Trick's Tales

Some of my blog is directed at people like me who exist in the indie dev or OSR scenes, but I want to address Dungeons & Dragons for a bit. This is Part 1 of the Play Something Else (If You Want) series.

I write this in comfort in Vienna, warmed by a space heater in my long-suffering Austrian boyfriend's apartment, debating in the GM Supergroup about whether gaming and game design is resistance. We read this article by Lin Codega as part of the conversation. It's a sweet perspective, and certainly one that I have considered before. Utopian imaginaries have their space in tabletop roleplaying, from the explicitly utopian worlds of solarpunk (check out the Applied Hope solarpunk gamejam entries here ) to the cozy games of queer found families such as Our Traveling Home , which includes within the rulebook the instructions that "while the stakes are high, this game will always have a happy ending. The queer romance will resolve happily, and everyone in the family will get to have a happily ever after." In fact, utopia studies scholars have written an entire book on the intersection of utopia and tabletop roleplaying, although I confess that I haven't read it and am...