Hurricane Helene’s Impact on Tabletop

In the last two weeks, a pair of catastrophic storms have made landfall in the southeastern United States. Helene and Milton, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes respectively, have caused immense amounts of damage across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; both from their direct impact and the subsequent infrastructure destruction of these climate change-induced catastrophes. While Rascal is a publication about games, it is also a publication about people who love them—their lives, their passions, their hopes, their fears—and to go without acknowledging the effect of these storms would be a disservice to them, to you—our community of readers—and to anyone who believes there is a possibility for a better world. We must know what we are up against and how we can come together to keep each other safe.

“We were not prepared for what Helene brought. No one was,” said Andy Boyd, owner of Pandion Games in an email to Rascal. “We've lived in the Carolinas for 13 years now and have weathered our fair share of hurricanes making their way 350+ miles inland to the area, and this was completely different. The mountains have been resurfaced, rivers have moved, whole towns are destroyed. It's not normal.” Boyd’s hometown of Greenville, South Carolina was heavily hit, with downed trees and power lines making evacuation an impossibility within the first few days and leaving Boyd and millions of people stranded. “I was caught unprepared, and my camping equipment was stuck in a storage unit behind a digital keypad without power. I had no way to cook food or even boil water. And I only had an old power pack to charge our phones to keep in touch and up to date, which quickly drained. And we couldn't buy anything to fix this, because nowhere had power and no one could get to the stores anyway.”

After he’d managed to find cell service, Boyd made arrangements to seek refuge with friends in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Once we confirmed the interstate had been cleared of debris, we packed up and headed out. Getting out of town was like a rat in a maze, trying to find unblocked paths forward. We made it to our destination with 20 miles left in the tank because all the gas stations on the way up were either out of power, gas, or lines of cars were backed up down the exit ramps.” 

"We were not prepared for what Helene brought. No one was."

Nico Paoli is a game designer and convention GM based in Asheville, North Carolina, where some of the most infamous images of post-Helene flooding have originated. Like many others, Paoli is currently staying with loved ones in another state. “We have a six year old, so our priority was making sure she was able to stay safe. After that, because all of our adults are okay, we started checking in on our people—for me and my metamour that meant local nerd communities like our Pathfinder Society, the SCA, and HEMA. We have been fortunate that we’ve been able to reach almost everybody. Some of the structures no longer exist, but as far as we’ve been able to determine all of our immediate people are okay. So that’s been some small peace in all of this.” 

Upon leaving, Paoli discovered that downed trees had made their driveway impassable. “Without the kindness of our neighbors letting us use their property to cut through, we wouldn’t have been able to effectively leave.” Paoli said he doesn’t think he’s “actually processed quite everything, and won’t for a while. I’m sort of still in ‘waiting for news on people and when we will have reliable water and power and food sources’ mode despite being physically okay at my in-law’s house. My partner and I both started crying because they had a local alcoholic ginger beer brand in stock that got wiped out by the flood—their whole building was fully underwater. Stuff like that isn’t fully sinking in and coming in bits and spurts, and I know that’ll be for a while.”

In Marshall, North Carolina, the storm left Main Street Comics and Games nearly unrecognizable. “The flood water, which crested at over 22 feet, destroyed all the contents of the shop, leaving behind a wake of mud, toxic muck from factories up the river, loss of livelihood, and a dream shattered,” reads the store’s GoFundMe page. The only comic and games shop in Madison County is raising $25,000 to cover rebuilding costs.

While the devastation from the first hurricane was still being counted—with at least 230 people dead, thousands missing, and millions displaced or without basic services; marking this as the deadliest hurricane since Katrina in 2005—millions more faced difficulty adhering to mandatory evacuation orders, as the cleanup efforts from Helene began. According to the Associated Press, nearly 3 million people have lost power after a frankly staggering 150 tornadoes spawned from Milton’s landfall the night of October 9. Without assistance from government agencies, many were unable to leave their homes at all, either due to disability or inability to afford transportation, shelter, and costs for other essential needs.

“Everyone is hurting,” said Caroline Hardin, known online as Birdie Bristlecone, owner of Lupine Honey clothing brand. “Our geography is irreversibly changed. Roads are completely destroyed in areas that have one way in or out, and rural areas are still struggling to have contact with the outside world.” Hardin lived near the Swannanoa river and the River Arts District, where some of the Asheville’s worst flooding happened. After evacuating, they managed to connect with their loved ones but were told by city officials that “it will optimistically take 4 weeks to repair the water system and restore service.” 

