Queer tabletop games like Thirsty Sword Lesbians are helping define the format

Family can look like an unruly teenager, a devil-child, a wild knight, a brave knight who has become a frog or a robotic maid trying to learn how to live in a community. Sometimes it appears like a group of Super Sentai-style super heroes in bright rainbow hues, who are kicking the tires with empathy. Sometimes it appears like a team made up of plant children, who are raised by a compassionate witch mother to protect their community’s ecology from disaster.

Sometimes, it looks like friends at a table, rolling dice, telling a story, and enjoying each other’s company.

Queer people have relied on TTRPGs to tell their stories for as long as they have existed. A new generation of game designers and storytellers are creating innovative, fun games for queer people. Evil Hat Productions’ Lesbians from Thirsty-Sword, a role-playing game designed for telling queer stories with friends, not only met its initial Kickstarter fundraising goal in less than three hours, but raised more than 10 times the initial goal — and won a Nebula award for Best Game Writing.

“I think queer creators are whom I trust the most to tell queer stories because they are invested the most in making sure they ring true,” says Dominique Dickey, a writer who has worked on a number of TTRPGs, including Lesbians from Thirsty-Sword. According to them, success is a result of Lesbians from Thirsty-Sword and Possum Creek Games’ anticipated legacy slice-of-life, found-family-focused game Yazeba’s Bed & BreakfastThe group hopes to hear more stories of queer TTRPG success and to have creators who can earn a decent living from these stories.

Dickey has just completed an impressive crowdfunding campaign to fund their latest TTRPG project. Plant Girl Game, a cozy game where players assume the roles of plant children — from hardy haworthia to fearless agave — of a gentle witch mother (the titular “Plant Girl”), working together to prevent an ecological disaster in their community. A ashcan version of the game is now available. The full, lushly-illustrated version can be preordered for digital release in December or a printed release in March 2023. Hugo Award-winner Sarah Gailey, and World Fantasy Award recipient C.L. Polk.

In the world-building process Plant Girl GameIt is collaborative, customizable, and highly adaptable for repeated plays. Players are empowered to discuss their story and the community they wish to build together via a series open-ended questions. Which part of your community do you most love?To What’s your school’s mascot? “I think about open-ended world-building and open-ended safety tools, and I think about generosity in design,” Dickey says. “Where do I want to be more closed-fisted and have a very clear vision, and when do I want to give that over to the players entirely?”

It’s natural that so many queer TTRPGs would center the theme of found family, also an essential part of the TTRPG experience — just look at any Dungeons & Dragons party. The brooding vet is seen hanging out with the gorgeous dancer. “It’s the natural conclusion of thinking for 10 seconds about party composition,” says Ruby Lavin, the art director at Possum Creek Games. “It’s always the hard part about D&D — figure out why you’re hanging out. If you think about it for 10 seconds, it’s going to be a found family.”

Jay Dragon from Possum Creek Games, and M Veselak (co-creator), began work Yazeba’s Bed & BreakfastIn late 2019. It was released in late 2019. This prose-heavy, lengthy game allows players to plan birthday parties for residents or go on scary adventures to the basement in order to restore power to their home. It was born out of an idea that was rooted in an intergenerational space where queer people could be happy.

The community spirit of Yazeba’s can be seen in the collaborative creative process behind the game — which sports 48 chapters and 400 illustrations at time of writing — where writer Mercedes Acosta says writers were encouraged to be involved in the art development process and vice versa. You will find the unique mechanics that make this game stand out. Yazeba’s feed into the development of these community relationships — additional adventures are “unlocked” by collecting “mementos” of their adventures together and evolving relationships.

The community is depicted even with its whimsical characters, such as stone trolls or rabbits wearing little clothes. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast The game is multi-generational, ever-changing and includes mechanisms for characters growing older, leaving and dying. “It was really important to all of us for characters to be presented as accepted as they are,” Acosta says. “Someone can be cranky and mean, and instead of getting a callout post on Twitter, they can say, ‘Yazeba, that wasn’t cool,’ but they still love her.”

Acosta wrote the chapter “The Witch’s Old Hostel,” a pensive dungeon crawl elaborating on the source of Yazeba’s trauma and how she’s healing. Amelie (the housemate) and Gertrude (the guest), go to the remains of Yazeba’s all-witch hostel. They are set up in a dungeon crawl. The act was coded anti-trans hate crimes. It’s a slice-of-life game, and with that includes not just the moments of putting on a play or doing laundry, but the ways these characters experience, and heal from, their trauma.

Queerz! This manga was originally written by Isago Fukuda and is about a queer Super Sentai team that uses their Rainbow Empathy powers to fight Ignorance. Fukuda wanted the story to be “stupidly positive” and welcoming for all kinds of readers. Amit Moshe of gaming studio Son of Oak loved Fukuda’s story and thought it would make for a great role-playing game.

“I wanted a game that was about being kind, not only to yourself but to other people, and recognizing humanity in places you might have problems finding it,” says Steven Pope, the lead writer on Queerz! “And there’s an unbridled optimism in Isago’s work and in the Super Sentai genre that I really wanted to bring to this game as well.”

Photo by Son of Oak Game Studio

The game, which is powered by the system from Son of Oak’s The City of MistIt raised five times more Kickstarter goals than its original goal. The product is currently available for pre-order and will be released in December.

