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

It started raining at Everest Pipkins Farm in rural New Mexico while I was interviewing her on Zoom. “I’m thrilled,” they said with a touch of awe in their voices. “My dogs chewed through my irrigation lines yesterday so I had to water all my trees with buckets for the next week until I fixed it because I have to put up a fence before I fix the irrigation and that means I put it on don’t have to water.” The last word came in a chant, a celebration, and then we switched back to discussing Pipkin’s latest tabletop creation, World ending game. More on that later.

That moment of joy in the rain is what I would call fundamentally Pipkinesque. In their official bio they describe themselves as “author, game developer and software artist”, but spending a few minutes perusing their projects reveals a true capacity when it comes to artistic production. 2019 Five objects for Corsicana Sky consists of strange little sculptures that report the IDs of planes passing overhead at that precise moment; 2020s Roblox dream journal is a series of abstract art games developed within the framework of the ever popular Roblox.

What underlies these projects, and the dozens more Pipkin has created, is the ability to find wondrous things in mundane places. Create strange artistic works in the blockbuster grind of Roblox takes a particular perspective on the world we live in, a perspective that finds joy in things like the chance occurrence of rain, and that is well visible in Pipkin’s landmarks the ground itselfreleased in 2019.

Billing itself as “a game about places over time”, the ground itself is a tabletop game about developing and following the story of a place in all its peculiarities – a field, a city, a rabbit hole or a continent. Works in the same space as games like Avery Alder’s The Silent Year or Ben Robbins consequences, the ground itself involves the players in a process to generate the story of the place. While mainstream games like Dungeons & Dragons often focus on the epic stories of people confronting world historical challenges, the ground itself challenges players to think about the world making these challenges.

the ground itself is mostly about players shaping the world with confidence, making claims about a place, and then using dice mechanics to take those claims to their logical conclusions. A six-sided roll of the dice could have them haunting a small farming village for days, weeks, months, or millennia. The game of the game tracks these time frames along the physical transformations of the world. Is an invading galactic empire destroying the mountaintops for fuel? Are beavers damming the stream and flooding the barn? Does a bed of wildflowers grow across the field, creeping each season to mate by the side of a once-burned cedar forest? The game is a kind of funnel for the creativity of the soil and its accompanying ecologies.

I asked my buddy friends at the table Host Austin Walker on why he’s considering the ground itself to be such a mighty work. He said that “it forces players to not only work together, but also with an explosive and powerful sense of time.” Instead of letting you play through the most important moments of a world, commanding armies or casters, you’re more concerned with the implications. “The result is that instead of creating a fun playground for future adventures, you end up building a place haunted by its own history.”

Speaking to Pipkin about the game’s development process, I felt that this sense of being haunted by space and location was crucial to the project from the start. They told a long story about access to the internet while working on the game in a remote Nevada cabin. To check her email, Pipkin had to climb a mountain for more than two hours and connect her laptop to a cell phone. When not walking up and down the mountain, they were isolating in a cabin, doing an artist residency that many others had previously completed. These people had left fragments and remnants of themselves in this cabin, and Pipkin noted that they “existed in space, with others, though in time”.

Pipkin wrote the game for over a month and said it was easy to write precisely because you were aware of living with others who weren’t actually there. The cabin was remote, but the former residents had left text, information, and their physical footprints at the site. As Pipkin spoke, I could see the scratches on the floor or the burn marks on the countertops, all those unthought-of remnants of ourselves we leave behind. That kind of interactive legacy, the impressions we leave in a place, had a big impact on the final product.

“The topics of [The Ground Itself] is essentially about this process and the abstraction of this process […] to the types of life lived in each place, human and non-human, including things like ant colonies and great rainstorms,” ​​Pipkin said, laughing. “Not so much ‘the country remembers’ as it remembers. Everything is imprinted in the world and using that as a basis for storytelling is something that is important to me.”

the ground itself caused a stir in the world-creating games genre by asking players to design and create a place with certain finite rules, and Pipkin directs a similar designer’s gaze towards the games’ ending in World ending gamenow available in PDF, with a physical release on September 15th.

In a sharp turn off the ground itself‘s spatial, mostly characterless worlds geared towards narration, World ending game is character driven. Intended to be used as a tool for managing the end of things in tabletop worlds, it fits right into games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, and the wide world of tabletops beyond. These types of games are played in a character-centric way, and figuring out how to let go of those characters to let them transition into another phase of their lives beyond the campaign you played is often difficult to accomplish. What does Old Zoot the Dwarf do after defeating Strahd and flying a Spelljammer straight into a cloud giant’s floating palace?

With 20 little games to complete campaigns and characters, World ending game tries to help people solve this problem. And something like that the ground itself, World ending game arose out of a direct relationship to Pipkin’s present conditions. As Pipkin wrote to me in an email after our interview: World ending game is a response to our now: “It is certainly special to be in the third year of a global pandemic in a failed state with dwindling healthcare options and a murderous police force to watch the hills burn in the summer and the energy companies cut the heat in the winter , when climate collapse slowly shifts where I live to a place I don’t recognize.”

These are certainly dire circumstances but the way this was handled World ending game is Pipkinesque again, if only because of the games it contains World ending game seem much less nightmarish than our current reality. Instead of resolutely focusing on the reality of the end, World ending game takes a cinematic approach to its games, giving players the tools to complete their games with rulesets derived from our most popular media renditions of endings. I mean that literally; Pipkin revealed that a fundamental step in the design of AWAY looked at lists of popular screenplays and noted how they ended, then worked backwards to create categories of endings that could represent many of them.

There is joy in them and there is also a sadness. After all, these games are designed to help you end things, and even the best endings are a little painful because of what you have to leave behind. Much of this is communicated through the illustrations of World ending game, as each entry in the book has an illustration that helps set a tone and feel. Michael DeForge’s illustration for Karaoke Bar, a song-ending riff for movies, has both a characteristic exuberance and deep melancholy. DeForge’s shallow characters exploding with energy draw a conclusion about the inevitable crash; The karaoke bar closes, the energy dissipates, and you’re out on the street, walking home in the dim light and smog. Doors close with a bang. Lights click off.

Endings are hard, but anyone who’s played more than a few tabletop games knows that true endings are hard to find. Most games don’t end. Someone doesn’t find time, or people get bored, or someone moves away and people just can’t get back together. The number of unfinished character arcs outweighs the number of finales by many, many orders of magnitude. By giving players a set of tools to finish things off, I get it World ending game as a pragmatic tool, but also a bit of a carrot on a stick. I could run a staggering campaign to complete a minigame where each player in the party sees a doomsday omen and has to interpret it for the others. There could be a conclusion. It might make it all worthwhile.

At the beginning of our interview, Pipkin said that “you cannot completely separate a creative practice from a lived life”. As we think through the tools they gave us for our campaigns, creating and ending worlds, it’s easy to extend this a little further to our engagement with this practice: you can’t completely separate gaming from a life lived. What I find so compelling about Pipkin, and what allows us to use these games to infuse Pipkinese attitudes into our own tabletop games, is that they hold on to what could be in the world without losing that , which is already there. Barbarians and Bards can get their heartbreaking ends and resonate with our own world without being reduced to it, and they are taken seriously when they do so. Rocks and the civilizations built upon them are rendered ecologically within a game frame, and you can enjoy their creation and destruction, or use them to build a world for your characters. Pipkin’s contributions to tabletop games ultimately focus on the world we have and how we exist in it, without belying the entire project. And then we can take those rough edges and create or erase worlds with them.