Neither Hope Nor Cynicism: A Central Tension

31 Aug, 2025

A Lakelands setting post
cw: climate crisis

David Somerville identifies three key phrases that define how his Planegea setting ought to feel: kinetic action, primordial horror, and mystic awe. I think this is a great way to communicate a tabletop setting, but I haven't hit on key phrases like these for the Lakelands (or not yet, anyway). Instead, my intention is for two central tensions to animate the setting. This post will lay out the first of these tensions, which I think of as "neither hope nor cynicism": in the long term, the Lakelands are doomed, but art, tradition, curiosity, hospitality, mercy, play, and community all still matter anyway.

Source: David Gabric, 2020.

Neither Cynicism...

You can tell several different kinds of story in the post-apocalyptic genre, which is perhaps one reason I'm drawn to it. There is, however, a certain kind of story that I'm not drawn to, one that has been ubiquitous in the post-apocalyptic genre for a little while. These are suspicious stories, closed off to much of what is wonderful in life, in which most of the characters, and consequently the world, contract into a posture of only personal survival and group loyalty. Cynicism and nihilism are common in these stories, to a degree I don't care for.

On the podcast Know Your Enemy's 73rd episode, entitled "'Succession,' 'Extrapolations,' and TV Writing Today (w/ Dorothy Fortenberry and Will Arbery)," guest Dorothy Fortenberry, co-showrunner for the cli-fi television show Extrapolations,¹ discusses that trend:

I think there was a real vogue for making shows about a bleak apocalypse. Certainly in the last twenty years there have been so many shows, so many zombie shows, so many the-world-has-been-totally-destroyed shows, and [...] one of the constraints about an apocalypse, when you come in after the apocalypse has happened, is that you really can focus on a small group of people, and the concerns of your characters really are, "Do we have enough water, Can we defend ourselves, Do we have sufficient weapons." You know, whether it's an actual nuclear family or whether it's a sort of ragtag band of survivors, you're modelling this very small unit, facing a hostile outside world, who needs to be very fully armed and [is] constantly at risk of immediate physical threat. I think that has a particular politics. I don't know that those shows were created to advance a set of politics, but I certainly think if what you're doing imaginatively is like, "Well, you're hunkered down with five people and you have a ton of weapons and everyone outside you wants to kill you, at all times," all your choices come from that set of givens, that creates a particular worldview.

In case you aren't familiar with Know Your Enemy, that "particular worldview" is implied by the context: it's a kind of parochial low-trust American conservatism, or at least has a lot in common with it. After she and the hosts describe those politics of the post-apocalyptic genre a little more, Fortenberry talks about how she wanted to do something different:

…and so part of the reason I was excited to join Extrapolations was that it wasn't taking place after the apocalypse. It was an ongoing, sort of slow apocalypse, where things got worse, but they didn't completely dissolve into a total anarchy and a total end to functional systems. I really wanted to be part of a show that wasn't saying, "We're all just hunkering down, we have nothing to take care of except our immediate kin, every person for themselves."

Like Fortenberry, I'm not a conservative, and even less am I the shrunken, paranoid kind of conservative of the post-apocalyptic fiction she observes. For that reason I'm simply not interested in games that reproduce that nihilism, where characters take care of nothing but their immediate kith and kin. That said, I think if you're careful, you can be properly post-apocalyptic and still avoid cynicism.

Of course, it's impossible to work on a post-apocalyptic setting without confronting cynicism, not only because of the genre's history but also because of its actual features: first, if the social fabric unravels, it is much harder to trust strangers and rivals, and second, the fewer resources you have, the harder it is to justify expending those resources on anything beyond survival. Both features of the post-apocalyptic genre put constraints on what your characters can realistically choose to do. If our own pre-apocalyptic² world has plenty of grifters, bullies, warmongers, thieves, slavers, hypocrites, misers, and cowards, then so too must any post-apocalyptic world. You have to confront all that. The question then is to what extent you reject cynicism, embrace it, or find some third option. My goal is to fully acknowledge everything that makes it hard to be open to strangers, merciful to enemies, generous to friends, and honest with yourself – and then affirm the importance of all that anyway.

It's a tall order, I guess. If there's often an element of wish-fulfillment in tabletop roleplaying games, maybe this is mine.

What does this mean at the table? It means that travelling PCs will find friendly villages open to trade, and other travellers on the paths between them. It means that there are raiders, cultists, and petty despots, yes, but there will also be just as many good characters who proactively help others. It means that those raiders will have turned to banditry for a reason, even if, as Seedling Games points out in their post "Grounded Fantasy," those reasons aren't always sympathetic ones. It means that most plot hooks lead to adventures that build up settlements rather than simply enrich the adventurers. And it means that most of those settlements make music, tell stories, hold festivals, perform religious rites, celebrate marriages and births, bake sweets, record histories, play games, plant flowers, and otherwise show in small consistent ways that they care about more than survival. If a settlement in the Lakelands does not do those things, it's a sign that something has gone very wrong indeed.

