the default dungeon is colonial

when progression is built on taking

there is something so colonial when it comes to a lot of ttrpg mechanic structures. take a look at dungeons & dragons, for example, the most ttrpg “ttrpg” that we can set as the default. and i don’t mean colonial in the “your table is evil” way. i mean colonial in the quiet, structural way. there’s no villain speech that comes with it, because it lives in the loop.

you start from somewhere safe. a town, a tavern, a guild, a settlement that reads as “civilization.” then you go outward into somewhere framed as unknown. wilderness. ruins. a dungeon. a place that is treated like it exists for discovery. for encounter. for danger. and if you survive, you come back with proof that you were there: xp, gold, magic items, levels, leverage. the game doesn’t have to say “conquest” out loud. it just has to reward you for moving through the world like an expedition.

and it’s not just d&d. old-school essentials, for instance, makes the structure even clearer because advancement can be directly tied to treasure recovered. not treasure returned. not treasure redistributed. not treasure that comes with responsibilities and claimants.

recovered. converted. turned into progress.

when a system turns extraction into growth, it teaches a relationship to place that feels familiar in a very specific way: enter, take, leave, get stronger.

this is why i don’t think the main issue is “bad stories.” because you can write a compassionate campaign in any setting. you can roleplay kindness. you can avoid stereotypes. but the mechanics are still there doing their own kind of storytelling underneath you. combat tends to be the most supported resolution engine. loot tends to be treated as neutral reward. progression tends to be attached to defeating obstacles and coming home richer. so even if the narrative wants to be gentle, the incentives keep pulling the party back into the same shape: the world as a resource site, and the people in it as obstacles, content, or set dressing.

so when someone says “it’s just fantasy,” i always want to ask: what does the game pay you for. what does it make optimal. what does it make easy. because that’s where the default lives. and the default, more often than we admit, is built like a colonial pipeline.

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the thing about mechanics is that they are not just rules. they are a philosophy with numbers attached. they are what the game believes is worth measuring. and what the game measures is what the table repeats.

that’s why i keep coming back to incentives. because story can be anything. story is flexible. story is what we tell ourselves we are doing. but incentives are the part of the system that keeps quietly steering the car, even when nobody is touching the wheel.

most mainstream fantasy ttrpgs are incredibly generous with support for one kind of problem-solving: violence. there are pages on how to hit, how to avoid getting hit, how to optimize the hit, how to take turns hitting, how to survive being hit, how to turn hitting into new abilities. initiative order. action economy. range. cover. conditions. resistances. tactical movement. the whole machine is built to make violence legible, repeatable, and rewarding.

and i’m not saying combat should not exist. combat can be cathartic. it can be dramatic. it can be beautiful in the way choreography is beautiful. i’m saying: look at the ratio. look at what gets a full system and what gets a paragraph. look at what gets precision and what gets vibes.

because if combat is the most detailed engine, then combat becomes the most reliable engine. and if something is the most reliable way to move the game forward, it becomes the default, even when you swear you are playing a “roleplay-heavy campaign.” the rules are not forcing you to fight, but they are constantly making fighting the cleanest option. and clean options are powerful. clean options become habits.

then there’s progression.

in a lot of tables, xp is still discussed like a receipt. what did we do that “counts.” what did we defeat. what did we clear. what did we complete. sometimes it’s literally counted through enemies, sometimes through “encounters,” sometimes through milestones that are still structured like encounters, but dressed up in different words. and the effect is the same: the world becomes a series of gates, and you grow by pushing through them.

which sounds fine until you ask what those gates usually are.

in default fantasy, opposition is often placed in the world in a very specific way. monsters in the wilderness. “hostile tribes” at the edge of the map. ruins full of traps and guardians. factions that are hostile by default until proven otherwise. the game doesn’t always say “these beings are disposable,” but it often designs them to function that way. as repeatable obstacles. as content you can clear. as a resource that turns into experience and gear.

and once you notice that, a lot of table behavior starts to make grim sense.

why does negotiation often feel risky, slow, or unrewarding. because it is mechanically under-supported compared to combat. why does empathy sometimes feel like “extra credit roleplay” instead of the main path. because the system rarely pays you for it at the same rate. why do players treat the unknown like a shopping aisle of adventures. because the game has trained us to see it as a pipeline: enter danger, convert danger into reward.

we have to be careful, for that is where the colonial shape is hiding.

colonial logic is not just “violence exists.” violence exists everywhere, in every history. the difference is how violence gets framed as acceptable, even necessary. max weber’s point about the modern state is that it claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, meaning force becomes “legitimate” when it can be narrated as order, law, and security, not just harm. and once violence can be baptized as legitimacy, extraction can be baptized as progress. david harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession, where taking land, labor, and commons is treated as development and growth, even though it is still dispossession. so the colonial move is not simply brutality. it’s the story that makes brutality sound like civilization, and the story that makes taking sound like advancement.

a lot of default mechanics accidentally practice this.

you go somewhere that the game frames as unclaimed. you take value out of it. you call it adventure. you come back stronger. the system hands you proof that it worked. the world becomes a means. you become the end.

even when your character is nice. even when your party jokes about being “the good guys.” even when your setting has diverse cultures and beautifully written lore. because the loop is still there, humming underneath.

