So, spoilers abound under the cut, but in summary: Tales Unrolled is a master class in how to incorporate real world culture into a fantasy world. It not only serves to evoke specific themes, but it also ensures that the target audience (English-speaking Latines) experiences the story in substantially the same way as the players and the characters. It’s delightful.
There’s 3 things I want to highlight: race, generational culture, and stories. These things overlap, so it’s not going to be a super tidy discussion, but those are the key things to remember as we go.
Tales Unrolled does not emphasize racism, but it doesn’t shy away from how it colors experiences of descendants with mixed heritage. In Alma (which means “soul”), everyone has some kind of combination of human, elf, and/or orc in their families, but everyone has tiefling heritage. Of all the D&D races that could have served as a common ancestor for the cast’s characters, Luis chose the one that is considered corrupted in every iteration.
It’s both jarring and comforting. Everyone comes from this history of people who made some pact with a devil. We don’t know if that’s only the case in Alma or if that’s true for all people in the large world. We don’t know whether that’s relevant to the story or not. But everyone we’ve met is like this, so there’s no point in shaming anyone for it. It’s just a part of life.
In the real world, being Latina feels like being a tiefling. I have mixed heritage of all sorts of European and Central American origins. My family on both sides has been traveling north for generations, making their way to Texas and California when they were still Spanish territories, then Mexico, then the U.S. Some pass for white until someone learns their name, and others are too dark and don’t have the right face to be confused for that. It is always used against people. Too light skinned or gringo to be Mexican, too round and tanned to be White, too assimilated to be Chicana, too exotic to be American. Too anything to fit anywhere, so the next generations leave because they never felt welcome, then they finally settle when they realize that’s true everywhere, so they make a home where they are, they have children who don’t feel welcome, and the cycle begins again.
We have something in our blood that is not welcome—so tiefling heritage makes perfect sense. How wonderful it would be to live in a place like Alma, where they all have that devilish ancestry, so that’s why they have a place to belong. It lures the audience into feeling at home in a place that never existed. The audience already wants Alma to be preserved, and it’s only with knowing that they’re all part of tiefling, before we even learn anything else.
Monarch butterflies migrate north and south across generations. The butterflies that spawned in Mexico die long before reaching the northern end of the cycle; they only live a few weeks, and the migration cycle is governed by seasons. In the folklore that I heard growing up, they’re spirits that need places to rest and recover—like the ofrenda we make on dia de los muertos with my grandparents’ favorite foods for when they visit from the afterlife—so you leave the milkweed to grow and don’t clean it away even though it’s ugly.
It reminds me of my family, gradually moving north and away from where we originated. My brother refused to go north, and he hasn’t changed at all in 20 years, stagnated and bitter. I was the first one to move north and then decide to move back south. None of them really approved of that. Did I break the pattern for my family, or am I ahead of the trend? It’ll take another generation or two to know. If we looked across generations, it would look like I’m returning somewhere, but I keep moving to new places I’ve never been, and I have no way of knowing if an ancestor was here first because that was never passed down to me. I can’t know if I’m in a cycle because that history was lost, and I won’t live long enough to see it repeat.
In Tales Unrolled, monarchs are spirits of the deceased elders of Alma. They aided the party in fighting off dire cadejos and corrupted spirits seeking to kill the denizens participating in a ritual of generosity and sacrifice at the river. In the next loop, the corrupted spirits sabotaged the monarchs at the glade where they spawn, preventing them from later offering aid. We haven’t yet found out what these corrupted spirits actually are, but there’s hints that they are also deceased people from Alma. Were they forced to turn because of how they died? What corrupted them? It’s something other than blood, and the mystery is not solved.
It brings the viewer back out of that misconception that Alma is a utopia at the same time that the players and characters accept it as well. Even with their shared heritage, there are other forces that are causing strife and war. There are outside forces they don’t understand and histories of their own people that are kept from them. Some of them are even descended from foreigners and may share blood with those threats. They don’t have a full view of these cycles because they’re living within them, but they know enough to realize the cycles are worsening. Something needs to change, but how can they know what will cause improvement? They don’t know. They still have to try.
Aristropa, the axolotl (an endangered species in Mexico), tells the party stories, but they have to use magic to understand him because they don’t speak his language. He commiserates with their loss. His kind chose to change instead of making the arrangement Alma had with hiding away to remain the same at the expense of ritual sacrifice. He still lost loved ones, and he does not regret his choices.
