Wildness & Intent
The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which housed the dungeons.
Dungeons & Dragons: The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, pg. 14
A lot has been written about the internal assumptions made by Dungeons & Dragons and how it portrays its area of exploration as wilderness inhabited by savage beasts and sparsely populated fortifications manned by people who speak the same language, and arguably belong to the same culture, as the Player Characters. This isn't about that, though if you're interested then I'd recommend Zedeck Siew's 'Decolonising D&D' as a good jumping off point. Reading the above passage made me think about the nature of 'wildness' and how I interpret it in games.
I live in a sparsely populated landscape dominated by rolling heather moorland, peat bog, weathered rock, and rugged coasts. I share it with curlew, plover, wagtails, ravens, wheatear, eagles, stonechats, harriers, wrens, redshanks, gulls common, little and great, painted ladies, bumblebees, tiger moths, ticks, and red deer. Beneath my feet grows clover, white and red, selfheal, marsh thistle, tormentil, orchids, rushes, yellow rattle, vetchling, eyebright, cock's foot, crested dog's tail, ryegrass, fescue, and sphagnum moss. Settlements cling to the coasts and hunker down against the Atlantic storms, connected by thin strips of asphalt across the moor. Many would describe where I live as 'wild' and, indeed, people often move here out of a desire to live in such a place.
In truth, my home is not wild. Wildness is an illusion which seeks to divide humans from the natural world, and often elevate them above it. It is an artificial construct. There is no land on Earth that has not been impacted by either indigenous communities or the activities of colonising powers/international capital. Mankind is not a separate class of animal, apart from the whole. The island on which I live has felt the touch of human activity for over 5,000 years - the treeless landscape is the end result of cumulative changes stemming from the introduction of grazing livestock and agricultural deforestation, locked in by climate change. The people who move here desiring a wild existence drive cars to supermarkets and watch TV just as they would in any other settlement in the country.
Despite this, I still often run hexcrawls in the style of the LBBs - sparsely populated landscapes calling out for exploration. A pivotal theme is often the conflict between civilisation and the wilderness. Why?
Pelican recently mentioned the idea of playing with intent and my initial response was that playing fun games with friends was enough for me. The thought stuck, though. Looking back, a lot of my campaigns have followed the above formula. They've been fun, certainly, but maybe there's something worth interrogating. Part of why I read through the LBBs and plan to run them is to really try and interface with the mechanics as written to see if I experience anything in a new light that previously I discarded out of hand, why not do that with the framing of a campaign? This needn't be down to the fictional framing of a campaign either: the Evil Labyrinth game recently finished up on the Gay Beholder Discord and this was run as a so-called 'Arcade Game', the style of which which intentionally focuses on the game's procedures as the point of playing.
Thinking about my own relationship to the wild and how I've incorporated that into the games I've played makes me think I should perhaps try and inject some intention into the next game I run.