Hardin described the dangers their family faced as “of the urban survival variety, where the flooding damage, scarcity of resources, density of population, and lack of services made it unsafe to stay in our home.” While Hardin doesn’t keep any of Lupine Honey’s stock in their home, they lost “a good amount of my [personal] clothing in some flooding, and my husband’s recording studio was damaged by the water as well. Fortunately our flood damage was directly from the rain rather than rising floodwaters so we aren’t dealing with extra contamination concerns.” They stated that people in more remote areas, and those who were unable to evacuate, must contend with “different and more immediately life-threatening dangers like exposure, lack of access to food and water, and being trapped in their homes or on their roads.”

Vyn Vox, an actual play performer and TTRPG content creator, told Rascal via Twitter that their hometown in southern Georgia is “facing one of the largest outages in local history. Power is being restored neighborhood by neighborhood, but we’ve been given estimates from a few days to weeks.” While their home was one of the few in their neighborhood left largely undamaged by the storm, their “sister’s chicken coop (that she built herself) is practically nonexistent. The flock is totally fine, but I don’t know how soon we’re gonna be able to repair/rebuild.” Vox and their family are currently “surviving with a generator” in their home, which maintains a base level of power for essential needs. 

The nearby city of Atlanta, Georgia is one of the most heavily populated cities impacted by the storm, which only worsened when a chemical fire at BioLab—a chemical factory 30 miles east of the city—emitted significant amounts of toxic chlorine gas into the air. Caleb Zane Huett, designer of Triangle Agency, lives in Athens, 50 miles from the incident and was warned by his local government to limit his time outside.

“My wonderful neighbor came by after the hurricane and helped deal with the large branches blocking my way out,” said April Raygun, an Atlanta resident and AP performer. “But then we had chlorine gas in the air from a chemical plant fire, so the days after were hard to do a lot outside.” They say that “things are going a lot better in Atlanta now, but I am at the point where I have to work a lot of extra hours or odd jobs to try to afford to deal with the rest of the tree damages (which also means I can not do a lot of TTRPG stuff right now, and future stuff is kind of in the air until things get sorted).” 

While many of the individuals who spoke to Rascal had their lives disrupted and permanently changed in Helene’s wake, nearly all of them had to continue working in some capacity to sustain themselves, their families, and their businesses. Because Hardin’s Lupine Honey stock is held elsewhere they were “able to get the orders filled and continue operations once I had a little bit of access [to cell service].” Similarly, Vox and Raygun have put a hold on performing in actual plays as their energy is instead directed towards recovery efforts and survival.

"Our geography is irreversibly changed. Roads are completely destroyed in areas that have one way in or out, and rural areas are still struggling to have contact with the outside world."

“Hurricane Helene put a pause on our work at Pandion Games as we sort through all of this,” said Boyd. “I've contacted Indie Press Revolution to fulfill orders on our behalf, and they graciously agreed and began getting games out to people the next day. I've asked our printers to hold shipments because I can't take delivery (and because our books shouldn't be clogging up deliveries of essential goods). We launched a new game in open beta last week and have a backlog of player feedback, and an additional review from our editor that I'm just now beginning to look at again. But all these are small, insignificant issues compared to the vast destruction that's happened.”

While government relief efforts are indeed underway, local mutual aid remained the most significant and immediately useful resources available to the people Rascal spoke with. “My hometown has really banded together to help another,” said Vox. “Our small businesses, churches, banks, and local figures have been offering food/ice, renting out gas canisters for free, and holding charging/laundry spaces. On Facebook, those with power are even opening their homes for showers and wifi.”

“Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate all the work that’s being put in by the government,” said Paoli. “But that infrastructure just isn’t prepared for a storm like this to hit so many places.” Paoli, his partner, and his metamour have been alternating taking turns caring for their daughter, all while “coordinating information and seeing if we can get gas and supplies up to our networks and distributed to people who need it. I know soon I’ll need to balance more with my day job, which is technically a mandatory position at a university in administration.” 

