Thousand Year Campfire: Impressions and Review

I really enjoyed this solo rpg. I think it works so well because it is so specific and so confined, both narratively and mechanically. You are conducting research on a tiny cave, digging through layers of soil to discover what lays beneath. You draw on a worksheet as you move through the layers, and at certain depths there are flowcharts to go through that give you a prompt. An artefact is found; a fire pit was dug, a creature died, an excavation was made, an amulet buried. Then you move on to the next layer. 

The first thing that caught me were the discoveries made while navigating the flowcharts. First, they are determined by depth. As you build up layers of soil you roll a d6 for the depth of a specific layer. The depth then determines which flowchart you get. Deeper ones are mostly animals, then as indigenous people move in you get some experiences from them. Finally, white colonizers arrive near the top. The flowcharts read like poetry, and at crossroads you roll a d6 to determine which path to follow, sometimes looping multiple times until you reach an endpoint. 

My favorite experience with this was at a depth about halfway, a group of indigenous people moved in and made pottery. In the flowchart I got stuck in a loop, falling asleep by the fire, dreaming, and waking up to attempt more pottery. I was a little frustrated at first, but as the loops repeated, I realized each pass could be a day or a year or a generation. Time passed. Eventually, the cycle ended. The people moved on, leaving potsherds and paintings of their dreams. 

Experiences like this were in nearly every layer. One time it was a bat colony, another time a dying deer. And then white people arrived. 

In this game (and in real life) white people love to leave trash behind, burn things irresponsibly, and worst of all, dig. Luckily we're lazy, if there's no artifacts found we give up and move on. But if we find one artifact, the digging does not stop until the entire cave is strip mined. 

Digging is itself an arduous process. It requires you to pick a random column and dig down layer by layer. You must pile up the dirt somewhere, and if any artifacts are found you have to do it again in a new spot. Out of the narrative it's annoying to do, and it ruins your drawing with all of the erasing you have to do. Inside the narrative, any artifacts discovered are removed from the cave permanently, and one of the pits is used for trash. The flowcharts these digs arrive from are just greed and ignorance. 

And then you realize that this is exactly what you are doing while playing the game. You only get to create these little stories because you are digging up each layer, albeit with a bit more methodology, and a scientific purpose. You're playing as an archaeologist after all. You're systematically demolishing the cave, to record it on your little worksheet. 

Thousand Year Old Campfire excellently captures the way whiteness legitimizes and justifies itself, through the gameplay actions of creation and destruction. The book ends with two in-universe texts: an “In Memoriam” for the now dead Professor Hutchings, (the man you were roleplaying as, and also the actual author of this game) and a letter to the editor from one of his former students. 

Professor Hutchings fought Native American advocacy groups to get the legal right to dig this cave. In his last moments he was swept away in a flood while prospecting the cave. A fitting end. May his body find the rest that he in his work did not allow others. 

The second text is from a former student. We find out that Professor Hutchings actually published these flowcharts, and that he thought by creating them he could accurately capture the actions of the Indigenous people that had left their mark. He could not. His flowcharts produced frustration, and it is only through imagination that the beauty of life could begin to be captured. He desecrated the spaces of Native Americans and abused his students, while pushing forth a white, western, destructive form of archaeology.

Navigating the flowcharts, and the friction and frustration they create, lead to a realization that they are not enough. These simple diagrams cannot capture truth.