The Fifth World

Four hundred years from now, humanity thrives beyond civilization.

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Christmas

Christmas marks the winter solstice among some Christian families. Those families which still keep the Gregorian calendar often observe it on December 25, while others track the length of day and night to determine when to celebrate the holiday.

Have yourself an ecotopian Christmas.

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We need your help!

In The Fifth World tabletop roleplaying game, you begin by creating not a character but a family. This process involves tracing four centuries of change from our near future into the Fifth World. You pass through four eras, and in each one answer a different question about how your family dealt with its changes by placing yourself somewhere on a spectrum between two possibilities. Each of those possibilities has a prompt that asks you about a custom that your family still follows that arose from this era of your history. Each custom arises from one of five core values: compassion, fairness, loyalty, honor, or purity.

We don’t expect everyone who plays the game to have an extensive background in anthropology, but this remains a game that delights in anthropological imagination. The examples we provide have a daunting goal to fulfill: to inspire exciting, anthropologically plausible speculation even in players who might not have the background you might think such a thing would require. That’s why we want your help. For each of eight prompts, for each of the five values, we want to provide at least three really great examples of possible customs. That means coming up with 120 examples!

Can you help us come up with some of them? If you have some ideas and would like to help, join us over at this Google Doc.

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Animism

Animism means recognizing personhood even in an other-than-human presence.

Animism means recognizing personhood even in an other-than-human presence. From the sort of perspective focused on taxonomy and classification that literacy encourages this can seem nonsensical, but oral people focus on relationship rather than classification. From that perspective, personhood has more to do with the network of relationships around someone than describing an individual as a discrete being. “Person,” in this context, comes down to someone you can have a relationship with, rather than ascribing any particular characteristics to that person. Animists often classify the word for “person” as a verb rather than a noun, something you do rather than something that defines you.

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Storytelling

Storytelling represents one of the most basic human activities.

This week’s featured entry from the Fifth World Encyclopedia:

Storytelling represents one of the most basic human activities. The human brain has evolved to naturally form stories from nearly any sensory input. Every family in the Fifth World has a rich oral tradition that preserves their unique history alongside a wealth of knowledge about dwelling in their particular territory, but to see these stories as only or even primarily concerned with transmitting data would mean fundamentally misunderstanding their purpose. Stories create relationships, both between humans and between humans and the more-than-human world.

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Chapter Six

I sink in the sea. I hear voices from above, muffled and distant. I look up towards the light, filtering down through the water. I want to swim towards it. How did my arms and legs get so heavy? Why can’t I seem to move?

I sink in the sea. I hear voices from above, muffled and distant. I look up towards the light, filtering down through the water. I want to swim towards it. How did my arms and legs get so heavy? Why can’t I seem to move? Someone has to come to save me, right? I don’t see anyone coming. Air bubbles slip out of my nostrils and rise towards the light.

How did I get here? I dove in to do something, right? My memory feels like the surface: hazy, muffled, out of reach and slipping further away with each second. I remember all of this happening before somehow.

“What bothers you?” Robin asks. She stands to my left and I hear her clearly, as if she stood on solid ground.

“They want to kill you,” the old woman says, “and that would frighten anyone.” I turn and see her on my right. I hear her just as clearly. I know her. Why can’t I remember her name?

“It happens every night, doesn’t it?” Robin asks.

“I thought you said you’d never trained,” the old woman replies, speaking to Robin like they know each other, like they don’t even notice me drowning here between them.

“So how much longer will you wait?” Robin asks me. “How many more of these dreams will you have?”

“How long have the dreams hunted you?” the old woman asks me.

“Who chased you this time?”

“Narluga!” the old woman says. Does she mean to get my attention, or does she simply mean to answer Robin’s question? “I’ve heard of them, the great unicorn-whales of the northern seas. I’d always hoped to see one, and now I have.”

“We don’t live anything like these people,” Robin tells her.

“Ah, but they do in dreams. They remember the horns of their ancestors.”