The response by federal agencies has become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, in combination due to active misinformation efforts by Republican officials and a historic distrust of governmental bodies from local populations. Appalachia, a region of the country that has for decades been subjected to exploitation and neglect at the hands of both the government and private corporations, has a rich history of community care. Its people are too often only acknowledged when subjected to the consequences of regressive legislation at the hands of gerrymandered electoral politics. There are certainly issues with the US’s allocation of resources—such as prioritizing spending on policing, deporting asylum seekers and climate refugees, and enabling a genocide that also emits immense amounts of carbon into the atmosphere—and the federal government's overall lack of action regarding the impacts of climate crisis. However, using people’s suffering as pawns in a political chess match is far less important than ensuring the actual work is done, both in serving the needs of the people affected right now and building up the infrastructure to address the existential issues of tomorrow.

“Climate change has continued to have an impact on the whole area with higher temperatures and humidity, milder winters, and stronger storms (not just the hurricane!) that cause more damage and stress to our forests, mountains, rivers, and towns,” said Boyd. “We're either getting less rain than we should, or too much all at once. Temperatures are getting hotter faster and it's staying hotter longer into the winter. This is over the course of decades, not years or months, so it's difficult to notice. We normalize it, but it's not normal. Hurricane Helene is not normal. Western North Carolina turned into helicopter access only for days. Entire highways and interstates have been destroyed. People are hiking out of the mountains with what they can carry because there is no other way out. Upstate South Carolina and the Appalachians are basically rebuilding their electrical infrastructure from scratch over the course of a week.” 

The privilege of being able to evacuate while others are forced to stay has taken its own toll, a survivor's guilt that often goes unaddressed during these types of catastrophes. “I'm anxious because I wanted to stay and help, but if I could get my family safe and not take food and supplies from a charity or the amazing local restaurants cooking meals for people who didn't have anywhere to go, that is good too,” said Boyd. “We went down to Greenville yesterday for the day with a chainsaw, food, water, and cold drinks. We are stocking up on supplies again to donate when we head back this week.” In the wake of the storm, Boyd designed Helene of the Blue Ridge, a solo game meant to evoke the experience of surviving a climate catastrophe. The game is available for pay-what-you-want, with all proceeds going towards organizations aiding recovery efforts in Appalachia.

Helene of the Blue Ridge by Pandion Games

A Solo TTRPG Raising Awareness of Hurricane Helene’s Impact in Southern Appalachia

itch.ioarmyknight63

“Many charities need supplies as much as money,” Boyd said. “For monetary donations, there is a great and extensive list here of charities working in these areas here. Right now, food, supplies, and rescue are the top priorities. Many of our charities and mutual aid are focused on specific counties or cities, but I'd recommend looking at American Red Cross, Hearts with Hands, Manna Foodbank, BeLoved Asheville, Mercy Chefs.”

Similarly, the most significant push for Hardin to evacuate was not self-preservation, but community care. Hardin relied on the aid of their friends and family to allow the already strained resources of local mutual aid groups to focus on others unable to evacuate. “We’ll be staying away from town for a month minimum, which is intensely disruptive to our work and health. When we return we will be rebuilding our recording studio in a different room of our home. It is difficult to acknowledge the trauma we are facing while others have it so much worse, but we are trying to secure our own oxygen masks before turning back around to help our city survive and rebuild.” 

Amidst all of this, tabletop games have provided a mental escape for climate refugees of this life-altering catastrophe. When Hardin evacuated their home, they packed “everything we could fit into the car, my laptop, and a bag of dice for my home games. I hope to find some normalcy as we spend a month in a donated rental property.” 

In Paoli’s experience, games are among “the small things that keep us going.” Due to physical disabilities, Paoli is unable to do the type of manual labor many relief efforts necessitate. “Physically, I can’t do as much as I’d like. My feet keep me from long stretches of work that requires standing, like chainsawing, and I’m not strong. But morale? Music or games or helping keep people vaguely entertained is something I can do.” Among the list of games Paoli brought to keep despair at bay are Fake Chess, The Electric State, Blades in the Dark, Kids on Bikes 2e, and The Quiet Year—notably, a game about a community rebuilding itself after a catastrophic event.

More than anything else, this should act as a reminder that even in the worst of times, the human need for play is not a luxury, but a necessity. When the worst is no longer a distant hypothetical, but an immediate reality lapping against your doorstep, games remind us that other things are possible when people come together to build community within suffering. Tabletop games don’t require electricity, but they do require hope. In return they offer the promise that no matter how bad things get, we will be here for each other, telling stories and pushing back the encroaching darkness.