We don’t have histories; we only have stories if our families decide to tell us. They change it to match where we are, so that children will remember it as important to their home, but as they change, some of the reasoning is lost, and we become disconnected from the places our ancestors came from. Knowledge is sacrificed for understanding, and we resent the loss.
For me, La Llorona was a woman who drowned her children to save them from invaders who would take them—la migra as some told it, or the church, or the military—because they were useful. She was executed, and although she was not barred from heaven, she could not enter until she retrieved her children, who were swept away by the river. She searched the river bed for ages, unaware that they had been taken to the sea, until she lost her memory of their faces and voices. Now, she takes any children wandering the river hoping to enter heaven with them because she cannot recognize her own. But to me, the river is a river bed, empty and dry, and the danger is the flash flood that starts within minutes, and the coyotes and mountain lions that roam with screams that sound like a wailing woman.
To others, it’s a raging river that brave children fall into and drown. Some stories are that La Llorona was a jealous woman who killed her own children because their father had cheated on her, and she was rejected from paradise for her sins, so she hunts those who tread where she is trapped. Others are that she and her children tried to cross a river to escape to safer land, but the children drowned, and she searches for them in vain and lashes out from grief—heaven doesn’t factor in at all. The details change to match the attitudes towards women, children, and the land. Usually, La Llorona did something to deserve her suffering, and it’s because she deviated from what is demanded of mothers to be accepted somewhere. She doesn’t have a name because what matters is that you don’t approach the wailing woman.
So when the party first heard a wailing woman, my mind immediately went to La Llorona. Stay away from the river! But then the party found la curandera, an ally, and I thought, goddamnit Luis, you got me. I fell for the misogyny of the folklore. Okay, there’s no Llorona out to get us.
Once the party gets to the old camp and explores the temple to discover a wailing woman, my mind didn’t go to La Llorona. That had already gotten pushed away, so when they find a vengeful spirit hoping to trip them up, it didn’t click until afterwards: that is La Llorona trapping the people who are foolish enough to go where she is bound. From what we know so far, it may have something to do with searching for children, but it also evokes a different story: La Malinche.
La Malinche refers to a Nahua slave who was gifted to Hernan Cortes, who conquered Mexico. She acted as an interpreter and bore his children. Despite the lack of agency and control in her own life, she is referred to by a title that effectively means betrayer. People called malinchistas are people who prefer foreign cultures over their own. She’s a woman trapped, but she’s considered a traitor all the same. She was baptized with a Christian name (Marina), but if you were to ask anyone about Marina, they’d assume you mean someone you know. If you say La Malinche, ah, we don’t call her by a name when she traded her people (who enslaved her) away in exchange—she doesn’t deserve her own name, whether it was chosen willingly or inflicted upon her.
This goes back to the reasons that families who went north are unwelcome in the cultures they left. They’re traitors for leaving, but they’d be traitors for staying if they adopted European norms for the sake of survival under the whitewashed leadership that runs these countries. They’re outsiders wherever they go, like Aristropa, because their ancestors made choices to change when they had the opportunity. There is no home to return to anymore because the places they left behind changed too.
Some are spiteful and assimilate further. They take White names and join White churches, they anglicanize their relative’s names in conversation, they develop two accents and pretend not to speak other languages. Anything to be considered White, because they’re happily welcomed in as a buffer against outsiders, with the belief that the cultural discord will last long enough that it’s never turned against them. They relish the destruction of what they left behind because it was never theirs anyway. They’re like the monstrous undead plaguing Alma, and then I wonder if they felt they had a choice when they were not welcome.
The cadejos blame Leo, the hunter and daughter of an outsider, for the curse that has befallen Alma. They slaughter the denizens in an attempt to kill her for this supposed crime that she does not remember. The players defend her because she’s their friend, despite that Quolla sees the cadejos as lives worth preserving on an equal level as the people. He made a choice and mourns it, and when the time comes for him to use Wildshape for battle, he takes on their shape in memory of wha he sacrificed for his friend.
Then I remember that all the people of Alma are tieflings: they’re all descended from a traitor, and the people who were not (the elves), were wiped out by the dangers that now threaten Alma. The people of Mexico are mixed descendants of the conquistadores and the natives who survived genocide. Histories were demolished in the name of conquest, stories were changed to satiate the new rulers, and the scars remained even when Mexico gained independence. Even when the players all together in this, they struggle to unite, they suspect each other, they resent their differences and connections, they hold grudges against those that left (Leo’s mother), and those that remained (Leo’s father), and those that came from elsewhere (Neza’s family, and Leo’s family), and those that died, and themselves for surviving in ways they didn’t want to.
