#balikbayan

🌤️Share your favorite mechanic from a game you’re working on.

In my on going war against Setting Elements in Belonging Outside Belonging (I'm half-joking!), I've been experimenting with unlockable and growing sections of the City in BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home. Here are two (out of eight) parts of the City you can work towards accessing: the Market and the Sensorium. The group tailors the leader, aesthetics, and threats to their liking.

On October 11, 2014, Jennifer Laude, a Filipino trans woman, was killed by US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton, whose presence in Zambales was made possible by the Visiting Forces Agreement. 

In September 2020, then President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his misogyny and whose regime was marked by extrajudicial killings from his drug war and anti-communist crusade, granted Pemberton absolute pardon, cutting short his time served by four years. Months prior in the same year, during the height of the pandemic, the Congress railroaded the passing of the anti-terrorism bill amidst rampant red-tagging of activists and dissidents; LGBTQIA+ protesters were arrested, detained, and harassed by police. 

Under the current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the largest Balikatan Exercise took place in 2023, a military exercise that was bolstered by counterterrorism training since the War on Terror campaign by the US. His father, former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., serving as the blueprint of violence and repression for Duterte, formalized the export of Filipino labor through the 1974 Labor Code in an attempt to stimulate the struggling economy, resulting in the human trafficking of Filipinos to this day.

This is the political milieu that informs the narrative of “Balikbayan. Through the protagonist Stella, a trans woman, whose motivation is to find her missing sister Katrina, supposedly teaching in Texas but ended up as a victim of tokhang in the Philippines eleven years later, the play tackles the entanglements of the US War on Drugs and Terror, neoliberalism, and extrajudicial killings under the Duterte regime, and how women, both trans and cis, are subjugated and dehumanized by the same system.

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April 13, 2024, 7 PM @ IGB Gallery, UP Diliman 

#RPGCovers Week Thirteen BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home Rae Nedjadi

I was super jazzed last week when I saw a Tumblr post from Rae Nedjadi going over his TTRPG Projects on the table- and where they were at. In great part that was because I saw BALIKBAYAN listed among the games in “different forms of active.” I love the concept of the game, enslaved elementals in a cyberpunk world escaping to fight back against The Corp which has exploited you and your people. 

It’s a Belonging Outside Belonging ttrpg with a) some of the absolutely best pick lists for creating the world and b) some of the most striking and amazing playbooks for characters and beyond. 

I also adore this cover. The mix of colors here is so smart: both complementary and clashing. I am a sucker for distressed logos and so the title font at the center is absolutely my jam. I love the way the yellow backlash borders look like warning tape. There’s a great detail in how the neon characters in the background bleed upwards from the “BA” there. 

The figure in the center is striking, precisely because they aren’t looking out at the viewer. They look down: in worry? in exhaustion? in contemplation? It makes what otherwise might be an ordinary cyberpunk photo image into something more. There’s the additional detail of one hand reaching up to touch the side of their mask. I don’t know why, but it feels like a vulnerable gesture. 

Balikbayan Bring Christmas to the Philippines

If you are Filipino, or have been to a Filipino household, you are probably familiar with one of the most recognizable symbols of the Filipino diaspora: the balikbayan box.

Each winter, the care packages from Filipinos living overseas make the long journey home that their senders wish they could.