Terra Fabula

Welcome to Terra Fabula.

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. 

The Teacher's Guide 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.

Terra Fabula is still a work in progress. Please contact us if you have any questions about running the game at brett.rolfe (at) schoolhouse.edu.au, and if you bring Terra Fabula to your classroom let us know how it goes!