THERE'S NO LIFE LIKE LOWLIFE

I’ve made it a life rule to reign in the power-bloat in what I produce ever since having the realization that everything is not an epic battle between Good & Evil for the existence of the Universe. To understand this is to accept one’s place in reality as small & insignificant.

All you need to do is think about the size of the Earth in Comparison to the immensity of our Sun (a diameter approximately 109 times greater) & then think of how distant we find the nearest star to our Sun (Proxima Centauri is 4.24 to 4.25 light-years away. That’s 5.88 trillion miles).

That’s all to say, anything going on with us in the Human world is low. Yes, we view what happens with us as the MOST important, & it is but that’s because we perceive everything from ourselves outwards not from anything else.

Because of this insistence on perspective, I am beyond sold on the core idea of LowLife. That being low fantasy, smaller stories which involve more intensely personal dramas that only hint at the intercomplexity of all the different people, creatures & the various groups they are part of, mostly vying for survival, sometimes domination.

People desperately try to establish some way to control this uncontrollable mess. Whether it is the attempts at laws or even the rules of a family or the unspoken social expectations of a city - they all fail in the basic understanding of the nearly infinite complexity contained in the individual.

They fail to understand that the control must be granted from & come from the individual. In this they are not being controlled, the law, the rules come from within.

The scope of LowLife is massive, because I engage in world-building every day & this particular well has an incredibly strong gush & seems to have no end. However, it is the disparity in scale that I think is most important.

The largess of Bödengärd contrasted with just being one section of one continent on one planet in one solar system emphasizes the scale & the potential. It is a beautiful, almost endlessly expanding web of meaning.

This perspective on the smallness of our lives isn’t to reduce the importance of our actions. It is to emphasize what actually gives them value. To show that we don’t need to up the stakes to a level where our ordinary actions are dwarfed, even the largest actions we can comprehend are irrelevant in the cosmic scale.

Because of this understanding, it actually increases the meaning of our individual actions & stories. But this is only attained through a conscious process of transformation.

I remember when I first started to understand the beginning of this paradox, the vastness of space gave me a stomach ache, the potential of the infinite produced a gnawing feeling of irrelevance. In the face of all this endlessness I didn’t matter, how could I? I felt this unease because I was stuck on the concept of relative value.

I hadn’t yet understood that the key to life was in creating your own relevance. This grows if you are able to share this relevance with others. That is ultimately what my art, what this game is about.

We first see that given relative value we are miniscule, therefore our worth must come from an internal place. A statement of, “This Is Important” completely changes the rules.

The Kickstarter for LowLife, a DUNGEON DEGENERATES role playing game is live.

LowLife, a DUNGEON DEGENERATES Roleplaying Game lets you adventure in the grit & grime of the gutter. Actions have consequences, magic is rare & dangerous, combat is messy & lethal, allegiance is survival.

You are dropped into the weird, fantastical world of Bödengärd. The unclean continent is constantly saying, “No!”, but you say, “Yeah!” You engage in an exceptional, exhilarating episode that exponentially expands as you explore.

You beg, borrow, steal & fight your way through an untamed world. Stories are created that smolder with strange & seedy detail & drum with decay & daring brought on by roleplaying in a well-worn world.

You take on unwholesome habitations, the somewhat civilized lands that surround them, wretched wilderness & devious dungeons. Bödengärd is a haunted, gritty place where the land is archaic, contested & quarters to a cacophonous crucible of cultures & where time buries its mistakes.

Over half of the population is imprisoned & even more than that have served time. You play one of those rare ex-convicts who have decided to throw away any hope of a normal life & taken on adventuring. Choosing to be an adventurer over the mundane, predictable day to day is characterized by great unknowns & risks. However, the pay-offs on this dangerous road are great.

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