The Myth Weavers

• Bioregion: The Allegheny watershed
• Favorite games: The Fifth World, of course!
• Age: 26

I played roleplaying games well before I learned about rewilding. That only came when I read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in 1998. That prompted me to study anthropology and computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. I wrote for the Anthropik Network, the website attached with our first rewilding effort, for several years, and made a bit of a name for myself in some rewilding circles. More recently, we’ve refocused on the bioregional nature of rewilding with Toby’s People, along the banks of the Clarion (Toby) River in northern Pennsylvania.

I had some surprise when I found roleplaying games, the pasttime of a former life, resurfacing in the context of rewilding. The more modern “story games” fulfill this role even more. I have a story game of my own in development, titled The Fifth World, that tries to create animist oral tradition the same way that Primetime Adventures creates television, or Shock creates science fiction. Besides just enjoying the game, I also have a compulsion to see games from an anthropological and rewilding point of view, but I’ve had trouble finding like-minded gamers in Pittsburgh willing to experiment along these lines, so it excites me and honors me to take my place among the Myth Weavers, and begin to really plumb the depths of how we can use these games as tools to authentically revive our oral tradition.

“What I Want to Weave”