To get ahead of my own anxieties: this is pretty much a personal reflection to help me figure out how I want to better focus my queerness in Sealed Pacts and Terra Philia: Prestige in Perversion (more the former than the latter, given the elevator pitches of each). That said, I know a lot of TTRPG creators are 1) queer and 2) trying to figure out how to communicate that queerness in their own work, so I make a few nods towards bringing readers along instead of just leaving my ideas all internal. I'm going to be focusing on three games (Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Dungeon Bitches, and Girl by Moonlight) because they all had successful crowdfunding campaigns, which I'm using as a proxy for "are they big enough to be significant in The Discourse." Notably, TSL & GbM are both published by Evil Hat, while DB is published independently. Any criticism I levy is not to disparage the authors of these works or to call the games bad, I'm Just Analyzing Over Here.
You can tell I'm anxious because I feel the need to write a huge-ass disclaimer. Anyways.
First: Where Is the Game?
The discussion around "what does a game do" (usually framed in the specific case of "is D&D a combat game or not") is nothing new, and frankly there are multiple functional (if not always compatible) answers to the question. For the sake of this discussion, my answer is thus: a game is exclusively what is written in the rules, the incentive structures they build, and the behaviors they directly assume or prompt. This perspective leads to Amaranth M's Game Focus Razor and the like. This is a limiting perspective, akin to ignoring the massive modding community of Skyrim, but for the purpose of writing TTRPGs it's useful. When writing a TTRPG, you cannot guarantee that whoever actually runs your game will understand it like you do; the text is all they have. Thus, the game is nothing except that which is written in its rulebook.
Put another way, I once read an anecdote of a novice designer observing a playtest of their game by a skilled GM, asking for feedback, and getting largely useless answers – right until someone at the table (I think it might have been Meguey Baker; at the very least, an experienced designer) pointed out that most of the comments were about the products of the skilled GM, not the rules. For a TTRPG designer, you can't count on there always being a skilled GM, so you have to either write their tools into the rules or build systems that limit how far a bad GM can stray. That is your game – the stove, not the food the players bring.
TL;DR I'm analyzing the texts of these games exclusively, where we must assume anyone could approach them – not just the people who are already aware of & receptive to queer identity & labels. If you come at me for saying I read the texts wrong, you'd better have quotes from the texts themselves.
Second: Which Version of "Queer" Am I Analyzing?
I said some of this in my original review of Girl by Moonlight, but I wanna dig into it more here. To my knowledge, there are 4 major meanings to the word "queer": catch-all, identity, political, and academic. The catch-all use is when "queer" gets substituted one-for-one with "LGBT+" because quite simply, that's too many letters. The identity use is intended to capture something "outside" the acronym's many components, usually referring to gender identities & sexualities that a speaker either cannot or will not define (and usually also tied up in the politics of using a label in the first place). The political use is epitomized in the (contemporary) saying "not gay as in Pride, queer as in fuck you," an anti-assimilationist position within the broader LGBT+ community that often pairs well with anti-capitalist, sex-positive, and individualist opinions. The academic use is about outsider positioning & resistance to dominant narratives, regardless of identity; QAnon is queer because it positions its adherents "outside" majority reality, even though it's a traditionally conservative community.1
For the sake of this discussion, I am particularly interested in TSL's, DB's, and GbM's queerness in the political sense – how they are or aren't supporting anti-assimilation politics rooted in outsider LGBT+ identities through the use of the word "queer." If it feels like a different sense of "queer" is being invoked, I'll discuss how that use of "queer" influences the politics that the rules evoke, juxtaposed to the queer politics I want evoked.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians
Thirsty Sword Lesbians, written by April Kit Walsh, comes right out of the gate (page 6) by saying it is a game for telling queer stories, though it immediately narrows that to "angsty disaster lesbians with swords." On page 11 it has a direct statement of its politics, demanding that players support queer liberation to play TSL.
