One of the things I’ve been enjoying about Under Hollow Hills, Meguey and Vincent Baker’s game about a wandering fairy circus, is the way that it continually asks players to think about the different parts of their characters that are immutable versus changeable. Without experience or any kind of material advancements available to characters, the game wants players to learn how to play their character to their fullest potential, creating a refining structure that allows players to explore the game while their characters remain ever-so-slightly precious. 

While playing my character, the Lantern Jack, John Stamper, I’ve realized that I often lean on the move when you greet someone with honest pleasure to propel my character through much of the game. I initially treated this move, which I can choose to roll whenever John enters a conversation, as a considered choice. But as I’ve continued playing I’ve started treating it like a passive ability that just… happens to John whenever he approaches someone new with genuine curiosity and, perhaps, a sense of indulgence. When I allow this move to be a constant, rather than a trick I opt into, I inadvertently create a kind of fairy magic to the character, where his very presence initiates moves. At this point in the game, greeting someone with honest pleasure isn’t just a move that I choose whether or not to trigger, it’s something that John does.

It’s worth knowing how the move works so you can see the kind of power we’re working with. Greet someone with honest pleasure is a familiar Powered by the Apocalypse move, where when an action happens that triggers the move, the player rolls 2d6 to determine the outcome. The text reads:  

On a 10+ hit, any grudge, grievance, or unfinished business between you vanishes, for real. On a 7–9 hit, they choose: let unfinished business vanish, as for a 10+ hit, or hold onto it. If they hold onto it, though, and bring it up again, they’re insulting you. On a miss, you’re insulting them by pretending there’s no unfinished business between you.

This, as one might imagine, is exceedingly helpful in many situations. John has had a long and storied life as the behind-the-scenes force driving the fairy circus across the worlds, and that means that every NPC could be an old friend or a storied rival. When it comes to greeting someone with honest pleasure, I’ll fully admit that I’d rolled very well throughout the entire game. Perhaps better than John deserved in some cases. 

One of these moments happened in an earlier session; we were in the human world, in some small town that was having a puppet parade through town, led by a pair of sisters, Heidi and Patricia. These women had, at one point, been a part of the fairy circus. They spent 10 years with John and the rest of the fairies, and it was always a little ambiguous whether or not they wanted to be there that long, or had even chosen to stay. A drag queen named Tanya Bricks (the lone human in our player party) was talking to Heidi, who had been hospitalized. This woman told Tanya that her experience in the fairy world was full of tricks and danger and untrustworthy characters. Just as Tanya was about to ask her for more details, John popped in.

John had previously vanished and appeared in the hospital room. He immediately smiled at Heidi, took her hand, and demurred that he was so happy to see her again, that it was such a shame that it had been so long, but that her eyes were just the same — greeting her with honest pleasure. I rolled well, and as soon as John smiled at Heidi, she forgot all about her fear and resentment. Her grudge was gone, for real. She forgot about how fairyworld left her traumatized, how it haunted her, how she was building puppets every year to try to imitate the wonders and horrors of fairyworld. John didn’t even know she had been upset with him at all.

But Tanya, who had been there the whole time, watched this play out. To John, it seemed like a normal interaction. He showed up and smiled at an old friend who was delighted to see him again. To Tanya, an arthritic, sick, old woman who had been scarred by the world that John had kept her in, had encouraged and perhaps been a cause of an incredibly cruel time in her life, had taken one look at John and… forgive him. The unfinished business between them dissolved into the tender back and forth of two old acquaintances catching up. It was a moment of horror for Tanya. A fairy trick, a deception, and Heidi was happy for it. John had just become one of the scariest fairies Tanya knew, and it was because he made other people crave the kind of elysian absence that his smile inspired. 

Caleb (Tanya’s player) was very quick to point this out above the table. That John had just become a threat because he made people forget their own goals, grudges, resentments… and Tanya was a character who had to hold onto those things in order to keep looking for her lost son. This was when it clicked for me, that this move shouldn't be something I decide to use, but I should treat it almost like a geas — a fairy binding all on its own. That John, whenever he greeted someone with honest pleasure, must trigger this move. Framing the move as a passive effect rather than my response to a situation added another layer to John’s personality. 

Earlier in the session he had absconded with two puppet parade organizers and used his own fairy magic to turn them (temporarily) into puppets of his own. Neither of these things were born from cruelty or spite, but a kind of inherent capriciousness that happens when a fairy (like John) who had been alive for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, has never truly faced severe interpersonal consequences. No matter how bad a shape he might have left someone in, when he saw them again — An old friend! How lovely! — all their unfinished business vanished, for real. John had no problem turning humans into puppets for a day or two, just like he had no problem taking children to fairy world and keeping them there for a decade. And if nobody — not even those children — seemed to hold it against him, John would never be able to understand that his actions hurt people or even comprehend that his thoughtless or impulsive decisions had long lasting effects on the people around him. He became a foolish archetype that everyone forgave because… well, it’s John; he didn’t mean it. And even if he did, it wasn’t that bad, right?    

