Utopia Burns: Imperial Worldbuilding in TTRPGs

This essay began as an attempt to address the divide between practices of worldbuilding empires and utopia in the TTRPG space, and how (while seemingly very different in terms of content) they are both functional with reproducing a particular kind of fantasy worlds in the medium, consequently informing the way people think about social possibilities and the present.

Tabletop roleplaying games could hardly be trumped when it comes to the degree of agency they offer in shaping worlds, playing with new, unprecedented political forms and social institutions, yet what one finds when one peruses the catalogs, the top ten lists and most of what’s on offer would tempt people to think otherwise: From an endless deluge of licensed IPs cribbed from other media, to a traditional core of games centered around characters who define themselves mostly through their capabilities to exert violence, it would seem like the medium’s premise has deeply betrayed its material outcome.

Now, I’ve written a lot about the ways in which the ideological inheritance of Dungeons & Dragons, with its colonialist western background cosplaying in medieval-fair attire, has continued to inform and pervade every aspect of the creation of roleplaying games. You wouldn’t expect otherwise given the fact that, compared to any other artistic medium, the sheer magnitude of D&D’s cultural monopoly is nothing short of colossal — upwards of 95% of the market share translates into an entire universe of preconceptions that tend to apply to all other works in the medium (specially in the imperial core). For those who want to get a sense of scale, I tend to invite them to imagine what would happen if 95% of everything listened in the realm of music, for over 6 decades, was The Beatles. Aside from echoing what would be a personal hell for me in particular, I think it establishes a good baseline for folk to meditate upon the ripples that every aspect of D&D’s design sends across the seas of what’s possible.

Seeing past the surface in this requires an analysis that is far beyond my capabilities and those of this essay. Instead, I want to talk about worlbuilding, and specifically about the imperial imprint of D&D reproduces dated ways of seeing the world, both in the designs that tend to replicate it as well as those that want to challenge it.

Part 1: Imperial Worldbuilding and The Real

Worldbuilding is a strange term. The way it tends to be understood is closer to those practices of “speculative fiction”; a subset of science fiction that draws on historiography not just as an inspiration but as a recourse of authority — intending to pose the author not just as a creative, but as a prophet: Someone who’s “done its homework” and tapped onto (mostly Western) historical records to project forward and predict what could happen. Within this medium, the reader derives joy not just from the narrative, but from a feeling of “becoming aware” and sharing in the prestige derived from the author’s perceived intellectual authority.

Hard sci-fi has a similar pull (though drawing also from physics and other natural sciences), which is also reflective of common patterns of Western thought with regards to conceptions of history. The idea that the future can be predicted is predicated upon historical notions of linear progress that became prominent during the age of global empires (S. XVI onward), notions that — as posed by Amitav Ghosh — set aside the destruction and genocide of most life on Earth, the result of colonialist expansionism, as an inevitable, natural process of the relentless march of history. In a way, hard science fiction and speculative fiction are one in the same in this regard, only switching the disciplines from which they draw authority as you move further into the future (from historical research when we talk about near future predictions, to natural sciences as we project into other worlds and stars). This sort of transition has an uncanny parallel with conservative, imperial views on the “end of history”, and the idea of an eventual death of politics and a human world shaped entirely by the product of science.

In TTRPGs, while the sources considered valid for informing the practise of worldbuilding (the western historical record) are mostly the same, the process goes through an additional ideological filter before actually put to text, put in play, etc. The filter is that of D&D, its mechanics, and results in what we could name “imperial worldbuilding”. After all, for D&D, not every aspect of the historical record can be deemed useful — the information we go after gains relevance the further we search for references to the kind of action carried out by the player characters. Most of this action pertains to military history, the history of empires, of kings, of torture and violence. It makes for the perfect excuse to put on the History Channel. In this sense, it also helps build a perception of history that is deeply marred in imperial tunnel vision: What does it mean for TTRPGs, arguably the most freeform, liberatory medium, in which we might project our most grandiose fantasies, that we always end up limiting ourselves to Great Men Theory of History reenactments, rehashing Hobbessian homo homini lupus philosophies, and painting the horizon of our imagination in the colors of empire? Some might say that “this is just games”, and that they have no effect on reality. Those people might have to contend with the ample evidence that the archeological, anthropological, and historical record shows of games as the origin of political thought. Truth is that fiction, and the domains of the imagination, are the first place in which the fantasies of terrible people first become edified. From notions of mob rule originating at the roman amphiteater games to Pentagon backing of Marvel movies and other fantasies of empire, as a designer, I find the handwaving and lack of compromise and taking responsability, well… irresponsible at the least.

The worst part of this is that, once the domain of imagination is narrowed to this, our perception of what is possible — the means by which we may change the world — is simplified to calculating degrees of power enforcement. A huge part of what justifies this simplification, this reduction in our capabilities to imagine, is the invocation of academic authority from the imperial historiography; military history, western mechanicism and other colonial ideologies. For most TTRPG writers, these sources form, indeed, a material basis for their worldbuilding works: Real world examples that give credence and a touch of realism to their works. Without even going into an actual critique of how “material” or “real” these sources tend to be (their rigorousness often aren’t, as is their state in terms of how up to date they are), they all contribute to the grand imperial homogenization of TTRPG worlds. This homogenization needs to be seen both in the surface as well as the mechanical bones of what is written—something I find important to point out, given the tendency of Wizards of the Coast as well as many of its ideologically entwined companies to employ cultural consultants to apply “native” paintjobs to their games of xenophobic extractivism in order to dance to the tune of US liberal sensibilities, which form the majority of their customer base. All of this goes to, later on, inform the real world view of those who partake in RPGs, the notion that this is reality, and the rest is utopia.