The word "queer" isn't used again until the GM's section, where it gestures at mass media's history of villainizing queers (usually via queer-coding antagonists).
The glossary makes it pretty explicit that TSL is primarily using "queer" in the catch-all sense. Certainly, it has aspects of political queerness too; TSL's political statement demands respect for trans people, racialized people, neurodivergence, and more. Notably, it also lays out explicitly that people are not obligated to be educators about their marginalizations. I can't help but notice that it's mostly phrased in terms of "respect," however, in an enumerated list no less. It ends the list by saying, "If you don't agree [with these politics], fix your heart before sharing a table with other people." It's brash, don't get me wrong, but it calls to mind the soft-toothed protest signs declaring "RESPECT TRANS PEOPLE."
As for TSL's expectations of characters, they're never explicitly laid out (despite having a blurb on page 5 explaining what a thirsty sword lesbian does). It's pretty obviously assumed that they're all lesbians, but beyond that all bets are off; nuance is relegated to the table and your interpretations of the playbooks. That said, there are plenty of politics packed into the term "lesbian" – and thankfully, TSL's glossary provides us some insight on which politics TSL (or perhaps more accurately, Walsh herself) holds. Here, "lesbian" is defined as inclusively as possible: anyone trans, nonbinary, intersex, and/or bi that identifies with the label, movement, or community counts. Walsh frames lesbianism as primarily a challenge of Patriarchal womanhood, which may or may not mean identifying with womanhood in the process.
There's one more thing I want to hit before I get into the meat of how a character is mechanized (and what politics that produces), and that's the "hacking the game" section common in PbtA games. Specifically, there's a section titled "Adjusting the Premise" that addresses how you can remove magic, thirst, swords, or lesbianism itself. That last subsection acknowledges that the oppression lesbians experience is rather similar to other forms of oppression. The possibility of playing TSL with cishets is acknowledged, but it's assumed that said cishets will likely come out the other side "queer" – which brings me to the mechanics.
Bringing back that "what if TSL isn't thirsty" subsection, TSL defines its assumption that characters crave sexual or romantic connection only to refute it. Specifically, it suggests an alternate trigger condition for the Entice move:
Original: When you appeal to someone's physical or emotional sensibilities, roll +Heart
Alternative: When you appeal to someone's desire for emotional or social connection, roll +Heart
This is TSL's "flirting" move and the basic (if not primary) source of Strings, TSL's representation of connection & influence between characters. Being honest, I remembered it being more explicit than this; I probably mixed it up a bit with Dungeon Bitches. Strings can be used to tempt players into action, help/hinder on rolls, or (when sufficiently accumulated) generate XP. The only other mechanization of relationships is the Smitten move, which triggers when (at the player's discretion) a character becomes smitten with someone. When smitten, the player reflects on their playbook's core question & problem in relation to romance, self-sabotaging to reinforce the disaster lesbian archetype. In case it wasn't obvious, this is TSL's version of the "moment of intimacy" or sex moves.
What I draw from this is that, while TSL isn't afraid of sex per se, it's doing its best to put its attention on the emotions and romance instead. It calls to my mind a certain era of Tumblr lesbian, where cishet Patriarchy was heavily defined by sex and lesbianism was explicitly posed against it. IIRC that moment was also where "sapphic" became especially popularized in internet slang, queer/sapphic love was defined as something wholly distinct from cishet love, and the puriteen movement got its start in saying queer/sapphic relationships shouldn't center sex. The result, at least for me, is that TSL feels like a game that would really rather not be seen as a horny game. It uses euphemisms like "turned on" rather than saying "aroused" or "horny," and discussions of sex are relegated to setting books at most (despite demanding players "respect sex workers" in the political statement mentioned above). Heck, when TSL describes what characters do, there are line items for "redeem or seduce adversaries" and "make out, dance, and carouse," but nothing about being Actually Horny as characters.