Looking through the playbooks of Under Hollow Hills, there are a lot of moves that could be read and played like a kind of literal, imperative geas. The phrasing of all of the moves in the game could, further, imply that many of the consequences of using them just happen to the characters, like they are stuck in a kind of cycle of unintentional actions and outcomes. The Chieftain Mouse’s move when you address someone courteously, the Crowned Stag’s when you step into the woods, or the Troll’s when you tower over someone could all easily be read as literal curses laid on these characters, rather than moves that players choose or attempt to trigger. 

There is a certain kind of poetry to it. That it does not matter whether or not the Stag intended to lead their fellow characters to the court of their father, it just keeps happening. Fairies are afforded a lot of power through metaphorical changes and through the assumed magical abilities of their kind. (There is no move to turn someone into a living puppet. I just told the Game Master what I wanted to do and then John did it.) Giving their mundane interactions with the world the potential for severe narrative consequence feels like a balance to their unwieldy and undefined magic. They can reshape reality, but they can’t escape their own nature; or, in this case, they can’t change who they inherently are and how they move through the world.  

Under Hollow Hills seems like a game that wants to prioritize conversation as a high level mechanic that forces, rather than encourages, moves to be made. While almost every tabletop game seeks to encourage conversation at the table — and some games, like Dialect and Alice is Missing, play with those assumptions — many of the moves in Under Hollow Hills feel like they are a part of the conversation rather than a part of the game that is added onto conversation, or specifically asked-for in the appropriate context. Even the moves in a game like Apocalypse World are given titles, and the conditional that allows you to trigger the move is explained afterwards. Framing the moves as the absolute When you greet someone with honest pleasure rather than something like Meeting With Delight encourages a glossiness in between conversation and game mechanics. Familiarity and repeated use has made me, and John, fluent in the language of the game. And, now that we’re a dozen sessions in, the brilliance of it.

It is incredibly interesting to me that narrative moves, which so much of the indie scene is currently based on, could develop to be such an inherent part of gameplay that they don’t even become triggered, but instead are just revealed as you play. It is thematically resonant that this happens in a fairy game, where promises made, oaths sworn, and gifts given can become irrevocable bindings that force a destiny on an unsuspecting character. 

To be fair, this kind of stepping into moves does happen a lot in games. A player will be working an angle and the GM might say, “it sounds like you want to sniff the wind,” and the move becomes a derivative of the larger conversation. Although it’s just as likely that a player will be kind of stumped about what to do and will simply announce they’re sniffing the wind, asking for the move to trigger independently of what the character is actually doing. For me, the difference between a move like sniff the wind and a more inherent, geas-like move is context. Greet someone with honest pleasure has a very specific moment wherein it applies. Additionally, if John greeted someone dishonestly, or wasn’t happy to see someone and made that known, I wouldn’t roll. Having a clear boundary around the move helps establish it as rooted in the world, and in John, allowing me to treat this glamor as a constant, inadvertent, immutable part of who he is.

During our last session, after a small funeral, resurrection, and wake (in that order), John was at a bartop — the kind that gets set up at the side of a party — when Roan (a recurring NPC) walked up. A couple hundred years ago, when John hid out in his father’s court, they had been lovers. John left when Oberon’s whole thing got too much,  literally running away in the middle of the night, and never said goodbye to Roan. Not so much as a letter tucked under the pillow. Or a Post-it Note on the copper-polished mirror. 

 And, for the past three-to-four sessions, Roan had been forced to deal with a murder where John and his compatriots were the primary suspects. On top of that, John had lied about his true identity for the decade or so while the two of them had been in a relationship, which was revealed in a very dramatic fashion that caused a huge headache for Roan and the rest of Oberon’s Court. There had not been an ideal time to reconnect. But here was Roan, ordering a delicate drink, and John leans in and flirtily greets him with honest pleasure. This was the first time in the game where I thought, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want Roan to forget what John did to him. I don’t want Roan to think that what John did was okay. 

I rolled a full success. 

Roan immediately moved closer, smiled kindly, and said it was so nice to see John, despite everything. John was off put — he knew that he had hurt Roan. He knew it. He pushed back, asking if that was it, if Roan was mad, or upset, and held some kind of resentment for how John had treated him and Roan brushed it off. All in the past, wasn’t it? John tried one more time. He left. He had lied. He had ignored and avoided Roan for hundreds of years. Roan shrugged, not reticence at all, and said that it didn’t matter. They’re here now. 

John lost all interest immediately. He smiled a little, pulled his arm away from Roan’s hand and left the party alone. He didn’t want to be magically forgiven; he wanted to stay up and fight. 

It was one of the great moments that solidified John’s character. His geas is often helpful, but just as often it keeps him distant from others. Everyone loves him. Nobody hates him. He fades into the background on purpose, and few ever truly care because after a conversation, he leaves no impression. He’s an old friend, and you are happy to catch up. Every single time.

The biggest perk of winning the Diana Jones Emerging Designer award is an expenses-paid trip to Gen Con. The largest American tabletop convention, celebrating its 59th year, broke attendance records in 2026 with 74,000 people attending. But amidst this sea of people (and actual water), all three of this years’ Emerging Designers — Glaiza Champion, J Strautman, and Kodi Gonzaga — were unanimous in their praise for what the award was able to do for them.