...Nor Hope

So no cynicism then, and no nihilism. Or, characters can be cynics and nihilists, but we at the table are not. But if that's to mean anything, I must make it hard to care about the soft things. This is where the cosmic horror comes in.

The Unbound will one day conquer the Lakelands. No one alive in the 2130s-2140s will see it happen, and with luck neither will their children, but it will happen. Nothing can stop it. All of North America will fall to the Unbound. Of course, that doesn't mean everyone in the Lakelands will die; many will be enlisted into one Unbound's dystopia or another. But there is no foreseeable future without the Unbound in the world and for a long while their dominion will only grow. Most Lakelanders do not truly believe this, but some suspect it and, regardless of what they think, it's true.

This is all in keeping with the original conventions of cosmic horror, of course, in which no victory over the immortal eldritch horrors will ever be permanent, nor is even temporary victory all that likely. As an aside, in "Why give Cthulhu a happy ending?," Amod Lele at the philosophy blog Love of All Wisdom points out that Lovecraftian fiction³ written nowadays usually does end in victory. Lele gives their own reasons for preferring Lovecraftian fiction to end in catastrophe; I have different metaphysical commitments than Lele does, so my reasons are different.

It is vitally important to me that we still care about things even if we have reason to believe it will all end badly. A lot of people seem to struggle with this: What's the point of living if we're just going to die? What's the point of anything if all life on Earth will one day end? What's the point in trying if we know we're going to lose? On an intellectual level I understand why people reason this way,⁴ but ultimately I think it's nonsense. If something would matter if life went on forever, it must also matter if life ends tomorrow. If community matters, if kindness matters, if love and understanding and humour and pleasure and tradition and creativity intrinsically matter, then they matter now, regardless of what the future brings. We must practice this kind of thinking because, believe me, we're going to need it. We already do. So the Lakelands is a post-apocalyptic cosmic horror setting to make this as clear as possible: everything that matters, matters now, even if there's no tomorrow.

Of course, there is a tomorrow for the Lakelands, and for many years afterwards. The Unbound will eventually win, but not quite yet. The game is about fighting for what happens in the meantime.

But What Will Players Put Up With?

That's my ideal Lakelands game, and I want to ensure that everything I design is at least consistent with that tension. But my ideal Lakelands game is perhaps a bit too bleak for most people. Maybe it's even, sometimes, a bit too bleak for me. So if you like the setting and want to run a game in it, but you know your players will not tolerate something quite so fatalistic (or if you cannot tolerate something quite so fatalistic), what can you do? How can you turn down the fatalism without losing the tension entirely?

Option 1: The Unbound will conquer the Lakelands, but not the whole world. You can seed rumours that the Unbound can only exert their influence over so much territory each, and with only fourteen of them, they cannot rule the world. Even if they cannot be defeated, a significant portion of the world will remain free of them, especially because the lesser horrors like idols and egregores can be killed or destroyed. This would locate hope for the world abroad, outside North America; the downside, then, is that players might focus their efforts on moving to those places, rather than on improving things in the Lakelands for the next few generations.

Option 2: The Unbound will win, but not forever. You can seed rumours that the Unbound have limited time in this world, that just as their victory over the Lakelands is inevitable, so too is their eventual unravelling. They aren't meant to be here; that wrongness is what broke the world where they Arrived and it's what causes the dreamzones to form, but it also means that the Unbound are slowly dying. When they do, the world will be fundamentally changed, but it will also be free.

Option 3: The Unbound will almost certainly win, but we don't know that for sure. You can emphasize how little anyone knows about the Unbound; they may seem invincible, but that does not mean they truly are. The conflict between some of the Unbound may even reveal an opportunity: perhaps one of them could be persuaded to give up the secret of killing or banishing the others. This is a hope based in ignorance, but it is a hope nonetheless. The downside here is that many players are used to playing in games where their characters are the ones to beat the odds, succeeding on the slimmest of chances, and giving any hint that it is possible to defeat the Unbound will likely encourage them to try, even though the heart of the game is elsewhere.

Adjusting the game in one or two of these ways might make the Lakelands setting more palatable to some players. These are only optional adjustments to the setting and not the default, for the reasons I've given in this post and more besides; realistically, however, you must run the setting so that it works for your table.

*As usual with Lakelands posts, everything here is provisional.

#cosmic horror #for GMs #post-apocalyptic #style and approach #the Lakelands