Orichalcum, and Map Makers

Playing the part of exiled citizens from a distant empire, the players of Orichalcum do not play “characters.” Not really. Instead, they take turns in randomly selecting five “pillars” — important aspects of their lost culture — and drawing them on a map of the empire’s land. The exiles describe their memories of said pillar, and then draw their own version on their own land, explaining the differences between the original and the hollow imitation.

The purpose of the game is not to go off on grand adventures, delve dungeons, or thwart villains. It’s not to grow as a person or overcome character flaws. The goal of Orichalcum is to draw a map.

It is hardly a unique concept, with recent peers such as Ex Novo, The Quiet Year, The Ground Itself, and I’m Sorry Did You Say Street Magic all providing similar storytelling goals. Some map-drawing RPGs have built in narratives; The Hidden Lives of Trees, for example, includes minigames about droughts and storms to spice up the usual shared narrative building.

It is still collaborative storytelling, just not a story of people.

RPGs are oftentimes only concerned with the stories of humans. They may have pointy ears or wrinkled foreheads, have different colored skin or prehensile tails, but they are, in principle, human. They think a bit like us — at least enough like us that they can be played by us — and have perfectly relatable wants and needs.

Most RPGs assume that each player will control one character: if you have five non-GM players, you have five main characters in your story. Troupe RPGs defy this idea, having players portray different characters at different times, or having different numbers of characters and players. You can have one main character who is shared, or multiple characters per player.

There has also recently been an increase in Legacy RPGs — not to be confused with Legacy Board Games — that explore families, or at least humans on a generational scale and timeline. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, The Curse of the House of Rookwood, and Lineage all focus more on families as characters, with multiple individuals adjusting the story as it progresses; but even this is still focused on humans, just more of them.

What if you played something other than a human? And I’m not talking about the RPGs where you play as cats, plants, or plates of spaghetti; those personae are still human enough. What about stories about things that are fundamentally non-human. What about characters who are histories? What about the scenery? What about social movements, biomes, cities, or the whole of a continent?

If this sounds odd or daunting, you’ve never been a GM. A GM doesn’t just play NPCs, but also the land, the weather, the cities themselves. They’re rarely main characters but they’re roleplayed all the same. Ruins can tell stories as clearly as books, and any advocate of urban exploration can certainly talk your ear off about the meta-narratives they’ve experienced from the simple act of plumbing a city’s secrets.

Several RPGs include short or small versions of this creative act during character creation. Iron Edda Accelerated is one such example, where the players create their stronghold and a bit of its history before the game even begins.

Anything can be a character in a narrative. Consider the looming pressure of the One Ring around Frodo’s neck, or the omnipresence of Gotham’s streets for Batman. They may not speak in words, but their influence on the story is as palpable as any protagonist. It is the origin of FATE’s Bronze rule: “anything can be a character.”

What I think is interesting about Orichalcum is its framework: the players are not omniscient narrators but exiles from their homeland. They are not creating a map for amusement, nor crafting a world to adventure in. You are not telling the story of the land objectively, but seeing the old world with melancholic longing; remembering all the things it meant to you and building the story of your new home through the whitespace of your memories.

It’s important to remember that stories do not exist without tellers, and tellers are biased. They have worldviews of their own. Who tells the stories of our heroes? In RPGs, obviously, it’s the players. Even the GMs are often charged with creating situations for the personas to be notable and heroic. Can these heroes make mistakes? Certainly, and they should, but ultimately, their story is one of significance to the tellers.

Making a character is an interesting process in RPGs. It is a combination of imagination and aspiration. Narratively, we don’t know precisely what story our persona’s may take part in. All we can do is create a backstory filled with narrative hooks in the hope that our GMs will take note. Mechanically, we don’t know what the dice will do to us so we stack our bonuses and adjust our stats. We invest in probabilities for certain strategies.

Shaping a character through their story is no more or less complicated than shaping the world around them. City-builders and Map-makers look at the adventures that we tell and ask: what stories can the land tell us?

After all, we anthropomorphize inanimate objects all the time, complaining about weather, appliances, and technology that has it out for us — to say nothing of our relationship with dice — but can we anthropomorphize a place? And if we do, how do we play said place in a way that makes sense to us?

Places are large and complex. They have different facets to themselves depending on the viewer. Consider how 1920 Coney Island might look to a gangster, an immigrant, or a debutante. Consider modern New York as viewed by someone who is rich, poor, terrified, hopeful, or cynical.

It might feel overwhelming, but then consider that every person in the world has just as many facets to themselves as a city. Fractal-like, we too have our slums and our beeches, our gated communities and our open-air parks. We lock parts of ourselves away, showing the best of ourselves to tourists, are known for our cooking, perhaps, or our manufacturing. We suffer traumas like Detroit’s automobile industry crash or the L.A. riots. “Where can I find the best barbecue” can be answered with the name of a city, a restaurant, or a person.

In each of us, a city; each city made of us.