Journey to Earthseed is a moving homage to the Parables duology

Early Saturday afternoon, I braved Los Angeles traffic to head downtown to the Central Library to meet my Fate. Fate Accelerated, at least. In the Octavia Lab, a makerspace in the library, surrounded by 3D printers and recording booths, three tables were set up with custom maps, a Game Master at each table. The Lab had commissioned Tai Gomez to create a tabletop roleplaying game for a celebration of Octavia E. Butler in July. Gomez eventually brought on three collaborators from the LA area: Jay Africa, a game designer and professional Dungeon Master, Karen A. Parker, an author and book coach, and Kenneth “Kenny” Shima, a professor at UCLA who focuses on literature and Japanese Studies. Together, they wrote a tabletop roleplaying game based on Octavia Butler’s Parable duology—Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. I was lucky enough to get a seat for the first public outing of Journey to Earthseed. 

The Parable duology is a seminal piece of work in a series of genres that Butler was a master of: apocalyptic fiction, climate fiction, science fiction, Afrofuturism. The books follow Lauren Olamina’s life as she journeys through a desolate, fire-ravaged Southern California landscape, hoping to reach a homestead in Humboldt County. Political and social unrest, slavery, and financial collapse have created an apocalypse of a former paradise.

The game was three hours at three tables; each table was set up for an individual scenario, each led by a different GM. The players had an hour to get as far as we could before the time would shift and we would move on to another act in the story. I was sat at the first table with two other players (Nia and James) and our GM, Karen, took us through the first part of the Parable of the Sower; a time of struggle and underlying innocence in Robledo. We were all characters from the books; James took on the role of Lauren Olamina (the main character of the book), Nia was Tracy Dunn, and I was Lauren’s little brother, Keith. With two of the group being motherly, Keith’s desire to go shooting was overruled. But even as Lauren and Tracy tended to the garden, I didn’t let this get in the way of my training—that scarecrow was catching these 12-year-old hands.