RPG Thoughts: Lighting the Darkness

So, I’ve already pointed out my dislike for the “Points of Light” campaign concept. Protecting the status quo might be somebody else’s idea of a good time, but I’d prefer to organize that underclass of goblins and help them start an agricultural commune.

Yet in seeking to develop a one-pager in support of Fallout 76 as the media of the week, it comes down to making a wasteland safe for those who will come after, perhaps those fleeing the status quo and trying to find a new life.

I have to admit that this bothers me because its part of our colonial history in Canada. Authorities claimed that what they were doing was making a wasteland safe for civilization when really they were creating a wasteland from what was a civilization. Thankfully, with RPGs we can create settings in which there really are no indigenous people—no sentient beings—which need to be displaced. It still feels a little odd, a little like I’m buying into a cancerous fiction, but that’s true of a lot of plots and concepts.

For me, a way to engage people is figuring out why the area is unpopulated. I can’t divorce myself entirely from our history, so I believe that people will find a way to populate even the most seemingly inhospitable regions, so why is this place the PCs are making safe abandoned? That reason—or reasons—is the key to the plot. If it’s a post-apocalyptic story and the area is irradiated, the PCs need to figure out how to remove that radiation. Maybe its science fiction and it’s the ghost planet of a lost civilization—what destroyed them. In fantasy, it could be a curse, some magic the PCs must unravel.

And while we can create truly uninhabited spaces for our stories, I am still reminded of how often that the escape from the status quo is led by figures who once had authority. Be it the Late Bronze Age collapse or emigration from Scotland, our stories of migration too often have displaced figures of authority seeking to recreate the status quo somewhere else, with them at the top. That might not seem a problem to some. We’re all different. For me, I’d much prefer a game in which the PCs find spaces for the downtrodden so that they can live free and prosper.

So this kind of is a point of light campaign, in which it’s the PCs who are creating those points, illuminating the darkness.