Gathering Storm: Origins

This is the time of feeding,
A steady glut

Of fruit and labour

That has made them drowzy

And complacent.
The store grows,

Of their alien fruit

While the others

Hear whispers
Of a reckoning.
A different time is coming.

But how will the Authority fall?

Gathering Storm told the tale of life after the occupation, an analogue of  community rebuilding after colonisation in Kenya, while exterior powers still hold great sway over food production. For Origins, I thought about how these power dynamics play out in Geneva, home of a plethora of multinational organisations and international bodies. The game became an abstraction of international relations, of capital reaching out across the world, and how that influence is felt in communities. The players think about those effects through the microcosm of one community, and one Authority. Origins is a tale of resistance and making change.

Several of the events are inspired by incidents in which Geneva-based corporations are involved. The writing and worlding takes on the language of Mary Shelley's Geneva-based Frankenstein.
Influences

A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

The Quiet Year by Avery Alder

Orbital by Jack Harrision

The Ground Itself  by Everest Pipkin

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Gathering Storm: Origins was developed for The Seashore of Endless Worlds. Art & jeux de société, Le Commun, Geneva, November 2023. With thanks to Sébastien Guex, Christian Bili and Samuel Wagen Magnon.