Arisen from the Ashes: Archaeology as Tabletop Gaming in “The Age of Silence”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

“The Age of Silence” is an ongoing “Dungeons and Dragons” campaign in which players’ final challenge will be decolonization amid apocalyptic war, either leading a cultural revolution, or joining the forgotten beneath the ashen waste. Realistic material culture is central to the campaign, with agricultural terracing, boulloteria, funerary practices, and tel formation all tangibly significant. Players must consider landscape use, settlement patterns, and processes of cultural change. Ultimately, saving the world will require inducing cultural change, against the overwhelming forces maintaining the mode of physical and spiritual production. The world itself is a multi-phase site, its cultural taphonomy of colonization, displacement, and inquisition bearing hints to the systems that produced its ruined state. Propaganda forces reliance on the material record, analogy with living peoples, and cryptic ethnographic interviews with subjects as diverse as imprisoned demigods and primordial dragons. Denizens of the deep and far places confront players with kinship systems, lifestyles, and worldviews designed to challenge players’ preconceptions. Hominid evolution itself exists as both a mystery and a set of clues for players to follow and interrogate notions of race and diversity present not only within the real world but also “Dungeons and Dragons” as a subculture and product.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Digitizing Archaeological Practice: Education and Outreach in the Archaeogaming Subdiscipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37591.0