Spirits Without Number - a personal note + my SWN game in review

Supporters of the Malagasy Uprising are forced to annul their pledges to the rebel cause in a cattle sacrifice staged by the French military, 1948

"Any fool can get into an ocean/But -

- it takes a Goddess/To get out of one."  Hello, I hope everyone's doing ok. Mostly alright myself, though these past few days have been pretty rough at times. Kinda feel like it might help to write about my feelings here before I get to the post proper. Skip down to the next bold heading to avoid hearing about some intense stuff. 

One of my cousins is missing - the serious kind of missing, not just the habitual itinerancy and spotty communication you come to expect from migrant family abroad. This isn't the first time it's happened to us, losing people to dangers of the road or the Med itself, but it is the first time that I've been old enough to be brought in on the news (the modern clan network - mark of adulthood to be entered into your subsubtribe's Whatsapp groupchats, where kinsmen in the diaspora organize remittances over spreadsheets and very animated voice messages)  and the first time I've really known the person. Abdulfattah's my paternal parallel cousin, a father's brother's son, and v. close to me in age: we bonded back when I first came on an enculturation visit (what Somalis call dhaqan celis  - though im talking about it as a broader concept, not the newer "camp" phenomenon) as a kid. My immediate family has been lucky enough to go back a bunch of times and we'd reconnect with occasional check-ins between stays. Dude was smart, he went to Uganda to study architecture (another situation where having family abroad is a leg-up; diaspora people pooling money for your education is about the only way you can get decent postsecondary schooling in SL) and got a solid job apprenticed to a guy in Hargeisa. We'd talk about a lot of stuff but tahrib came up more and more in later visits; one summer in particular was just fight after fight on the pros and cons of leaving. I argued in favor of moving back to Uganda instead, talked about the risks involved with the trafficking networks in Sudan or Libya, told him that our folks in SL or the UAE or even the States wouldn't be able to pay the extortionate ransoms any smugglers would demand. More than anything else, I was scared bc I loved him and everyone knew what happened on those trips, but I was a teen boy and couldn't just say that. It got fucking nasty one night. I yelled at him for squirreling away money we'd sent back to his family for rent and meds and kids' school fees to build a migration fund + he (correctly) said that I had no place to judge him as an incredibly privileged American citizen who would shortly go back to a life with vastly more opportunity. We made up before I left but it's been on my mind. 

About a year later, Abdulfattah left in the night with a girl who worked for a trafficking outfit - probably operating out of Ethiopia - that hooked him up with some Sudanese dudes. Long wait with periodic contact and large sums of money being transferred. Eventually he gives us a call saying he's being processed on some godforsaken Greek island and I was just so happy he was alright. Happy to hear him laugh about all the stupid Burao shit he wouldn't have to deal with anymore. They were screwing him like they screwed everyone in those detainment centers, though he avoided talking about specifics whenever I called, and I guess he got tired of it. Some people we talked to that saw him right before he stopped calling think he tried entering (Greekier, EU member) Cyprus through (Turkish-aligned, easier to enter) Northern Cyprus and...that's it. Nobody knows what happened to him or the other guys he was traveling with. Authorities in either Cyprus, whenever they deign to call us back, say they have no information on him. He snuck in, ofc, and anyways we're not sure what name he was giving out at that point. The uncle who was serving as point man on all this got a notice from some bureaucrat that the Greek gov has stopped looking for him a week back, though I only heard five or so days ago. Been preparing for it much longer though, so it doesn't feel much like a fresh wound. 

One of the things I did during my long-term stay in Somaliland was teach English to college students at this tiny place called Frantz Fanon University, run by a family friend who spent his academic career in the States studying Fanon before moving back to SL. I used to test my terrible curriculum on Abdulfattah. Was an even more pretentious dickhead back then, so the English Poetry classwork I forced him to look through was full of Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. I know, one of those guys. Don't think my weirdass ego stroking attempts to juxtapose Stein and Hadraawi - child of both worlds! diaspora brainrot - did anyone a lick of good but I miss talking about the poems ahead of time with my cousins. He has (had?) this wonderful crooked smile, a spin on the classic Somali "I'm fucking with you" thing where you literally talk out of the corner of your mouth, and he would bring the house down by doing shit like reading the poems I'd prepared in the style of a lovestruck heeso crooner or the Nigerian evangelical preachers we watched for fun on TV. One of the few he actually liked - probably bc it was one of the few that WORKED for the purpose I had in mind  - was Jack Spicer's Any fool can get into an ocean. We didn't talk about it in detail or anything but it does seem...important somehow. Doesn't take a genius to notice how eerily amenable to reinterpretation it is. I'm still not sure if it feels comforting or like a sick joke. 

