Our game focuses on one community in the Fifth World. Perhaps they roam the jungle as a small band of hunter-gatherers. Perhaps they live in a village set among the forest gardens that they cultivate. These communities shift their focus throughout the year in a regular cycle, and with that can come changes in their living patterns, but they form a close-knit web.
Every community also has a territory, not defined by its borders and the space that they enclose, but as the collection of places that the community claims as their own. The closer a stranger comes to one of those places, the more intrusive hens trespass becomes. Each community has its own standards for when they will tell a stranger that hen has wandered too far, and how aggressively they’ll react to someone who fails to heed those warnings.
In our game, we’ll focus on one such community — the one living in the same place where you find yourself right now. What will that place look like in 144,000 days, after the collapse of civilization, after runaway climate change and mass extinction, after the earth becomes a jungle planet from pole to pole? Have your descendants moved poleward with other climate refugees, or remained here and changed with the land?
Your community will need a looming question to begin with. Look at its history, its relationships, and its members. Look for unanswered questions, lingering wounds, and unsolved mysteries. Find one that at least most of you find interesting, and write it down as your first community looming question.