Live on Backerkit, but ENDING SOON!

I originally wanted to do more updates myself, but last week I was called to deal with a serious family emergency. As we slide toward the end of the campaign, however, I’d like to talk a little bit about maturity and tone.

In my opinion, a lot of people confuse harshness with maturity, and maturity with a work’s worth, whether it’s a game, film, book, whatever. When we’re younger, we often look to extreme, dark stuff to explore the cultural world beyond what our families and other elders have provided for us, and for a while, we might associate seeking these things out with maturity. And certainly, there’s a lot to learn from dark themes. Most of my own work has been in dark fantasy and horror, and it’s a genre I plan to return to—but it isn’t the most mature or worthy.

I started playing around with the ideas that would coalesce into Wardens of the Blue Rose because I was fascinated with the simple proposition of the game’s subtext: What if the type of good in a fantasy world actually matched the values we want to see? And that raises this question: Why do we think that focus is less interesting or elevated than something darker? One reason is simple and value-neutral: Whenever you solve a problem, you prevent a conflict, and while we can have stories without conflicts, the ones we enjoy in roleplaying games usually have them. “But!” I said to myself at the battered coffee table where I do my work, “Conflict for a good cause is cool.”

And conflict doesn’t need to be lethal or otherwise catastrophic. In real life we have very meaningful struggles and reconciliations without gods, monsters, and death. Wardens of the Blue Rose probably wouldn’t exist without slice-of-life narratives finding a place in genre media, because that makes people used to exploring fantasies where the goal isn’t to satisfy a prophecy, bring things back under a good deity, or whatever, but to be good to people, and help them solve their problems. Sometimes we’ll find the fight for goodness goes to dark places, but whether it’s about a fencepost or something from the Shadow, these are worthy stories, because they offer us more than hope for an imaginary land. They remind us that we can take up goodness—real goodness instead of a fantasy metaphysics of gods and magic—and it can drive us to communicate, join together, and make the world better. I think I decided on younger adult protagonists both to appeal to all ages and as a reminder that we can renew ourselves, even our tastes.

I’m hardly claiming that this game is a social good, but it is valuable to remind us, in play and work, that we can do that, and it can be as fascinating as a dark lord on a lonely throne.

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