Tossing out Aladdin: Egyptian writers breathe life into Cairo:Otherscape
Ra and Egyptomania are out. These writers want the gods of their rural grandparents.
Son of Oak always planned to explore the world beyond Tokyo. The studio best known for City of Mist has modernized the tabletop RPG’s engine to power :Otherscape’s world of synthesized myth and technology. Using Japan’s largest city (a mainstay of cyberpunk literature) as its hub, Metro:Otherscape and the Tokyo supplement situated yokai alongside wetwear to tell stories in a magical future dystopia.
The second setting book travels to Cairo and explores a markedly different metropolitan sprawl. But rather than simply export Gibson, Cadigan, and Dick’s genre scaffolding to the Middle East, Son of Oak’s founder Amit Moshe hired three freelancers with heavy ties to the city and tasked them with thinking several decades into an imagined future—one where cultural ties to family, heritage and national pride battle against both transhuman advancement and the Western World’s extractive politics.
Cairo: Otherscape will be funded through a Kickstarter campaign beginning March 18th. It will use the same tag-based system and themebooks that combine the game’s core stats: Noise, Self, and Mythos. While this is far from the end of the Son of Oak’s design tail, the studio is already dedicating time and resources to Legend in the Mist, which Moshe described as an intentional challenge to Dungeons & Dragon’s high fantasy hegemony.
Rascal spoke with Cairo-based game developers Albert Bassili and Omar Samir, along with Egyptian-American game developer Sarah Helen Slovak. They spoke about the challenges and joys of representing their city and culture in a tabletop RPG, what it means to imagine Cairo’s future while honoring its past and present, and why cyberpunk does not necessarily have to mean the West’s vision of corporate dystopia. Different worlds; different struggles.
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
