299 - Thirsty Sword Lesbians with April Walsh
Thirst, swords, and lesbians
April Walsh’s day job is as a civil liberties attorney for a nonprofit organization, but she also has a passion for game design and queer stories. Thus, along with a diverse team of authors, Thirsty Sword Lesbians was designed, the table top roleplaying game that centralizes queer storytelling and uplifts marginalized people’s experiences.
Throughout the episode, April covers a variety of topics relating to Thirsty Sword Lesbians:
The Kickstarter description talks about TSL characters fundamentally craving affection, which is almost unheard of in role playing games. April expands on how that decision was reached and how it plays out in the actual game.
Fundamental roadblocks in portraying queer or nontraditional relationships in games.
The combat aspect of the game, which employs tactics like wit and flirtation to provide more robust options as opposed to sole physical conflict.
Playing characters in the game who aren’t lesbians, as well as reactions that some have given to having the word “lesbians” in the title of the game.
TSL’s team of writers and consultants.
Next steps for TSL and reception and backlash to the Kickstarter.
Find out everything else there is to know about Thirsty Sword Lesbians at swordlesbians.com, and follow April on Twitter to learn more about her and her work.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about queer storytelling and representation with tabletop game designer April Walsh. April is the designer of Thirsty Sword Lesbians and other games that center and celebrate queer stories. She's also, as a side job, a civil liberties attorney. Probably that's the other way around.
April: Yes, it's the other way around.
Jase: Also a civil liberties attorney at a nonprofit organization protecting the rights of journalists, researchers and the general public. April, thank you so much for joining us today.
April: Thank you so much for having me and being excited about my game, Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
Dedeker: Oh, very much so. I have to say that as soon as I found out about it, I posted the link in our private Patreon group on Facebook and just overwhelming response. Absolutely overwhelming response. Clearly, it's striking a bell with certain people.
April: Yes. We've got over 5,200 backers right now.
Dedeker: Oh my goodness.
April: We just crossed 200,000K in funding as of the recording now on November 3rd and still going. We've got over a week to go and a bunch more stretch goals.
Jase: That's so cool.
April: Yes, it's really incredible and something I needed in 2020, and it sounds like other people needed some joy and fun and queer storytelling as well.
Emily: Oh, heck yes.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. As in we shouldn't-- Don't let anyone tell you that queers don't sell.
April: Oh, yes.
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: Can I ask real quick about the pronunciation of the name of the game? I called it Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and you said Thirsty Soared Lesbians. Is there a particular emphasis for how it's supposed to go? It's like Brits.
Emily: The sword is thirsty.
April: Sword lesbians is a queer meme for lesbians with swords and art of women with swords. I didn't just want to call it Sword Lesbians, the RPG. I considered Slash Fic, the RPG or Fem Slash-
Dedeker: Oh, that's good.
Jase: That's fun, yes.
April: -the RPG.
Emily: Love it.
April: But no, they're Thirsty Sword Lesbians, although the spooky witch archetype, everyone has a sword look that they describe. You could have an elemental sword or a famous sword. The spooky witch can have a thirsty sword, and it's up to you what your sword thirsts for.
Dedeker: Okay. Exciting. So Thirsty--
Emily: I love it.
Jase: Sword Lesbians. Got it. Thank you for clarifying that for me.
Emily: Okay. You are this attorney by day, and then you are this game designer by night. Does your work in both fields intersect or overlap each other, or is this completely different, completely new for you in doing this?
April: I think it definitely overlaps. A lot of the tools for moderating the conversation that happens at an RPG table are similar to tools that you use in activist organizing, particularly grassroots organizing, or figuring out a brainstorm between multiple colleagues where you want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to provide input, and also an interest in making sure that people who are marginalized are able to tell their stories.
Professionally, my work on net neutrality and on protecting against overly restrictive copyright claims helps people who don't own massive media conglomerates be able to participate in culture. Fan culture is a part of that as well, so it's not all journalists and activists. Sometimes people just want to be a part of culture because it's fun, and it's part of being a human and expressing yourself. That is both part of my professional work but also part of the ethos of Thirsty Sword Lesbians where I am absolutely centering lesbians, but it is super just-- As written, it's super inclusive of asexual takes, aromantic takes or anyone on those spectra of bisexuals, pansexuals. As a stretch goal, we added men, so Lucian Kahn-
Emily: I love that.
April: -who is an award-winning game designer wrote Gaylords. This was the first stretch goal, so you are gay male warlords, and it's a reflection of the '90s culture that he's familiar with. It's cheeky and fun to be like for once men are the stretch goal, but also, it was the first stretch goal. We were pretty sure we were going to hit it because I don't actually want to leave anybody out. Yes, it's not prescriptive at all, which is also a very queer way to think about relationships.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely.
Emily: My partner is one of the creators of Hero Forge, which also had a very successful Kickstarter campaign back in the day, but when I think about it, it is a very cis male type kind of thing. It seems like D&D and tabletop gaming, like when my head first went to it, it's like a bunch of big group of guys sitting around and just playing these games. I love the fact that there's a different thing that is out and that is bringing marginalized groups to the forefront. It's so fantastic and very different than what I think other experiences of tabletop gaming are or people.