While Gonzaga and Champion had been to the Indianapolis show before, it was Strautman’s first time. Like most first-time attendees, Strautman found it “very big and very overwhelming" but felt like the DJA award legitimized their presence. “Having the Diana Jones Award and having that kick off the entire convention [meant] there was a reason that people wanted to talk to me,” said Strautman to Rascal in an email. “So, it was very easy for me to get myself into new conversations and meet new people who are working in games at a level that is way beyond the level that I'm at.”

Gonzaga was making their third consecutive pilgrimage to the convention, but it was still a unique experience. Not only were they returning as an award-winner, they also had completed their first crowdfunding campaign earlier this year for Extra Ordinary, a game of children with super powers on the run. “This was the first Gen Con where people walked up to me and were like, oh my god, you're Kodi Gonzaga, I love your game! And I'd be like, what, I don't know who you are!” they said. 

Champion had attended the convention once before but echoed the surprise at how much visibility the DJA award seemed to bestow. As someone primarily known as a performer in the actual play scene, discussions about design were a sudden and welcome change. “People were coming up to me asking for my business card,” siya said. “They were asking about my writing skills, my game design skills, my ability to make bespoke mechanics.” Champion described the experience as their “first time being an industry professional,” adding “I like to go on the internet and say I'm just a little guy, I'm just a little dude. Now, I can't do that anymore.” 

The three winners spent regular hours at the Diana Jones booth interacting with many people who sought it out intentionally. They ran and demoed games though that ended up a mixed bag. Gonzaga had almost no sign ups, a stark contrast to when they attended on their own dime. “At the 2024 and 2025 Gen Con, I would have set those events up very early on, they would have launched with the rest of the events, and in the past, they filled up pretty quick,” they said. “I either didn't promo them well enough, or they didn't get on the schedule fast enough.” The others had better luck. Strautman fully booked out every game of A Fool’s Errand, their tarot-driven game of space fantasy hijinks they designed with B Marsollier. Champion had the unique experience of gathering a table of people to quietly play a solo game and then discuss their feelings together. 

In the evenings, all three emerging designers were pulled by the gravity of Gen Con as the center of the industry into a dizzying variety of mixers and networking events. For Gonzaga, professional socializing was explicitly why they came. “I want to make my career out of writing, and writing TTRPGs as part of that,” they said. “I don't treat this as a hobby; I treat this as a business.” 

Strautman is already full-time in games but as a second act, arriving at this industry's shore after more than a decade as a working musician, which is very helpful because they’ve done this whole dance before. “I have spent 15 years at festivals and conferences for music, I have really learned how to be the person that I am when there's 100 people around, and we're all selling ourselves,” said Strautman. “You have to really get used to acting like you belong somewhere, even when it's really uncomfortable.”

Champion has a career in the tech industry, and when imagining their game design journey, siya saw it as a ten-year process. According to them, the resources from the award (which included a small amount for printing copies) turned Missing Month, their solo game of memory loss and stolen time, from a years-long project to a matter of months. “I think what the DJA Emerging Designer award program does is very, very important,” siya said. “I hope people see the importance of it and continue to support this program because it's really mind-blowing the things that it could do for a person just starting out.”

Almost by definition, an award for an “emerging” talent is a tricky feat. It can’t be judged on past achievement — if someone has found concrete success in the first three years of practice, they might not even need the leg up. It is almost always a leap of faith, an investment in potential. The indie RPG scene, in so far as it exists, is a raucous parade of burgeoning artistry. Because self-publishing a game has become so easy and cheap, there is no dearth of people who take that wonderful first step into this medium. But usually that’s where the journey stops. The second step and the third — every step after that, really — are the challenge. It’s easy to lose motivation when you’re lost in the crowd.

Most people’s potential remains that, never realized. It’s not just about the lack of eyeballs and attention, it’s also about a lack of institutional memory and mentorship and the difficulty of making genuine artistic progress in the craft of game-making. The industry is full of people who walked winding paths to get where they are, and it’s also not-full of people who disappeared along the way. This is the context of the DJA Emerging Designer award. It’s not a perfect panacea by any means, but it seems to be an admirable intervention that would ideally be ten times larger.

All that said, the warmest part of a Gen Con visit remains the ability to meet elusive friends-from-the-internet (maybe for the first time) as well as those beatific souls who have ditched social media but regularly haunt convention floors. This was particularly special for Champion, who brought their whole family including their son to the event. “My friends who are in actual play knew I was pregnant,” siya said. “A lot of them knew [their son] by name… and wanted to see him and meet him for the first time.” It’s a coming together of worlds that might not have happened under any other circumstance. 

In the end, it was this feeling of connecting with others on the same wavelength, of talking about games with others who, despite all the industry challenges, shared their enthusiasm, that left these designers energized as they boarded flights and returned to their regular lives. “Getting home, I can't wait to make a game,” said Strautman. “I love being in this industry. I love working with all these people, and I want to be part of the thing that takes us to the next level.”

The swashbuckler-themed tabletop RPG Pirate Borg released in 2023, and since then its popularity has only grown. Earlier this year, expansion Down Among the Dead fulfilled a 2024 Kickstarter that raised half a million dollars. A 148-page collection of adventures and character options, Down Among the Dead jokes it is “a terrible expansion for Pirate Borg, the worst pirate RPG ever made.” In addition to referencing the horror focus of the game, it’s also a tongue-in-cheek warning to those who could bounce off the light nature of the rules and the evocative pastiche of the setting. Down Among The Dead doesn’t want us to take it too seriously, and yet within its pages lie some serious issues.