This all said, I do want to give TSL props for centering queer political questions in many of its playbooks. To pick some examples, the Infamous asks about harmful legacies, the Seeker presses unquestioned beliefs against a new sense of justice, and the Spooky Witch juxtaposes the pressure to conform with the pressure to be something distinctly Other. In this sense, I do see how cishet characters can come out the other side being queer, even if it's arguably more a resonance between queerness and outsider narratives in general.
Okay, time to wrap up the TSL section. TSL emphasizes queer identity far more than it pushes queer politics. It is frequently brash, but hesitant to be truly exclusive to anyone. The edges of queerness are sanded off to create something loudly welcoming, but lacking much indication that queerness is something that must be fought for (I hesitate to call it "tenderqueer," but I suspect there is some resonance there). In some sense, it is a relief to so casually assume queer existence, especially given the rise of conservative politics in many countries. At the same time, I can't help but feel it's struggling to find a core narrative or purpose, especially as its settings depend heavily on gesturing at queerphobic beliefs without ever enumerating them. The Patriarchy is a ghost that haunts Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and it cannot be exorcised by the soft queerness the rules support.
Dungeon Bitches
Dungeon Bitches, by Emily F. Allen, outdoes TSL by declaring on its very title page, "This game is kinda packed with angry queer lefty stuff. It's a game about queer women, and the way shared trauma brings us together. If you're not on board with that, then this game isn't for you." My experience with DB is that this matches its attitude towards queerness – direct, unapologetic, and extremely open. Where TSL avoided using "queer" through much of its text, DB names one of its stats Queer all its own. On page 6 it outright states that a player character (called a Bitch) is a:
- Queer
- Woman
- With no place in polite society
This is also where my personal friction started with the game: when the writing immediately tries to hedge those first two qualities.
You can be ace or bi or whatever so long as The Straights don't get it.
You're a woman if you or your fellow Dungeon Bitches say you are – or maybe you're not a woman, but also distinctly not a man.
When I describe DB to others, I often describe the vibe as "that particular kind of lesbian punk who really wants to be accepting and will absolutely be welcoming to fellow queers, but doesn't quite get why non-lesbians don't want to hang around her spaces." The section explaining Sex Moves opens by saying, "We're playing as disaster-lesbians trapped in a horrible situation, so they're probably gonna fuck eventually," focusing on how Sex Moves represent the playbooks' most vulnerable and intense moments – but also you totally don't have to fuck if you don't want to, there are Intimacy Moves you can take instead. The advice for playing nonbinary characters is that they should "[be] at home in female spaces" – and the matter of what that means is left as "a complex [question], which needs to be approached with nuance and sensitivity." These moments of friction are infrequent, but all the more glaring for their presence in an otherwise refreshingly queer and messy game.
Despite my troubles, I do want to emphasize that DB goes above and beyond with trying to create queer and messy stories. It discusses the messiness of birth control and transitioning, with magic serving to make both possible but not easy. A host of lesbian archetypes are represented in the playbooks (called Deals, as in "what's this Bitch's Deal"), ranging from the violent Amazon to the peaceful Runaway Nun, the innocent Lantern Girl to the predatory Beast. I was elated to see neopronouns get some time in the spotlight to refer to hypothetical or archetypal characters. It is a game determined to recognize and respect the traumas we undergo, and how those wounds can lead us to hurt those close to us in turn.
All of this leads me to conclude DB is using "queer" in the political sense primarily, perhaps even ignoring its catch-all or identity senses. It explicitly frames the party as a group of outsiders, doing the work polite society refuses to acknowledge and riding the knife's edge of survival. It is extremely horny and sex-positive, going so far as to have advice on how to ERP for the inexperienced (I don't know how those people would find this game, but sure). Queer, as a stat, is used equally for flirting and communing with powers even further outside society. DB is an important marker in the Overton Window of queer TTRPGs, demonstrating just how far we can really take our art.
