Welcome to the eighth post in a series of Design Diaries for Rangers of a Broken World by the creator Leon Richardson:
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The Coral Coast, the Tracker, and Volcanic Sceafing, are my absolute babies. Tracker is my Problem Child, the class I had to work on and rework and rework again until it ended up where it is today. The Coral Coast is my humble offering to a world stifled by colonialism. Volcanic Sceafing is the Chaos God I named after the Good King Scyld Sceafing from Beowulf because I am a creature of pure self-indulgence.
The Coral Coast is my vision of a Pacific Rim that had been allowed to flower into the modern age without the interference of colonialism. As a white person, I’m in no position to tell these stories FOR anyone, since they’re not my stories (read Gubat Banwa, Islands of Sina Una, Coyote and Crow, and anything else you can find by people with direct lived experience), but what I can do is create a space for them to be told.
The reason the Coral Coast is on the cutting-edge of science is because I want this to be a world where Indigenous knowing and understanding grew naturally into modern science, as it always should have, instead of being suppressed and devalued. I want people to understand the continuity of the place as precious, and through that, maybe come to see the value in our own world’s Indigenous continuities. It’s not much, and it’s absolutely not going to take the place of own-voice stories, but it’s my offering.
The Tracker has gone through several iterations. From the beginning, they were the most “survivalist” of the Rangers, as they made their way through a place full of natural dangers. But this wasn’t interesting enough. It was never interesting enough! Plus, who wants to play an explorer in a pith helmet with a blunderbuss?
The final iteration of the Tracker is one I love a lot. Eventually, instead of being strong against the ever-changing world of the Coral Coast, they incorporated that spirit of change into themself. They could transform themselves and change to suit their situation. In the end, it’s not about imposing your will on nature, but about adapting to it, living in harmony with it, and coming to understand it. The new Tracker was part of the jungle, and felt less like an outsider and more like a creature.
And philosophically, Sceafing represents something very important to me. The reality of change, the chaos of the world, and the need to adapt. If you also love the beauty of the unpredictable world, then maybe the Tracker is the class for you!