Into the Mother Lands: A Sci-fi RPG by PoC Designers

When Eugenio Vargas spoke to us on our podcast back in November about this Afrofuturist RPG, it was still months away. Now the game has hit Kickstarter, and has made over $100K in the first couple of days!

Into the Mother Lands - An Original Afrofuturist TTRPG

Setting book for Into the Mother Lands RPG!!!

www.kickstarter.com

Imagine if African explorers had set sail for the New World long before Europeans did... but got transported to a new planet instead! This planet is developed by a civilisation of African descent.

Choose from five cultures and several professions such as the Bio Priest or the Spine Ripper.

The team behind Into the Mother Lands is a group RPG designers, all people of colour, led by Tanya DePass, the founder of the non-profit group I Need Diverse Games.

You can pick up the PDF for $25 or the hardcover for $50, plus an array of dice, screens, maps, sheets and more.

Podcast #127 Into the Mother Lands with Eugenio Vargas

This week, Morrus and Peter are joined by Eugenio Vargas to talk about Into the Motherlands. In the news, Gale Force 9 sues Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything released, Comic Relief Plays D&D Part 2, and more plus a brand new sketch about the...

www.enworld.org

 

[ART!]

This is the kind of project i would back regardless of system, just a) to support the creators and the concept, and b) for the setting, ideas, etc.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

The Planet is said to be peaceful which makes me wonder what there is to do considering nearly all the classes shown are either combat classes or healers.

Your last post is a very helpful breakdown of the setting--they should ask you to write a campaign update! But that bit that I quoted from you up there is what still mystifies me about the KS campaign. If this place is so unspoiled by colonialism and generally wonderful...what do you do in the game? Not saying that all settings should be apocalyptic, but the good ones usually feature some clear inflection point or general period of instability. Descriptions of various utopian environments are neat and all, but those are typically places the PCs just pass through on the way to somewhere more dangerous. I don't care about Naboo or Wakanda during peacetime. I care about Tatooine, or Wakanda once it has to deal with the rest of the world, or faces a civil war (or similar).

 

[Ixal]

Your last post is a very helpful breakdown of the setting--they should ask you to write a campaign update! But that bit that I quoted from you up there is what still mystifies me about the KS campaign. If this place is so unspoiled by colonialism and generally wonderful...what do you do in the game? Not saying that all settings should be apocalyptic, but the good ones usually feature some clear inflection point or general period of instability. Descriptions of various utopian environments are neat and all, but those are typically places the PCs just pass through on the way to somewhere more dangerous. I don't care about Naboo or Wakanda during peacetime. I care about Tatooine, or Wakanda once it has to deal with the rest of the world, or faces a civil war (or similar).

I just listened to the session 0 stream and typed up what I noticed (skipping most of the individual character creation after the first one).
They do get a starship, so thats probably where the adventure is, including space combat as the ship will have a weapon station.
I do wonder what type of adventures you can have (or rather which they aim to support). The types of skills they have remind me of those condensed skill lists in games like Pathfinder or D&D which are mainly combat with a bit of skill on the side and also the classes are nearly all combat related.
Listening to more of their streamed gameplay sessions would probably be enlightening about this issue, but honestly I do not have the time to do that.

 

[Bagpuss]

Your last post is a very helpful breakdown of the setting--they should ask you to write a campaign update! But that bit that I quoted from you up there is what still mystifies me about the KS campaign. If this place is so unspoiled by colonialism and generally wonderful...what do you do in the game?

It is a planet hopping setting, spaceships and the like, so perhaps the Musalia (sorry shouldn't use the colonial name) I mean Vutoa is peaceful but the rest of the universe (or is it just solar system? Not got that far in the AP yet) are troublesome.

 

[Bagpuss]

The Solanci sound like there will be variants within a race.
Mansagene: That they are not biological is played up in the stream and their culture also is against repairing their bodies. That makes me wonder how combat and healing will work for them.
That they have different faces to plug in and out depending on their mood etc. sounds like a interesting concept.

