Wanderhome (Part 1)

A confused liminal experiment

Wanderhome is a game published by Possum Games Creek and designed by a team headed by Jay Dragon. Financing of the game involved crowdfunding. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Possum Creek Games.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do not find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement.

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Ludo

Wanderhome is an art object; that is obvious even before you interact with it as a game, tool or an artistic expression of tabletopping. Every game is best at its individual art forms that make it what it is, but Wanderhome is also an art object in an aesthetic sense; extravagant is the only word that makes justice to the attention to layout colours, spatially-careful writing and the way it dominates a coffee table and the abundance of expensive, labor-intensive commissioned art.

The game has some remarkable accessibilities tools: a grayscale version, and even an insectophobia version - those with other animal related phobias may want to be careful, as there is a lot of art and odds are one of those may be unsafe for you.

While the book is a gorgeous artifact, it also introduces problems of accessibility. Reading may be difficult in some layout background choices, and because of the book’s binding, some lists may be hard to consult. The book excellently uses natural language through an explanation of its mechanics, but that can make learning the game demanding for neurodiverse folk.

The text has a cordial, inviting voice, that is eager to show you the world of Wanderhome. However, this first person authorial voice sometimes crosses into the territory of cultivating a parasocial relationship. Those that find such construct unwelcomed may be made uncomfortable by the text.

Possumsocial?

There are over 300 lists in the game and there is not an easy print and play reference. You going to end up photocopying/printing/taking photos of a book or ruin its spine early with all the back and forth. The game also expects you to copy the contents of many lists to its play sheets, so you going to flip back and forth between Playbooks, Traits, Locations, Seasons, Festivals, etc and copying this information. While this is not the biggest TTRPG book, it can become demanding to some to flip through the book mid-sessions. You should prepare in advance to make the interaction with the book as comfortable as possible for your group; the easiest way would be through the game’s PDFs, but that can introduce hurdles of its own. Just be aware and take care of yourself and yours.

Safety and comfort is a priority concern of the game. The game has no specific tools you may be familiar with; instead, it makes the establishment of a play culture where there is a habit of frequent check-ups and consent-affirmations are part of the game itself. This is, unfortunately, something often neglected; safety tools are the tools with which safety is built, but they are not a replacement for the actual work of making the environment safe. Integrating this with the game puts this arduous, continuous work center-stage and tries to make the conversation with the game-text as safe as possible.

Natural language sometimes means “No” takes a paragraph

Brad

As someone who is openly not a fan of coffee table-style RPG books, I think Wanderhome is a stunning example of them. Its pages look like a rainbow on their sides. It is full of stunning art, showcasing all sorts of scenes. The cover is alluring, and each art piece recaptures that enjoyable interest in the setting that it inspires.

I think that the way the text interacts with you is at its best, playful and fun, leading you deeper into the setting and deeper into its mechanics. But at its worst it can come off very different, a tone that I wasn’t a fan of. It could be me misreading the author's intent, but I will leave that up to you, my humble reader.

The layout is simple and clean. It avoids a dreaded overpopulation of sidebars, and has a very nice index. The digital version, also includes descriptions of the art pieces, if you simply hover over them with the mouse.

I do agree with Ludo’s point, that in my test game it was easiest to have the digital version open to refer to the traits, and that the safety tools included are perfectly serviceable.

I also think it’s very important to mention I have run a one-shot of Wanderhome, I think it is important in our process of reviewing here, that we both have some level of at-the-table experience in the actual game. I ran with four experienced players, two of whom were familiar with Belonging Outside Belonging.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

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Ludo

Wanderhome is nearly impossible to review. There is a Wanderhome that you can get in stores and funded by Kickstarter. There is a Wanderhome that is created by a playtest kit. And there is a Wanderhome that exists entirely as an idea and how the game is talked about.

None of them are the same game.

So how does one meet three games at the same time? Two will always fall short. Wanderhome is a Belonging Outside of Belonging (BoB) game. It has plenty of its assumptions baked in, but demands one to understand Wanderhome’s unique spin on it first: there are optional GM roles, narrative forces are delegated to a cast of characters and locations, the token economy is both reversed and underplayed, and Wanderhome seem to assume longer campaigns and games.

Another break-away from assumptions is the additional, front-loaded work that is expected. There are a lot of moveable parts of Wanderhome, and what you choose to not include in your game says almost as much as what you pick. Experienced BoB played any expect 12 roles tops; Wanderhome has dozens of playbooks, dozens of locations, dozens of supporting cast and dozens of festivals to track - or not. For people expecting to run a game only from the supporting materials, they must remove that notion; the game expects everyone to interact and look through the book regularly and during play if need be.

