The Forgotten City is a tale of slow, creeping, relentless, and inevitable doom. The peril is insidious, its growing influence, its corruption, and its fore-telling are entwined through the very fabric of the city that the players create. Their actions are tinged with hopelessness. They are powerless to stop the disaster, however forewarned.
This puts The Forgotten City, and the wider Rooted in Crisis anthology at odds with other contemporary environmental messages. It is commonly regarded that doom-laden messages are counter-productive, that they rob people of agency, the feeling that they have the ability to make changes and control their own fates. Instead, modern day wisdom chooses more hopeful messages, focusing on the power of the individual to affect change.
However, there is a power and truth in doom-laden messaging that can inspire a different type of action and locus for change. At the height of the Cold War, films like The Wargames, The Day After, Threads, and When the Wind Blows, were unabashed in their hopeless messages of doom. They stood in contrast to official messages of personal resilience like the UK’s ‘Protect and Survive’ campaign. It was their hopelessness that inspired action on nuclear disarmament, or ‘Protest and Survive’. It is rumoured that The Day After influenced Ronald Reagan’s policies for approaching potential nuclear conflict.
But The Forgotten City is still a game, and one that seeks to inspire, entertain and give players an avenue to explore difficult subject matter in a way that invites collaboration and empathy. It tells the story of a diverse and resilient city, full of people with their own hopes, dreams and resourceful answers to the threats they face. Each community within the City has a unique perspective to offer, drawing on science, faith, magic, ways of working in closer harmony with the land and water incorporating the wisdom of those who came before.
An early design goal for this game was to explore this expansive picture without losing the point of view of individuals affected by the flood. We ended up using two main approaches: having players shift between the perspectives of individual characters and voicing the decisions of their wider communities; and using the narrative structure of Trophy Dark to cut forward in time, dramatically escalating the threat of the rising waters.
Players begin with a bird’s eye view of the City as they create a simple map together, deciding how various influential districts and communities are connected within it, and how close they are to the water. As play progresses through five thematic chapters called Tides, the city faces a steady escalation of strange omens and manifestations of the rising waters – both literal and supernatural – which also bring new opportunities for each community to bolster their particular corner of the city against the effects of the flood. Every action has consequences, pushing the story forward, until an epilogue where we see what remains of the City and how well its communities have managed to combine their skills and resources to endure and rebuild.
Embracing the approach of collaborative worldbuilding from Trophy, we have littered this game with all sorts of open-ended prompts about the history of the City, the beliefs of its residents, and strange discoveries revealed by the tides. We have also made sure to incorporate real-world approaches to flooding in possible actions each community might take, even though we’ve woven them in with an atmosphere of magical realism.
As a creative team with backgrounds in environmental science, education, humanities and healthcare – and all living in cities directly affected by sea level rise and flooding – the themes of The Forgotten City have been particularly resonant. It has been freeing to acknowledge the fear and frustration we feel about the climate crisis and our inability to tackle it on any meaningful scale. Just as working on it has for us, we hope playing the game creates a safe space for others to explore these feelings too.