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Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9781898" data-attributes="member: 7044099">Over the last year-ish I've been playing two games focused around community building/sustainment as the fulcrum of play: Stonetop and Songs for the Dusk. The latter is a post-post collapse/apocalyptic setting (Think: Destiny 2), but one where many of the institutions lean towards power-seeking / expansionism. Not like comic book evil (mostly), but definitely some parallels of our current time. The players are essential to a smaller community in this place, and depending on where they situate themselves will have the option to push back against an expansionist empire by bringing fractured areas together; do counter-espionage (or espionage); smuggle needed goods and people around; or just go get stuck into ancient tech and compete with weapons makers and such. I'd say it leans towards your hopeful world - it assumes that most people are good and you need to defend it from getting bad.Stonetop is a little different. It's perhaps a bit despairing in that the World's End is a bare points of light(ish) setting full of ancient and current darkness, and the larger settlements are a) a wretched hive of scum and villainy and b) a town teetering on a precipice. Your home village, the entire reason you're adventuring, is different. It's a Good Place, full of mostly Good People, but fragile - a bad harvest or ancient evil away from extinction. And the people aren't perfect. So teh question it asks of the players is: "will you be able to see your home survive and perhaps thrive? Or will it dwindle away."Both of these already highly resonated with me before things declined, and now even more so. I have lost some ability to run villains with too much parallel to current events (I had started a Blades in teh Dark game which is very much a despairing world with the idea of the players doing a bit of a rebellion act but lost the desire to run the totalitarian factions ramping up oppression the setting is geared towards). So my latest games have been a bit more simple classic "the evil person wants to be a bit OTT evil" for some distance.</blockquote>

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