The expansion introduces NPCs and enemies clearly inspired by Mesoamerican cultures. The adventure Into the Maelstrom features an orangutan sorcerer named Ou-Ka-Bong adorned in a mask that seems inspired by Mayan motifs. A figure in the background of the image has a headdress that resembles one belonging to Aztec emperor Montezuma. Searching for “Maya” in Down Among the Dead reveals one result: the name of a little girl living in one adventure’s orphanage. Searching for Aztec returns nothing. 

In the second adventure, Venom in the Veins, there’s a shaman called Tezomoc Almotil, a name which resembles the name of a real-world ruler of the Tepanec Empire, Tezozómoc. Tezomoc has turned himself into a snake-man using the ancient magic of an Aztec-like precursor culture. We’re told Tezomoc was entombed “by his people,” but the game doesn’t say if those people were Aztec. It just uses Aztec architecture and symbols in the art. The timeline of the setting included in the adventure skips over the fall of these civilizations; Tezomoc’s people entombed him in the shrine, and hundreds of years later Spanish explorers discovered the site. The Spanish church and French revolutionaries are said to be interested in the shrine, but there’s no mention of any living descendants of Tezomoc’s culture or what happened to it.

It’s not unusual for pirate fantasies to include Mesoamerican motifs. The genre has a lot of overlap with classic pulp adventure stories; strong men like Doc Savage and Allan Quatermain exploring lost cities of gold and ancient temples. The core book is aware of some of the problematic parts of those pulp classics and opens with a statement addressing them: “[this] is not a game about slavery, sexual violence, genocide, or any of the other abhorrent real parts of our history. Please treat these topics with the respect they deserve, or leave them out of the game altogether, and go hunt some skeletons.”

It’s an important message, but it’s immediately followed by something that casts it in a different light; the skeletons it advises us to hunt include dead Indigenous people. And they’re the only ones in the book. Pirate Borg is not about genocide, but piecing together clues from the expansion's setting reveals it’s about the potential for fun in a genocide's aftermath. 

The opening pages of Pirate Borg displays a blood-splattered map of “The Dark Caribbean,” echoing the colonial narratives around wild, strange, and untamed “Darkest Africa.” On the map, the Yucatán Peninsula has been renamed “The Dark Yucatan." The channel between Mexico and Cuba around the real-world Cayman Trench is labeled “The Abyss”, and a spooky skull is stamped over the real-world Isla de la Juventud. Other names such as Havana, Nassau, Guadeloupe, and Maracaibo appear unchanged.

Then, typeset over art of an ominous lighthouse, a shipwreck, and stormy seas comes this short explanation of the game’s setting:

“Early explorers thought the Caribbean was paradise: They found nothing but deserted islands and bountiful treasures. It wasn’t until thousands had left their crowded, blighted homelands and settled in among the islands that they encountered the Scourge…

It began on the solstice. Haunting screams echoed over sandy beaches, and from the death black waves crawled the undead. Terror spread like wildfire. At first they came in single numbers, but hordes gestated and soon settlements were blotted out by a torrent of lifeless, nameless creatures. 

Possessed flesh of dead sailors, ghosts of displaced inhabitants, skeletal constructs shrouded in seaweed and muck, and horrible monsters born from the unknowable dark places in the world: they emerged from the sea and consumed all.

The meek had nowhere to flee but to their graves, only to rise again at dusk. Survivors fortified cities and bolstered strongholds. Soon after, the effects of ASH were discovered. A new status quo was born.”

This explanation is intended to be vague and evocative, informing the mood of the setting rather than describing it outright. The most striking part of this description is that the Caribbean of Pirate Borg was abandoned before the colonizers arrived, which means the Scourge either wiped out all Indigenous cultures or uprooted them entirely. They left behind their “bountiful treasures” to be discovered by the Europeans, who have to deal with the “ghosts of displaced inhabitants.” The Scourge is a constant danger in the game, and while its undead ranks include people of all kinds, it’s the only name under which you’ll encounter the natives of the land.

After the book describes its major factions, there’s a section about the “Dark Yucatan.” Like the pirates, British, French, Spanish, and eldritch cults described before it, the section includes full-page art overlaid with evocative text. Everything about this layout primes the reader to expect another faction; but instead of Indigenous Maya or other native inhabitants of the Caribbean like Mexica or Taíno people, Pirate Borg writes:

“Far to the WEST, evil wells in the DARK YUCATAN. Folktales of cities made of gold and temples ripe with untapped fortunes taunt the meek like the befouled carcass taunts the vulture. The borders reek of rot, yet the jungle calls to those who listen. Like the heretic Cortes, none who have ventured into that execrable labyrinth have returned to tell the tale…”

This conspicuous absence is all through the text; if a player randomly generates their character’s name, they’ll find references to real-world pirates such as Stede Bonnet, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and even a reference to Star Wars. But their name will never be Mexican, Native American, or Afro-Caribbean; it will only evoke European heritage.

