International Rewilding Discussion Forum

Very early preparation now underway. Live in or near western Pennsylvania? Updates as they become available.

What really defines story games comes from Ron Edwards' essay, "System Matters."  Traditional RPG's offer "physics engines" as their rules.  If a story happens, great, but the rules don't have much to do with that.  Story games quite explicitly drive a story forward.

In Primetime Adventures, each character's "screen presence" has a tangible effect of driving nested characters' story arcs forward.  In Dread, everything you do requires you to pull a block from a Jenga tower, and when it falls, the character who pulled that piece dies--which builds a palpable sense of impending doom perfect for the thriller and horror stories Dread focuses on.  In Burning Empires, the three phases and scene economy likewise provide the beginning, middle and end of a sci-fi story.

For The Fifth World, I want a game that will help us rewild by giving us the tools to renew our oral traditions.  I've made some progress codifying an animist ontology into the rules, but now I need to figure out the rules that propel the story forward.  To do that, I need to figure out the principles of oral tradition the way literary theorists have figured out the principles of written stories.  And then, I need to figure out clever rules to emulate that experience.

Picking from the other end, I think the post-colonial perspective of magical realism also presents some fertile ground.  Spiking oral tradition with magical realism ought to get the perfect flavor of feral, as opposed to wild, storytelling.

Obviously, I'll need some help here.

I'll post my thoughts on this thread to keep you up to date, but if you think you can identify common characteristics of how oral stories flow, or how magical realist stories unfold, those observations can really help us out here.  And if you think you know of some clever mechanics that would propel players down those paths, those would help, too.

So, after thinking about The Fifth World as a game of awareness, I started thinking of it as a game of movement, but now I've started considering how it might work as a game of trust.  Specifically, using the prisoner's dilemma as a resolution mechanic.

For now, let's say we use coins.  I'll probably come up with something more evocative later, but let's stick with that for the moment.  You have beads in your relationships, you have a pool of free beads, and you have a coin.  You want to go hunting, since that seems like the archetypal challenge for a game like this.  You pick a place to go hunting, and the player playing that place tells you if any animals reveal their tracks to you here.  Let's say a deer reveals her track there.  You now face a resolution.  The genius loci flips a coin and covers it without looking.  You hide your coin under your hand, heads-up to indicate "Trust," meaning you agree to share the deer meat with your whole community, and offer the proper rites of thanksgiving for the deer.  If the deer also chose trust, your village will have venison for dinner tonight; if not, you'll go home with nothing.

The deer has ten beads; you only have seven in your bowl, but then you also have six beads in your relationship with deer.  "Okay," you say, "I follow the tracks and start to get a feel for the deer's health, weight, and age.  Three beads in to gain the deer's trust."

But then the genius loci matches your bet, and raises you two beads; does that mean the deer chose "trust"?  Or does he just want to compel you to trust, to screw you over?  Have you offended Deer before?  Might he want to punish you now?

No matter, you need to press on.  You see the two beads, and raise him two more.  "I keep on tracking, and find where she slept last night.  Still a little warm; she must have slept late.  Does she feel alright, or has she taken ill?"

The genius loci matches you again, and raises you two more!  "I won't burn beads from my relationship with deer," you say.  "You win."  You raise your hand.  "I chose 'trust' anyway.  You?"

The genius loci raises his hand.  "Trust!" he calls out.  "You enter the clearing, and there she stands.  She sees you, and stands silent and still.  You draw back your bow, and shoot.  She falls to the ground.  You offer the appropriate thanksgiving, and prepare to take her back to the village."

Because you had an encounter with the deer (you both chose trust), you gain a bead to your relationship with Deer.

I've got a lot of things to still work out here.  What happens to the beads you bet?  How do offer the proper staggering to make betrayal lucrative?  I think answering the first question will answer the second, though.  How does this work with group effort?  How does this work with multiple parties involved at once?  Even so, I think this gets us farther than I've gotten so far, and I feel good about this--better than I've felt about most of these mechanics.  What do you all think?

I need some help from the more advanced trackers here.  I don't fancy myself a very good tracker yet, though I've put in enough dirt time to have the basics drop on me like a ton of bricks.  But for those of you who do have some more experience, what ideas do you have about how to make a game of awareness instead of conflict, built around allocating little beads of awareness around a medicine wheel?

Modern RPG's evolved out of wargames, and since we conceive of the universe as constant struggle, those mechanics worked well. You'll even hear, quite often, the mantra that "story is conflict." But what if that just arises, like so many other things we take for granted, from our cultural expectations, and the basic conflict required for our way of life? What if story could also trace relationship, based not on conflict, but on the attempt to synchronize two parties?

In tracking, different modes of awareness mean a great deal. Owl eyes sacrifice focus for breadth, while focus sacrifices breadth. So we already have there an idea of "resource allocation," if you will, where the "resource" simply means your attention. And we have different kinds of awareness: the synaesthetic awareness of the Flesh, the imaginative and intellectual awareness of the wind, our internal awareness expressed as emotions mapped onto the landscape, and so on. I've found this already mapped, quite elegantly, in the medicine wheel.

What if the "character sheet" took the form of a medicine wheel, with concentric circles, that fundamentally mapped your character's current awareness, and the game's mechanics mostly modeled different ways of shifting that awareness? What if, instead of beating a target number, you had to synchronize your awareness with some Other? What if, instead of conflict, this game modeled awareness?

I do not know how to do that yet, so I welcome suggestions.

Could something as simple as, "match the other character's pattern of awareness" work?  It seems like it should involve something more, I don't know, nuanced than that.

