Wanderhome, and Apocalyptic Hope

I wanted to end this project with a discussion of this game, because for all the myriad of games I have mentioned in this journey of ours, Wanderhome differs in perhaps some of the most significant and profound ways from all the others.

Based on the Belonging Outside Belonging system (also called “No dice, no masters”) from the Dream Askew and Dream Apart games, Wanderhome is, quote: “a pastoral fantasy roleplaying game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change. It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine.”

The setting is inspired by the works of Brian Jacques, Tove Jansson, and Hayao Miyazaki. Yes, the world did suffer a recent war, but there is no violence in the world right now. There is a widespread culture of hospitality with freely offered food and a place to rest and share stories. The people you meet are fundamentally good. Should you choose to have “villains” in your journey, they are at worst kindly souls who have been weighed down by old scars, undue burdens, or un-assuaged fears; “thwarted” by compassion and care rather than swords and spells.

RPG Systems, even the most universal ones, tend to bend towards adventures with a concrete goal. Wanderhome is about the journey. It is dice-less, GM-less, and goal-less. The game is not about fighting the great evils of tyranny and war, but the small evils of loneliness and carelessness. It is about cresting the next hill and seeing a mountain you’ve never seen before. It is about the changing seasons, and how we change with them.

We live in times. Uncertain? Troubled? Dark? Strange? Interesting? Add whichever adjective you’d like.

We all can see the world around us. The post-modern malaise has seeped into every facet of American Culture. Read any Cyberpunk novel and realize how much of it could be best described as “timely.” Our media is saturated with references upon ironic references all based in the subtle certainty that to be right is to be sad. Hope is an illusion. Love is ephemeral. joy is a lie, while anything bleak, cruel, absurd, or nihilistic must be technically correct. Our heroes can be cynical and spiteful like Rick Sanchez and the boys of South Park, or defiant like Batman and Spiderman, but none of them challenge the fundamental assertion that life is strife, struggle, and pain.

I find it difficult to put into words how important games like Wanderhome are. It is perhaps cliche at this point to bring up Kurt Vonnegut’s famous quote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” We RPGers pretend to be warriors, spies, pilots, adventurers, pulp heroes, wizards, monsters, villains, and everything in between. We practice charity, yes, but cruelty as well. Absurdity. We can try to be Lawful Good, but we can always fall to Chaotic Neutral. We step forward confidently, assured that whatever the dice say, whether our guesses are correct or not, even if we are not morally right in our actions; at least we are the protagonists!

Wanderhome defies all that. While its world may too have been made for us, it was not made for us to be heroes in. It asks us to practice living in a world populated with people who are not just extras in our grand epic. They are not silhouettes and shadows and empty shells that do nothing but repeat a single line of dialogue. They are not tools for our redemption, nor enemies to be vanquished, but fellows in a world full of beauty and the sublime, warmth and cold, abundance and scarcity. There is no Foozle, no McGuffin, even our explorations will likely take us to places that someone calls home.

It is important to remember that these little things exists. Moments of gentle delight, calm rest, and satisfaction of a job done well. It is the pragmatic hope of Solar-Punk, the intellectual optimism of Metamodernism, and the practiced community of Anarchism. It is neither pollyannish nor cringingly naive. It is not childish, but youthful, full of the quiet energy given by the certainty that there will be a tomorrow, and we have neither the need nor luxury of cynicism and irony.

It can be too easy, sometimes, when all we see is campy pulp and gritty grimdark, to forget that there is value in the quiet, the humble, and the gentle.

At the beginning of this project I called What If We Kissed the “Anti-D&D,” but there are lots of different ways to categorize an opposite. Lancer could be an opposite, because it’s 4th edition but in space. OSRIC is an opposite of modern D&D, because it’s based on classic D&D. Lovecraftesque has no GM, is narrative focused, and centers on one character.

What If We Kissed opposed the fundamentals of the system on so many levels, I thought that it was the best way to show that everything we think is integral to an RPG can be questioned. It was a useful example.

Now, I think Wanderhome deserves the title more than any other system; at least in this specific context:

Dungeons & Dragons was built on the back of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. His stories were grand epics of heroes, wizards, armies, and dragons. He created mythologies that have been iterated on time and time again, and we RPGers have taken our shot at the same. We adventure into dark caves, hunt goblins and ogres, find magic daggers and mithril shirts, challenge otherworldly evils, and fight for a better tomorrow.

But we forgot, somewhere along the way, that Tolkien himself thought the Hobbits were the truest souls in all of middle earth, that they had got it right. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

D&D was based on Tolkien’s books. Wanderhome is based on Tolkien’s heart.

It’s not always easy. Sometimes it is. It’s not always simple. Sometimes it is. It’s not always bad, dark, wrong, or apocalyptic. Apocalypse, from the Greek apokálupsis, doesn’t mean destruction, but revelation. Discovery. Understanding. A new paradigm.

Remember the promise of Solar-punk: The post-apocalypse can be green.