OK to the game post 

A while back, I started running a Stars Without Number game for my high school students and it was really really cool. None of them had ever played TTRPGS before and all but one had no experience with the concept beyond seeing it on Stranger Things. These kids were easily one of the best groups I’ve ever run for: weird and funny and brilliant in ways that being involved with the hobby proper can beat out of you. Ended up going for 13 sessions (we only got one semester together) before coming to a soft close with the arrival of summer, but I'm hopeful that we'll pick things up again this fall. Assuming I don't get moved, that is - trainees in the district's alt-cert program don't have a lot of agency around stuff like that. Our gang of characters started tiny and ballooned over the course of the game, thanks to the intense proselytizing efforts of our brand-new Tabletop Club's membership. There was a new player joining about every two weeks on average! This is not a play report or true retrospective - would hesitate to call it that right after some very good ones were posted recently* by friends - just a couple of reflections on stuff that worked and didn't work. 

What happened

We all expected that our game would be a piratical spin on the planet-hopping Travelleresque adventuring that SWN’s core game is geared towards, but my players fell in love with the first world they landed on. The planet Forberance is a budding post-Scream power (imagine a blend of Saint-Simonianism, a Greek polis and the Massachusetts Bay Colony) trying to expand its spaceflight capabilities as the big sector hegemon tightens the screws and the gang quickly got themselves involved in its messy local politics. Their overall goal was to prepare a possible migratory path for the Shawlfolk fleet - scout out the threats, make tenative alliances, and generally act as ambassadors. The players had a lot of leverage to start with, as representatives of a major spacefaring culture on a world desperate to find ways of countering their own regional powerhouse's technological advantages, and they threw that weight primarily at three zones of influence: the military, the bondsman's rights movement, and the civil service. To planetary leadership they literally promised the stars, offering the technical expertise of the fleet as a way for the world to circumvent crippling bans on the development and importation of posttech imposed by the sector hegemon. They told the military that as good Jains they would never suggest the use of force…but the fleet could provide aid in constructing orbital defenses as a prudent preparation in case of an unprovoked attack. With the bondsmen they preached the Possession Branch Jaina doctrine of caste annihilation and held tromba rituals where they channeled the spirits of the world's founding generations.

None of their machinations had been happening in a vacuum, ofc. Their propaganda work had drawn local allies - the official bondsmen's rights org, the clique of expansionist stellar naval officers, and "progressives" in government - closer and closer together until they hammered out a joint plan of action. Leaders of this new Salvation Front (some of them contacts that they cultivated!) approached the players and informed them that their allies had already launched plans to coup the current planetary gov. The Salvationists wanted the players to be up in their ship, where the threat of orbital bombardment would force a quick and bloodless resolution (how Jaina) in the putschists' favor + a supportive speech from the great and mighty star wanderers suggesting cooperation with the new government could be safely broadcast. This was what they wanted, right? A friendly and compliant junior trade partner aimed right at the big bottleneck in the area. The prospect of safe harbor for their people was too much to pass up in the end; they agreed to play the part. 

Anti-Canon Worldbuilding

Wound up employing something of a hybrid approach as far as the traditional/anti-canon worldbuilding split - as mentioned before, we handled the players’ home culture using Ty’s world pillars but everything to do with the sector they were exploring was my own. I didn’t consider this optimal at the start, more just hedging my bets in case my group of novices weren’t into world pillars, but it may have been a sweet spot for the kind of game we wanted. The wonder of exploratory games and the differentiating nature of colonial encounter both benefit from the sense that you’re learning about a place as you stumble around, which would be hard(er) to pull off with collaborative worldbuilding. OTOH, I think that the use of world pillars to determine truths about the Fleet def contributed to players feeling like Shawlfolk culture was their own in a way that the stuff I was setting up solo was not. This frayed a bit as people who joined late hadn't gotten to do a lot of the early establishment of canon but our informal practice of letting new players take the lead on adding features in play (started by the kids!) seemed to mitigate the problem. 