Brad 

Wanderhome has a lot of things to track, things that theoretically make each area on your journey feel as unique as possible. I was hoping that each area would come with a list of interesting people we could run into; I didn’t find that, but I have a table full of people with dudes in their mind, so I figured that once again, it wouldn’t be impossible to deal with.

Now, I do want to take a very brief moment to talk about violence. I do not believe that violence is the necessary lubricant of stories, I believe that a great story can happen without violence, especially if we narrow down a definition of violence to very specifically “Violent confrontation between two or more people or groups of people.” which is what I believe was the author’s intent on Wanderhome.

I have some very strong opinions on how Wanderhome handles this idea, and those are more effectively contained within the second part of our review. But we have two playbooks that are defined by violence, even by our very specific definition, which leaves me feeling tonally confused.

Ludo

I keep asking myself if this is worth mentioning, and keep having doubts; but if I am someone that defends that a game system is not non-sense like mechanics and “system”, but all the choices of design: from the spread of information, what is said, what is omitted, how different elements feed on each other, choices of art, typeset, spacing, the interaction of the game as tool and game as art piece, the conversations the game create, the text and the game content as part of a conversation and the negative spaces that the game creates so that people playing the game can finish turning the tool into a shared art, I cannot meet the game where it is if I don’t acknowledge this. Scratch that; this framework does not work if I accent a reduced view of what parts of a game are well, the game. So here we go.

Wanderhome asks you to imagine a post-violence world, a world beyond stories where the thing that matters is the journey; however, it does so while maintaining violence. It sneers at rebels and loyalists alike for daring to war it out, blaming both sides; it does not ask about the material conditions that led to the revolts in the first place and all across the text shows they have been preserved.

The contradiction is obvious: if there was such systemic violence and oppression that a war was deemed necessary, and that status quo remained, how can this be a world beyond violence? If the text explicitly says you cannot fight this, you cannot change the status quo, all you can do is a journey from place to place — how is this anything but resignation? Even those that their purpose is to challenge that, such as the Rebel, they can do more than describe the status quo and lash out impotently.

There is also the less explicit violence that is created by the text and subtext strange relationship with personhood. While most entities in Haeth have been invested with desires, wants, sense of self, etc, there is a big divide between who gets to be people and who is an acceptable slave-labor and food-source. There seems to be an arbitrary division about that; while some large groups seem to be denied personhood wholesale (insects, fish), ultimately, if you are a person is decided mostly if you get to wear clothing - to put in other words, that you comfort to the cultural hegemony. Otherwise you can be killed indiscriminately as a free playbook move, be cattle or an enslaved postal worker. Another terrifying element of this cheerful setting.

If it is a world without violence, it is one where people have just stopped fighting it and passively go along with it; beaten where they can no longer dream of true peace. There could be a subversive theme there, and have a lot more to say about, but the sincerity and authorial voice make this reading impossible to support.

And the most baffling part is that these were all weirdness added when the game expanded tenfold for crowdfunding; this text and strange assumptions were not present in the original Wanderhome kit! They are ultimately different games. One is about stories and how they connect your journeying characters; other repudiates stories to focus on the journey for the journey’s sake. The kit makes so assumptions about personhood: I got to play the Sheepherder as a sheep with a bee family and community, as peers going along her journey with her bee-barrister wife and their extended kin; it was a natural choice. The final Wanderhome, me doing that would be something done not only despite the text, but against the text; I feel expected to play the moth slave-driver or the bee slave-owner.

This divide is so stark that makes it difficult to read the text at face value. This is a failure of me meeting the game where it is at that must be considered for the rest of my review of it. Unfortunately, I’m asked to identify with the cloth-wearing people, but I’m too non-hegemonic looking outside into the hegemony to not see myself more in the depersonalized insects and demon-associated fish; that is a perspective that I’m unable to set aside.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and creates a common space for creation.

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Ludo

This was always going to be difficult with three Wanderhomes, but I would like to stick to the post-Kickstarter version of the game; however, Wanderhome’s published version is oddly coy at stating what it is about. It is much more confident in establishing what it does not aim to be.

But I’m not here for a story. I’m here for the journey.

Wanderhome rejects stories as divorced from what means to be alive. So the game is about being alive, which the game contextualizes as a journey.

So, Wanderhome is about a journey. But what Wanderhome considers a journey?

The strongest claim on what a journey is:

Journeys, as liminal and complicated environments, are spaces for queer self-reflection.

Other than that, the journey and the game are seen as the same. So saying the game is about journeys would be the same as saying the journey is about the game.