Part 2: Utopia and The Unreal

The fact of the matter is that, in the same way that speculative fiction built on the back of military history (and drawing on the authority power of academia of it) helps narrow down our imagination to the sphere of uses of violence through our notions of “the material” as determined by how much we can quote from western academia, the idea of “what belongs to the realm of pure fantasy” is also functional to imperial homogenization of TTRPG worlds. The trend of “hopepunk”, “solarpunk”, and other aesthetic movements that functionally alienate the way new worlds look from the way they are ideated and conformed has been critiqued and disregarded (rightly so) as liberal propaganda for a while now. But in my opinion, to simply regard them as propaganda without addressing the part they play alongside imperial worldbuilding would be to miss the forest for the trees.

Simply put, there is a very nasty duet being danced off when we observe that the works of imperial worldbuilding can draw from an academic repertoire that grants it “materiality” while all the utopias of solarpunk, hopepunk, etc. seem to be conjured out of Pinterest/Tumblr scrolling binges. One would think that most people producing works in these genres would actually look for real world examples of alternative takes on society rather than going out on a limb. Something of this kind is very reminiscent, to me, of the experiences of Marxist Leninists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, and other state left wing utopians who continuously reminisce about the URSS experience (an experience as horrifyingly macabre as most other warring state histories), riffing on their aesthetics, while completely ignoring actual revolutionary processes happening as I write these words, in the Altiplano in Bolivia, in Rojava, in Chiapas, in Zomia, in Madagascar, etc.

I don’t think it’s in good practice to afford both of these the benefit of assumed naivete. In both cases, both a) the lack of any sort of reference to real world examples and b) the rose-tinted nostalgia for murderous regimes, serve to enclose the realm of “what could be” both to imagination, as well as to the past respectively. Functionally, these excercises are no different than usual right wing critiques of the left as “delusional”, but they are particularly insidious when we see that they are contrasted by the perceived material reality of the imperial worlds I mentioned in part 1. The lack of any interest in reading about how the societies of Teotihuacan, Poverty Point, Sanae Maruyama, etc. managed to horizontally plan for public housing for tens of thousands of people, build entire cities without a statehead at the helm, literally thousands of years ago is baffling. Where should one draw the line between stupidity and willing denialism?

The end result is clear. What is deemed “real” and backed by material history is everything that reinforces the imperial worldbuilding projects. What is deemed “fantasy” is made of a collection of aesthetic tags with almost no groundedness. This duet reinforces in people the idea that some ways of projecting into the future are more real and achievable than others.

Part 3: Burning Utopia, The Solution

I’ve critiqued the practice of utopianism as one of the key aspects of what makes for “state brain” (the kind of thinking upon which state projects are built) many times in the past. Both of these practices, imperial worldbuilding and liberal utopianism are predicated on the same idea; the deeply narcissistic notion that we as designers, writers, artists, have the knowledge and intellectual insight to create fantasies applicable to everyone else. This position (Vanguardism) has long since been decried and disregarded — though it is probably due to TTRPG’s state of isolation that we barely have heard of it, as is the case with so many ideas and roads already treaded upon.

It is also very patent of western dominance that the act of worldbuilding in itself is so perceived to be closer to the domain of a sort of impassioned academic excercises, full of do’s and don’t’s, rather than a creative excercise. The act is practised as if it involved a search for some sort of objectivity (not for knowledge, but to draw upon the power of academic authority) while, in truth, the foundational difference between writings on the real world vs writings on the fictional world is that (at least, in intention) the later has a narrative goal as a tool to invoke a particular set of ideas. Funnily enough, is is often imperial academia and their constant claims to objectivity that tend to obscure and disregard the sheer degree to which they are worldbuilding excercises themselves. In any case, this is the reason why almost the entirety of worldbuilding advice seen in resources online and offline is about “instilling realism” rather than writing places, people, and philosophies that help evoke the feelings of the players and everyone involved creatively in the work. Posited as it is through its prescriptions, agency over the conception of worlbuilding remains strictly the domain of empire rather than creatives themselves.

In truth, the excercise of worldbuilding need not be as strict as you might think it be: While it will always show, whether consciously or unconsciously, your biases and upheld preconceptions of the world, simply assuming that what we write is not a prescription for liberation may be enough. This is an assumption that has a bit of a double edge: the fantasies we create will have an impact. And so while casting out all pretemptions, if we deep down wish for our art to challenge the imperial worldbuilding project, we need to reach out and be in touch with the experiences of peoples that have built “the future” thousands of years ago, as well as the obscured, maligned futures being built right now under our noses. And above all, it means interrogating our designs and what we type down, seeking to understand the forces at work behind them, and making an effort to extirpate empire — one word at a time.