Many Forged in the Dark games—including the original Blades in the Dark—open their rulebook with a list of influences or touchstones. These highlight inspirations, but perhaps more concretely, clue players in on what type of media you can expect to create with this game.
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The new setting in Crossing Worlds is important to me partly because I struggle to list inspirations that most gamers would understand:
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• The Round House and Tracks by Louise Erdrich
• Custer Died for Your Sins  and God is Red by Vine Deloria
• Power by Linda Hogan
• Pushing the Bear by Diane Glancy
• Blood Struggle by Charles Wilkinson
• Boarding School Seasons by Brenda J. Child
• Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiawai Smith
• the poetry of William Stafford
• the stories my grandmother taught me about our family and what we did to survive
• the stories multiple mentors told me about becoming educated to help their tribes, then being accused of abandoning those same tribes for working outside the community
• the community members who feel their wisdom is ignored because it does not come with a degree
• NDN twitter, with all of its fury and sadness and humor and sarcastic bite
• traditional Cherokee stories, like the origin of disease; the ways worlds overlap, even where we cannot see; and how fear is the greatest killer of all
• the teen vogue article that say's two-thirds of Americans don't believe Native Americans suffer discrimination—as the majority culture clings to the idea that forced-invisibility isn't a form of violence (yes; that's part of the inspiration for the term "irrelevant" in the game)

But what about genre touchstones? Surely I have those?

Any mainstream touchstone I could point to is steeped in the culture that created it. Sure, let's say the game is like fantasy, but decolonize it: there are no monsters; there is no treasure or loot; you do not get xp for killing others, instead you have to inflict that damage on yourself too; there is no supernatural magic, instead there is the power that comes from relationships and interdependence and the magic of realizing nature is our equal; there is no concept of set destiny because time is not linear but moves in cycles...but unicorns? I mean, I don't care. Animals of mythical shapes and sizes and features are fun; imagination is cool.

But remember if you do have unicorns they have no special connection with virgins, because women are not owned by their male relatives or defined in relation to male sexual appetites.

There is no good vs. evil, only balance vs. imbalance.

But also there are no heroes and there are no nobles; there are people, choosing to add or to take away.

There is no success condition or happy ending; the world will fall into ruin; your job is to make sure it doesn't happen in your generation; your job is to think about the effects on the generations to come.

Okay, maybe fantasy isn't right, let's look at science fiction.

Oh wait. Western Science. There are literal textbooks and degrees deconstructing all of the tension between that genre and indigenous views.

And this is why I prefer to avoid genre touchstones. I'd rather let the mechanics and the experiences speak for themselves.

So...why am I saying anything at all?

 
​Part of me would prefer to sidestep touchstones entirely. I would prefer to not mention the inspiration at all. That's what my grandmother did; she hid her Cherokee identity for decades. Until she went back home, and decided it was time to be honest about who she is, and started talking. It came out slowly. It wasn't until her 70s that the dam broke and she talked about it every time I saw her; it was only with a few people she talked about her traditional spiritual beliefs at all. But she talked.

So as uncomfortable as it is for me, here are my touchstones. I am Cherokee. Some of my family were on the Trail of Tears; some weren't. Some enrolled with the tribe; some didn't. Some stayed in Indian Country; many did not. Some identify as Cherokee now; some identify as white.

The game is about the tension and complexity of that question: "how do we resist when pressured from all sides to be something else?" Importantly, the game is about you defining and exploring what resistance means. Because it can look vastly different from person to person—and still be valid.

I ask my questions through the lens of the Cherokee culture, but I think the exploration is something we can all relate to on some level. Because I think we're all connected. That's part of the magic.

In July I tweeted: "When you've been working on a project for 3 years, are preparing to release the 4th version, and THAT's when your brain is like, 'Oh, THIS is what the game was about the entire time.' Thanks editor brain, glad you finally showed up to the party."

Last summer I was writing an intro to the Mission chapter of the book, and as I described what missions you would be called to do, and why the powers-that-be relied on the desperate, my brain was like, "Oh hey, this feels familiar."

Crossing Worlds is about several things, but the advancement system? The entire concept of doing missions for "more important people?" Starting with a mix of ideals and ambition, then becoming jaded and beat up in the process?

That part of the game is about the military system in the United States.

What do I mean by that? On this Martin Luther King Jr Day, I'm going to turn to his words. From his speech "Beyond Vietnam":

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"I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

"Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."


Full Speech transcript and audio. If you aren't familiar with this speech, it is well worth a listen (or read).

Crossing Worlds, in many way, is about the military. Join. Fulfill the agendas of those above you. Conform to the system to find success, or leave the system. Be pulled in by the promise of benefits (healthcare, stable salary, educational scholarships) but pay the price of extreme stress, potential trauma, and existing in an inherently dehumanizing system that refers to you as "bodies", i.e. "We need another body...you can't go on leave, we don't have enough bodies...ok y'all, we're going to be down some bodies over the next few weeks."

I will be the first to admit the benefits of military service can positively change a person's life. My own family has served for generations, and received financial and educational benefits, as well as developing skills of leadership, resilience, organization, discipline, and probably a dozen others from that service. But as MLK Jr highlights, you can't escape the violence inherent in the system, especially with such a disparity between who makes the laws and declares the wars, and who actually serves.

I can't play military-themed roleplaying games personally. Partly because seeing non-service members "roleplay" being in the military based on Hollywood stereotypes is grating, and partly because I don't like my hobbies to remind me too closely of real-life events.

But as it turns out, all along I was making a game about the military. Just in this version there are no ranks or uniforms, and instead we have super-sized magical pets and Inspector Gadget level cybernetics....and I'm okay with that.

I really want to get Crossing Worlds out. I have handwritten notes for everything I need to write.

I also am really sick of writing. Whenever I try to translate the notes to fully formed sentences, my brain switches into neutral and refuses to budge.

I decided to fall back on my very first writing strategy: using art to push forward. The first full story I ever finished writing (back sometime in like 3rd/4th grade, probably 20 pages total) relied on a very simple technique. I found a picture I liked in the Word Processor, pasted it into the doc, then wrote more of the story inspired by that image. It started with a unicorn, went to a pony, and finished with a jungle (with a fire, cart, cat, and parrot in between).

​Turns out that strategy still somewhat works for me.

Simple as it may seem, creating that image helped me write a little more in the new chapter on magic.