The Spirit World

Here's where things get delicate.

The fine line ensuring things are sensitive rather than a caricature is always going to be in a different place for different people. However, based on my discussions with various members of Indigenous communities over the years, a lot of this can be mitigated by ensuring everyone understands the way the game works, the narrative structure, and the way it attempts to development a liminal space in which communal storytelling occurs.

That's a heavy start to a post, but if you've read through my How to Run a Game series it should make sense. 

We're not trying to co-opt or appropriate the stories of the past, but to create new stories that reflect current issues and cultural morality standards. Walkabout doesn't critique the Indigenous culture, but draws inspiration from it, as well as considering the complexity of situations and how they might be impacted by a hypothetical situation. Our hypothetical situation is a blend of science, science fiction, and fantasy (or spiritual dogma). 

The characters in our stories manifest supernatural powers, much like the heroic characters in the stories of the Dreaming. So I'd like to think that it's pretty obvious to delineate the differences between the world of our stories and the real world, but there's always going to be people who suffer bleed between the fictional and non-fictional worlds...and there are always going to be people who take things out of context because they either can't be bothered reading/understanding the whole process, or because their looking for a reaction.

Anyway, enough of the prologue...

In the traditional western cycle of the hero's journey, the hero is an outsider. They are typically an orphan who needs to gather or lead a group of allies against a threat, then return to his people with a benefit that reflects the adversity he has overcome. 

This has informed much of western culture. We hear stories of successful industrialists who have confronted struggles, and overcome them against the odds to lead us toward a brighter future. Many roleplaying games follow this pattern too, accepting a quest, leaving civilisation, descending into an underworld dungeon, facing a monster, returning with treasure...though one of the common dilemmas is working out who the "real" hero is among the group.

Walkabout deliberately flips this narrative on it's head. In many Australian Indigenous cultures, the one who walks alone is often the villain, the protagonist typically doesn't do things for themselves but for the benefit of their community and people/places they have relationships to. The characters are still wanderers, but they aren't working for pay or glory, they're charged by the spirits of the Dreaming to restore balance to the world. They don't quest for items to tilt the status quo in their favour, instead they actively look for the effects that are causing those tilts and they work to remove them.

The game is pretty blatant in this regard. The whole world has tilted off it's axis for reasons beyond the understanding of mortals. The spirits who left humanity as custodians of the land have seen that their former chosen children have lost their way (through the deliberate actions of invaders) so they've decided to take a more active role in transforming the world. Thus the magic of the dreaming has returned to correct the imbalance. The core factor about this game is not that it's just a facade of "Aboriginality" overlaid onto a generic game engine, with a post apocalyptic vibe...it's informed by my experiences with Indigenous elders, their stories, and their relationships to one another and the world around them. I'd like to think that it has come from listening and analysing what has been told to me, and paying just as much respect to what hasn't been said (and why it might not have been spoken). I accept that I've been bringing my own biases in, that's just a part of life. But a lot of this is unravelling a mystery that has been deliberately obscured for generations. It's like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle from a box where government agencies have deliberately set fire to half the pieces, missionary groups have scribbled on a whole heap of the pieces they didn't like and have added in a bunch of pieces from their own box, and maybe a quarter of the pieces have been hand drawn and cut out of cardboard based on what people can remember, and what they've been told years ago by parents and grandparents who might have memories of the original puzzle. 

The idea in Australian popular culture of the "Dreamtime" is a misinterpretation, accidental or otherwise, filtered through a lens of Judaeo-Christian dogma. The religious texts of these dominant religions are filled with stories of a legendary/mythical past, claiming to be the true stories of how the world was formed and how the chosen people of a divine entity passed through ancient times and into the modern age. When explorers, anthropologists, and people actually interested in Indigenous culture sat down with people who remembered the stories (such as Francis Gillen and Walter Baldwin Spencer in 1899) to record them for posterity, they naturally made assumptions based on their understandings of religion and spirituality. Rather than considering the stories universal multi-layered morality tales, they saw simple childrens' stories describing a mythical age in the past. Others followed suit and this has been a difficult barrier to break through, especially as the word "Dreamtime" sets up some useful shorthands to establish context for Australian Indigenous narratives.

The better accepted term is "the dreaming", which almost parallels the work of Freud and Jung with it's echoes of universal constants that are tapped into via stories and allegory. That's where we're heading with Walkabout's spirituality. We're not trying to make judgements about what is real or otherwise, but are establishing a framework for storytelling. In Walkabout, anyone can access the Dreaming through their unconscious mind (especially while sleeping), though this is distorted by a filter of cultural understanding, a neo-pagan drawing on Celtic lore might percieve the spirit world as one filled with fey and courts of capricious unknowable immortal beings of magic...a person with beliefs in Hinduism might see a pantheon on beings served by an array of Daevas and Asuras... a Christian might see angels trying to lead them upward while demons lead them astray. Each of these is fractured truth restructured by a waking mind that wants to understand things beyond it's comprehension. Walkabout suggests that places have eternal spirits ("Genius Loci"), so do animals, and people. The characters in our stories are able to interact with these spirits to gain otherworldly insights into situations...the characters are avatars of those spirits, sharing a fragment of a divine essence from entities of balance that seek to restore a natural order to things, while the structures of a past civilisation strive to restore the imbalance that brought them to power.

...and everything in the spirit world is driven by stories and relationships. 

The Genius Loci and other spirits will have their own character sheets, and their own abilities, sometimes helping the characters, and sometimes working against them.