Problematic Elements in Walkabout
I have no illusions about the fact that certain elements in the Walkabout setting could be perceived as problematic. Removing those elements removes some key thematic concepts from the game and turns it into a vanilla post-apocalyptic game, or maybe a vanilla game with a few veneer elements that make it look like I've just slapped on some colour for a bit of difference. That's never been the intention of the project, the game has never shied away from deeper analysis, because the aim is not for players to become indigenous tourists, it's not a game for "nerdy white boys" to play "blackface Indigenous survivors in a over-the-top Mad Max wasteland" (despite what certain superficial reactionary critics might suggest).
These elements are key to the types of stories able to be told. Excluding them would be like trying to tell a World War Two story without mention of Nazism or Japanese Imperialism, or discuss the destabilisation of South American economies without mention of the CIA.
Let's look at a couple of the problematic elements, and break down why they're present, how they contribute to the games framework, and what might be missing if they were excluded.
1. The Cleanborn
The Cleanborn is just the current working name for those who grew up in secured facilities. In Fallout, the same concept applies to those who gre up in the vaults, in fact there were certain iterations of the game where I called this group Vault-dwellers (but the popularity of Fallout...especially hitting the mainstream with the streaming TV show meant I decided these folks needed a new name). The Cleanborn has been intended as a self referential name, they see the dirty lands outside and they've grown up in sterile laboratories deep underground, or in defended glass and steel enclaves, protected from anything that might injure them or infect them with the mutations they've been seeing among the populations outside. From their perspective, they are clean because they see the rest of the world as degraded and dirty compared to an imagined golden age.
The enclaves where the Cleanborn live are often serviced by Rust Scavengers, and I see these communities having more of an "Ocker" working class sensibility. People from these communities would tend to have pride in building things and getting their hands dirty, so they'd be inclined to use the term "Cleanborn" in a derogatory manner. The workers would see their wealthy (but mechanically incompetent) employers as unwilling to get filthy, and therefore useless except as providers of funds and working spare parts from the past. Darksiders might similarly use the term Cleanborn to indicate someone with no genetic mutations, and therefore a throwback to the pre-cataclysm age...and possibly unworthy of their attention as beings striving for spiritual growth. Sometimes, an uneducated Darksider might describe a Rust Scavenger as a Cleanborn because that's what their definition indicates, but they'd rarely do this more than once due to the insult that the Scavenger would take the comment as. The person who'd lived their entire life in a bunker or a protected enclave would initially be too oblivious to realise that they were being insulted when they were called a "Cleanborn". However, those who had lived on the outside and had "gotten dirty", become "spirit touched", or otherwise had their eyes opened to the nature of the post-apocalyptic world, would begin to understand that most folks in the ruins and the wilds don't necessarily respect Cleanborn as a word or as a people.
The presence of the Cleanborn gives the opportunity for social commentary on the wealthy in the world, and how they have ramifications on the wider setting. They don't accept that their actions are perpetuating their problems, and believe that any issues they see in the world are either the result of corruption and degradation of the unwashed masses, or unnatural forces that are beyond anyone's control. The Cleanborn are the Walkabout world's top 1%, or at least they'd like to think they still are because they're the epitome of conservatives. Only those willing to moving beyond the enclaves are capable of understanding that their time has passed, but moving forward requires moving beyond the conservative mindset and an acceptance that the world lives by new rules now. Progress has happened, it may not be the progress they want, but there is no turning back now. The name may change, but I kind of like the ambiguity of it and the way it can mean different things to different communities of people.
2. The Neo-Tribals
Yes, Walkabout derives it's name from the Australian Indigenous pidgin. It drives a lot of ideas from the lore of the Dreaming, and the respect that the original inhabitants of Australia had for the land. It's a game about spirituality and community, a game about journeys physical and metaphysical. Within this context, the Neo-Tribals are almost a parody. However, they aren't an attempt to parody the Indigenous communities of Australia, but more a parody of the new age movements. The Neo-Tribals also weave together narratives that are complex, sad and forsaken. I touched on this a while ago, in my post about the Bower Bird.
A number of historical events have systematically destroyed a great deal of the Indigenous culture in Australia. Two of the more insidious among these are the events of the Stolen Generation and the missions. Both of these worked to remove younger children from their systems of belief and to instill a new system of dogma, replacing the spirituality of the past with the Anglo-Christian cultural imperialism of the colonists. Facing a dominant and more powerful force, the children abandoned their ways but were still afflicted with the stigma of their skin colour and simply not having the cultural capital from community connections that would have stabilised their lives. This left them locked into the lower classes of society with no real means of upward mobility (even though they had been promised better lives). Some thought they just hadn't integrated well enough and doubled down on their pursuit of Christianity, others felt betrayed and either sank into despair and drugs, violence and anger, or pushed to regain their power through the legal systems of the colonial invaders. Few who had moved from the ways of the past ever returned to them, it was a new world and the old ways weren't integrated into the new society that dominated the country. But there were some who learned to look after the land in new ways.
The cultural imperialism of the colonial forces had betrayed more than just the Indigenous communities in Australia. This was a nation founded by convicts, and settlers who'd been promised dreams and delivered hard work. It was a beacon of hope to refugees who were often imprisoned in camps by ruling conservatives who could not bear to share their soil. Over the years, members of the community saw through the lies of the ruling class, and looked to break free of the dominant society. They founded cults, communes, and went back to the established patterns they knew.