“They haven’t yet,” Robin says. She turns to me and says, “You have more strength than them. I think they know that. I think they won’t leave you alone because of that.”

The old woman says, “The true wizard understands that those all mean the same thing.”

Robin reminds me: “You promised.”

I did, didn’t I? I remember now: I’ve come here to die.

Read the rest of chapter six of Children of Wormwood

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Do Not Forget Who You Were

Twenty years had passed since She-Gathers-Yarrow had died of pneumonia and took her husband’s soul with her. She didn’t mean to, of course, but they had grown so close that she did by accident

[thefifthworld]

World Octopus Day

As the name suggests, World Octopus Day celebrates one of the most distinctive creatures living on the planet today; the octopus. Octopuses are worthy of...

Happy World Octopus Day. Global warming is harming a lot of sea creatures, but cephalopods seem to be benefitting. The oceans of the Fifth World, then, will be full of octopus cities, along with squids, nautili, and other alien intellects.

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Chapter Four

Three Myland hadn’t changed much. It never did. The Vulture Priests lived in the past, rebuilding the dead, brittle concrete structures our ancestors had left behind, donning the thick robes of a colder world, still speaking an archaic dialect of the language that birthed all the languages now spoken in this land.

My real initiation took place after sundown, after all the uninitiated had left the island. Three Myland had four great towers with no roofs. When the sun fell, the priests lit great bonfires in each tower, one by one. Smoke wafted out the tops, tinted orange by the fires below.

Brother Willem led me to the first tower, a chanting procession behind us. When we stepped inside, the heat pummeled me. Now, in the face of blinding firelight, the green glass of my mask helped me see the many spiral symbols that covered the wall.

“We come now to the first tower, called Atziluth,” Father William said. “We come to the Emanation, and the Emergence. Drink.”

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Chapter Three

A rock told me this: Way way down in the hot black churning, we lived as one, and we swirled together in warmth and comfort, and we had no me and we had no you, and we had no space and we had no time.

A rock told me this:

Way way down in the hot black churning, we lived as one, and we swirled together in warmth and comfort, and we had no me and we had no you, and we had no space and we had no time.

And then it happened that the churning ejected us. We flew up into Something not each other, Something cold and bright, and we broke off from each other and became ourselves. In the Something we discovered a cold so sharp that we hardened our new skins into solid black shells to protect ourselves from it. Once we had done that, we could no longer melt into each other as we once had. But still, inside, a fire burned.

And we tumbled down and scattered. We crashed against each other. Because we had made ourselves hard, we hurt each other. And the longer we remained in the Something, the harder and colder we became.

I have met somebodies whose embers have gone out, who have become nothing but cold, sharp blackness, who have forgotten that they once churned as part of something more. They crumble into sand and scatter.

I once met somebody who had many colors, many bits of somebodies all pressed together into one. And this somebody told me that we will all return one day to the hot black churning. Again we will melt into each other, and again we will churn as one, and we will have no Something — only us. And we will have no you and we will have no me, and we will have no space and we will have no time.

This, the somebody told me. I don’t know if I believe it. But just in case, I will try to keep my ember burning for as long as I can. And I will wait.

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Chapter Two

Robin and Glassknapper and Vervain all hug each other, this family that knew Pelica and misses her. I stand off to the side, watching, making myself scarce. I know I don’t really belong in this family. But Glassknapper does, whether he wants to or not.

I’ll say this for the yinzers: all those hills keep the bugs at bay. Mostly. Of course, they have to throw their big yearly festival in a floodplain, the one place in all their lands where midges swarm almost as wretchedly as in the Arctic. At least they don’t live full-time in their low, swampy areas and try to farm them like the dirt-diggers up north. They flee back up to their hilltops as soon as they can. But they still gather here once a year, and invite all the traders here, so I have to assure my friends year after year, “No, really, most of the time it doesn’t get this bad.” They don’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe me.