That all said, DB is a game extremely intended for specific kinds of people and only really functions well when met on those terms – a fact that makes the friction mentioned above all the more noticeable. You see, DB is a system with one goal above all others: hurt the players' characters to push the players towards catharsis, whether through their spiraling demise or through the brief moments of community, healing, and recovery that bring them together. In some sense, this is even more emblematic of the game's queer politics – it has one vision in mind, and it delivers it without compromise. As someone whose tastes don't align with its goals, however, I could feel the dissonance as both a GM and a player. I think a good litmus test is: if you don't know that you're comfortable exploring a playbook that's riding the line between being a successful womanizer and a sexual predator (the aforementioned Beast playbook), DB may not be for you.
To summarize, DB is the most politically queer of the three games I'm analyzing here, but its unbending disaster-lesbian intent (expressed both in the writing and through the mechanics) causes its gestures at inclusivity to ring hollow. It is not afraid to name the struggles we face, and in fact has many useful tools to bring those forces to life in towns, dungeons, and monsters. It is also determined to replicate what we live: those forces will win, inevitably. Our survival and joys are mere temporary victories. Dungeon Bitches is a leftist queer punk game of catharsis, of reliving our traumas in fiction where we have a measure of control, and I don't know if I'll ever feel comfortable playing it.
Girl by Moonlight
This is probably mostly going to be a rehash of my earlier review, but: Girl by Moonlight, by Andrew Gillis, first uses the word "queer" on page 6, under the section header "Why Magical Girls?" There, it declares that it is reinterpreting magical girl narratives to be allegories for "self-discovery and queer identity." It uses the word again on page 9, reaffirming that in the context of GbM magical girls are "a metaphor for queer self-realization, and their magical transformation is an allegory for their own self-discovery." On page 29, there is the player principle "See Things through a Queer Lens," which emphasizes resistant narratives over any identity labels. Finally, on page 107, the player principles are restated, producing a use of "queer" referentially.
These are the only times "queer" is used; the index only refers to pages 9 and 29 as noteworthy.
To restate my position, to be queer in GbM is to be resistant to dominant narratives: to see healing in destruction, to feel the human in the monstrous, to discover third answers within supposed binaries. In short, GbM centers the academic sense of "queer." With this description, "queer identity" could just as well be "Republican in a progressive college town" as it could be "off-axis genderfreak with an identity melting pot polycule and a growing kink collection." In some ways, this definition does a good job of being anti-assimilationist—you cannot be simultaneously resisting a dominant narrative and seeking to better conform to it—but it lacks the teeth of queer politics.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh on this game, though; certainly, "See Things through a Queer Lens" specifically mentions that the protagonists "defy monolithic cultural expectations concerning gender and relationships." The individualist and identity-first phrasing is much more compatible with left-wing politics than right-wing, and the description of Transcendence—the magical transformations—explicitly highlights that a protagonist's "look, their body, their gender, might all shift to reflect the true self that otherwise lies hidden within them."
The word that keeps sticking out to me is that "might." Protagonists might change their lived performance during transformation. The world they navigate might despise them for their gender or sexuality. The foes they face might be a nihilistic version of their future, where hope is lost and they choose instead to accelerate the world's demise. For those looking for reparative readings, this is a deliberate decision to expand the scope of queerness to encompass anyone and everyone's lived experience. For people like myself who are inclined towards paranoid readings, however, there is the looming specter of saying "no" to every opportunity for queerness.
I am reminded of Discourse around "what does it mean to be trans." Is it HRT? Is it dysphoria? Is it community? Trying to define it concretely inevitably runs into the same issues as trying to define any word, whether through cluster-definitions or single qualities: inevitably, you can find a case that people will accept without any critical qualities, or reject despite having most/all of them. GbM feels like it wants to be a queer game, but doesn't want to accidentally reject anyone by taking a firmer stance towards what "queer" means and the politics it entails.