In Walkabout, the spirits of the past returned and were unhappy with what they saw in the world. The devastation of civilization killed billions, and those remaining were lost. Some tried to rebuild the world they previously knew, others took the opportunity to followed the known paths out of the dominant cultural narrative and founded cults, communes, and tribal groups. They knew the old ways weren't working, and they didn't have the established legacies of the Indigenous communities because these legacies had been disrupted. This is all a part of the mystery and horror of the setting, in some cases there is simply nothing that can be done...because the truth is gone, the ways to honour the spirits have been destroyed. But at least the Neo-Tribal groups are trying. They look for the fragments of the past, they combine them however they can, they try to honour the Indigenous communities and look for anyone who might have a fragment of insight to add to their lore. But is it too little too late? That's one of the key stories being told in this setting.
3. The Mutants
Walkabout could probably work without the mutants. Mad Max doesn't explicitly have mutants in it, the stories of The Dreaming don't have mutants in them, but Tank Girl certainly does, and the stories of the Aboriginal Dreaming have sentient (or is it sapient) animals in them. Underlying ideas in the setting relate to the changes in the world, and characters like this reflect those changes in a more visceral way. These are people who have been forced to change whether they want to or not. They are manifesting physical changes, while the Neo-Tribals, Nomads and Skyfarers reflect social changes (often making those social changes on their own terms....but some nomad groups may have been forced into transient life due to forces beyond their control). Mutants reflect a range of changes, some good, some bad. Not all progress is good, but without progress nothing changes and things stagnate.
Mutants are probably the closest that this setting gets to non-human races, and if I want to do them justice I'd probably have to expand the rules for inhuman traits such as advanced senses, natural armour and weapons (eg. claws and teeth), psychic powers (but there will be magic in the setting, so this will probably end up being an alternate path toward mastery of supernatural powers), and similar benefits or occupational paths that are only available via a genetic heritage... predator, beast-speaker, spirit-walker, etc. Making these fit the pattern of other occupations, balancing their ability aspects, and giving a special benefit that pushes beyond the normal scope of humanity should be pretty easy.
From a story perspective, the Mutant could be viewed from a few different perspectives, and it's this ambiguity that makes them a valuable addition in my opinion. A sympathetic look at the humans (especially the Cleanborn) might view the mutants as an invading force, and new level of colonialism that overwhelms the power of humanity. This might force the Cleanborn to side with the other humans finally, or be an ethical dilemma for them to face. If there aren't many mutants, or the mutants don't prove too powerful in the face of humanity, they could retell the types of narratives that we've seen in X-Men comics since the 1960s. This is a world where survivors must struggle no matter who they are, some survive through technology, some through community, others through evolved advantages. The community of wayfarers (to whom the character's belong), draws it's membership from each of the cultures of the world, allowing them to understand that everyone has strengths that counterbalance someone else's weaknesses. It's worth pointing out here that the mutants and otherworldly character types in the game have a spectrum of movement from the humanity of the past. Darksiders and Outlanders can generally pass for human in most cases unless they really play up their mutations (and if that's the way players want to go with their characters, then that's a valid story option that should have repercussions on their tales). At a greater extreme we get the Angels and Demons of the Wasteland who are much further removed and generally suggested as story elements rather than player characters because they have transcended so far away from humanity and the notion of Angels and Demons doesn't really have a counterpart in Dreaming Lore. The Angels and Demons will be described differently by the various groups that do encounter them... one person might describe them as "devas" and "asuras" by those who draw their cosmological understanding from Hindu dogma, another might describe them as "kami" and "oni", "fey" and "formori"... whatever the words used, this helps tell us about the character making the description at least as much as it tells us about the mutant being described... Cleanborn who still don't accept the resurgence of the spiritual in the world might refer to Darksiders/Outlanders as "Type 1 Mutants", while Angels/Demons are "Type 2 Mutants".
I don't know that mutants are as problematic as the other character types presented so far. Their presence actually helps to establish the idea that this is not our world, and assists with the presentation of the liminal and otherworldly state that the tales of the Walkabout game are told in. We're using these characters as metaphors in the world to allude to concepts, and deeper meanings that might be uncomfortable in a mundane modern setting.
4. The Spirits
What are the spirits?
Walkabout could probably work without the explicit appearance of the spirits, and in most cases that's how I'd like to see the stories of the game told. I'm deriving a bit of influence from Werewolf the Apocalypse and Mage the Ascension for this part of the game. This means that the spirits are a reflection of the world, and the world is a reflection of the spirits. They are two sides of a coin, and what happens on one side has an impact on the other. Spirits will rarely manifest in the world, except at specific times and places where the boundary between dreaming and physicality are thin, or if the world gets far enough out of balance that surrealism starts to creep across. This is a bit gnostic, a bit Lovecraftian, a bit horrific, and this is deliberate.
If characters are going into direct confrontation with a minor spirit entity, then it has probably manifested due to a minor issue in the physical world. Unless the physical world's issue is resolved, then the minor spirit will manifest again and again. If the spirit is still there, the issue hasn't been resolved. If the spirit is getting bigger, the issue is getting worse.
If the characters are going into direct confrontation with a major spirit entity, then it will probably wipe them out with no effort at all. Again, it's better to deal with the issues in the physical world that is causing the spirit to manifest.
Specifically the spirits will not be described in detail, these entities are one of the mysteries of the setting. These creatures may be manifestations of psyche, they may be otherworldly entities feeding on the emotional resonance of the sentient beings of the world, they may be remnants of a rogue nanotechnology AI swarm from the dark days, they might actually be the eternal spirits of the Dreaming. Again, this is a point where the beliefs of the individual will vary and it says as much about the describer as it does about the described. The Dreaming is a complex thing, and this project is designed to draw inspiration from it rather than the pigeonhole or belittle it.
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