Hyenale: Basic loremaster from the sound of it who collect and share lore.
Hathare(?): Another native culture which looks like anthropomorphic animals (that seems to be the theme for aliens they are going for. A bit outdated but not uncommon for SciFi). They are said to be rather large and as one of the stretch goals is a elephant plush, so its elephant people with a engineer culture apparently.

I'm still trying to understand how they can say "we wanted to get away from the biological determinism like calling it race or species or any variation there of, so we went with culture" and yet all these cultures only have members of a singular race or species as anyone else would understand them.

If they wanted to get away from biological determinism, perhaps they should have kept species, and added culture, so that people from one species could have joined other cultures? Here if you are human you follow Musalian culture, if you are an android you are the Mansegene culture, a planet/person then your Solani "culture", etc.

You can't just go replacing the word race with culture to fix biological determinism.

 

[Ixal]

I'm still trying to understand how they can say "we wanted to get away from the biological determinism like calling it race or species or any variation there of, so we went with culture" and yet all these cultures only have members of a singular race or species as anyone else would understand them.

If they wanted to get away from biological determinism, perhaps they should have kept species, and added culture, so that people from one species could have joined other cultures? Here if you are human you follow Musalian culture, if you are an android you are the Mansegene culture, a planet/person then your Solani "culture", etc.

You can't just go replacing the word race with culture to fix biological determinism.

Did they actually say that? Or that decolonialism is a feature of the setting?
It looks to me that the goal is mainly to represent cultures often overlooked in RPGs, here northern/central Africans, but the mission statement does not mention anything about any cultural goals.

Granted the stream made it sound like exploring your culture and your relation with it is part of the design goal. Still, this doesn't imply to me that you can't have more fantasy "monocultures" (warrior culture, scholar culture, etc.) and they did mention during character creation that most Bio Priest are Mansagene and that a Musalian Bio Priest would be unusal, but not unheard of and that this choice would be part of the things you can explore.

 

[Bagpuss]

Did they actually say that? Or that decolonialism is a feature of the setting?

It's a quote by the GM from the first AP video. As is my earlier comment about being free from the "baggage of western colonisation and slavery".

 

[imagineGod]

Posted Soulbound in wrong thread.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

It's a quote by the GM from the first AP video. As is my earlier comment about being free from the "baggage of western colonisation and slavery".

This is their selling point to score points and get immediate pledges to the KS from some people who are of the like mind-set who will back no matter what just to support this.

The other selling point of this KS seems to be that every person part of the writing and design team is a person of color, which is fine but making it a specific statement about the project is them scoring points with another segment of the population who will auto-back to support for this reason without looking into the project.

The third is the artwork, which is really good. Good artwork will always get me to look at a project, if only to check it out.

The success of this KS will not be based on the game itself, though. It Will be for the first two reasons here. It's another anti-colonialism (which is often treated as synonymous to also being anti-white when the tag line also includes the fact that no non-person of color is on the design team in any way) fantasy rpg based on hypothetical what-if white people were never part of the world culture.

I'm just imagining how people would react if this game was designed by an entire group of non-people of color and Advertised (virtue signaled) it like that and decided that every single facet of art and culture in the game completely ignored any reference to any of our world's (planet earth) many, MANY other people of color or indigenous cultures. I'm betting that KS would get slammed on Twitter for being bigoted and the designers pushed out of the industry.

As a person of earth and an anthropologist, I'm kinda getting tired of all the racism and hypocrisy.

It will be very interesting to see how they will write up a setting that has exploration in it without any colonialistic tropes at all. You can't expand any culture without establishing colonies somewhere to have a base of operation to further explore and settle. And no game, story or entertainment (tv show, movie, etc) can work without some kind of conflict in it. Conflict is the driving force of all dramatic situations and action in every good story told. Without conflict there is no reason for anybody to act.

If this game was a Cortex game I'd still be pretty tempted to back it. Cortex System is one of my favorites. The art is quite phenomenal IMO and the class (profession) names are evocative enough to definitely make them distinctive from other games. That's very cool.

 

[Marc_C]

By the way, Coriolis The Third Horizon RPG from Free League is one of the best Islamic inspired cultural futurist settings I have seen.

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Correction: Arab inspired rpg. It is a great game and setting. There is no Islam in Coriolis.