The Places We Belong
Neighbourhoods
I’ve been consumed with moving for months and found it to difficult to work on anything creative during this process. A move is a difficult thing. I had lived in my last apartment for 11 years. I was tucked into a little west-end neighbourhood full of cute side-streets. I had a part-time job at a coffee shop on the same block as my apartment. I had a city park with a big river winding through it a short walk from my door. I would run into people I knew all the time.
The move wasn’t our choice. Our apartment was cheap and massive, and we treasured it like a rare jewel, despite its many flaws. Toronto’s in the middle of a housing crisis, as is most of the country, and my partner and I would search for almost half a year before we found a place that would accept our application. At the end of summer, as the move loomed ahead of us, I started walking by the river every day. I tried to keep an open mind, by I was mourning the neighbourhood I had become so attached to. I was getting as much time by the river as I could. It was my way of saying goodbye.
The move worked out great in the end. We were patient and found a new home we love. The new apartment, while smaller, is clean, quiet, and beautiful. I said goodbye to my old neighbourhood but hello to a new one that I might enjoy even more. I am steps from Toronto’s largest park and eager to explore it more. We’re closer to the things we need. Slowly, I’m finding a new sense of belonging here, finding my favourite spots. I thought the old place was such a good fit, but in moving, realized how much I had outgrown it. I forgot that sometimes we feel we belong somewhere because its familiar.
After we settled in, I found time to work on game design. I don’t think it’s possible to waste time as a creative—everything you do is useful and effects your work. The months I had spent barely touching my notes had filled a creative resevoir that needed to be replenished. I was full of thoughts of places and what they mean to us.
My current project, a game of post-apocalyptic survival called The Things We Become, is centered on this idea of belonging. Avery Alder’s Dream Askew presented a system called belonging outside belonging which encouraged exploration of setting through unique play sheets shared amongst the players. Her game is about queer outcasts forming an enclave and finding space on the fringes of society. Years ago, this sparked the idea for my own work.
Found family and belonging are often talked about as queer experiences, but while being queer can bring the issue of belonging into the spotlight, it’s a journey many others go on. In fact, I would say it’s a journey that everyone should go on, and many miss out on it by a lack of necessity, going through life less complete for it. We all know people who stay within the bounds of a place they were born into, whether that place be physical, social, or emotional.
So The Things We Become presents belonging from a different angle, not queer on the surface, but informed by my own queer experience, and, I believe, easily recognizeable by those who know it. I love games about queerness, but belonging has, in my own life, been about so much more than that. It’s deeply personal, but, I’ve discovered, also inherently universal.
So as I transition through places where I belong, this informs a design based on this idea of place and what it means to you.
Place at the core
The Things We Become is an interesting idea with a lot of competing aspects to it. It’s a post-apocalyptic game set in a world where nature learned to fight back, where it eventually overtook humanity. You live on the fringes of the wilderness that now covers the globe. You play hunters, people who defend their community while slowly being changed by the strange wilds they explore.
But behind the exploration of the things you might become is something bigger, which is a bit purposefully hidden: the places where you belong.
I divided the setting into three distinct parts that your hunter might find themselves attached to. The enclave is the community you protect. They are some of the last surviving humans, a couple hundred souls that you have sworn to protect. They need you, but your strangeness keeps them wary. The lodge is where the hunters live, and its where you find people like you. But hunters disagree often, and the lodge demands order and obedience in order to function. Then there’s the shroud, a wild and untamed land full of strange beasts, mutated flora, old-world ruins, spirits, and things beyond our understanding.
I didn’t exactly intend this when I designed them, I think these three places parallel a lot of real-world places we must choose between.
The enclave is something that should make you feel safe, but is always a bit cold and wary to those too different. Many others find belonging, but it will always be harder for a hunter to fit in. And the weirder you are, the harder it becomes. It wants the status quo. It’s the world at-large.