Not that I don’t like Christmas. I do, really. The poinsettias, the oranges, the cinnamon, the candles in the trees (which do strike me as kind of dangerous, not that I should make it any of my business and anyway, they haven’t set the whole place on fire yet), it all looks very nice. I find it adorable how they consider this a lot of darkness, so much darkness that they need to burn thousands of animals’ worth of fat just to make themselves feel better about it. And they seem to think all Christmas cheer comes from some guy who lives in my area, so that makes me kind of a celebrity among the kids, especially when I wear red and white. So that cools, until they realize I won’t give them candy, at which point it abruptly stops cooling.

Anyway, I don’t come here for the candles. I come here for family. I come from a people who sail everywhere, a people known for moving around a lot, and I spend most of my time with traders who move around even more, and I still don’t know anyone else with family that lives so far away. When Glassknapper decided to leave, he didn’t take any half measures, he really left. Frankly, sometimes it amazes me that he didn’t run all the way to Antarctica.

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Chapter One

My little brother came into this world with half a skull. He stayed for a day, then left again, taking my mother with him. He didn’t live long enough to earn a name, but we called my mother Pelica.

My little brother came into this world with half a skull. He stayed for a day, then left again, taking my mother with him. He didn’t live long enough to earn a name, but we called my mother Pelica.

She had darker skin in life. I tried to hold the color in my memory as it faded. I clung to the sound of her laugh and the rhythm of her footsteps and the nimbleness of her fingers. The baskets she’d made would fall apart. The people who knew her in life would die. But I wanted to remember her for as long as I could.

Mourners flooded our little village — aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, some from as far away as Raccoon Creek, some I’d never even met. I’d never even seen a funeral with my own eyes before — not a funeral for a dead person, anyway.

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Children of Wormwood

For countless generations, the family downstream of Beaver Valley Temple have helped the Vulture Priests contain the nuclear waste locked away within it. But when it begins leaking out and people start dying, they must leave their homeland and travel across the world in search of answers.

Chapter six is coming soon! The first five chapters are now available on the website. You can also download each chapter as PDF, EPUB, or MOBI files.

[personalgremlin]

this makes me want to cry

[halfarsedhermit]

Spent the last two days working on this little archery guide in art and writing. Considering the rise in popularity of archers in pop culture this hopefully  comes in handy for a bunch of fandoms.

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Game Theory Chat: Decolonizing RPGs

RPGs have a violence problem. In almost every non-indie tabletop RPG, combat receives special attention. It is given additional mechanical and narrative weight. It is brought to the surface and mad…

This speaks to a lot of our design goals in The Fifth World tabletop roleplaying game, so I felt like I should mention some of the ways we tried to achieve the same goals.

Emulate Works That Don’t Glorify Violence

The Fifth World doesn’t really emulate much in the way of existing fiction. A few works, like Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home or George Stewart’s Earth Abides seem similar in some regards, but also differ markedly in others. We’ve focused much of our attention in designing the game so far in how we short-circuit gamers’ impulses to employ violence. Part of this comes from the notion that post-apocalyptic stories have nurtured that in times of crisis people become more violent (despite the examples to the contrary provided by the real world), and part, no doubt, comes from the fact that as gamers, they have been conditioned by games to look to violence as the first and only true solution.

We made a conscious choice to not privilege combat as a special mechanical feature, though many other games (particularly other independent RPGs) have done the same before us, so we know that this does not count as any kind of grand innovation. Nonetheless, our game centers awareness, asking questions, and empathy, and makes violence a strange special case of those tools, as opposed to other RPGs which generally do the reverse. Notice how in a traditional skill-based game, empathy involves rolling a die, adding your empathy skill, and comparing it to a target number — or perhaps a die roll made by the other person. In other words, you can empathize with someone by overcoming them in a contest or struggle, so empathy happens only as a strange subset of conquest. An encounter in the Fifth World makes empathy a matter of an Other trying to communicate her needs and the player trying to understand them, but facing the difficulties of truly communicating with one another. Violence becomes an afterthought in this system, something you can do, though it could become dangerous or even very dangerous. It doesn’t generally provide the fun that connecting with the Other does, though.

