Play Something Else (If You Want)
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.
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Art vs the Horrors
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...
The Manifesto
I'm about low barriers to entry, where it takes less than 30 minutes to learn the rules. I'm about story gaming x OSR. I'm about emotions, performance, telling a story, the players as characters and audience. I'm about deconstruction, finding the limits of the hobby and pushing on them. I'm about experimentation, breaking the norms of my own manifesto. I'm about deeply-considered worldbuilding. I'm about embracing that feeling of strangeness that you encounter when you travel, when your assumptions about how things are are turned upside down. I'm about undertold stories of underrepresented people, writing in the nooks and crannies between the genre/culture heavyweights. I'm about anthropology, history, political science, linguistics, comparative psychology, decolonial studies, and maybe a dash of heterodox economics. I'm about breaking the rules of physics, vernacular architecture, tropical fruit, magical realism, pulling on one thread and seeing...