Weirdhope Not Grimdark

A primer for adventures in a hopeful future

Detail from an illustration for ECO MOFOS!! by Daniel Locke

A bit of an odd blog this time, but people on our Discord (particularly Gingerino) have been asking me to write a bit about what Weirdhope actually is. So here’s a gathering of thoughts about the place I’ve been imaginatively living in for a fair while now. Thanks to Caelin for thinking this through with me.

What is weirdhope?

• Seedlings breaking through cracked earth

• Believing in change not progress

• Embracing the strange and the unknown

• Revelling in nature’s wonders

• Working together to end want

• Building kinder communities

• Developing sustainable technologies

• Embracing a complex culture

• Finding more joyful ways of living

wander ecological islands recovering data, helping our punk evolution

Origins of weirdhope

I’ve been making games based in future magical worlds for a few years now, since The World After, my dumb heartbreaker. The concept of weirdhope arrived a bit later, while I was trying to explain ECO MOFOS!!, as a direct counter to the idea of grimdark.

I wanted to imagine and explore a world that was weird, not grim. Unsettling, strange, perhaps even inspiring wonder. Like looking in a microscope at a tardigrade, or seeing the depths of the Milky Way in the dark night sky. I also wanted to evoke a world that is not wholly rational, where you can meet with the uncanny or magical, like the the weird of weird fiction, of old gods, visions and the supernatural.

And then there’s the dark of grimdark, a dingy, grimy world of Warhammer 40k or Mork Borg, of the World War One trenches. A vision of a world with no future except doom, just one hellish eternal present. I love these games, and these worlds, but I wanted to propose an alternative. That we can have hope, even when that doesn’t seem to make any sense. We see the wars, the political situation, the wild fires, rising temperatures, and hope can seem incredibly naive. But it’s absolutely necessary. So grim becomes hope.

If there’s one thing I’m pretty sure of, it’s that the future is going to be weird, filled with unfamiliar ecosystems, technologies, and social structures. Change is often unsettling. But I believe we can meet change with resilience and adaptation, changing ourselves as the our environment changes. We can meet it with the hope of a more equitable world.

Cover illustration for Ursula Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest by Peter Elson

Playing games in weirdhope worlds has the potential to be more than escapism. It might, in some small way, help to prepare us for a different reality, while having fun. It’s science fantasy about human stories, like the work of Hayao Miyazaki, Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler. Instead of assuming that a damaged world will inevitably become worse (like grimdark), weirdhope becomes an alternative. Maybe the crisis we are living through can lead to new ways of living together, of living with the planet rather than just taking from it.

At its heart, weirdhope is a rejection of the idea that better futures are simply not possible.

What is a Weirdhope adventure?

Weirdhope is not a new genre. It’s an umbrella term for a trend, maybe just a feeling, within collection of stories by disparate authors, filmmakers and comic book writers. It’s in many works by Miyazaki, like the melding of spiritual and natural in Princess Mononoke, or the conflict between nature and technology in Nausicaa.

image from Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind

It’s even there in Kiki’s Delivery Service, where we watch the creation of a found community through helping strangers. But it’s also there in Obi Wan powering down the tractor beams in A New Hope, using cunning to undermine an overwhelming corporate force, or in the journey through hazardous wastes towards a new community in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Weirdhope adventures can be cosy, solving small community problems or tending to a magical allotment, through to dungeon delving and base infiltration, like the direct action of the Avalanche group in Final Fantasy VII.

Ideas for Weirdhope stories:

• Flavour Mutated nature, strange science and surreal environments.

• Tone A mix of wonder, mystery and occasional horror

• Adventure Helping a community, restoring an ecosystem, exploring a site from the Before

There are some obvious analogues with traditional OSR adventuring:

• The dungeon delve > Investigating a Billionaire’s bunker

• The wilderness crawl > Exploring a psychedelic wilderness, searching for your Glade

• Faction negotiation > The weirdhope world is riven by factions, the Wasters (common folk), the Bandits, the Punks (you) and the Corpos (the imperial force)

• Investigating a mystery > investigating a site from the Before Times or a social adventure, talking to a host of weirdos to uncover the truth

This is just a primer, but hopefully it sparks some ideas. If you’d like to discuss them, feel free to join our Discord and say hello, and you’ll find a friendly welcome.

Illustartion for ECO MOFOS!! by Daniel Locke