In 2089 Des Moines, Iowa, along the “2-3-5”, a highway-turned-metro-transit hub, communities are in an ideological struggle to make real their own visions for the future. This is a land of suburban agri-jungles, community-scale 3D printers, and up-to-two-story-tall battery-powered mecha. The federal government has become mostly irrelevant to people's everyday lives, as communities have been largely self-sufficient for decades. Through a handful of independently-produced roleplaying games, 235 bloom explores the invasion of the Des Moines metro by plutocratic ideologues, following the stories of Emil, an Emergency Services Cooperative worker who is in over his head in the Civil Resistance, and Baz, a hotshot BE-TLE pilot whose mercenary cooperative has returned him to his childhood home. 235 bloom also features seven guests to help scaffold the future in which this story takes place, over three prologue episodes.

235 bloom - the premiere series of Canopy Archive, a collaboration between Des Moines & Dragons and the Institute for Manufactured Futures - is a work of speculative fiction taking place in Des Moines, the traditional, ancestral, unceded land of the Báxoǰe, Sauk, and Meskwaki peoples, in the year 2089. The locations may be real, but any similarity to actual persons or their descendants is unintentional. Please be aware that this series deals with issues of paramilitary and other violence, including fasco-capitalism, colonialism and occupation, as well as natural disasters in a real city in the future lifetime of current generations. Please take care while listening.

Producers: Jordan Lee Thompson + Paul Privitera. Editor: Jordan Lee Thompson. Music: Goatfoam (Javier Lopez), Isac Lundholm, Tommy Ljungberg. Cover Art: Maddy Fusco. Additional Voice Work: LIPING VONG.

Find the games we used to create this story:

ECOPUNK: 2044 by Liam Hevey

Salvage Union by Panayiotis Lines and Aled Lawlor

The Ground Itself and World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin

Conquest & Glory (Expanded Edition) by Kyle Serafin

Dog Eat Dog by Liam Liwanag Burke

Special Thanks: All our guests, The Rook Room, Alex Walton, Oanh Vu, Ruben Vallejo Regalado, David Valentine, nouf saleh, H. LaVeau, Aydın Yaman, Alexander Anderson, Jeff Knopf, Nick Studer, Courtney Gunderson, Katie Privitera, the Des Moines & Dragons podcast collective, and everyone else whose conversations and stories informed the process behind 235 bloom.