Colonialism and Memory

My surreptitious attempt to use this game as an experiment in teaching colonialism succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. The players displayed that exquisite blend of cutthroat pragmatism in service to the home power and dreams of uplifting the benighted foreigner into their own visions of technological/cultural progress that is so rarely balanced well in conscious attempts to simulate colonial encounter (we get in our own heads, ofc.) There was some honestly creepy conversation around regime change the second they got stymied in just one effort by the vagaries of local politics, I loved it. Like many a would-be imperial mastermind, the party learned that manipulation is a two way street - the players were getting involved in longstanding factional disputes that they frequently didn't attempt to investigate beyond "oh awesome this guy likes us, he's probably cool."  The “xenophilic” arm of the military they supported was largely fueled by desire to prepare for open confrontation with the sector hegemon. The civil service bureaucrat thing was pretty straightforward honestly, they hated sortition and wanted it gone. The players had been interacting with the "legal" bondsman's rights organization, mostly staffed by upwardly mobile ex-indentureds committed to gradualism. The gradualists had been losing ground to physical-force abolitionists for decades at this point and the utopian promises of the star people had buoyed their cause. Even worse, the Shawlfolk devotion to Jaina nonviolence was used as a cudgel against those same radical bondsmen. 

This was the bluntest layer in-game and worked pretty well, imo. I'm not so sure about the others tho. One of the books I read in prep for this game (as mentioned in the previous post) was Jennifer Cole's Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar, a sensitive and sophisticated ethnography of the Betsimisaraka people and what Cole calls their "memoryscapes":

"Memoryscape includes an array of schemas through which people remember and the socio-historical forces that draw these schemas into action and sometimes enable them to be formulated in narrative. It also encompasses the broad spectrum of commemorative practices through which people rehearse certain memories critical to their personal dreams of who they think they are, what they want the world to be like, and their attempts to make life turn out that way."

The profound interconnections between collective ritual practices and their dual function as both cohesive agents within communities and memorywork. Within this context, spiritual experts diligently curate (perhaps orchestrate is better) very particular renditions of historical narratives that serve equally particular purposes with the active participation of their communities. Maintaining a keen awareness of the lingering influence of the colonial encounter, Cole presents some excellent examples of ritual (cattle sacrifice in particular) as a locus for reorganizing memoryscapes  - forgetting as well as remembering. Especially pertinent were the rituals centering on the cultivation of coffee and vanilla, which displaced subsistence farming and vastly amplified local hierarchies; the sacrifices for construction of houses featuring tin roofs, imbuing them with a foreign essence; and the handling of returning soldiers who, while serving the new god of the post/colonial State, were often forced to neglect the veneration of local ancestors. And it doesn't always work. The great masterpiece of Betsimisaraka memorywork in the postcolony, the spiritual domestication of memories tied to the brutal French suppression of the Malagasy Uprising, nearly collapsed as the specter of mass violence returned with the presidential elections of 1992-93. This relationship is what I really hoped to capture w/r/t colonialism, a world where calling the spirits is less a question of metaphysics and more like Cherie Rivers' description of seeing the dead in her book on the DR Congo, To Be Nsala's Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze: 

"What I mean by seeing the dead is looking for the possibilities rendered invisible by systems of normalized violence. This is, quite literally, a matter of seeing ghosts, of seeing what once was or could have been, what isn’t but still could be."

In review, I feel like my attempts at dealing with memory and colonialism in specific - pointing at the complexity of historical memory,  the ways that memoryscapes constructed by the Shawlfolk players flowed into Forberance through shared histories of Mandate oppression, where lines between individual and social memory were drawn, memorywork as healing, etc - were suffocated by the other sort of colonial encounter I'd set up. C'est la vie. 

Religion

Religiosity became a central aspect of the game pretty quickly, which worried me a little considering the age of my players and the fact that real-world religions were involved, but they handled it with grace. One thing that I really enjoyed about the table was our gradual shift away from interacting with religion as a codified set of things you believe (le background Abrahamism) the further we got into Malagasy or Jaina practice. There was a wonderful throughline where the students playing monastic-mediums frequently had to return to their most ancient texts (a diegetic excuse for us to scour the collection of books I assembled in preparation as a group) or cautiously borrow aspects of local ritual to adjust a faith attuned to the lifeways of stellar nomads for planetary concerns. One of the highlights of the campaign was a ritual that sanctified the ancestral ghosts of the planet's founding politicians, which in retrospect came to be seen as the moment when the Tromba Gaccha went from an alien religion to something approaching a native faith. One of latecomer players had “local converted by the Great-Souled Sacrifice” as their concept! It was also really fun just getting to talk about stuff we found interesting in Betsimisaraka possession ritual or Sakalava double burial or Jain versions of tantra; it sometimes rode the line of acceptability when students talked about how things compared to their own  relationships with faith or personal philosophies, but it was def validating to see the material connect with them. 

