Fifth Season RPG exposes N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth to a new audience

N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is being adapted to a tabletop role-playing game by Green Ronin Publishing. The Fifth Season: Roleplaying the Stillness will use the well-established d6-based Adventure Game Engine (AGE) system, the same system that underpins many of Green Ronin’s most popular titles. With it, players will be able to guide their own homemade communities (comms) across Earth’s last remaining supercontinent. From now until February 23, Backerkit will host a crowdfunding campaign.

“With any license, the first thing you want to do is identify what is unique about it, and then how you can translate that into the game,” Green Ronin founder and president Chris Pramas told Polygon. “The whole way that The Fifth Season RPG works is different than a lot of games, because one of the key aspects of the whole series is that to survive these cataclysmic Fifth Seasons, you need community.”

In Jemisin’s apocalyptic world, humanity must band together into tight-knit comms in order to survive a seemingly never-ending series of natural disasters. Every turn brings with it logistical and interpersonal problems. Only the strongest groups can survive as the cataclysms stack on top of each other. Players will create characters based on the Broken Earth trilogy’s strict caste system, which divides workers from creators and even from those tasked with raising the next generation.

Embedded within that rigid caste system are the secret orogenes, powerful magelike figures who are persecuted — and, in the books, often shunned out of comms — as others fear their titanic abilities. Think Earthbenders mixed with X-Men and you’re on the right track.

“The rulebook has rules for minor orogenes,” Pramas said. “People who have talent but they haven’t […]not been properly trained. And you can play one of those characters with limited powers, but you won’t be shifting tectonic plates or anything like that. […] That can create interesting story stuff where you’re part of the community, but you’re secretly an orogene, and all the difficulties that that engenders.”

Campaigns will start with extensive comm-building exercises. The composition of comms can vary depending on the people who are populating them and where they’re located geographically. Pramas stated that these nuances would make them an individual player character. The game, like the books will deal with race issues.

“I actually want to give credit to Chris and Green Ronin for reaching out. […]Ronin, credit for your proactiveness [on these issues],” said co-designer Tanya DePass, founder and director of I Need Diverse Games, a not-for-profit advocacy organization. “[For]Reaching out to me and other [people of color]We are currently working on it. [for]Making sure we are heard in these stories about people of color and Blackness that center on survival and calamity. It’s a little too much like right now, but it is what it is. It was the first time the books had been published. [real] world wasn’t burning, so.”

This isn’t Green Ronin’s first time dealing with challenging and culturally relevant source material, Pramas said.

Blue Rose is the most obvious example,” Pramas said. “That is our romantic fantasy role-playing game. It also uses the AGE system, and it’s inspired by fiction from Mercedes Lackey, and Diane Duane, and Tamora Pierce, people like that. It’s super LGBTQA-plus-friendly, and that was not well received in certain corners of gaming [when it launched in 2005]. But it’s one of those things that we felt was important.

“We’re also working right now on […] Twilight Accord,” he continued, “which goes even further than Blue RoseIt focuses on the queer experience. It’s not just like, Oh, they’re also here!This article is about the experiences of queer persons. This is about the experience of queer people. That’s how we are here.”

The Fifth SeasonThe core rulebook will be the main focus of this crowdfunding campaign. You can purchase it in two versions: a standard (60 dollars) or a deluxe (80 dollars), each with a PDF. A Roll20 version is also available as an add-on, as well as a game master’s kit, which includes a screen and quick reference materials. The delivery is anticipated for this summer. Pramas claims that Green Ronin’s next project is a traditional campaign booklet, that will be available for up to one year.

DePass, who is close friends with Jemisin, said that she is relishing the opportunity to translate a series with which she is so intimately familiar to the tabletop — a space where players can explore, but also be introduced to Broken Earth potentially for the first time.

“[I’m most excited about] giving to the world and to people that may not be familiar with the books a mode that they can engage with, because not everyone gets information the same way,” DePass said. “Some people may not want to read the books, but it’s still getting them The Fifth Season in a format that they can understand and engage with in a way that — I’m excited to see what happens.

“I hope there’s a lot of let’s plays that come out of it and people doing shows,” she added, “with the caveat of I hope they’re respectful to the source material in the game.”

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