Marine Sciences Role Playing Curriculum
Foundry10 is a Seattle based education research organization that has a wide variety of experiments into alternative learning models. In fall of 2021, I had a the honor and pleasure of being a part of their pilot classroom test of their table top role playing game based marine sciences curriculum, Endless Blue. The game’s plot focuses on the recovery of Amelia Earhart’s long lost aircraft, allowing the players to take on one of a variety of roles to explore the deep sea, rescue wildlife, and preserve the marine archeological site. The book Foundry10 has available on their website for Endless Blue contains a number of plot hooks for catching players interest. I selected the three most location dependent and used those as a module-style framework for introducing the more sub-plot appropriate hooks. I added a cantankerous captain to give the players someone to unify against, as well as a love triangle, and an anime smuggling ring to pull in specific players’ interest. Using Endless. Blue in the classroom was easy. Where the game or the story wasn’t a player’s cup of tea, the science would usually pull them in. The result was a weeklong adventure that brought to bear social media management, oceanography, and lab skills both simulated and actual.
This was the second project I’d gotten to work on for Foundry10, and was gloriously close to my heart. Using simulated experiences as framework for generating student engagement, and converting that engagement into learning, is at the heart of our Dungeon School program. This was my first chance to apply my decade of experience using role playing games in the classroom using someone else’s curriculum. My usual focus on writing and art was replaced by a tour through the regular classroom teacher’s notes for the class and my dusty memories of long ago marine science and south pacific anthropology classes. As an added bonus, the game mechanics themselves are simple, innovative, and player progress focused, making it easy to adapt to classroom management and curriculum delivery.
There’s a lot to love about what Foundry10 is doing with this game, but I have a special place in my heart for opening our imaginary foray into the south pacific with a land acknowledgement. Placing this right at the front of the book showed me that Foundry10 has appreciation and respect for the peoples who will inevitably end up being represented to some degree in the future play throughs of this game. My understanding is that they have and will continue to include indigenous peoples of Polynesia in the review of the content and intentions of this game.
The character creation process is remarkably straight forward, with the skills and attributes both combining in clear and intuitive ways within the fields of expertise, but also providing interesting secondary skill options to round out a character or fill skill gaps in the party. Everything else fell to the captain I added, who provided support when needed to keep things moving. Equipment, which necessarily plays a tremendous role in the game, clicks into the mechanic as smoothly as skills.
The fields of expertise themselves do a pretty good job or capturing most of what Foundry10 has listed amongst the possible marine science careers on their website. They also do an excellent job of modeling the many roles and skills it takes to make marine science expeditions happen. A power couple Photographer and Science Communicator proved as instrumental to our success as the Ocean Engineer’s piloting and Oceanographer’s lab work. I wouldn’t mind seeing ‘Mermaiding’ add to the list of available skills, though I’m not sure what exactly it might bring in gameplay.
The mechanic has a significant de-emphasis of physical skills and abilities, which speaks to its focus as an academic simulator. The lack of mechanical, ‘physical’ conflict makes it difficult to leverage a more traditional combat focused model of role playing games, but I think this is a huge advantage to the intention of the game. Without fighting as a mechanic for resolving problems the players are forced to try to analyze their difficulties, and communicate their needs and interests. Even then, we were still able to include some action sequences – leveraging the Submersible Piloting skill when a player wanted to ram a falling wing segment to prevent it from falling on their archeological site, and its cephalopod inhabitants.
The game really came to life when I incorporated the daily topics and overall curriculum structure from the classroom teacher. It was a revelation to be able to twist the narrative around what the students had learned that morning, or fit the activities that afternoon. We were able to perform PH tests, examine rock and mollusk samples from comparable sites to those in our narrative, and identify actual shark specimens in class to determine if they would pose a threat to our imaginary octopus friends. There was even a real time zoom visit with Foundry10’s marine science submersible team aboard the Nautilus, allowing the students to imagine even more vividly the experiences their characters were having.
I always like to draw on white boards so that I can make it easy to understand exactly where the character’s are and what they’re seeing. In Dungeon School this clarity usually comes in the form of models and miniatures, but I didn’t have time to assemble and destroy a model Lockheed Elektra (though I would have loved to) for this class. The modular nature of the narrative structure and the player led nature of the exploration made it easier to draw on the fly anyway.
I picked the Palmyra atoll as the location of the crash site because there was a wildlife refuge there, allowing us to tie in a sub-plot of rescuing an injured reef shark. The most exciting part of this was that it sparked a wave of player led research into the legal status of the site due it being, not only a potential national historical landmark, but also to determine what the consequences of disturbing the family of octopi they found living in the wreckage. When pirates tried to steal a part of the wreck while the players were distracted by the reef shark rescue, their research reached a fevered pitch as they worked to determine which local, federal, and international agencies could be brought to bear (or at least named to threaten the pirates).
The height of the narrative to real science experience for me came on the final day when gentle study of live samples of the octopi captured in the airplane wreckage revealed that they had an extraordinarily high density of chromatophores. We then moved to the classroom where dissection of squid specimens allowed us to study real chromatophores in action. There was even a squid paper model building activity for students who chose not to participate in dissection.
It was a privilege to teach and learn with these students as we encountered this new kind of education together. A truly adaptive, hybridized model of simulated experiences that brings remote reality in the field into contact with imaginary recreation of those experiences, and real classroom experiments performed on samples taken from the places we were pretending to visit. This is a new kind of educational gaming, leveraging play to inspire students to learn by doing.