There's this impulse I have and it comes and goes whenever I fumble about trying to fit in another ttrpg into my life. It's that game I tell myself and others I want to play where we set it in some kind of technological visual language of the past. An SNES game, an abandoned MMO, the low fidelity lens crossed by crt scanlines. Blur the pixels, feel the warm glow on your face and so on. For me, the impulse is from the digital rpgs where I saw those rudimentary visuals and filled in the abstract with my imagination, plus wonder.
Pink mountains are my shorthand. I am reaching for the isekai and retro-wave imaginary of heroic fantasy and letting it seep in. These are fantastic wonderscapes of the natural world that offer a modicum of whimsy. How big can a fantasy city be? How big can a tree be? What does a city on a waterfall look like? These factors do not need explanation, the explanation is that the world is that way and all characters relate to the world accordingly. They aren't somewhere you really engage with on these terms, even if you ever go there. They are an imagined visual background in a conversational game.
But here is my struggle with Pink Mountains. It is that in a roleplaying game (here modestly restricted to a definition where we roleplay through circumstances), the most evocative things I bring to the table, the pinterest board visuals, are not what is best emphasized by the activity. The conversation of our game is not concerned with engaging with pictures of Pink Mountains. The Pink Mountains are therefore additive but not foundational to the activity. What I actually have to bring is what directly ties into the roleplaying: What is going on and who is doing it?
This is the hangup. It's that the aesthetic vignette is not enough for roleplaying games. I find a lot of the fun in roleplaying games are in their unique premises, which give me things to consider when I am preparing to run the game or topics and challenges to think about engaging with when I am playing. Because that's what we're really here to do right? Take some characters and run them through events and see how they come out the other side?
So my conclusion is, Pink Mountains are nice but cannot be treated as foundational to the roleplaying game inventory. I have to dig deeper into the moments that spark deep character drama, dream up the altars for those rituals, and only reach for the Pink Mountains once I have down where everyone stands at the beginning.
