In the Roots: Playing with Habitats and Ecosystems in My Bayou RPG

I haven’t interacted with the RPG Blog Carnival before, but I was so excited when I did finally happen across this month’s prompt: Tiny Epics: Small Souls in a Big World! by Errant Thinking. I love “tiny epics” of all shapes and sizes, whether in a devoted “swords-and-whiskers” game or through a more general use of scale as tension. Reading the posts from this month has been an incredible treat, and they have inspired me to take a more deliberate look at how I have (or have not) been encountering some of these ideas in my own upcoming critter-feature, BAYOU. 

In particular, I wanted to write a bit about my intentions and aspirations for creating environmentally-informed player critters (PCs).

First, though, a general claim for consideration: 

Defining “Player Critters”

I believe a game’s “character creation” procedures are the most pivotal expressions of that text’s voice and spirit. This is the first time players feel the game’s heart beat in their own hands. When designing a character creation process, we must remember to make the important things important, and not be afraid to let the rest fall to the side… we can’t afford to do anything else!

When designing a hack or system, it’s important to ask yourself: How will this game define a person? If a character could only have one distinctive, notable trait, what should that trait be? Might it be… their Name? Fashion sense? Magic school? The balloonship armada they’ve sworn fealty to? Whether their feet point backwards or forwards? 

This isn’t a particularly novel or revolutionary idea, however it is one that I often have to make an effort to remember and consider in my own work.

So to bring this back to the tiny… imho, an underutilized facet of the “swords-and-whiskers” genre (at least in TTRPGs) is habitat. Scale is obviously paramount, however I would argue that “habitat” is the critical plane on which the encounters between “Tall” and “Small” first take place. You’re always on somebody’s home turf, and the nature of that place will determine how it feels to trespass as the “other size” (whether they are looming above or scattering through). Not all tiny creatures are alike, but all tiny creatures in this one place probably have something in common. 

Take something like Finding Nemo. Besides names, you could certainly distinguish that film’s characters as “clown fish, lion fish, sword fish…” Fine, but it’s probably not the most compelling or interesting approach to describing these fish. Personally, I think looking at the ecosystems within that world—and which characters live within each—is far more interesting. What groups live in the coral reef, as opposed to the deep sea trench, the shipwreck, or the waiting room fish tank? What traditions do we find in these various locales? What fears, what quests?

Critter Roots in BAYOU

In BAYOU, the most important aspect you will decide during character creation is where to draw your critter’s Roots—the unique habitat (slash culture) they grew up in and where they continue to feel most at home. 

Currently, the options include: 

1. Bramble:  Villages of straw and thicket, roaming among the tall grass, levee banks, coastal marshes, hanging gardens, abandoned courtyards, briar thickets, ivy-covered rooftops. 
2. Burrow: Cozy dens, nut orchards, tree-trunk libraries, grand flotsam lodges.
3. Roost: Cypress canopies, twig forts built along moss-covered branches of lanky oak trees, abandoned attics, balconies, planks and wires connecting tiled roofs.
4. Nook: Everywhere with a shadow. Crawl spaces, cemeteries, old wharfs, tire swamps, restaurant kitchens, potholes, and drainpipes. Strip malls and shotgun houses.
5. Puddle: Tall trees, still water. Green clovers, purple flowers. Swamps, bayous, mangroves. Bug buzzes, moldy boat wrecks, smuggler caches. Churning storm drains.

In keeping with the dense landscape of the bayou, these different environments do not sit in isolation. They are stacked on top and nested within each other. Just one oak tree or shady porch has plenty of room to home all five at once, if you look just close enough.

Playing with Roots

For players, these Roots function similar to a typical character class or background. Each set of Roots has its own spread with randomizers for habitat-specific names, species (Relations), currency (Booty), and professions (Trades). The last also comes with a starter set of equipment: an assortment of rations, tools, weapons, and clothing (again, all specific to the ecosystem at-hand). 

A key distinction between Roots and similar class/background systems, I think, is that each new detail you roll establishes two things at once: both something new about your PC and something new about the wider ecosystem they live in. While both are immediately apparent (“I am a sewer-surfing crawfish”), the latter will also reveal itself gradually over time, in play. As you travel and mingle, you will start to notice different trends across the values, traditions, and personalities of each habitat. These are not prescribed mysteries hinting at some hidden, in-depth lore: just simple questions, small perplexities to get you thinking and exploring further. When it’s time for some well-deserved r&r, you’ll need to find a way to carve out the comforts of your own home, wherever you actually happen to be.

In short, my intention is for these bite-sized habitats to create a flavorful texture, malleable and vivid, that will weave itself behind and between your many interactions with the world. To immediately situate each player within their own miniature ecosystems—self-contained, interconnected, and (arguably) balanced—without the players having to do anything but play! 

Running with Roots

For the GM, I also hope these pages are useful resources for adventure design and spontaneous world-building. Though the spreads themselves are notably sparse, they (should) contain plenty of the triggers / effects you will need to incite a natural world that feels as idiosyncratic, dynamic, and full of life as the one outside your window. 

If working as intended, you should be able to pull out a chunk of info from one of these spreads—the listed species, currencies, professions, or gear—and treat them as random tables and narrative prompts for generating that one tiny fragment of the larger world. Wherever the adventurers land—in a new sewer-port, garden-market, or canopy shack— these Roots can be used to give the local shop an inventory, the nearest quest-giver a name and trade, and the watering hole a distinct, regional menu. 

These Roots are also meant to help you relocate other adventures into the bayou. All it takes is a quick matching game of mini-biome to mini-biome. A village of medieval farmers can be rendered as a little town of shrews, slugs, and lizards in the meadow of an abandoned lot. A rival party of Mausritter adventurers might make sense as a group of Nook-scavengers or Roost-pirates, depending on the situation. 

In BAYOU, a pond is a city. A sidewalk is a vast, barren steppe. Adventure is everywhere (if you know where to look) and everything talks (if you know how to listen).