[…] Luxury Gay Space Communism

I don’t think I can overstate how excited I am to finally share this thing. It’s by far the largest solarpunk project I’ve finished - in fact it’s the largest fiction project I’ve completed at all. At 300 pages it’s longer than the game system’s actual rulebook, and between the text, location and character art, maps, and paper evidence, it’s pretty dang elaborate! In many ways, it represents a sort of amalgamation of all my rural solarpunk projects so far. If you like my postcard series, then playing this campaign should be the closest thing to stepping into that setting.

Personally, I also think it’s a pretty solid introduction to solarpunk. My second player group were entirely friends from other parts of my life, none of whom were familiar with the genre beyond intuiting that it was similar to steam- and cyberpunk. Their investigation and the twists and turns of the mystery they were uncovering certainly kept their attention, but throughout the dozen two-hour game sessions, it was the chance to explore a grounded, optimistic future which seemed to really delight them. I ended up getting to share far more of my worldbuilding than I’d expected to just because they wanted to see more of the world, and the hopeful setting and the way it was influencing their real-life worldview came up several times when we talked about their experience.

It may be obvious from my other projects that worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing, and the TTRPG campaign format has allowed for an admittedly rather absurd amount of world - certainly more than I could have fit in a novel. After all, the players will determine which bits of the setting they’ll engage with and dig into. That fact, combined with my preference for being able to play the part of a knowlegable character accurately, led to a lot of research and a lot of notes on everything from crop rotation to phytoremdiation.

The campaign provides dozens of locations to explore, from isolated homesteads and farms to deconstruction sites, rewilding/forestry camps, environmental restoration projects, and a modern agricultural village and food forest made from an abandoned development of McMansions around a golf course. You’ll also find thirty-plus named NPCs with backstories and character art, maps with toggle-able layers for each discovery, evidence files, and location art.

It’s also a sort of manifesto on solarpunk in rural New England: on the recent history of the region; how it looked and worked in the past; the changes which have shaped it into the sprawling, car-dependent, habitat-fragmented place it is today; and some of the ways it might change (good and bad) in a more solarpunk world.

One of my main goals was to explore various ways rural solarpunk could look, including questions of what makes for a genuinely sustainable community, what sort of tradeoffs and sacrifices a degrowth-based rural community may need to accept, and how towns and industries might look if they were to accept that they live in a world without limitless resources. It collects a lot of my thoughts on how the exurban “bedroom communities” I grew up in would change in a world where endless growth and a total reliance on cars are no longer the societal default. It examines various lifestyles and technologies that make sense in that context, as well as the kinds of people the area might attract. Along the way, it explores some of the aspects of life where people can independently arrive at solarpunk practices out of necessity or goals like individualist self-sufficiency.

In contrast to some of Fully Automated’s Los Angeles setting, the campaign generally aims for a lower-tech, slightly more grounded look at rural areas.

It’s also got some heavy environmental themes around conservation of wild land and watersheds: The primary setting is actively being deconstructed and rewilded, essentially being turned into a large natural park. The players can visit deconstruction sites, an unlined town dump in mid-excavation, a once-badly-damaged rewilding zone, phytoremediation sites (including one where they’re rebuilding a wetland contaminated by cheap fill), beaver dam analogs on rivers, an enclave of fuel-engine mechanics, former sandpits, and more. Watersheds play a fairly large role in the story - the main map aims to show how old world borders split watersheds so they couldn’t be managed effectively, treating rivers as boundaries rather than as shared resources. The town itself is divided into three watersheds which merge downstream. Only one has been poisoned, which can help the players isolate the source, but if they fail to find it, the poison will eventually follow the rivers as far as they go and contaminate everything downstream.

I’m very glad to have made this thing, and I really hope you’ll check it out! And if you like it and would like to support us, please share it around! Email it to your friends, upload it to a file share site, leave it somewhere on a USB drive, whatever works for you!

I’m working on an interposed, bookbinding-ready version for anyone who wants a hardcopy version, but I need to make it myself before I’ll know how tall the book block will be, and thus how thick to make the spine in the cover file. I also need to make a rear cover as my original plan had a different front (which never got finished) and would have used the current one as the back.

I’ve got a few other projects lined up to start once this thing is officially launched. I’m actually working on a gamebook version but, to my surprise, it’s already becoming a distinct project, sharing a setting, some characters, and the broad strokes of the mystery and some of the plots from the campaigns but adding new characters and events. I’m interested to see how far it’ll diverge from the campaign. Some of the changes I can spot from here - more built-out scenes, fewer charts and blunt chunks of worldbuilding - but a lot of the shifts are subtler and come from thinking about this place and events in a different context. I really hope it works out.

I’m also excited to get back to smaller-scale projects like the postcards, some bookbinding work, and some tech restoration.

I’ve looked at this post a couple of times now but I can’t see any link to something that can be installed?