If you’ve been following independent, miniatures-agnostic wargames lately, you probably didn’t notice a trend, but your brain probably did. It’s a golden age for the genre. Lots of people pumping out product to no concern for whether you own the “correct” miniatures.
It’s kinda nice and kinda depressing.
Not because the games are bad. I haven’t played enough of them to form an opinion on that. But I have seen enough to notice trend.
No one gets to save the world anymore.
You don’t lead the last free kingdom against the forces of darkness. You don’t rebuild civilization from the ashes. You don’t drive back the invaders.
Instead, you’re a demon. Or a cultist. Or a mutant. Or a scavenger. Or a disgraced knight. Or one of the handful of miserable souls still breathing after the apocalypse happened.
Even when you’re technically one of the “good guys,” congratulations: you’ve already lost, or you’re about to. The gods won. Civilization collapsed. Reality is tearing apart at the seams.
Now get out there and have some fun!
Games like Reign in Hell, Turnip28, Forbidden Psalm, The Doomed, and Repent! Ye Foolish Gods have their own personalities, but they share a miserable assumption. The world is beyond saving. The only remaining question is whether your little band of doomed weirdos can accomplish something meaningful before the last of the lights go out.
Do you see how different that is from older campaign games?
Once upon a time, campaigns were about growth. Your rookie swordsman became a champion. Your little kingdom conquered a continent. Your band of buddies became an army. Your victories mattered because they were part of a larger story moving somewhere.
Now packaged campaigns are mostly about accumulating “psychological trauma”, missing limbs, eldritch mutations, and increasingly poor life choices.
Progress!
Let me pause to recognize that I am an old man yelling at clouds I’m trying to hold back the tide. On my own little way perhaps I’m no different from the miniatures in games like this. Or it would be if I didn’t know that in the end, Christ wins.
Anyway, I’m not arguing that every game should be The Lord of the Rings. Grim settings can be fantastic, and after all, tragedy has been a part of storytelling since the Greeks. What’s interesting is that so many modern games begin with what amounts to a built-in fail state.
The apocalypse isn’t coming.
You missed it.
You’re playing in the epilogue.
And I just don’t think that is a mere a game design choice.
Fiction doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It reflects the emotional climate of the people writing it. The tales of Conan are about deep pagan barbarian, but they sprung up from the rich soil of a deeply Christian West Texas. Over the last twenty-five years, though, we’ve lived through terrorism, endless wars, financial crises, fake pandemics, a well deserved decline in institutional trust, and a cultural dogma that is deeply pessimistic about the future.
This philosophy has been imposed upon the West by people deeply inimical to the Christian virtues of Faith and Hope to the point that it even infests out little hobby where even our little metal avatars have stopped expecting rescue.
Which brings me to something the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observed decades ago. He argued that modern societies still admire virtues like courage, loyalty, sacrifice, and perseverance. What we’ve lost is agreement about what those virtues are for.
That’s exactly what I see in these games.
The heroes (or more often the antiheroes) are not entirely without virtue. They protect their companions. They endure hardship. They sacrifice themselves for others. They stand their ground when retreat would be easier.
They’re admirable people, but trapped in universes where history has no redemption.
The point of these games is not that good eventually triumphs – the point of these games is to lose well. Which is a shame because God’s creation tells almost exactly the opposite story.
The Bible is not optimistic in the shallow sense. It takes suffering far more seriously than most modern fiction does. Kingdoms fall. Innocent people die. The righteous are persecuted. The world is genuinely broken. Hell, Satan himself claims dominion over all the world’s governments when tempting Christ, and Jesus does not disabuse him or us of that notion.
Christianity stubbornly and rightly insists that history has an author. The story begins with creation, passes through the fall, and ends not in entropy but in restoration. Evil gets a long run, but it doesn’t get the final chapter.
That’s why Christian hope isn’t mere optimism. It’s confidence.
Which makes me wonder if these games are revealing something about the hobby and it’s practitioners.
Perhaps these games aren’t really about demons, mutants, or doomed warbands at all. Perhaps they’re the mythology of a civilization that still believes courage is beautiful but has forgotten why.
And if that’s true, then the most interesting thing about the current crop of indie wargames isn’t their mechanics.
It’s their eschatology.