Noumenon, and Exploration

Noumenon is an RPG…and frankly, that’s almost all I’m prepared to say categorically about it.

Noumenon is a system designed to facilitate an exploration of a surreal dream. Characters wake up as the insect-like Sarcophagi trapped within the Silhouette Rouge, and they barely have time to look around before they are approached by a well-dressed three-eyed elephant-headed being who guides them to a sweeping staircase with only thirty-three steps that reaches all the way up and out of a hundred-story-high cavern.

If this RPG has a goal, it is to explore the Silhouette Rouge and uncover its secrets, in the hopes that this will somehow unlock the gate that will lead to the next stage of their destiny. There is no eminent threat, nor the call to adventure. The purpose of the insect-like Sarcophagi is simply to experience. No more, no less.

It is, in some respects, the Dear Esther of RPGs.

In his foreword to the first published edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax wrote: “These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard’s Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers.”

But Tolkien, Howard, and Burroughs aren’t the only kind of stories there are. Mad God certainly doesn’t have a narrative in the traditional sense. Neither does Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

We know what an adventure is; most RPGs are designed to tell these kinds of stories. They involve heroes, action, conflict, and overcoming obstacles. Different genres provide different obstacles, or different tools to get past certain kinds of obstacles, or both. They provide different tones, designed to elicit different feelings from both victories and defeats.

But what about the other kinds of stories? What about RPGs like Ech0, which is about the ghosts of war, our personal fears and scars, and how we confront the things that shape us? What about Standoff, which is about laughing at silly characters performing a nonsensical farce of machinations and betrayal? What about We Have Lost, a game where you are the guard of the recently dead queen, doing little more than remembering her rise and fall together in a macabre and frighteningly personal wake?

In every “transported to another world” story, there is a period of time where our protagonist (usually a precocious child) wanders in wonder, gazing at the strange flowers, birds, rivers, and architectures of this new and strange world. Eventually, this wonder is muted by the sudden arrival of the shadowy evil antagonist of the story, and the child’s new friends must come together to thwart the villain’s plot…but does it have to?

Sure, you could put a Foozle to kill in the Silhouette Rouge, a great problem that threatens those who reside in its warm embrace and can only be thwarted by you and your team…but why would you?

There comes a time in every medium’s life when the artists who utilize the medium look around at the assumptions that have underpinned the medium since the beginning and think “…hang on…” Maybe a urinal can be a sculpture. Maybe color can be a whole painting. Maybe a song doesn’t need music. Maybe video games can be purposefully uncomfortable, unpleasant, or awkward to play. Maybe an RPG doesn’t actually need anything to do.

Exploration RPGs are a relatively new focus for RPGs. Oracles provide suggestions for ruins and temples to stumble across. Some games have survival mechanics, to encourage watching where you put your feet. Hex-crawls are utilized to represent overland travel, while maps and sketchings push dungeon delving towards the strange experiences of games like Outer Wilds, Firewatch, and Gone Home. If there is a story here, it is one without an antagonist.

Now, before I go too far off track, Noumenon is designed to be flexible and modifiable. It has stats and traits for your characters, challenge checks handled with dominoes rather than dice, and an ethos of cooperation between the players. So why not have armies and Foozles and McGuffins and more traditional RPG goals?

You can if you want, but the rulebook itself is purposefully obtuse in explaining what kind of story you’re supposed to tell within the Silhouette Rouge. Rooms are described with seemingly irrelevant narratives. Characters are described not as living things, but as concepts. The game expressly states the goal of the Sarcophogi is not to change the fate of the Silhouette Rouge, but to find the answers that will set them on their next path, to transcend this strange world and move on to the next, either in exultation or damnation, and possibly entirely by your own choice. This is not a game about hope in the face of adversity, or freeing the downtrodden from tyranny.

It is, in fact, a game about discovery, about mystery, about the abstract. It’s about opening your mind to the unreal, the surreal, and the hyperreal. It’s about making choices about the unknown and uncertain, in the chance that there is something on the other side — some kind of purpose or intent, placed there either by God or the GM or both.

It’s perhaps a bit simplistic to say that RPGs can tell “any kind of story,” because there are kinds of stories that we rarely think to tell: stories from the viewpoints of people we’ve never met and cannot think like. Worlds alien to our five senses, and maybe to senses we don’t have names for.

Maybe you don’t feel comfortable playing a game like that. Maybe you are more interested in the familiar, the comfortable, the relaxing. After all, there is enough in our world that is challenging, diving into a strange new world with laws you do not grasp, in a body that is not your own, with a goal that you cannot understand…

Some of us play RPGs to escape. I can’t honestly say I would always be in the right mindset to play this game, or any of the similar RPGs that go into exploring more personal concepts. Slaying a dragon, saving a planet, thwarting a tyrant, these things are easy compared to seeing unpleasant truths in ourselves.

But roleplay is used in therapy as well as gaming, and opening ourselves up emotionally is a skill that requires practice. Games are good at that, at giving us the chance to practice the skills we need to survive, thrive, and transcend.