Why should I play this game?

The Fifth World imagines a neotribal, ecotopian future four centuries after the collapse of civilization. It imagines a future in which climate change and mass extinction brought the world to the brink of annihilation, but human beings succeeded in bringing it back to life by finding our place in it once again. If that intrigues you, and you wonder what life in such a world might look like, then you should play this game.

The Fifth World deals in animist realism, a relative of magical realism rooted in the common human experience of animism. What happens when, instead of rejecting that natural, human perspective as a category error, we develop it as a skill that connects us more deeply to the world? We designed this game with the goal of pulling an animist experience from the depths of even the most domesticated human mind. If rewilding your awareness or practicing your animist skills sounds like a meaningful experience to you, you should play this game.

Like any other roleplaying game, the Fifth World creates a shared imagined space. With its animist sensibilities, it recognizes personhood in a story that lives not inside the imagination of any one player, but in the space between the players, created by the act of play itself. If you relish the challenge of imagining together to breathe life into a story that belongs to no one but itself, that could not have lived in any time or place except here and now with us, then you should play this game.

You should not play this game if you want to play a crunchy tactical wargame. Wars still happen occasionally in the Fifth World. Your grandfather might tell you stories about the last time your village went to war, back in the days of his youth, and how those dark times stretched on for months, and one person even died.

You should not play this game if you want to rebuild civilization. Most people in the Fifth World consider the stories of that ancient time cautionary tales, not examples to emulate — when they think of them at all, anyway. Mostly, they have their own lives to live, and think about the last decades of civilization as often as you or I think about Jacobean England.

And you should not play this game if you’ve identified one or more groups of people that you don’t consider people thanks to circumstances of their birth, such as gender, race, or sexuality. If you can’t even see the personhood in your fellow human beings, you won’t have much luck seeing it in your other-than-human kin. To survive into the Fifth World required empathy; those who held bigoted beliefs either abandoned them or perished long ago.

The game uses something we call looming questions. We’ll get to how those work soon enough, but they provide a concrete focus for the sort of things you’ll deal with in a typical game. Some examples include:

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