The pattern of side-stepping the people of the Caribbean continues in the character classes the game offers: one, called the “Sorcerer”, is surrounded by skull motifs. The sample figure is Black, wears a top hat and suit, and possesses an affinity for necromancy, power over “natural spirits”, and has ability to put others into a zombie-like sleep. These are all pop cultural trappings of a Haitian Vodou priest, or that of a Louisiana Voodoo witch doctor, similar to the villain of White Zombie (1932) or Doctor Facilier in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009). But given that the book suggests Haiti has been depopulated, who keeps this tradition alive?

There’s a lot of other art and textual references to cultures found around the Caribbean: The spread for the “Dark Yucatan” includes references to cities of gold and ancient temples, as well as art of a pillar resembling Maya pictographs (p 22-23). The “Brute” character class has splash art done in the style of a Mesoamerican relief, a style that continues in the lists of “Dark Fauna” (p 35, 86-89). There’s also a single reference to “Native Medicine” (p.117). In the adventure The Curse of Skeleton Point, the temple was built by “Mesoan settlers” and includes a visual reference to the Mayan calendar (p 146). All of these nods to non-Western cultures are just that: nods.

The repeated inclusion of Mesoamerican aesthetics prompts an interesting question: why did Pirate Borg decide that the Caribbean had to be depopulated, its inhabitants likely destroyed by the Scourge, before the Europeans arrived? In the game’s setting, there was no genocide of the people of the Caribbean and Mesoamerica by colonizers or the empires they belonged to, but there still was a genocide — a worse one, apparently, as it seems to have left no living survivors. This elision also effectively absolves the European colonists of their crimes. When situating their games in certain time periods of history, many designers have had to downplay the true horrors of reality to make play more palatable. But in Pirate Borg, while their culture has been deemed useful for play, it’s as if Indigenous people themselves have been declared inconvenient to the game’s goals. One does not have to be particularly educated about colonialism to point out that the real-world empires depicted in the game felt much the same way.

The conspicuous absence of any existing inhabitants and the presence of the real-world empires who attempted to destroy them means that any close reading of Pirate Borg and its expansions will yield uncomfortable questions about slavery, sexual violence, and genocide, the very topics the game says it isn’t about. The game asks us to treat the “abhorrent real parts of our history” with respect, but unconsciously creates an atmosphere within which they might thrive. 

This isn’t the first time the book has been criticized for having blind spots. In 2023, there was controversy over one of the art pieces in the first printing of Pirate Borg. The art, depicting a brown-skinned zombie with dreadlocks, was labeled “The Rope Monkey.” The designer, Luke Stratton, apologized and removed the offending artwork. Free League, who publish and distribute the game, produced stickers to cover up the offending name in the first printing, and game studio Limithron the game’s studio hired a sensitivity reader to review the entire book. They explicitly declared that it is “firmly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-bigot, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, and do not want anyone to feel like they do not belong at our tables or playing our games.” 

While the colonial nature of fantasy adventuring is a broader problem, Pirate Borg could have taken steps to ameliorate the issues of its setting. If it wanted to include indigeneity and non-white, non-Western cultures, the factions and classes would be a natural place to do it. It could have ensured that players take up the roles of returning inhabitants by making it clear that there were survivors, including such names in the list of options. Instead, it describes the dangers of their exotic homelands in a passage that plants the readers firmly in the shoes of the now-innocent colonizers. The game had the opportunity to lend context and a critical lens to a genre laden with racism. It could have included sidebars with advice for how players and GMs could approach these topics in a sensitive, nuanced, respectful way. Even if it wanted to remain an irreverent game, it could have employed multiple writers and sensitivity readers from these cultures to work on the setting and adventures. Despite hiring one for Pirate Borg's core book, there are no sensitivity readers credited in Down Among The Dead. 

Another key part of Pirate Borg’s setting is ASH, a psychoactive drug. ASH is unique to the Dark Caribbean and made from the bodies of those infected with the Scourge. If done intentionally and with care, ASH could have been a metaphor for extractive colonialism and the fetishization of exoticized minorities. ASH consumption is similar to the real-world practice of 19th-century Europeans unwrapping and consuming Egyptian mummies. Even the fact that ASH slowly kills its users could be a metaphor for the moral rot of empire. 

But ASH is no such metaphor. It’s just a powder made from bone and is only ever employed as shorthand for “very bad drug that turns people into addicts.” One of the game's suggested plotlines culminates in “everyone who has ever used ASH” becoming one of the ravening undead.

Pirate Borg doesn't have any native people in it. It doesn’t contain any knowledge of them. It doesn’t think about their genocide. It wipes them all out in its first lines, and then adorns itself with their cultures and symbols without once crediting them or paying them respect. Like the colonists it depicts, Pirate Borg eats their bones and trips on them.

Psst, the first season of the Rascal Reading Club is now up on YouTube! Hit, smash, stomp, pulverize, or leap off the top rope and body slam that subscribe button. If you've never tuned into the show, this thread of Bluesky might help you figure out which episode you want to dive into.

