Everest Pipkin’s World Ending Game shows new ways to end tabletop RPGs

It started raining at Everest Pipkin’s farm in rural New Mexico while I was interviewing them on Zoom. “I’m thrilled,” they said, with a bit of awe in their voice. “My dogs chewed through my irrigation lines yesterday, so I was going to have to water all my trees with buckets for the next week until I fix it, because I gotta put up a fence before I fix the irrigation, and this means I don’t have to water.” The last word came out in a sing-song way, a celebration, and then we shifted gears back into discussing Pipkin’s newest tabletop creation, World Ending Game. You’ll find out more about that in the next section.

This moment is fundamentally Pipkinesque. They describe themselves as “a writer, game developer and software artist” in their official bio, but spending a few minutes sifting through their projects reveals a true capaciousness when it comes to artistic production. 2019’s Five Corsicana Sky Objects is made up of strange little sculptures that report the IDs of planes that are flying overhead at that very moment; 2020’s Roblox Dream Diary A series of abstract games created in the ever-popular Roblox.

These projects and many others by Pipkin are just the beginning. They reveal a talent for finding extraordinary things in seemingly mundane settings. Strange artistic creations within the blockbuster hustle of Roblox takes a certain perspective on the world that we live in, a perspective that finds joy in things like the chance occurrence of rain, and that’s easily visible in Pipkin’s landmark Ground ItselfThe following was published in 2019.

Billing itself as “a game about places over time,” Ground Itself is a tabletop game about developing and tracing the history of a place in all of its specificity — a field, a city, a rabbit’s den, or a continent. Working in the same space as games like Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year or Ben Robbins’ Follow, Ground Itself involves players in a process of generating the place’s story. While mainstream games like Dungeons & Dragons often focus on the epic tales of people rising to world-historical challenges, Ground Itself Asks participants to consider the challenges that they face.

Ground Itself This is about how players make claims about places and take those claims to their logic using dice mechanics. A player might roll six dice to map a village of small farmers over the course a few days, weeks, months or even millennia. These time periods are tracked along with the physical changes that take place in the world. Do galactic raiders raze mountainstops to fuel their empire? Is it possible for beavers to dam the stream, flooding the barn? Is there a wildflower field that grows across the field to hybridize with the cedar forest side by side? This game can be used as a way to channel creativity into the ground and surrounding ecologies.

I asked my buddy, Friends at the Table Austin Walker hosts the show, and he explains his views on why Ground Itself This is such an important work. He said that “it forces players not only to collaborate with each other, but with an explosive and forceful sense of time, too.” Rather than having you play through the major moments of a world, commanding armies or wizards, you engage more with the impacts. “The result is that instead of generating a fun playground for future adventures, you end up building a place that feels haunted by its own history.”

Talking with Pipkin to discuss the design process for the game, it was clear that the feeling of being “haunted” by place and space was crucial to the success of the project. The story was long and detailed about how the Internet worked while they were working in Nevada. Pipkin needed to climb a steep mountain for two hours to access their email. To do so, he had to attach their cell phone to the laptop. When they weren’t walking up and down that mountain, they were isolated in a cabin, doing an artist residency that many others had completed before. Those people had left fragments and remnants of themselves in that cabin, and Pipkin noticed that they were “existing in space, with others, though time.”

Pipkin spent a month writing the game. Pipkin said the simplicity of it all was due to the fact that he knew he lived with other people. Although the cabin was far from the main road, the ex-residents left text messages, information and physical footprints on it. Pipkin spoke and I was able to see the marks left on the counters or scratches on the floor. The impressions that we leave behind on places, such as interactive leaves, had a significant impact on the final product.

“The themes of [The Ground Itself]These are fundamentally about the process of abstracting out that process. […] to the types of lives that are lived in every place, human and nonhuman, including things like colonies of ants and big rainstorms,” Pipkin said with a laugh. “Not so much in a ‘the land remembers,’ but it remembers. Everything is imprinted on the world, and using that as a basis of storytelling is something that’s important to me.”

Ground Itself made a substantial splash in the world-creating game genre, asking players to generate and make a place with certain finite rules, and Pipkin is taking a similar designer’s eye to the end of games in World Ending GameThe PDF version of the book is available now, while a printed edition will be released in September.

A sharp change from Ground Itself’s spatial, mostly characterless worlds focused on narration, World Ending Game It is character-focused. Meant to be used as a tool for managing the end of things in tabletop worlds, it slots right into games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder as well as the wide world of tabletop beyond. Many of these games can be played character-centered. It is difficult to know how to let go, or allow your characters to pass on into a new phase. What does Old Zoot the dwarf do after he’s defeated Strahd and flown a Spelljammer directly into the floating palace of a cloud giant?

There are 20 games to help you close campaigns or characters. World Ending Game aims to solve that problem. This is just one example. Ground Itself, World Ending Game emerged out of a direct relationship with Pipkin’s present conditions. After our interview, Pipkin sent me an email in which he expressed his gratitude. World Ending Game is a response to our now: “It is certainly distinct, on year three of a global pandemic in a failed state with increasingly dwindling healthcare options and a murderous police apparatus, watching the hills go to fire in the summers and the power companies cut heat in the winters, as climate collapse slowly shifts the place I live into somewhere I do not recognize.”

Although these situations are dire, they can be overcome by the care and compassion shown. World Ending Game Pipkinesque again. World Ending Game Our current reality is less frightening than it seems. Instead of focusing solely on the realities of endings, World Ending Game It adopts a cinematic approach for its games and gives players the ability to close their games using rulesets that are derived from popular media endings. This is what I meant literally. Pipkin explained that the fundamental step in designing of WEGIt was a process of looking at screenplays of interest and noting the endings. Next, we worked backwards in order to find alternative endings.

There’s joy in them, and there’s also a sadness. These games help you to end the game, which can be a bit painful. Many of these messages are communicated by the images of World Ending GameEach entry has an illustrated cover to set the tone. Michael DeForge’s illustration for “Karaoke Bar,” a riff on the final song ending for films, has both a characteristic exuberance and a deep melancholy to it. DeForge’s flat characters exploding with energy draws a conclusion about the inevitable come-down; the karaoke bar closes, the energy dissipates, and you’re out on the street walking home in the dim light and low smog. Doors close abruptly. The lights go out.

It’s hard to end things, but any person who has played more than a couple tabletop games knows that true endings are hard to come by. Most games don’t end. Someone can’t find time, or people get bored, or someone moves away, and people just never manage to come back together. There are many more endings than there are characters. It is my goal to give players tools for ending things. World Ending Game It can be used as both a practical tool and a bit of a carrot. It would be possible to push through a shaky campaign to complete a minigame, where every player sees an omen that ends the world and must interpret it for their party. You might find some closure. This might help make it all worthwhile.

At the opening of our interview, Pipkin said that “you can’t fully separate a creative practice from a lived life.” In thinking through the tools they have given us for our campaigns, making worlds and ending them, it’s easy to extend that slightly further into our engagement with that practice: You can’t fully separate play from a lived life. Pipkin is a fascinating figure. This is because they keep the best of both worlds while not losing any that are already there. Barbarians and bards can get their gut-wrenching ending, resonating with our own world without being reduced to it, and they’re taken seriously when they do so. You can play the game with rocks and civilizations built upon them, or create a new world for yourself. Pipkin’s contributions to tabletop games are ultimately centered on the world we have, and how we exist in it, without filing any of the burrs off the whole project. These rough edges can be used to craft or destroy worlds.