In the last article on dystopias, I looked at how things can go wrong with the messaging and how design can impact the game play. This time? This time it’s all about looking at some dystopian settings that work amazingly well. So, let’s dive in!
The Dystopia: The Alpha Complex
This list has to start with one of the original and best dystopian settings ever created for tabletop gaming. Paranoia’s Alpha Complex. Paranoia walks a fine line between being a comedic game and one of the most horrifying dystopias ever designed.
The Alpha Complex exists in a alternate history future Earth, where nuclear war was triggered accidentally by a technical glitch and multiple failsafe systems. The Alpha Complex is a vast, mostly subterranean ultra-tech facility that sprung into action to save humanity. On paper. In reality, it’s a massive, malfunctioning mess run by an increasingly eccentric AI called The Computer (or Friend Computer). Why increasingly eccentric? Because of the top end of society meddling in its programming to try to benefit themselves and their interests. The society is ranked on an extended rainbow spectrum, from the lowly IR masses to the elite of the elite UV overlords. And on top of all that, the place is trapped in a cycle of propaganda against, well, everything. Life is sort, weird, often miserable, and once you’re a Trouble Shooter (a player character)? You have to experience it six times because you’ve been cloned.
What Makes It Dystopian?
It’s a socially stratified totalitarian state that’s maintained through artificial scarcity and brutal social controls. Everything has the potential to be a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a surveillance state. Literally all the characters are cops. And traitors. Its Brazil meets The Hunger Games meets Vault-Tec from Fallout meets The Office with 1984 as a baseline. The confined nature of the setting (it’s mostly in the endless Alpha Complex) also adds heavily to it, creating a claustrophobic vibe to it all.
Why Does The Alpha Complex Work?
It’s a scathing satire that knows where to punch. The entire operation is presented as a comedy where the situation is clearly bad, and that it’s not meant to be an end goal. By holding to this vibe, and by maintaining the over-the-top presentation of everything, it’s almost impossible to misinterpret the setting for anything else than what it is.
The Dystopia: Night City
To be fair, it’s not just Night City, it’s the larger Cyberpunk setting, but Night City is the easiest and most identifiable part of the world.
Night City is the logical and likely outcome of tech bro capitalist dreams. Founded as a private enterprise, it swiftly evolved into a capitalist libertarian playground where it’s all about getting that bag, no matter what or who you bury on the way. It’s a modern equivalent of Rome in antiquity, where all roads lead to it. It’s a financial hub, a place with few restrictions on its industry, and where you only really have as many rights as you can afford or enforce. Violence is common, there’s a looming threat from NUSA (USA 2, Electric Boogaloo) who want to fully return the city to its control, and immigration continues because it’s better than the climate change ravaged wastelands around it.
What Makes It Dystopian?
Foremost is the barely restricted capitalism; if it can be privatized, it’s privatized. We’re talking there’s a vending machine, pay for use showers, and food vending machines in apartments that you’re already renting. Got medical problems? Hope you got cash. There’s still public education, but it’s a shadow of what it is now and more a holding place for future labourers. Everything costs in Night City, and the rest of the world is varying levels of awful. The tech exists to fix a lot of it, even to push humanity towards a post-scarcity existence… But that doesn’t make the holder so the tech money, so it’s not happening. Then there’ the violence, every kind of it. Physical. Emotional. Environmental. Place is brutal.
What Makes Night City Work?
Ultimately, at its core, it’s that characters have the means and potential to actually make a difference. It might be a small one, it might be temporary, but it’s a difference. It’s a world where there can still be repercussions for the powerful, hard as they can be to generate. The world also doesn’t place multiple barriers on its occupants to move up in society or around the world.
The Dystopia: Mage the Ascension
This is a subtle one, because not only is it multi-levelled, it’s also the underlying fabric of the greater Original World of Darkness (OWoD). This is based on my favourite in the IP’s release history, the Mage 20th Anniversary Edition.
What Makes It Dystopian?
First we’ll deal with the surface level, the “real world” of the OWoD. The place is trapped in a gradually degrading stasis. The Technocracy more or less won the Ascension War, not realizing the cost was that their own brands of magick would be affected too. So the world is a dark parallel to our own, where problems and awfulness are significantly worse. Unemployment, access to resources, wars and conflicts… All worse. All darker. And given that many are already describing the real world as dystopian, it’s not much of a leap to full dystopia.
The next layer is the one where the player characters live. They’ve awakened, and they’re surrounded by literal “sleepers”. They have magick, but are limited in how they can use it. They can make a difference, but it’s almost impossible without drawing the attention of the wrong kinds of people. So they find themselves living on the edges of society, hiding from those in authority (the Technocracy), and fighting a in a war they never even knew was a thing. And that’s on top of all the stuff in the above paragraph. And that’s just their slice of the world.
What Makes Mage the Ascension Work?
It’s ultimately a story about rebels fighting to improve the lot of their fellow people. Even a Technocracy game is ultimately trying to find a way to get people to awaken. In the most ass way possible, but they’re trying. And that’s what makes it work. There’s a sliver of hope built into it all. People can ascend. They can awaken. Things can be better. It’s just a long, bloody road because everyone has a different idea on how to do it.
Final Thoughts
Something that all of these settings lack as dystopias is overt, baked in racism as a plot point or developmental aspect of their world building. Does racism exist in them? Yes. Especially in the OWoD setting. But it’s not the kind that’s going to actively affect a game or the interpretation of the world at a baseline level. And that was the point of these articles. That racism is not a necessary component of a dystopia. And it especially doesn’t have to dialled up to 11.
