The future of tabletop role-play is hope
Just as grim, dystopian post-apocalyptic visions of the world have held a lasting place in popular culture, tabletop role-players have woven stories of barren wastelands, burnt-out urban hellscapes and eerie cyberpunk capers. But with living in difficult, turbulent times comes a desire to see more visions of a future where we decide to make things better. That need is at the core of hopepunk, a term coined by author Alexandra Rowland as the opposite of “grimdark.” As hopepunk and its sibling genre solarpunk become more popular in the cultural imagination, more and more TTRPG designers are bucking the grim apocalypse trends and playing with visions of the future that prioritize care, community, optimism, and joy.
Hopeful spins on the post-cataclysm genre run the gamut in tone and setting, from Machine Age Productions’ futuristic, solutions-oriented Flatpack to the community-focused, Powered by the Apocalypse-influenced solarpunk of Dyer Rose’s Arcology World; from Norton Glover’s high-flying prairie-rewilding adventure Buffalo Commons to the shitpost-y, “be gay do crime” glory of Riverhouse Games’ This is a Game About Fishing.
“People have an intuitive sense that there is darkness in the world and want to process and confront that with a grimdark game or a horror game,” Mark Salabauskas, publisher and lead designer on the Fate Core-powered space opera RPG Return to the Stars, told Polygon in an interview. “I think, in a similar way, a lot of games [...] strive for those more optimistic notes. We’re realizing that we want to be better than we are and define ourselves, and we need to have spaces to do that.”
The space opera element of the game emerged during the start of the Trump administration, as Sabalauskas was
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