The people of Alma worship a goddess called the Mother, but we don’t know if she was a real person or not. If she had a name, it’s not as important as her role—not as important as the names of those taken for war, which are carved into stone near the message “we existed” in five languages. Was she the one who made the deal that gave them all tiefling heritage? We know so little of their practices that perhaps she is the rivier spirit, maybe she is La Malinche who sold her people and saved her children, maybe she’s La Llorona who drowned her children to save them from others or to spite those who hurt her, or maybe she’s merely a woman who led the people to Alma and was deified for her choices. Did the Mother save the people of Alma or abandon them or curse them? Catalina doesn’t know either despite that she is a priestess chosen to be the vessel for the river spirit that made a deal with their people. Her predecessor was taken too soon. In the efforts to safeguard Catalina, she is left without information and confidence necessary to take on this role—and she has to do it anyway.
These Mexican stories and practices come back to me like the PCs finding notes of to themselves of clues to follow, things I forgot. I had been waiting for someone to remind me again. The players have the same moments of epiphany: I should have known! I did know! And we all forgot, because it’s been so long, and the world works to erase our living memory in every way that it can.
Catalina doesn’t know why the priestesses train for a fight when she was not warned of any threats. Quolla doesn’t know why he lived so long when his brother did not, and he is too steeped in helpless grief to realize he holds so much knowledge that could explain these mysteries. Leo does not know why her mother left her here or what she would find if she were to leave as well, but she still wants to. Neza doesn’t remember his family—not even their names—despite that he cares for the dead of Alma and is meant to consecrate the bodies left behind.
There’s always that sense that “I did not choose to be what I am or to grow up in this place and time,” and although we demand these choices for ourselves, we resent the choices made by the earlier generations and those around us. We’re stuck in this cycle of wanting grace for our uninformed choices and demanding that it be given to us first before anyone else. We didn’t deserve this. We want a place like Alma: a home to return to where we’re supposed to be welcome in spite of all this, but places like that only last with sacrifice, and there comes a time when outsiders will threaten to destroy it. The cycle will only change when we offer grace to others. We have to hope they are ready to share what they know in return.
We’re all stuck in a time loop, but it’s so long that most of us will forget. We have to find ways to pass on information because we will forget, and we can’t even predict what will be forgotten this time. We have to decide how best to ensure these warnings and lessons survive. We plant milkweed for the monarchs and leave them when they’re ugly so a new generation has a place to grow, and the children don’t understand that they’re the worms who will become butterflies until they’ve gone through the cycle. We build ofrendas to attract visiting relatives and include their favorite foods so they have the chance to rest, and the hungry children don’t understand why we don’t eat it ourselves until they lose someone and want them to return. We warn of La Llorona, but it doesn’t matter if she’s vengeful or mournful because the river will take our children regardless of the tone we decide on. We denigrate La Malinche while we ignore that her face looks like it belonged here, with the people who sold her as a slave first, and we ignore that our faces look just like her children. We tell stories about what we remember, and we make choices to balance the past and future so that when the cycle begins again, it’s never exactly the same.
Luis constructed this story to pull characters, the players, and the audience into another loop, and maybe we’ll remember those stories this time around. Maybe it will be better.
i am seeing a lot of "tales unrolled" tags on this and i don't know what that is but i will take credit for it. unless it's bad. this is a stack of butterflies
Tales Unrolled is an actual-play TTRPG series and the reference is very much a compliment! Monarch butterflies play a role in the story and there is an episode where the butterflies decide to join forces and be trouble lmao.
the human-shaped vines are giving me both The Witness and Annihilation vibes and as soon as Luis said there was another one and Camila said "I don't like that" I was like. ME NEITHER THAT'S CREEPY AF
(A title card for Tales Unrolled: Alma, inspired by stained glass in the set design & monarch butterflies in the story. It's a super cool show, check it out!)
Luis Carazo: I'm just going to thoughtfully and lovingly introduce all these villagers of Alma and how important they are in the fabric of your lives and community :) the beautiful texture of their humanity :)
Table & audience: aw that's so cool, I'm invested!
The first episode of Tales Unrolled, a new all-Latino TTRPG actual play show produced by Sonoro, has been uploaded! Starring DM Luis Carazo (LA By Night, EXU: Calamity), with players Christian Navarro (Critical Role), Mayanna Berrin (New York By Night, Private Nightmares), Oscar Montoya (Dimension 20) and Camila Victoriano (co-founder of Sonoro, making her actual play debut).
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