I also had a breakthrough recently, realizing that I should have listened to Willem.  But following through his essay on E-Primitive, replacing skills or talents with relationships will certainly make this much more of a tracker's game.  Think of it: any time you want to do something, you'll sit there with your friends, sharing your experiences with different, other-than-human persons.  If you find yourself becoming obsessed and want to become a better gamer, you'll have to start putting in some dirt time! 

Hello all.  I haven't had much online time of late, but I do need to get some ideas that aren't my own.  Can't promise much in the way of well-considered response to this, but I would like to hear people's opinions.  I'm posting this here because I consider RPG's in general to be a social technology with much potential, and the Fifth World in particular, since we're actually making it with that in mind.  (See also, "The Fifth World Manifesto")

Anyway, I heard someone once say that much of the challenge of designing an RPG lies in defining things most of us leave undefined.  For your traditional RPG's, this represents no problem whatsoever: you can represent a character by his attributes (strength, dexterity, constitution, charisma, intelligence, wisdom) and his skills (jump, climb, knowledge, etc.).  This occurs quite naturally, from the perspective of a universe of objects defined by their innate characteristics.

But the Fifth World needs to draw its players into a more fluid, animistic world, one that doesn't define people in terms of innate characteristics, but in terms of relationships.  Basically, I need to figure out how to extrapolate a kind of E-Prime of RPG character models.

David Abram and Graham Harvey have really helped me to understand much more deeply what animists mean by a "person," and while I still stumble trying to describe that to others, I think I know it well enough to work on the Fifth World meaningfully.  I cannot claim that kind of confidence, though, when it comes to the question of "skills" in the animist mindset.  I fear I may still be looking at "skills" in a fundamentally literate way.

So, what does a "skill" mean to an animist?

That poses my biggest question.  If you have ideas on how to model a character in an animistic sense in general, I'm open to suggestions.  We have some ideas on that already in play, but nothing we wouldn't reconsider in light of a good suggestion.  But mostly, I'd like to hear some opinions from others who really understand animism on what animists think of skills.

Syncretism (s?ng'kr?-t?z'?m, s?n'-) n. 1. Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.

I don't care much about learning my European heritige.  I know I have Irish, English, Italian, and Russian in me, but it doesn't interest me to look any further into it, in the spirit of, as Jason would say, Sankofa.

I'd prefer really to forget about all that, and simply pick and choose things that work for the area I live in, and move on from there.

Most of us here are descended from European populations, and engaged in European cultures.  This is really the root of our problem; we were raised as domesticated humans, and now we recognize how much we've been missing, and we're no longer satisfied with that.  We want more.  We want to rewild.

This presents us with a unique challenge: the creation of a new culture.  We have been domesticated, so the idea of ever being wild again is not open to us.  There are certain effects that will probably always be with us.  But other domesticated animals rewild all the time; they don't revert back to their wild state, with no evidence that they were ever domesticated; they become something else.  They become feral.

Cultural appropriation is a big issue that we as rewilding people need to wrestle with.  Our own culture doesn't work, and yet, we can't simply pick and choose from other native cultures like a buffet.  That's just another form of imperialism, a final kind of theft that follows all the others.  The task of rewilding is more complicated than that.  The study of what works in other cultures provides a foundation, but it's not enough on its own.

We can never entirely rid ourselves of what we already are.  Our culture and all of its baggage are already lodged permanently in our heads.  We ignore this fact at our own peril.  What we do not examine is left free to rule over us, because we cannot see what it does or how it moves through our thoughts.  We have piles of examples of how it even makes it impossible to see how other cultures work.  How much of native brilliance has been systematically ignored and dismissed because we could not appreciate it for what it actually is?

That's why I believe central to the task of rewilding is syncretism.  We need to find what works in other cultures, and we need to explore the depths of our own culture for the vague remnants of what once worked, and begin working those themes together.  Rewilding cannot be as simple or as futile as running off into the woods to "play Indian."  It takes a life-long creative struggle committed to creating a new, syncretic culture.

Remember, wild human societies, cultures that work, honor their culture and their ancestors.  We need to find what in our culture, what in the traditions of our ancestors, is worth honoring, and tie that together with the native traditions of the lands we're becoming native to.  Those traditions can hardly remain unchanged as we make them native to a new land, but we cannot dismiss them entirely, either, because they're already too much a part of us.  The tools of belief, myth, and tradition are the only handles we have to keep those threads from burrowing deep into our minds and ruling us unchecked; with those tools, we can explore the fault lines of civilization, and not just rescue ourselves, but redeem whatever good our culture once had before it became civilized.

That means exploring our various European cultures and traditions.  There are strands there worth exploring, common elements found among animists and old-growth cultures as well.  It's a mine-field full of subtle dangers, to be sure, but if we shrink from that task, I don't think rewilding is truly possible.  We are what we are, and we cannot deny that.  We can't simply indulge a fantasy of "playing Indian," and we can't allow simple cultural appropriation.  By the same token, we can't allow the exploration of our own traditions to tip into the "bad old days" of Romantic racism.  It's a difficult middle road fraught with dangers, but I believe that's the only real road possible out of domestication.  Abandoning it to either side may lead us to a place superficially feral, but we'll always have that last bit of domestication holding us back.

Simple mimicry will not suffice.  We must create a new culture for a new type of human, the feral human.  I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's necessary.  Rewilding must be syncretic.

Some examples to give an idea; these are all beginnings, I don't think anyone right now is very close to the end:

Bill Maxwell's "White Road"
Me "Entering Merlin's Domain"