An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari

 

Sotho mokorotlo. They're postcolonial, but semiurge of Archons March On fame pointed out that big hats are a must and these are pretty baller.

"Their journeys are like strings of different kinds of beads. The opaque blue-black glass beads come from the lands of the sunrise. The pale grey disks made from the giant land snail come from home. The shiny white disks ground from ostrich eggshell belong to the sunset deserts. Whether you wore them around the waist, for a lover, or around your neck or ankles for all to see, or you put them on a person for burial, all these pretty beads point to the far corners of the world and the layers of life it held." - David Schoenbrun's Vashambadzi: The Coast Walkers

Toby Green's excellent public history A Fistful of Shells beat me to the Dollars trilogy reference, but I think this one is pretty good too. The arrow is poisoned, naturally. 

I'm on record saying that I'd warn people if I ever used African history as a Trojan horse to talk about other stuff because I'm not a hack, so here's the warning. We'll be back in "is this even a rpg blog" territory soon enough, never fear. The core idea for this vague-ass 4 am concept post came from Zedeck Siew's fantastic Twitter thread about the conceptual language of D&D + settler colonialism and a minor epiphany I had while reading Schoenbrun's Radical History Review article on the vashambadzi where I realized that the above quoted portion gave me an answer I liked for diegetic gold-for-XP (if a bag of gold is a string of beads.) The rest follows from there. 

When it comes to dealing with D&D-as-Western, there are two major responses which I think are valuable (these aren't the only ones but we'll look at a few others later) - restructuring some of the core assumptions of D&D and directly tackling the Western genre. I like these a lot and they offer v. useful perspectives, but I think the Kalahari presents an opportunity to tackle Zedeck's challenge from an angle similar to the one Marcia B employed with D&D gold economics, one focused on play "as prescribed by the classic TSR books." If we want to get real about OD&D as a Western (capitalist economics and all) cloaked in the fantasy medieval, the best place to locate the game is 1400s Southern Africa. Don't believe me? 

• Established Frontier Town - Bosutswe, on the edge of the eastern Kalahari’s cattle-keeping and salt-gardening lands.  
• Frontier Boomtown - Danamombe
• Fading Former Boomtown - Mapungubwe Hill
• Big City Back East - Great Zimbabwe
• The Old World - Swahili Coaster merchants and their connections in the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and India 
• The Train Coming to Town - the emergence of foot caravaneers working routes between the northeastern frontiers of the Kalahari Desert and the Indian Ocean coast
• Cattle Rustling - Still cattle rustling 
• Mining Industry - the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans near Bosutswe
• Roving gangs of desperados - the houseburner brigades (thanks to Mike over at Sheep and Sorcery for reminding me of this category) 
• Considerably more organized eastern religion both combating and syncretizing with indigenous faiths - madzimbabwe cultic operations and their relationship to Khoisan and S-group Bantu religions further inland
• Town Barons - local grandees from noble families with their megagrainaries
• Gunfights - the Ten-Spear Duel of the hill country 
• Autochthons who live in the "wilderness" - 'San' peoples
• Hunting buffalo for hides - overhunting elephants for ivory (irl overhunting wouldn't become a crisis tier issue until quality guns become a regional thing but they could and did become locally extinct depending on the vagaries of Indian Ocean trade)

You could run all seven classic Western plots here without skipping a beat. It even has the look down, the perfect transition from mosaic grassland to savannah to desert. But that's not enough, right? What good do we do by pointing at something and turning to the screen like "hey that's fucked up isn't it?" Just put it in a blog at that point. Here's the trick - we play the setting straight. The 1400s Kalahari of our own world, where power lies in poetic reconstruction of history and decentralized networks of knowledge and selective blurring of cultural difference. It's nothing but a reversal of the original trick, a fantasy medieval setting in a Western cloak. The thing about Zedeck's point above is that it's often hard for us to engage in the kind of self-confrontation he (correctly) suggests trying. People generally don't enjoy feeling like the bad guy, even if that's missing the point - hence the conventional responses to the question of D&D as imperial-colonial fantasy swinging between a rudimentary sort of "decolonizing" (im on my knees begging these guys to read Fanon i will pay them money to do this) or getting swallowed by the ideology dragon and quibbling about whether orcs should get to wear the pith helmet. Not only is this a cowardly approach which teaches us nothing, but idk…is it ever enjoyable? We're not counting the joy some people extract from feeling like they passed a purity test, this is for human beings. Zedeck was entirely right that part of the conundrum is that killing indigenous monsters, building forts with your flag on em, and fucking dungeons is really really fun. Ava Islam made a fantastic observation along these lines about the Jungle Book (that she has graciously allowed me to repost):

I genuinely think the misdirection might be necessary, using the Western framing and D&D's baked-in imperialist and capitalist structure to get people earnestly participating in the experience of forming imperial power structures and the early roots of regional capitalism. People don't like to play "bad guys," but they do love to participate in the fantasy-as-western, which you can use to your advantage! I'm hoping that the Kalahari Turn here can accomplish something akin to what Marcia pulls off in her econpost by doing what D&D was trying to do (whether Gary-N-Friends were fully conscious of it) in a more critical and systematic fashion, though I won't really know if this until I playtest it or at least flesh out the concept enough to see whether it has legs. The heart of the idea lies in the fact that we are leveraging a real phenomenon to get at D&D weirdness. The PCs are vashambadzi, caravaneers from the Sunrise Sea reshaping the world in their wake. They are the bleeding edge of protocapitalism blazing trails across the Continent's south. They cut apart intricate social fabrics and reknot them around bead/shell economics. They bring Islamicate, Sinosphere, and even Western racialized categories to the Continental interior. They open whole horizons of consumption culture. They birth ragtag armies of fighting-men and camp followers, generating militarized societies out of the kinless alienated peoples left in the ruins created by Indian Ocean slave trade. They (knowingly or not) create ways of being and belonging by constellating communities, using older forms of social relation as a scaffold. The PCs aren't the drifters on the train or the townsfolk watching with apprehension - they're the railroad itself. It might even be worth setting up a tempo clock a la Magical Industrial Revolution to track the effects of changes wrought by PC actions on the communities in their circuit. 

The nature of the game is such that they'll probably stop acting and looking like the vashambadzi pretty quickly and slide into the roles occupied by another set of explorer-caravaneers: the 1800s gun-ivory-slave cartels of the Ovimbundu, Chokwe, Sumbawa, Nyamwenzi, Yao and other middleman groups interacting with indigenized capital in the form of Arab-Swahilis in Zanzibar or the Luso-Africans of West-Central. What is a D&D party parlaying its atypically liquid wealth and the semi-nomadic military force it can muster into land claims but the empire-building of similar adventurers like Msiri or Mirambo or Lusinga? Hell, there's the nascent Belgian state as an endpoint; parties love their do-gooding crusades with a bit of profit on the side and humanitarian concerns provided excellent cover for Belgian colonial expeditions. Henrion used legends of human sacrifice as pretext for the ransacking of Nsheng and the conquest of the Kuba. Storms declared that he would crush the warlords of the mountains at the fort he was named after, passing the dream on to the White Fathers and their “little Catholic state." Stairs (why do they have such freak names) and later Brasseur were ostensibly charged with curtailing the Yeke slave trade, but after the Stairs expedition killed Msiri during negotiations, the Belgians worked with Msiri's successor to crush the Sanga Rebellion and turn the Yeke into vassals. Again, that's all unclear right now, but I def suspect that there are few settings, if any, which match the Eastern Kalahari's ability to force the issue to the surface in this manner without cracking under the strain or just feeling ridiculous.