You see my problem here? Bear with me as we have to go deeper.

So, the game is a liminal space, a queer-centered/coded in-between. In-between what? Where we will go, and what we will see. So the game is about the stations of the game and the scenery of said station.

And… this is it. That is all that can be glanced from how the journey book talks about its journey.

In Wanderhome, we’ll often find people who are coincidentally going the same way as us, and perhaps we’ll travel together for a while before parting. Remember, here, the focus is always on the journey, and not with where we’re going. Don’t get too hung up on why we’re all traveling together—if it matters, the answer will reveal itself in time.

Don’t worry about it. Just travel.

Let’s check the other Wanderhomes.

The fantastic Wanderhome Playkit introduces itself with text that is pretty much preserved verbatim in the Kickstarter version; its tight, purposeful design and language system, establish Wanderhome Playkit as:

• It is a primer to tell a journey story;

• The subject of the journey is to be established through it;

• It lays down some core assumptions about the setting;

• What the journey story is about is going to be decided by integrated-safety checks and questions.

This is pretty clear, so why was it so hard to figure on the Kickstart version? It seems the expansion of 4 pages of contextualization to 40 has diluted the brilliant, poignant context-system created in the Playkit; it is still the same thing, same purpose for game-journey, but a homeopathic version of it.

Or Playkit is that good at doing more with less? I’m going to go with this as my headcanon because while I like Wanderhome, I love that Wanderhome.

Brad

My perfectly smooth brain had never read Wanderhome’s playtest kit, so as I read the corebook I quickly picked up that Wanderhome tells me it is about the Journey, and definitively about The Journey, and not the destination. This is the ultimate road trip movie as a ttrpg, the idea that it doesn’t matter where we are going, it matters what happens along the way. This sounds rad as hell, I love those styles of films, those styles of novels, those styles of stories exchanged by a warm campfire.

But therein, to me, lies the first big confusion. This isn’t about those things I have listed above, the book tells us very specifically that. It’s about the self-reflection that a journey has, and how you change during it. Wanderhome is using the things you see on a journey to become a more person-y person.

Except, there is no established narrative about this, is it a common cultural thing in this land? We are told Haeth is a land of hospitality, a land of legendary heroes, and these things, but why this obsession with the journey?

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists on a context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

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Ludo

Wanderhome is a game about tourism; it is a game about wanting to live in a painting.

The journey/game is about the characters. Most of the focus of the game is on the player characters, who they are and how it is to exist in this liminal space, somewhat apart from their past and future. It is all about other characters - kith; unfortunately, not all kith are made equal.

Kith that are created alongside your character gets to be full people; they get to be part of the journey, and at worst, an accessory. Most kith are introduced us as part of the scenery of the Locations across the journey; if they are lucky, they get one or two traits. What they can be is limited by the fact this is a story about tourists: you can never improve the lives and places you visit.

The motivation is obvious: it seeks to avoid the tourism much more common in this art-form — the murderous sort. To avoid wanderers coming into town and solving its problems, the course correction is that no problem can be solved or improved; non-Player Character associated kith lack enough tools to have agency, and you cannot help them — the best you can do is provide relief.

Making this choice reveals the deeper layers of Wanderhome; the truth of Haeth is a painful one.

The bucolic aesthetic, soft language and adorable characters do not make this less of a bleak world; a place of deep melancholy that has surrendered to a cruel world. Violence has ceased, but only because nobody has any fight left in then; so the kings remain in place and people are expected to deal with their trauma without its source addressed.

Brad

In Wanderhome we are told there is no violence. That (to me) removes one of the primary reasons your character may be on this deep journey of reflection. Many people become unhoused, due to violence of all sorts. Wanderhome is a game of fleeing to me, a game wherein you are running from an inescapable force in your life.

Wanderhome is a game where you are running from an existential dread that you lack even the energy to discuss. You are walking away from the only things you have known for a reason, you encounter others who are beaten, and are walking away from the same dread.

This could be a fascinating turn, a turn that makes the game about healing, about growing, about finding that mythical home over the horizon where you can be free of this dread, of this horror that you are walking away from. But the game doesn’t really want you to, it’s about the Journey, not the destination.

This, again to me, makes this a game about coming to terms with living in a terrible world and choosing to do nothing about it. This could have had the punch of The One’s Who Walk Away From Omelas a short story where characters walk away from a utopia only possible through cruelty, and they don’t care about the destination, but they know they will find a kinder place. But Wanderhome tells us that we will not find a better place, we will simply replace our idealism with banal cruelty.