this is also why “representation” alone does not fix it. you can paint the dungeon with different aesthetics. you can swap europe for anywhere else. you can rename the monsters. you can add cultural consultants. and the work matters, it does. but if the core economy of play is still violence and extraction, you just created a more beautiful machine for the same motion.

and i want to be clear: this is not an accusation aimed at players. it’s not even really an accusation aimed at designers. a lot of this is inheritance. a lot of it is genre gravity. we learned what an “adventure” looks like from stories that were built during eras where the world was literally being carved up, catalogued, raided, and reframed as a prize. those stories got translated into fantasy. fantasy got translated into rules. rules got translated into habit.

so when i say “it’s not the story, it’s the incentives,” i mean this:

• mechanics are culture that you can roll for.

• mechanics are ideology that you can optimize.

• mechanics are what the table practices, week after week, until it feels like common sense.

the answer to this is fairly simple: a system can decantrilize itself from the colonial mindset by making mechanics where relationship is not just flavor, but infrastructure. and to do this, they have to start making different behaviors easy, reliable, and satisfying. and with the hope that thi turns into a loop of restructuring, and eventulally, a fix for the colonial habit. if a game pays you for repair, you will start repairing. if the game pays you for consent, you will start asking. if the game pays you for responsibility, you will start carrying it.

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if the default dungeon feels colonial, it’s because the game keeps paying you for the same two motions: take, and justify. “reskin it better” or “write nicer lore.” is not a good enough answer, for now. yeah, we could take fantasy systems like d&d, pf2e, or any osr chassis and tear into the reward structure until it stops praising extraction. you can rewrite xp so it pays repair instead of kills. you can make treasure come with names attached. you can make violence a last resort because it actually costs something that matters.

but i’m not doing that here.

because i don’t want this section to be a list of patches. i want it to be a list of proof. there are games that already refuse the pipeline on purpose, without needing to be “fixed.” their mechanics are the point. they show you what happens when a game starts from community, resistance, care, reclamation, and actually builds the rules to match.

take the quiet year, for instance. it’s still “explration,” but it refuses the expedition fantasy. you’re not a party of outsiders pushing into someone else’s world. you’re a community after collapse, trying to make a life hold together long enough to matter.

it runs on a deck like a calendar, 52 weeks, one card at a time. every pull drops a prompt in your lap: a problem, a temptation, a delay, a tradeoff. you can’t grind your way to safety, because time is the pressure and it keeps moving whether you’re ready or not. so progress stops meaning accumulation and starts meaning capacity, what you managed to build, protect, repair, and carry together.

and it gives you the tools to do build, but as the actual game. you draw the map as you play. you chart what’s out there, what you’re afraid of, what you can’t reach yet, what you might need, what you’re willing to risk. and the map functions like a living record of choices. every week is a card, every card forces a decision, and every decision leaves a mark on the land. you can still push into unknown territory, but the question isn’t “what can we take from there.” it’s “what happens to us if we go,” and “what are we building that we’re actually trying to protect.”

then there’s spire, and it doesn’t pretend any of this is clean. it starts from the position that some people are treated as disposable, and it refuses to make that disposability feel like background texture. you’re not the “civilized” party pushing into the wild. you’re the ones the system was built to step on, organizing anyway.

and the mechanics keep you honest about what that means. stress isn’t just hp, it’s the stuff an occupying power actually grinds down first: your cover, your reputation, your money, your safety, your ability to stay hidden, your ability to keep going. every move you make costs something, and if you keep pushing, those costs harden into fallout, consequences that don’t politely reset when the session ends. people disappear. heat rises. networks get compromised. you don’t get to do violence and then call it heroic because you slept it off.

that’s how spire sidesteps the colonial mindset. it doesn’t reward you for treating the world like a resource site. it doesn’t frame expansion as destiny. it doesn’t hand you “progress” as loot. it makes progress look like this instead: you build pressure, you survive backlash, you protect each other, you keep going. and in a world that’s designed to erase you, the game’s whole logic is about proving you’re not disposable by refusing to disappear.

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i think we should celebrate the systems that already try to decentralize themselves from the default dungeon mindset, even when they’re not perfect. because even an imperfect attempt is still a signal.

and to be clear, i’m not saying you’re a bad person if you still love the default structure. i play it too. it’s fun. it’s clean. it’s satisfying. there’s a reason it became the default. there’s a reason the loop works on our brains. this isn’t a purity test, and i’m not playing the judge, jury, and executioner of the moral courtroom. if anything, this is just a different angle on something we’ve been treating as neutral for way too long.

ttrpgs are inherently political. not in the shallow “this game has a message” way, but in the deeper way: every system teaches you what matters. what counts. who gets agency. what kinds of harm get mechanized, and what kinds of care get left to vibes. what the game rewards becomes what the table practices, and what the table practices becomes the story it learns to call natural.

so if this piece did anything, i hope it just loosened the grip of the default. i hope it made it easier to notice the loop when it shows up, and easier to choose something else when you want to. keep playing what you love. keep rolling dice. keep raiding dungeons if that’s your joy. just know there are other shapes of play, other centers, other reward systems, other definitions of “progress,” and you’re allowed to prefer them.