Speaking of which: GbM doesn't have any stated politics! I didn't notice this on my first read, but when juxtaposed to TSL and DB this lack comes to the forefront. This perhaps explains why my paranoid reading feels so much more present in the text compared to the others. While the general tone of the text may be vaguely off-putting to the kinds of fash that reconcile identity politics for their own ends, there isn't anything I can point to that would make it clear this isn't a game for them. On its own & among friends this isn't strictly a problem, but it does make me concerned about how well it can actually maintain its queerness long-term. Put another way, GbM feels ripe for reconciliation, like Postmates advertising a Pride menu with an eggplant dressed in leather gear. If your queerness isn't transgressive there isn't really anything preventing mainstream culture from aestheticizing and reconciling your "resistance," and GbM implies without defining that transgression.
For parity I want to have a section here about any queerness in GbM's mechanics, but I'm struggling to find positive qualities. At best, the Eclipse system's capacity to be reversed without lasting effects means players can push their characters past their limits without worrying about accidental character burnout. At worst, Transcendence lasts for an inherently limited time, which—given the explicit connection between Transcendence and "living your queer truth"—implies that queer truth is inherently unsustainable. This is to say nothing of the knock-on effects of necessarily treadmilling in a game's conflict: the protagonists must always be outside the mundane world, the mundane world must always crush their spirits incidentally, and their adversaries must always be capable of returning for another season (outside of one particular series playset). As for the playbooks, I don't think you can rightly claim that any of them deliberately explore questions of queer identity. There are resonances, to be sure, just as there are resonances with any outsider narrative, but there is no explicitly queer question at the heart of any of these playbooks like there are in some of TSL's playbooks.
In sum, GbM uses "queer" academically, and in trying to be wholly welcoming fails to do much beyond that. The temporary nature of Transcendence pairs with the inherently-oppressive settings to, like DB, provide no sense of lasting hope to the world. There are hints of politics scattered through the text, but most of the queerness (as identity & politics) in the game must be brought by readers and players. I'm left with the eerie sensation of being told I'm welcome to the table, but seeing none of myself reflected in the eyes of those seated. Where the Patriarchy is a ghost haunting TSL, for Girl by Moonlight it is a miasma infusing its pages: smelled but never seen, omnipresent but never named, and all too easily lived within uncritically.
Bringing It All Together
I was hoping at the end of my analysis I could find some throughline to queerness in each of these games, but I think I've simply rediscovered the linguistic overloading of "queer" (recognizing that I'm also predisposed to doing so). The only sense of "queer" that was left out of focus was the identity sense, but that's not too surprising; such an identity deliberately resists categorization, and as such is unlikely to be rendered into a game's rules without being extremely personal. You could maybe argue that GbM tries to capture the identity use through its broad definitions, but that's like saying an empty building can be a community center; it's not that it's welcoming, it's just not outright rejecting people.
Through the lens of queer politics, my opinion is that GbM largely fails to be queer, TSL is decent (if moderate), and DB is exemplary. It's worth recognizing that TSL & GbM are also both Evil Hat games, i.e. produced with the help of an established publisher for mass market audiences. I don't want to imply that the editors at Evil Hat—Karen Twelves for TSL, Daniel Wood & Jenn Martin for GbM—are ~suppressing good queer politics~ or something. Rather, I want to acknowledge that there are multiple filtration steps between project conception and final publication. Targeting larger audiences doesn't just coerce creators & their supports to make their politics more "publicly acceptable," it also selects for creators & supporters who are already publicly acceptable. Like, I highly doubt we're going to see Terra Philia get picked up by a place like Evil Hat, sex is already a touchy subject in the publishing world even without my attempts to suffuse it with achievable sex-positive politics.
Despite all this, if someone asked me to recommend a "queer game," I don't think I can justifiably tell them off of any of these games. They each have their own problems, to be sure: GbM's queerness can feel like mere lip service, TSL is sometimes more bark than bite, and DB arguably overshoots and is too specific to suit many players' needs. I would probably be inclined to recommend TSL first, since it is specifically delivering vibes-based genre over anything setting-specific, but GbM and DB are both at least competent in their intents.
