Samhain Blessings

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Cover image: Lightspress Media’s Ancestral Echoes, A Foragers’ Guild Guide

These last few months, I have been missing tabletop roleplaying. So many stories to tell, and I’m really missing the tabletop experience, the laughter, the sound of rolling dice, the stupid decisions some people make (“Wait … you want to seduce the lich?”)

At this time of year, more than ever I am missing the storytelling.

I mean, I woke up from a dream where my face was covered in blood, only to find that my face really was covered in blood. So I really must have some hilarious gaming scenarios I would want to share, right?

Liminal Storytelling

So much of what I do is liminal storytelling. My stories are about some sort of transition from one state to the other, where the players find themselves on the cusp of major decisions, having to depend on their instincts (and by “their,” I mean the players’) to make the decision to go back to where they were, or to push forward into a new reality.

This is the essence of the Hero’s Journey, but - as always - there is usually a twist.

Many times, in a Hero’s Journey story, the protagonist lives in their mundane community, and is somehow given a call to action which they initially refuse. But what if they do not fit in with mundane reality, and resist the heteronormative narrative which would force them to remain in their place in society; a place allocated to them by conformism and peer pressure, but which they loathe because it it so clearly not a fit for them at all? What if the call to the Other Realm is just the thing for them, something they could no more resist than a hungry person could resist free food?

And what if, against all expectations, the protagonist does not somehow enter that other realm, but brings it to the mundane world, forcing the other mundanes to confront and meet with the denizens of that other place, and go on their own hero’s journeys?

Example: The Thinning of The Veil

The above pic, the one with the sugar skull, is from a new Lightspress Media book, Ancestral Echoes, for the Foragers’ Guild (now Fantasy Manifesto) tabletop fantasy roleplaying game. The game is themed around discovery of, and communion with, one’s ancestors, and exploration of the ties which bind characters to their past - a past which is not so dead, at least not in this book.

This is a theme which is appropriate to this time, between it being Samhain (at the time of writing) and soon to be the Day of The Dead in Mexico; in both festivals, the veil between the worlds is thin to non-existent, and the dead return to the worlds of the living, just as the living are forced to confront the past and the lands of the dead.

It’s a time where the living can see the faces of those they lost, and know that the ancestors do not exist in torment but in a state of peace which the living cannot understand while they are alive.

Ancestral Echoes is a delight of a game book. This evening would have been the perfect night to explore the themes unleashed from within it. The perfect way to honour everybody’s ancestors, in a positive and encouraging environment allowing for exploration of these deep and meaningful themes.

The takeaway from all of this, I guess, is to look after your people. Get into gaming with them. Get together to explore these themes, rather than dodging fireballs down dungeons and endless repetitive bouts of deadly combat, over and over.

Go and find your people this Samhain. Find them, and never let them go, and let games like this draw you in. Remember, games are not about indiscriminate slaughter any more. They are about exploration. And how best to explore than to explore the lands where your ancestors now dwell only in memory?