The lodge is a smaller community within a larger one. It interacts with the enclave every day, but there’s a line there. While the hunters often leave the lodge and go into the enclave, the reverse is much less common. It should be a place of comfort for people of a certain identity, but just like in real life, those places are better suited to some more than others. It has its own rules and expectations, and sometimes they are even harsher than the enclave’s.
The shroud is unexplored and unknown. There’s little help or guidance within it, but it offers up things you won’t find anywhere else. Ultimately, everyone’s experience in the shroud is deeply personal. It’s dangerous and beautiful. Not everyone understands it or appreciates it, and many fear it. It wants growth and change. In this game, its a reflection of the personal, inner journey.
In my own life, I have wandered through all of these places. We are all born into the enclave and I know it well, and can survive in it for a time, but I feel the weight of it when I do. I’ve been a part of many lodge-equivelents. Groups, clubs, scenes, whatever you want to call them. Some suit me well. Others offer something I need but have costs or expectations that I don’t love. And the shroud is always there, this inner journey, the unknown, the private spirituality you cultivate away from groups and buildings. For me, its a place that is very alluring and comforting, but I know many that avoid it.
All this is to say these places are the core. When I realized how well they parallel real places, I made them a huge focus of how the game plays and how I present it to others. Setting to me is more than just where a character comes from and where they are: it’s where they feel comfortable, what they seek, and what they avoid.
Game design is a process of slowly peeling back layers until you discover what your game is really centered around, and (I hope) I’ve found it.
The mechanics of belonging
I think style in game design comes from what you make obvious and what you hide. I’m hiding a lot in this game. The title throws you off, making the game sound like its about your own humanity, while the truth is that it stretches beyond that into the idea of finding belonging as an outsider. And then there’s the real-life places hidden behind the setting.
But with mechanics, I tend to like the obvious. Right now, there are three big tracks on your character sheet labelled “affinities”; one for the enclave, the lodge, and the shroud. You distribute marks between them. These indicate where you have the most connection and reputation, and the more points you have, the more effective you’ll feel your hunter is when interacting in those spheres: you’ll get special abilities related to them and be able to add bonuses to your rolls when they’re relevant.
And since we are exploring not only where you belong now but where you will find belonging, they change. At the end of every session, the players look at these tracks and adjust, making suggestions to others if they think they are warrented. As you gain a point on any track, you lose one on another, showing how your priorities shift.
This might seem very mechanical for something that could be left to roleplay, but I truly think if its not on your character sheet and you never interact with it, its not in your mind when you play. This is why I loathe the “personality” boxes on a D&D character sheet. If you’re writing it down once and never using it again, its going to slip from the mind of a lot of players (myself included). If something is important, you need it to be a part of play. You need the players to toy with it, to think about it.
Even if someone goes in unaware of the themes at play, this part of thier character sheet forces them to see the setting in these three parts again and again, and they’ll naturally find themselves better situated to scenarios in the one they put the most points in, because they’ll be using abilities tied to it and adding bonuses to their rolls when it’s relevant. Their hunter will be more capable there, more confident.
And that’s a big part of my design; drawing people in with something that might seem very mechanical on the surface, but is subtly guiding you to something else I want you to explore.
What’s next
As a bit of a project update: things are coming along! I was able to get enough done since the move that I ran a playtest of character and setting creation. Right now things are still a little thrown together, but the next milestone is a downloadable playtest packet that I can get in people’s hands, and probably a discord server to manage all this. The plan is to debut printed copies in March at Toronto’s 2024 Breakout convention.
And speaking of burying leads, I’ve been working away on a cover for The Things We Become and I think it’s turning out pretty great so far.
As always, I hope this little exploration was helpful. I think a lot of games touch on belonging in some way, and how obvious you make that is up to you. Its a theme I see all the time, and maybe this will inspire you to explore it more deeply in your own work or in the games you play.
Let me know what you think! Drop a like if this was useful, leave a comment if you have any questions or interesting thoughts. Once again, the best place for updates right now is this newsletter, so subscribe to follow along!
Let’s assume all typos are intentional.