Invite your students to create their own world.

They will chart a vast land of majestic ranges, rugged coastlines and winding rivers. A place of icy tundra and dense rainforest, of sweeping savannah and parched deserts.

They will imagine a People who come to live in this land, creating a community and building a home. They will shape the way their People live, what they believe, and the stories they tell.

They will connect with other nearby communities, perhaps choosing to work together or trade resources.

They will design a symbol that represents their People; their history, their identity, and their hopes for the future.

And then, the Explorers and Settlers will arrive…

Terra Fabula is a classroom game designed to give primary school students a powerful and immersive experience of the impact of first contact and colonisation, through the eyes of Indigenous communities. Students work through guided map making, drawing and writing activities to create a land which they then populate with a pre-industrial community. They imagine a culture for this community, and connect with other neighbouring communities. Without warning, the game changes tone as colonising explorers and settlers arrive, often with dramatic impact to the lives of the communities the students have built.

Around the world, many school curricula now include content on Indigenous people and European settlement. Terra Fabula is not intended to be a substitute for this content, or a way of delivering this content. The game’s setting is intentionally abstract, and no explicit connection to real-world events is made until after the game concludes. Rather, playing Terra Fabula before a unit on Indigenous history and colonisation can foster an understanding and empathy that students can then bring to their exploration of actual historical events in their local context.

Terra Fabula is generally run over four sessions of about ninety minutes each. To play, each student requires a piece of A3 paper for a map, and four printed booklets that take them through each chapter of the story. You will also need some dice and basic art supplies.

All the resources required to play Terra Fabula are available to download free from itch.io. This includes a Teacher’s Guide that walks through planning and preparation for running Terra Fabula, as well as giving you tips on running the sessions every step of the way. There are also PowerPoint presentations for you to work through as you facilitate each of the sessions.

In Landscape, the first chapter of the game, students create a landscape of an imagined world. Scaffolded with helpful drawing tips, they fill their map with coastline, mountains, rivers, and vegatation.

Students imagine a small community of people, traveling to find a home. They invent a backstory to explain where they have come from, and how what make them decide to make a home in the land. They describe the animals and plants that they encounter, and how they survive.

In Community, students give names to natural features of the land which have become important o their people. They construct a headpiece featuring a symbol that represents their people, and describe one of their community celebrations.

In the third chapter Connection, students consider what resources are plentiful and scarce for their people. They connect their map with one of their classmates, and decide how the communities might trade or collaborate.

Then, without warning, technologically advanced explorers arrive from a distant land. They begin to map the land, renaming landmarks and building roads. Some of the community may die as a result of skirmishes or disease, depending on dice rolls.

In Conflict, settlers follow the explorers. Depending on dice rolls, the settlers may decide to clear the land and raise cattle or farm crops, to mine for resources, or to establish a town. Any of these requires changes to the map, with little regard for the original community and their culture.

Finally, a dice roll determines the fate of the remaining people. After further disease they may continue to live amongst the settler, they may be forced into reservations, they may have to leave the land to find neighboring lands where they can live, or they may face at the hands of the settlers, with the few remaining people forced to hide in remote mountains or forests.

As the conclusion of the game, students regain control of the narrative for the Resolution. They are presented with aa range of potential futures, and decide what path they want for their land and their people. They conclude the game by writing a narrative that begins “In the generations following the arrival of the Settlers…”

Following the final play session, students share their feelings about the game in a debriefing session. They make connections between the stories they had created and other stories, or real life events. At this point, teachers acknowledged the parallels with the European colonisation of Australia, and invite them to keep this experience in mind as they begin their next unit of inquiry, looking at that period of history.

 Sources of Inspiration

Like so many other games, Terra Fabula was inspired by Avery Alder’s genre-defining The Quiet Year.

The map-making and narrative building aspects of the game also owes a debt to other map-making and narrative generation games including:

• Ben Robbins’ Microscope
• Ex Novo by Martin Nerurkar and Konstantinos Dimopoulos

If you would really like to get into the weeds of how the Terra Fabula came about, I wrote an article about the development process, which was published in the Journal of the History Teachers Association of NSW, Teaching HIstory.