2020 in Indie RPGs/Maria/Game: Their Love Destroyed This Land

#HotIndieTTRPGs For the indie rpg that caught their interest in 2020, @MariaMison picked Their Love Destroyed This Land by @temporalhiccup

The collective & the personal: lenses of healing and story

My all-time favorite ttrpg experience is not only my first one, but the kind that grabbed me by the neck and left me staring into a wall for a good few minutes. Their Love Destroyed This Land by Jamila Nedjani (@temporalhiccup) is not only a solo lyrical-style game driven by tarot, it speaks deeply of misguided actions in the name of a misguided but great love. 

Who hasn’t done anything harmful thinking they were doing something absolutely good?

Quick think of a miracle, that turns out to be not a miracle when played out to it’s logical excess. Great, now whatever top of mind answer you have, is something that you kind of want right? In this game, I had three of my deepest (misguided) wishes play out to their most horrific, fantastic consequences, over the span of ages and large swaths of land. I had to see what my escapist tendencies looked like when performed by king who promised elixirs of no pain, endless beautiful dreams delivered by a sleepy mage, and a beast who created a beach where people didn’t age.

It was bad news for the land’s people. Both on a personal (me) and societal (..colonizers) level lying to oneself and by correlation other people, led to disastrous consequences. And games, especially indie ones that have self-aware questions for reflection—allow players to step in and experience symbolic spaces where they come to understand themselves, in this psychoanalytic dream-story language. 

This game, changed me. And at the same time centers around a narrative sympathetic and acknowledging the trauma of colonized people and their relationship with land. It’s incredibly powerful and needed and I hope to see more in the coming years.