Ground the Protagonists in Community

A new Fifth World saga doesn’t begin with character creation. It begins with family creation. Throughout the saga characters come and go, but the family dwelling in its territory takes center stage as the main character of the story. Since we play many characters in the family over time, we see NPC’s become PC’s and PC’s become NPC’s. One of the game’s three agendas tell us to “Reveal everyone’s personhood,” and one of its nine principles helps us achieve that by reminding us to “Give every person life.” The NPC’s already relate closely to our PC’s, but we might also recognize them as PC’s we’ve played in previous games, or as potential PC’s that we might play in future games, or potentially the parents or grandparents of PC’s we might play one day.

While we might spend an hour or two on family creation, we make characters in just a few minutes by making a few decisions. One of the most important lies in which of the family’s customs this person relates to, and how she relates to it. This makes her relationship to her family and its unique customs one of the most important defining aspects of her character. Mechanically, you can’t make much of a loner in the Fifth World. Even the people who live alone do so because of their relationships with their families.

Decolonize Incentives

I’ve sometimes heard people say that they can’t figure out “the point” of playing the Fifth World, and before it’s really confused me. In Dungeons & Dragons, you go down into dungeons and slay monsters to gain XP and loot, which you turn into levels and gear, which allows you to go down into more dangerous dungeons and slay more dangerous monsters. The surrounding storyline certainly changes, but so far as the incentives provided by the game itself, there is no marked difference between a party of 1st level adventurers fighting kobolds and a party of 20th level adventurers fighting a demigod. What is the point? At some point, you need to find some part of this cycle intrinsically satisfying or the cycle is pointless. You “get better,” but only to face proportionally bigger, badder obstacles, so that “getting better” is largely pointless. It has to be, or neither the dungeons nor the dragons would pose an obstacle any more, and the game would stop being fun.

Likewise, in the Fifth World, you try to address your family’s needs, your own needs, and the needs of others. Your family becomes more rooted in their territory, but they’ll always have needs, and they’ll always keep coming. They have to, or the story would stop and the game would end. If you don’t find some part of this cycle intrinsically satisfying, though, the cycle is pointless. I can point to how your family learns the names of places, earns new ancestors, unlocks new things, and generally becomes more rooted in their territory, more unique and more powerful in their own home, but you can say, “So what?” and frankly, I have no answer. Just as, when playing Dungeons & Dragons you can tell me that I’ve reach 20th level and have a +4 vorpal sword, but if I say, “So what?” you won’t have much of an answer, either.

Reading this article helped put this criticism in a different perspective for me. Why do some gamers find the cycle in Dungeons & Dragons inherently fulfilling and the cycle in The Fifth World not? Could it be because Dungeons & Dragons offers a colonialist power fantasy, and The Fifth World offers only the fantasy of coming home to a more-than-human world and finding a place not of power and dominion, but of greater relationship and connection?

I find myself suspicious of this conclusion, though, since it neatly avoids me having to blame myself for failing to design a compelling game (though I’ve also heard from plenty of people — perhaps significantly, most of them women — who tell me that they don’t find Dungeons & Dragons compelling at all but find The Fifth World incredibly so). Yet doesn’t this simply follow from the obvious and undeniable truth that we live and grew up in and absorbed the messages and values of a colonialist society? And if a society can shape us by telling us one type of story, can we change if we choose to tell ourselves a different one?

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Can Post-Apocalyptic Art Be a Force for Social Change?

In the wake of deindustrialization and climate change, a group of social media-friendly artists are making images of affected areas go viral.By Matthew KingAre

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We Are in the Future

Afrofuturism is a way of looking at black culture that’s fantastic, creative, and oddly hopeful.

By the modern U.S. definitions of race, just about everyone in the Fifth World is black.