Crawford’s Supplements

What is there to say, really? Dude knows what he’s doing. This just to spotlight how much fun I had doing the behind-the-scenes faction turn stuff for the players' thrust/counterthrust espionage using his Darkness Visible supplement, since it doesn't seem to get the kind of praise folks lavish on Engines of Babylon or Skyward Steel. Suns of Gold looks pretty solid as a trading supplement, but we didn't end up doing a raid-trade campaign like I'd planned, so I'm not sure how it holds together in practice. DV also has rules for horrible technology meant to be used by baddies (the maltech cults!) which fit in well with a lot of other games. 

Music

Maybe the most fun I've had with music in a game yet, though the bulk of our engagement with it came in the pre-game or post-game periods. Many of the students were band geeks so it was a familiar way to connect with Mada culture, particularly towards the end when most kids had already developed an ear for the nuances of Red Island genres. There was a regular thing where I'd play some Malagasy music (p wide variety - everything from tsapiky guitar master Damily's effortlessly cool studio sessions to Sasamoso's blending of classic salegy sounds with metal to Black Nadia's modern Afropop hits...tho I didn't show the music video in school) and we'd discuss our thoughts. The most notable spillover into the campaign proper is when we played through a hiragasy performance - check this out for an example of what typically happens - in game, with a player freestyling in place of the kabary. I don't even remember the context around how we got to that, but it was fucking cool. One student even sampled a Hazolahy song in a beat he made for his aspiring rapper cousin; no idea how the finished song will sound but I'm down regardless. Pan-Africanism is built on music! Most of the playlist-building outside of the Mada music was in their hands, tho I did reserve the absolute right to make one (1) veto a night. 

Quasi-Diceless Transition

Another element of the game that just kinda happened - I went from three students at my table to eleven and I was NOT ready for it. Usually I can rely on players offsetting some of the work for me with bigger parties but all the players joining were completely new to games and often weren’t able to run through a practice one-shot with me first. I’m not that good at running for more than 4 grown-ass RPG vets, let alone 11 teens starting fresh. We just started handling more and more stuff by talking it out, as a way to reduce the amount of recordkeeping I was doing, but it became the norm over time. Barely rolled at all in the last session! Our Critical Role fan was surprisingly down - she called it "pure roleplay roleplaying" (hmm) and it seemed like that's what she wanted out of her games anyways. I think this went ok in spite of me more than anything, though, and I really want to rethink my approach for games of this size. 

Violence

This was the least violent game I've played this side of Wanderhome! I genuinely have no idea how this happened, considering what I thought I knew about the nature of SWN and rambunctious teenagers, but it did. Players displayed an unexpected level of devotion to Jaina nonviolence from the very first session and this was really consistent with little reinforcement on my end. Probably gonna come back to this in a diff post but I just wanted to mention that it was a thing before wrapping up.  

Language

Did you know that Malagasy Wikitionary is dealing with the fallout of a Scots Wikipedia type scenario? It's worse in the Mada case bc less people care and there aren't funny headlines to draw eyes to the problem. Anyways, my players were really fond of messing with the Malagasy love of compound nouns when I spent one presession looking through digitized dictionaries of highland dialect w/them - not conlanging tbc, they'd just haphazardly slap English or Spanish words onto Malagasy ones. The most popular were putapanahy (formed by attaching puta to the compound form of the word for mindset or attitude or "soul-setting" -panahy) and the reduction of gasy into a general word for person which was slapped onto basically anything (stupidgasy for dumbasses, birdgasy for peacockmen aliens, donutgasy for the dude who made donuts.) My favorite language thing was the use of different intonations to represent different languages: Shawlsman (an exonym, like Shawlfolk itself) was normal tone, Spacer's Anglic was clipped and typically came in short bursts, the Veiled Tongue (the scriptural language of Tromba Gaccha - I called it Ardhamalagasy once but the joke was only funny to me and the kids never used it) was whispered, etc. It became pretty natural a session or two into trying it and I think the shifting prompted the players to think more about what language they wanted to use when and the audiences they directed speech towards. Plus it was really fun to see them jump when one of their NPC allies dropped the military sound of Anglic and spoke to them in fluent Shawlsman. 

* I had so much fun in the last game of this Lacuna campaign. Beyond a stray blog comment here and there, I've been staying off socials since I heard the news, and it was a v. welcome release to hang out and play a fucked up spy game with such talented folks. A million thanks to my man Dan for running it all.