Alright, we're gearing back up to record a new season of Rascal Reading Club and you get to pick the subject. We tend to wander into different parts of a game but it's good to start with a clear slice as our subject. GMing advice was a great place to kick off because it's a topic with almost unlimited depth. Here's my suggestions for Season Two:

• Settings: This is a continuation of GM advice in many ways because it's almost always GM facing. We'll be talking about what makes a setting exciting, what makes it easy to run, how to integrate players into settings, and more. We'll try to do some classic settings, some new ones, maybe even some rules for generating your own. But this might be a lot of reading, so also consider...
• Character Classes / Playbooks: If we do this, we'll pick one particular class or playbook from a game and explore how the design influences play. We'll talk about how worldbuilding is embedded into character creation, the appeal of different archetypes, how playbooks interact with each other, and so on. I'm imagining it's going to be both players (rather than GMs) but also design. I think of this as a high risk, high reward option because nobody has really done anything like this.
• Player Advice: This is also a natural move after our last season. Which games have a good player advice? Do they give generic advice or do they focus on how to play that particular game? We might even read a book that is just player advice like Play Unsafe by Graham Walmsley or The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'Amato.
• GMless Games: One of the ideas that came out of last season is we'd probably find some pretty interesting GMing and player advice in GMless games where that divide doesn't exist. This is another high risk, high reward option because we could go anywhere. While I expect we'll focus on games with characters and stories, we might talk about worldbuilding games or other weirder spaces if people nominate / choose them.

To vote, just drag and reorder the topics so your favorite ones are at the top. It's ranked choice.

Voting is open for a week!

If looking at the categories gives you some cool ideas for games that should make it into an episode, sound off in the comments.

On its cover, Defy the Gods by Chrys Sellers declares itself to be a game of “Queer Sword & Sorcery.” But what exactly makes a game “queer?” Queerness and “queering” textual readings have constantly been in flux as hegemonic resistance and queer desires have become more popular ways to analyze queer media beyond the study of queer characters within the text. Over the past ten years or so, a burgeoning academic study of queer games has attempted to establish how we can close-read tabletop games in order to examine how these texts encourage queer play. Designers such as Avery Alder (Monsterhearts, The Quiet Year) and scholars such as Dr. Persephone Berge, and Dr. Bo Ruberg have worked to refine a queer lens through which we can examine games. It is not enough that games include queerness in the characters and lore of their texts. Representation is good for the expansion of possibilities, but without supportive structures, the game only hints at the inclusion of queerness within the ritual circle, rather than queering the circle itself. Representation adds more seats to the game table; it does not set your place or invite you to sit down. At this point in the development of tabletop RPGs, identifying and including queer markers in the text is not enough to make any game “queer”. 

Queer games, as argued by the experts cited above, include supportive, immersive, mechanical structures within various levels of engagement that actively encourage queer play. Alder spoke about what makes up a queerly-structured game at the Ann Arbor District Library Game Con in 2024. In order to create a queer game, the manifestations of power, decision-making, and the context in which those exist must encourage not only queer readings but actively embody how queer people navigate the real world. She identified five themes which a game could utilize to encourage queer play: fluidity and transition, roles and reversals, erasure and coding, absurdity, and collective character ownership. This is not a definitive list of what makes a game queer, but is, according to Alder, a good metric to use as a lens for critical queer readings of games. 

Berge wrote in “Monster Power. Rebel Heart. Gay Sword.” that there are many ways in which queer games move beyond representation (called “cueing” in the article, based on the work of Tanja Sihvonen and Jaakko Stenros) in order to create structures that encourage queer play. She identified game mechanics like safety tools, modified health tracks (such as Conditions from Masks, and Ruin from Apocalypse Keys), and a resource-based relationship model (such as Strings from Monsterhearts) as methods for encouraging queer play. While these pieces can all be utilized within contemporary games that do not have an explicitly queer agenda, putting them inside a larger game framework that encourages resistance against larger powers creates many opportunities for anti-hegemonic movement within the game. 

Alder explains in her Ann Arbor talk that game mechanics are political, as they determine the ways that power works in the game and give players the framework for change and agency within its narrative. More than that, I would argue that the way that players interact with rules is a form of cultural critique, where the adaptations that players make to the initial structures of the game creates a sense of ownership and reflexive political commentary on power and play. In order to create queer structures, the game has to set up a world that encourages a queering of the text and a queering of the rules within the play. There must be room at the table to write the rules yourself, and to take ownership of larger, high-level storytelling choices within the game.

From the beginning, the premise of Defy the Gods sets up thresee player characters as antagonistic to the two hegemonic powers called the World Forces: the City, which oppresses them with laws that call into question their personhood; and the Pantheon, which seeks to consolidate power. Early in the game, Sellers asks players to “calibrate your oppression,” determining why the City and the Pantheon hate you. The three suggested levels are Deep Allegory (where you are hated for your differences, not your queerness), Thin Veil (where queerness has become a shorthand for differences, e.g. only queer people “dabble in sorcery”), and Out in the Open (where it is openly said that queerness is the driving factor in their hatred). When you create your City, you have to choose how the laws oppress you specifically (the City Watch comes into your neighborhoods and harasses you — this can obviously apply to many groups but is reminiscent of how queer enclaves were frequently targeted in major American cities in the 1970s and ‘80s), which provides constant tension when characters operate in the City. This hits on multiple points of Alder’s queer structural reading, asking players to determine coding and roles before ever picking up a character sheet. 

