reasons for your character to choose to put themself at risk and help others prompts compelling storytelling and reflection in a space of safety and abundance. Now, the Convention Authority sends adventurers on missions to travel to the stars not to conquer, but to reconnect. The world of Return to the Stars is one of post-scarcity - 120 years ago, a great disaster made galactic travel impossible. “There’s so much energy from that, and that energy is usually coming from a very pro-social place,” he said. The game is, in part, a love letter to geek culture (the analogue to the Galactic Federation is called “The Convention Authority”) and the ways sharing stories helps us make meaning of the world, and while Sabalauskas acknowledges the problematic elements of that culture, he finds something hopeful in the shared, communal enthusiasm of it. The space opera element of the game emerged during the start of the Trump administration, as Sabalauskas was attending conventions and thinking about media that gave him hope in dark times, namely Star Trek, which was initially created at a time of violent change and upheaval. We’re realizing that we want to be better than we are and define ourselves, and we need to have spaces to do that.” “I think, in a similar way, a lot of games strive for those more optimistic notes. “People have an intuitive sense that there is darkness in the world and want to process and confront that with a grimdark game or a horror game,” Mark Salabauskas, publisher and lead designer on the Fate Core-powered space opera RPG Return to the Stars, told Polygon in an interview. Hopeful spins on the post-cataclysm genre run the gamut in tone and setting, from Machine Age Productions’ futuristic, solutions-oriented Flatpack to the community-focused, Powered by the Apocalypse-influenced solarpunk of Dyer Rose’s Arcology World from Norton Glover’s high-flying prairie-rewilding adventure Buffalo Commons to the shitpost-y, “be gay do crime” glory of Riverhouse Games’ This is a Game About Fishing. That need is at the core of hopepunk, a term coined by author Alexandra Rowland as the opposite of “ grimdark.” As hopepunk and its sibling genre solarpunk become more popular in the cultural imagination, more and more TTRPG designers are bucking the grim apocalypse trends and playing with visions of the future that prioritize care, community, optimism, and joy. But with living in difficult, turbulent times comes a desire to see more visions of a future where we decide to make things better. Just as grim, dystopian post-apocalyptic visions of the world have held a lasting place in popular culture, tabletop role-players have woven stories of barren wastelands, burnt-out urban hellscapes and eerie cyberpunk capers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |