Blog Posts
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Rooted in Crisis coming to Kickstarter this Summer
Three years ago, Sam, James, and Chloe approached me to discuss the possibility of using Trophy as a teaching tool in the environmental sciences, specifically to counter the feelings of powerlessness that come up when facing the climate crisis. They saw how tabletop roleplaying games can use fantasy as metaphor for contemporary struggles, can shift…
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Shadows in the Ice
On this Earth Day – the annual initiative instigated in the USA in 1970 and now a global awareness-raising platform for a plethora of environmentally-themed events and campaigns – I put the finishing touches to my yearly contribution, Writing the Earth – a programme of events using the creative arts to explore ecological issues. This…
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New Ozymandias
“No one is more dangerous than someone fueled by righteousness.” While we were drafting New Ozymandias for Rooted in Crisis we were thinking about the type of person that does a lot of mental gymnastics to justify their means to their envisioned end. Throughout our drafting, we did a deep dive into the complexities of…
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A Poetic Turn
In the face of the ever-intensifying climate crisis, innovative approaches to fostering understanding and inspiring action have never been more needed. As an interdisciplinary scholar with a focus on the consilience of science and poetry, I assert that poetry stands as a uniquely potent tool to achieve this. It is this conviction that has guided…
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The Forgotten City
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…
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Ecohorror and Roleplaying the Climate Crisis
It is commonplace in our media to encounter images of the climate crisis that evoke the horror genre, especially in films and news reports that stage scenes of devastation and disaster. These representations of the climate crisis often promote a feeling that Simon Estok calls ‘ecophobia’. According to Estok, ‘the frustrations of not being able…
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Gaia Station
Gaia Station, my Rooted in Crisis contribution developed with Lev Horodyskyj, the founder and CEO of Science Voices, asks what turned out to be a hard question: is it OK to make the climate crisis, and specifically the human effort to expand beyond our own biosphere, funny? Ok, maybe not laugh-out-loud hilarious. But darkly humorous?…
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Rooted in Trophy
What does it mean for a game to be ‘Rooted in Trophy’? Simply put, it indicates that the game is inspired by and uses the System Reference Document (SRD) of the Trophy games created by Jesse Ross. The first and original game is Trophy Dark, a story of tragic fantasy in which a doomed party…
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The Culling
The Culling is a story about how few things are truly disposable. We began with a discussion about how we harvest limited resources, and questions about how recycling is more often downcycling. Materials tend to degrade when recycled. While aluminum is highly recyclable, and it’s cheaper to recycle it than harvest fresh material, a plastic…
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Rooted in Crisis: A Game of Climate Reflections and Choices
Imagine a world where every choice you make, every path you traverse, weaves the rich tapestry of our planet’s future. This is the essence of Rooted in Crisis, a groundbreaking anthology of tabletop roleplaying games that invites you to step into diverse yet interconnected realities shaped by environmental challenges. Each game is a unique narrative…