Defy the Gods uses a Powered by the Apocalypse structure (including playbooks, 2d6 moves, and clocks), which is largely informed by the additions of Apocalypse Keys by Rae Nedjadi. Defy the Gods not only uses the mixed success common in PbtA games, but also utilizes burning success, which is where you roll so well that your great actions have consequences that blow back on you. The only pure success in Defy the Gods is when you roll between 8 and 10. When you roll an 11 or above, your burning success is likely to wound others, cause a new obstacle to present itself, or you accidentally fall in love with the character you were attempting to Entice. Most often you will be asked to mark Fire — a symbol of your pride and your hubris. Burn too bright, fill your Fire track, and the World Forces take notice. This is an inevitable result of a game that asks you to roll using additional statistics, and is thematically resonant with queerness; Speak too loud, fight too hard, make things too difficult for the World Powers… and eventually one of them will make it their mission to destroy you. 

Drawing power from who you are and who you love

One of the unique parts of Defy the Gods is that it utilizes custom Epithets instead of statistics in any specific skill. They are “a phrase that reflects your adventurer’s values, principles, and reputation” and are unique to each character. Although each Playbook has suggested Epithets the game encourages players to materially adjust the Epithets, and essentially, the invocations of their characters to suit their own desires, which I read as a queer structure within the game. 

Epithets can be wounded or improved, or (eventually) replaced with a Doom. Wounds modify Epithets and can be physical or emotional. You must protect who you are or you will be Wounded — there’s even a rule that, if fellow players (GM included) point out when you fail to live up to your Epithet, you could be Wounded. By asking players to treat Epithets as open to injury or enhanceable, non-static fixtures of yourself, Defy the Gods treats being true to one’s self as the highest possible calling. Berge writes that this kind of nontraditional harm is a queer reimagining of consequence and establishes a “confronting context for consensual pain,” within the game, and she quotes Ruberg when saying that these changes could force characters — and players — to “feel what they aren’t supposed to feel,” encouraging a “messy possibility” for the game. 

For characters to gain a Doom, they must first get a burning success on a “Defy the Gods” move, which is typically triggered after accumulating too much Fire (similar to Heat in Blades in the Dark). They replace an Epithet with a Doomed Epithet according to the Doom move they choose. This move allows them to invoke great power in the game; However, these moves and Epithets also represent a denial of self and an assimilation of the character into the possession of power at the expense of their own humanity. Berge writes in her analysis of PbtA games that Doom and Ruin mechanics often put characters in tension between protecting themselves and protecting those they love — inviting explicitly queer and transgender readings. As Doom moves utilize oppressive forces to keep the characters down, Doom gives characters access to the same horrors that the characters originally stood against: tyranny, sexual domination, and sacrificing others for the self. The only way to truly Doom yourself is to remove those parts that create community, empathy, and life — a clear analogy to queer lifestyles and the ways in which queer people have survived. 

Much like Doom moves ask players to undermine and redefine the core parts of who they are, a Crisis occurs when all of a character’s Epithets have received a Wound, triggering an emotional, traumatic scene. These again call into question a character’s core abilities and invites them to rethink who they fundamentally are. Instead of changing an Epithet to something powerful and over-reaching, like a Doom move would require, a Crisis forces you to question what the community — what your friends — could possibly want with you. It is not just a personal failure, but it also results in a questioning where you belong. Queer people are in constant negotiations with their own communities, compromising responsibilities and obligations in ways that mix the personal and the political. A Crisis exploits the vulnerabilities that queer people feel when they fear losing these communities, or not being of use to their community. 

Berge writes that Bonds — expressed in Defy the Gods as Heart — mechanically support a “queer world of social bonds filled with mutual empowerment, grief, love, and desire.” When a Characters gives a Heart away, it is indicative of their emotions towards the object of their affection. Love becomes a part of the game that each character must be generous with, as the only way to earn Hearts to spend is by receiving them from other people. Hearts are resources that can be spent to trigger moves (spend 1 Heart) or gain an Epithet (spend 4 Hearts). Desire, love, and attachments are shown to be vital parts of the game, built into both success and failure. Alder previously said that queer games should assert, re-assert, refine, and redefine relationships throughout play. As roles within the world and relationships to each other shift, queerness is invited in as people continually determine how Heart works within their own frameworks; is Heart a burning erotic love? Is it a belief in someone’s mission? Is it the faithful devotion to a God? Is it the sense of duty one feels to another, or (perhaps unwillingly) to an authority? When players are confronted with so many opportunities to make choices, the queerness becomes more and more apparent, as not every act of giving and spending Heart will be aligned with the authorities' hegemonically-approved exchanges of desire and loyalty. 

Heart also allows for a rebellion against powers of authority by subverting the roles given to various antagonistic agents, which is an example of a theme that Alder states supports a queer game structure. By coming in and out of hiding within dangerous situations and using moves like Figure Out a Person, Entice, and Beseech a Force against antagonists and allies of the World Forces, the players are asked to deliberately blur the boundaries in between us and them. Because you can give an unlimited number of Heart, the game allows communities, sympathizers, and allies to grow expansively and naturally, through sincere connections made in the midst of deeply trying situations. Mechanically, Hearts are an obvious way that queerness is encouraged at the table.

Relationships reach their culmination when another character holds four Hearts from a single PC. The player holding the Hearts then bestows an Epithet on the person whose affection they have earned, as they have gained insight into who they are at their core, their very fundamental stuff. Intimacy as a way of understanding and knowing each other is a universal experience but also a common theme in queer media, especially when the social politics of same sex intimacy or the stigmas and potential harm that could come from unprotected sex make intimacy dangerous. Regardless, giving Hearts and receiving an Epithet is a fundamentally positive moment; Epithets are how you know yourself. They are how you keep going.

