Beyond the Dark Continent

When I sat down to design the Southern Realms — Akilan, in-world — I knew exactly what I was up against, because I’d seen it done badly more times than I could count. A vague, homogenized “tribal” continent standing in for an entire landmass. “Primitive” used as a synonym for spiritually pure. Colonizers who are either absent from the story entirely or, worse, quietly the good guys. I didn’t want to avoid that by just not writing the region at all, and I didn’t think good intentions alone would keep me out of the same ruts. So before I wrote a single region, I wrote down the actual rules I was going to hold myself to, the same way I’d write down a rule for how Position works.

No monolithic Africa

The first rule was the simplest to state and the hardest to actually do: there is no single “Africa” in this setting, because there isn’t one in reality either. Oshiira’s grain-ledger confederacy owes far more to the medieval empires of the Sahel than to any generic tribal aesthetic. Ngomebe’s walking cities — entire districts dismantled and relocated stone by numbered stone — are a feat of engineering, not a “primitive” structure doing something inexplicable. Taharka’s terraced highland fortresses echo Ethiopia’s rock-hewn churches and mountain kingdoms. Sekogo’s river-and-lagoon council draws on the forest kingdoms of West Africa. Each of these has its own economy, its own religion, its own internal politics and rivals — because treating an entire continent’s worth of distinct cultures as one interchangeable backdrop was never something I was willing to do, whatever genre I was writing in.

Agency, not exoticism

The second rule was about what these cultures are allowed to do in the story, not just how they’re described. The peoples of Akilan trade, raid, negotiate, and resist — they’re not there to be discovered, admired, or rescued. Oshiira’s own auditors keep foreign merchants honest. Taharka’s mountain passes have never been conquered by anyone. When a foreign naval power starts encroaching on the Brass Coast, the people who actually live there fight back, on their own terms, using their own institutions. None of that is a subplot happening around the “real” story. It is the story.

No noble savages

The third rule cuts against a trope that often gets mistaken for respect: the “one with nature,” mystically simple culture that exists mainly to make the sophisticated outsider feel something. Nothing in Akilan is written that way. A river-and-lagoon culture that looks pastoral from a distance turns out to be governed by actual legal scholars maintaining an unwritten but rigorously tended body of law. A short, forest-dwelling people are never framed through a real-world slur repurposed as fantasy flavor — they’re a distinct culture with their own coffee rites and their own trade relationships with distant mountain lords, negotiated as equals. If a culture in this setting looks simple on the surface, that surface is meant to be wrong, the same way it would be wrong about any real place.

Naming it honestly

I also didn’t call the region “the Dark Continent,” obviously, or lean on that imagery anywhere in the text — the in-world name, Akilan, comes from an actual empire that existed in this world’s own history, not from an outsider’s projection onto unmapped territory. And when a character in the fiction does voice that kind of bias — calls somewhere “savage” or “unmapped” — the text doesn’t let it stand as simply true. Every region has a biased in-world narrator threading through its chapters, and the GM guidance says outright: if a player repeats a harmful trope, the right question isn’t to shut it down awkwardly, it’s to ask whether that’s their character’s bias talking or the actual truth of the world. Usually, in Akilan, it’s the former, and the fiction is written to make that clear.

Colonialism plays as what it is

The last rule was about how I handle the moments when an outside power does show up. A foreign admiralty’s presence on part of this coastline is written as exploitative, full stop, not as a complicated-but-ultimately-beneficial arrangement. A historical slave trade in one of these regions is unequivocally evil in the text, with no hedging. When one faction commits something close to a war crime elsewhere in the setting, the game doesn’t offer players a clean way to sign up for it without consequences. I didn’t want a world where oppression happens but nobody in the text is willing to call it that.

Why this is the same design instinct as everything else

I don’t think of this as a separate, bolted-on sensitivity pass. It’s the same instinct that shaped the rest of the game: trust the fiction to do real work instead of leaning on a shortcut.

It’s also the same mechanism. A region in this system isn’t described by a block of special rules — it’s described in the same four objects everything else is: what a roll is against here, what the clocks are counting, what the four outcomes look like when they land, and who is owed what. Oshiira’s grain covenant and ledger bureaucracy aren’t a bespoke subsystem; they’re clocks and Strings, the same ones a heist uses. Ashaan’s state terror isn’t a special rule; it’s what a Story Beat buys in that region. That matters for representation more than it sounds like it should, because the moment a culture needs its own mechanics to be legible, you have marked it as the exception and everything else as the default. Writing every region in the same vocabulary is the structural version of refusing to exoticise.

The disagreement test applies here too, and it’s the sharpest one I have: if I can describe a region without describing an argument its own people are having, I haven’t finished. A monolith is exactly a place with no internal disagreement — that’s the definition, not a symptom. The same care that went into making sure the AI GM never quietly takes dice away from a player went into making sure Akilan never quietly hands a player a stereotype instead of a culture. Good rules and good representation both come from writing down what you actually believe before you need it, instead of trusting yourself to improvise it correctly in the moment.

I’m holding the not-yet-released Dhahara and Eastern Realms material to the same standard — courts inspired by Mughal and Rajput India, a bureaucracy inspired by imperial China, a Sengoku-era archipelago, a mandala-kingdom inspired by Angkor — each one specific, each one populated by people with real institutions and real agency, none of them a blended stand-in for “the East.” Those books haven’t shipped, and I’d rather take the extra time to get them right than rush something out that doesn’t clear the bar Akilan already had to clear.

Akilan isn’t a dark continent. It’s a bright, complicated, fully human place, the same as everywhere else on this map — and getting to write it that way took actual rules, written down in advance, not just good intentions in the moment.