Heroes of Queerz! are colorful and campy, poking at some stereotypes while drawing from queer subcultures and history — there’s the bear-inspired Teddy Woof, dance instructor Willi (a nod to ballroom legend Willi Ninja) and the “new kid,” Harvey M., named for civil rights leader Harvey Milk. “I’m using all the stereotypes and the words and the places and it’s kind of introducing our culture to everybody,” Fukuda says. “I drew this for everybody, for all generations and all ages and putting in everything I like, saying This is amazing; we’re having fun.”

These are the adventures of Queerz! are punchy, Super Sentai fun of the “fighting a witch who crawled out of a dumpster on the moon” variety, but the central theme of empathy is baked into the mechanics and stories. In addition to action tags like “Slay” and “Strike a Pose,” players can opt to “Care,” “Be Vulnerable,” or “Talk It Out,” exploring non-combat conflict resolution.

Writer Robin Caulfield’s adventure for the Queerz! Kickstarter, “Hero Support,” tackles big themes like self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and never giving up on your friends (while taking down a villain called Cyber Skeleton, natch).

“It’s an adventure about overcoming your failures and how you can succeed again in the future, and I think the system made it so easy for me to put all these different, complex ideas that are usually so hard for me to put into words to play through and experience them,” Caulfield says. “As a queer person playing this game, I got to celebrate my identity through these characters, do all these cool things I wanted to do, especially when this superpower is intrinsically linked to something so important to you, and I hope that when people play my adventure or make their own adventures, that they see what I saw.”

“In RPGs, there is an almost bottomless capacity to build empathy,” Dickey says. “It’s one thing to read about someone with a different experience, and it’s another thing to become that person. Queer RPGs by queer creators give queer players and GMs room for self expression, but also give people who are not queer or may not know they’re queer yet the opportunity to explore that.”

Consider safety as a crucial component in building an empathetic, fun environment. Dickey is a former cultural consultant who worked on many RPGs. One of his most painful experiences was when the game design team brought in a consultant late. Although Dickey and his family are in the best of health, they still need to be taken care of. Plant Girl Game is not intended to be an analog to being in a foster home, Dickey wanted their game to be safe and welcoming to players with those experiences, so they brought in cultural consultant Bee Zelda, working to ensure the family structure in the game felt comforting and kind without being the “traditional” nuclear family.

“I think of stories a lot as life rafts,” Dickey says. “If you’re going through a hard thing, a story can be what you latch on to get through that. While I was writing Plant Girl GameI began to think about safety tools, character dynamics and the implications of these.What can I do to make it the most comfortable place for those who own their stuff?”

Yazeba’s Bed & BreakfastSafety tools are presented using a narrative voice like Hey Kid’s. Dragon says ideally, every aspect of a game’s design would have a mind toward safety — there are safety tools in Wanderhome, for example, that players wouldn’t immediately register as such. “If we could, we would have a page that just said ‘Be cool,’” Lavin says.

Dragon says part of making games about queer joy is “creating space for many spaces,” where people can have fun and goof around, but also be sad or angry or pained. “If you’re going to create a community space for love and care, it’s gotta hold space for many feelings,” Dragon says.

Dickey served as the editor in chief Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, agrees that queer joy in TTRPGs is not without big feelings or conflict, but the conflict in that game, for example, mostly stems from the day-to-day realities of living in community and running a small business, not the characters’ identities.

“To me, queer joy, in TTRPGs specifically, but also in fiction, looks like escapism, it looks like imagining a kinder, more optimistic world, imagining a world where there are still problems but those problems aren’t inherently due to queerphobia,” they say. “I think Plant Girl Game is a good balance of that that I’m very proud of because it’s meant to be very cozy and very safe, but there’s this threat of ecological disaster. It’s not a perfect world, but it’s a much kinder world.”

Followers of Queerz! Discord has become a place where people can share their opinions and join groups. Moshe says he’s excited to see the characters and adventures fans start creating when the full version is released. “People have already made some characters — for me, that’s a big moment,” Moshe says. “We’re also looking forward to hearing from the community what they want to hear next and how they want to interact with this universe.”

Jay Dragon believes that the tabletop game’s community is as important as its content. Digital version Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast One More Multiverse will have an interactive platform online for TTRPGs in March 2023. It is anticipated that the complete book will arrive in August 2023. However, the community around it will continue to grow. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is already growing, from Possum Creek’s Discord to Tumblr to the game’s first jam running now through Sept. 15 — there’s even fanfiction about it on AO3.

The Possum Creek Games team sees the play community as the “heart of the game” and seeks to uplift it, and that includes practical support for the creative community — it’s created third-party licenses to give creators the capacity to create supplements or fan works based on their games, and created the Haeth Grant, which provides material support to small creators wanting to create projects (playbooks, settings, etc.) related to Possum Creek’s marquee title, Wanderhome. At the time of writing, applications are not being accepted for this grant. Lavin says to support the next generation of creators, the best thing to do is “hand them money,” and to provide “a space to talk about their ideas and feel like they matter.”

“Ultimately, I don’t care about the games I make as much as the games people make because of the games I make,” Dragon says. “I do this because someone’s going to read that book and have an idea that’s going to knock my socks off. That’s the magic part.”