Let's look at the TTRPG scene more broadly, though. TSL & GbM are probably more representative of how "queer" gets used in what I'll call the "mainstream indie" TTRPG community, while DB is probably juuuuust on the popular side of "games sold exclusively on Itch.io." What does this mean for "queer" in TTRPGs? Well... It's somewhere between an identity marker and a marketing term at this point. Like, GbM obviously isn't claiming queerness as a cynical ploy to sell more copies, but I think its queerness gets oversold as identity-centric when, as I've hopefully demonstrated, it's really just academic. I doubt TSL & GbM will be the end of "popular queer TTRPGs" as a genre, but I suspect they are indicative of where the bar will be set: approachable, respectable, and inclined to hedge statements for fear of rejecting people. For "politically queer TTRPGs," we'll probably be stuck with following specific designers, sifting through Itch.io uploads, and occasionally crowdfunding to see our darlings put to print.
Side note: Walsh, Allen, Gillis, if you see this post, I really hope you feel comfortable responding & dissecting how much of your games' politics are deliberate vs accidental/how much you agree now with the version of yourself that you fixed in ink. That you each made a queer game with a sizeable audience is an impressive feat in its own right, and for all I criticize you did good work.
What I'm Taking from This
Ultimately, none of these games perfectly reflect my desires for queerness in TTRPGs & personal identity, but that's to be expected. There's a reason I'm making my own games, after all. The point of this exercise was to evaluate how I'm left unsatisfied & figure out ways to fix that in my own work.
To start, I suppose let's establish my position away from each of the games discussed. My biggest problem with Dungeon Bitches is its tone, being honest; progressive politics are rife with doom and gloom these days, and I'm not immune to their pull. I am also so, so tired of being mired in this cynicism, of believing hope can only be fleeting and stability is impossible. Thirsty Sword Lesbians has the triumphant tone I want, but it lacks a lot of the bite to its politics that I want. Practically speaking, I think my issue is that its intended core conflict—the lesbian party against the powers of Patriarchy—isn't represented in its mechanics at all. As for Girl by Moonlight, it and I are both aligned (at least for Sealed Pacts) in that we want transformation to stand in for queer identity, but I think it politically struggles by having limited ways of permanently resolving the a campaign's problems. Like many systems, it is written for perpetual play, and that traps its characters into sitcom-like static natures.
On another axis, all three of these games fail to reflect my queer experience & identity – and I think that reveals some of the problems with calling them simply "queer games." Fact of the matter is, TSL and DB are both centered on lesbians, and while there will be resonances to other queer identities it will not wholly support them. GbM, meanwhile, feels like it was originally intended to be a specifically trans game, but soft-pedaled itself into poorly trying to encompass the entirety of queerness. I think it's important then to recognize I don't want a strictly "queer" game – I want a trans game, that understands the body as something that can be changed to influence your mind. I want a nonbinary game, that atomizes anatomy and gendered performance. I want an asexual game, that looks at sex and sexuality beyond the having or not-having and equations with intimacy. I want an aromantic game, that puts platonic and romantic relationships on explicitly even footing.
So, what does this mean for my own games? Well, the identity stuff is fairly easy I think. It's been in my design docs since day one that Sealed Pacts models a puberty that happens to you, even if players still get to choose the whats, hows, and whys. The formation of pacts to gain magical powers reshapes characters' bodies and minds, including changes like growing tits or dicks. The facticity of these transformations is how I'm representing my experience of my own body: it's not about what I have/lack, gain/lose, it's about what I do with my body as it stands. If you read the Terra Philia terabiologist MVP, there's an entire navel-gazing section where I discuss how the Arousal system reflects my ace experiences.