Inclusive definitions and collective mythology

All of Defy the Gods'Playbooks have clear queer analogies attached to them. The Revenant could be a trans allegory, as someone who has experienced rebirth, or had to move out of a toxic home in order to try to live again. You are a new person, and nobody is willing to recognize it. The Sailor is a playbook that transgresses loyalties and holds allegiances across physical boundaries. The assemblage of support and queer life is embodied in this Playbook, which draws strength from many discrete communities. The Vessel engages with BDSM culture, where the player is the submissive lover in a relationship with a dominant, minor god. Negotiating this relationship is key to this character, and Wounds are the ways in which they are able to draw on the power of the patron. The fluidity and care with which both the player and the GM must leverage this relationship is clearly drawn from kink communities, which have long existed parallel to, and intermingled with, the queer scene. 

Within character creation there is also space to define both your gender and your body. Defy the Gods continually asks you to think and present in metaphor. In the Sorcerer playbook, suggestions for describing your gender include “an unread text,” “whispered secret,” and “possessed.” Body suggestions include “vast as the night sky,” “wishing to escape its confines,” and “part stone or wood.” All of these choices open the door for queer interpretations and invite them into the game, and while they could be metaphorical, they could also be very, extremely literal within the imaginations of Defy the Gods, encouraging, as Alder might say, an absurdist perspective of the characters. These definitions also allow characters to defy society, moving beyond norms in order to establish new roles, and fight against assumptive coding. Berge identifies these moments as prompting queer play through “disorienting” narrative possibility (they use examples from Sleepaway by Jay Dragon, but we can assert the same conclusions with Defy the Gods’ gender options) allowing people to play with their character’s own queerness while playing through the game itself — a queer mechanical structure within the text. 

Looking at Defy the Gods’ moves, we can find similarly supportive queer structures. Often a burning success means that you have acted recklessly and with abandon, endangering the people and communities around you. In a few moves, such as Figure Out a Person and Entice, consequences include accidentally falling in love with the other person and giving them a Heart. The Entice move also invites another explicitly queer reading, where “a miss represents you flirting going awry in the worst possible way. You have transgressed a social boundary set by the Pantheon or the City’s Laws. The target of your enticement may take offense because they don’t expect your kind of person to be making eyes at them… However it happens, a World Force finds your actions abhorrent and its representatives make you pay for it… it will be bad.” It is very easy to layer this over queer experiences, where an expression of desire, or even looking at someone the wrong way, can be taken as a fundamental violation of the rules and laws that keep society orderly, neat, and lawful. In other games, such as Apocalypse World second edition, the consequences for similar moves like Seduce Someone are much less specific — it just says “prepare for the worst.” Even in Monsterhearts, which actively engages with the feral nature of teenage sexuality, the consequences for failing to Turn Someone On are covered by a general “the MC will likely introduce some unpleasant consequences.” While both of these moves obviously allow for a queer interaction, it is much clearer in Defy the Gods that you are meant to read a miss as an exchange between a queer person and a non-queer person going extremely poorly. 

Defy the Gods also asks that players sometimes expand their scope of control, moving from individual characters to the World at large. They are asked to take on the role of the antagonistic forces, playing a World Scene in order to answer a question about the adventurers. Sellers writes that the game, and these scenes specifically, “makes explicit what our world often implies: the ultimate authority of all creation is actively opposed to your existence.” In addition to giving players the opportunity to shift roles (another hallmark of queer games, according to Alder), it also gives space for people to share what they want to see within their games and gives everyone a chance to negotiate themes and tone. It reminds me of a more specific, focused version of Idle Dreaming — a game mechanic in the system that Alder co-designed with Benjamin Rosenbaum, Belonging Outside Belonging — where players are asked to sit and ideate what might happen, how characters might act, and present possibility and a choice before committing to a singular course of action. In the same way, the World Scene not only offers possibilities and complications for the characters, but also reestablishes the hegemonic powers of authority and reaffirms what the players are fighting against, keeping the metaphor of systemic oppression ever-present in the minds of the players. I read the World Scene as extremely supportive of players taking the reins and queering the narrative, giving everyone at the table a support system for narrative control and the opportunity to change rules, roles, and direction as desired.

Unlike the more common implied representations of queer life and queer people within the text of a TTRPG, Defy the Gods demands you play it queerly, and the mechanics challenge players to constantly push against the hegemonic powers established during the first session in order to create new, expansive exchanges of intimacy. This trick is most clearly laid out in the Play to Find Out section that reminds the GM that the adventure and setting are “props and metaphors” for the relationships, interpersonal drama, and emotional arcs. The point of the game, Sellers writes, is to get all your players to love deeply, earnestly, sincerely, and queerly and then directly endanger those relationships, to give them ambitions and then “grind them down,” to threaten and even kill their loved ones. Even when everything is stacked against you, even when the authorities, the gods, the world itself wants to eradicate you and everything you love, Defy the Gods tells you, in no uncertain terms, that your power is inherent, that you are bigger than what they think of you, and that you can always rely on those you love to make you stronger. You know who did this to you. Now, fight back.