By Francis Gene Rowe
Station to Station is a fishpunk game of building a better world. It is a hybrid card/tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) in the vein of works such as Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman’s The Deep Forest, a favourite of ours. While fishpunk is its truest descriptor, categories like solarpunk and weirdhope shed some light on its nature.
“Sometimes when you lose, you win” (Sun Ra, Space Is the Place)
“Whatever you win, you’ve lost” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)
We designed Station to Station in response to the themes of The Lost Bay discord server’s Build a Better World TTRPG jam and Vector’s Zoefuturism call. Our mechanical starting points were that the game would require tarot cards as physical components, include dynamic use of oracles to bridge rules and storytelling, and its endgame would give meaning to anything players ‘lost’ as they played. Our worlding starting point was that the game would take place in an archipelago, a landscape type that has fascinated us since childhoods spent reading Ursula K. Le Guin and messing around with computer game map editors. As places where land and sea flow across each other, archipelagos are sites of life and relationality, where attempts at imposing rigid boundaries will always fail. Our next realisation was that the game would revolve around travel aboard sentient bio-trains that are huge and ancient, and may only be travelled on if they willingly agree. In our playthroughs, both in testing and following release, we have noticed that players are drawn to explore the nature of their kinship with their group’s train, with these strange entities playing prominent roles in storytelling as agents unto themselves.
The game builds on our longstanding interest in oracular game design. The use of aleatory resolution methods such as dice, cards, or coins in games echoes divinatory practices; tarot historically was used for gameplay before it became a cartomantic tool. Equally, the use of tables of outcomes as storytelling procedures in TTRPGs resonates with manuals for fortune-telling, with indie game designers such as Perplexing Ruins and Alfred Valley foregrounding oracle tables in their work. Station to Station pushes things just a little further, whereby its Coral Oracle blends variance with player choice, at times creating productive tensions between storytelling and mechanically optimal gameplay. A second oracle, The Lost and Found Oracle, gives life to the sacrifices made along the way to building a better world. The game’s rooting in oracularity grounds players in a sense that they are influencing and responding to an ongoing stream of strange encounters, losses, and becomings.
“Heaven and earth aren’t humane” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)
Underlying the game’s use of oracles and incorporation of tarot are a set of Attitudes – confrontation, manipulation, scarcity, abundance – that pertain equally to the game’s world and its player characters. These Attitudes are not rendered in terms of anthropocentric moralising, which seeks to divide the world into forced binaries, but as neutral approaches that become specific and grounded through context. Story prompts cover a range of possibilities of flourishing and struggle, and repeatedly centre on symbiosis, life, and transformation. This carries over to the endgame, with playthroughs culminating at heterotopian destinations whose communities have their own unresolved contradictions. Player characters will both adjust to these tensions and help change them, with the distinction between group and destination ultimately melting away. As this happens, some of what was lost along the way will come back, be healed, or come to be seen in a more hopeful light. And for groups who do not get to the endgame, all is not lost. The sea gives and takes, and you can always play again.
“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.” (Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)
We hope you enjoy Station to Station! Stay fishpunk.
– GOBLIN FUTURES
vector-bsfa.com 