I haven't considered my aromanticism in the context of a game before this point, though, so let's noodle on that a bit. The cop-out answer is "just don't put relationship mechanics in a game," or the closely-related "never specify whether a relationship mechanic is platonic or romantic," but I think both of those just defer the matter to cultural authority where romance still takes priority. I think the mission brief of Terra Philia, "a horny game that prioritizes niche sexual experiences" makes it ill-suited for explicit aromantic mechanics; I've been designing it with an eye towards one-shots and basically TTRPG-based porn rather than anything particularly highbrow. So, the mechanic has to be in Sealed Pacts (specifically its narrative half), and needs to directly address the cultural inequity between romantic and platonic relationships.
I can probably do some preliminary work with pact transformations, pushing characters to dip in and out of romance and/or friendship. I could also have some Powers explicitly run on friendship rather than romance, creating contexts where platonic bonds are prioritized. Given that the narrative side is modeled after PbtA, though, I can't help but feel there's something productive I could do with "moment of intimacy"-style Moves... My immediate thought is that, considering I've also been struggling to give the Alliances more identity, I could probably give each Alliance a selection of such Moves, using them to explore how each community conceptualizes relationships – what's important to them, what are they built on, what do they consider sexual/intimate/friendly, etc. That'd give me space to explore relationships more thoroughly outside of romance. Consider it added to the design doc.
As for my queer politics, I have some ideas but I admit I'm not confident in them yet. Like, to cut Walsh and Gillis some slack, it's hard to bake queer politics into a game's mechanics! DB arguably doesn't even manage it consistently, and a lot of its queerness also depends on its cynical tone to give it appropriate context. Still, I already have a couple ideas. For Sealed Pacts, one of my core design goals has been delivering "hope for a better world after the end of the world." I've had some thoughts brewing about campaigns transitioning from capitalist to community-centric models of survival (i.e. from a goal of "make money" to a goal of "keep helpful people close to you"), but most of my ideas were either too nebulous or too cruft-y. In writing this, though, I think there's a productive route where I create something like a FitD Crew sheet that represents the players' direct community. This could pair with the apocalypse clock I'd already planned to create escalating survival needs and relief from those survival needs, which would give the end of the world essential pressure while highlighting the need to form resilient communities in our own world.
For Terra Philia, meanwhile, there are already some queer politics in the game's structure: positioning terabiologists at the juncture between capitalist exploitation and local community, normalizing fetishes and nonstandard sexual experiences, and the explicit focus away from mainstream respectable society all come to mind as important aspects. That said, I think a lot more of my politics will show up in my maybe-someday sequel/extension Terra Philia: Under the Freak Flag. That one jumps forward 200 years to a version of Terra Philia where capitalism ultimately won out, turning what was once a sexual frontier into another business enterprise. In many ways, its starting point will match DB's: oppressed queer laborers doing the dirty work polite society doesn't want to acknowledge it depends on. I think the trick will be building systems that avoid cementing that status quo into stone. While it's probably a decade away from seeing development, I'm thinking having rules for building autonomous zones, worker co-ops, maybe even revolutions for local independence through interdimensional solidarity. We'll see how these ideas develop as I work through core Terra Philia development & start crystallizing what Under the Freak Flag could/should look like.
Good gods this post ended up being so long. Am I done? I think I'm done. If you know of other queer games & have feelings/opinions about how they contribute to the concept of queerness in TTRPGs, please do let me know. I'm also happy to hear from folks who think TSL, DB, and GbM do better jobs than I think they do; I'm just one queer after all, it'd be good for me to know how other folks are engaging with the topic. I'll do my best to focus on understanding your perspective rather than trying to refute it. Otherwise, uhhhhhh enjoy the footnote jumpscare for something I mentioned almost 5,000 words ago.
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Someone could probably write a whole thesis on the de-queering of QAnon through its rise to prominence in the conservative political landscape, such that mainstream media & politicians must engage with aspects of its beliefs, but that's out of scope here.