April: I cut my gaming teeth on those kind of systems. My first RPG I ran on the school bus in second grade, and we rolled dice in a shoe box. It was the old Star Wars RPG.
Dedeker: It was the Star Wars d20 or the one before that?
April: It was d6. Yes, it was the West End Games one. I played a bunch of D&D, and to my modern moral sensibilities, I don't want to go and kill the designated evil races and take their things. I don't want to be told that your race inherently affects your characteristics in a game changing way that means that some types of people can't do some professions. I think there's a lot to enjoy in the hobby, but I also think there's a big hunger for stories that are told from a different perspective and make more space for relationship-focused play or ethical play, honestly.
It's not as if everyone in Thirsty Sword Lesbians is perfect. In fact, every single archetype has an emotional conflict that the person is grappling with. You are disaster lesbians. You are fun, and we love to hear about your stories because you make so much drama. It's a game that creates those melodramatic stories, and it focuses on feelings. In combat, the stakes aren't, do I get stabbed so much that I fall down, or do I stab you so much that I take your money or whatever? There are no hip points. There's no mechanic that tells you, now you're bleeding or decapitated.
The stress of conflict can cause you to get emotional conditions, so you might become angry or insecure. That's part of a play loop where then your comrades can give you emotional support to help you recover from those conditions, or if you don't get that, you can just act out. You can do something destructive. If you're angry, you can break something important. This is part of giving the table permission to play imperfect people who are going to do things that are destructive and melodramatic but not harmful to each other at a player level.
There's a whole lot of mutual respect and safety tools and consent built into the mechanics as well as the way they're framed to make sure that you can touch on things that are deeply emotional and people who are even causing harm without that happening outside of the story level. All of the players need to be safe and consenting to what's going on, but it actually-- When you have that framework, it gives you more of an ability to explore challenging issues than if you have no framework to make sure that you're able to touch on those in a way that's going to be safe for people.
Emily: That's wonderful. Is that something that drew you to game design in the first place, or what has drawn you to deciding to like, "I need to create something that represents who I am and my peers and things like that"?
April: It may not surprise you that I have played sword lesbians in a lot of different systems, and I did not exactly find the game that I wanted, which is a game that has all the features that I was just talking about and is a celebration of queer love and power. I think it's really important to share stories about queer suffering and to build empathy, but also, it's okay to just celebrate and be happy and show that also people who are marginalized can have fun and are worth celebrating.
There is a combination of things that I wanted in an RPG and didn't find it, so I made it. It seems like a bunch of other people are getting excited about it too. We have a lot of folks who are-- this is their first non-D&D RPG, or it's their first time backing a Kickstarter or trying an RPG. It seems like I was not the only one who needed this, and that's really exciting.
Dedeker: I will say that I think this is my first time ever feeling an urge to actually run a game of any kind, to be totally honest.
Emily: You want to DM or--?
Dedeker: Yes. I've played a lot of games, and I've never had the urge to DM. It helps that my partner, Alex, right now he's DMing his first D&D campaign. It's actually been inspiring to see him go through the process and learning stuff and things like that, but then when I saw this, I was like, "This is the kind of world that I would totally love to sink into and be orchestrating things in that way".
I found out about Thirsty Sword Lesbians because I have a Google search alert for the phrase relationship anarchy, which brings up all kinds of fascinating results on a daily basis. It brought up this quote from the Kickstarter, "Thirsty Sword Lesbians is explicitly designed to tell melodramatic and queer stories; tales fraught with relationship triangles, mystery, intrigue, relationship anarchy, celebration, and revolution". Of course, instantly intrigued on my part, but that is a pretty broad description.
For our listeners, can you tell us a little bit more in detail about the premise of Thirsty Sword Lesbians? Then I also want to set up that we have a lot of questions, and I put them into the broad categories of questions about thirst, questions about swords, and questions about lesbians. We will be getting more in there, but just for our listeners, can you give us the pitch line essentially or the logline for Thirsty Sword Lesbians?
April: Yes. Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a storytelling game for telling queer stories in any setting where swords cross and hearts race. It's based on--
Jase: That's great. I love that.
April: It's consistent in mood and genre in a sense in that it's about people in queer situations having melodrama in relationships and this motif of conflict and exploring yourself in one another through that. In terms of the genre like sci-fi, fantasy, cyberpunk, we have settings for all of those and more. We're up to more than 20 different settings. That was part of why an alternate name would be Slash Fic, the RPG, is you can take your favorite thing with swords and run it with this game and make it gay. That's all that I want for my media really like, "Okay, that's a cool premise. Now it's mine, and I'm going to make it gay with my friends". Fanfic or RPGs or whatever.
Jase: I love that idea of just taking all sorts of different fandoms that you might enjoy and taking one of these modules and then slotting it in and doing a short little campaign of whatever, being the voice from Supernatural or making the triad that should have happened in the latest Star Wars movie actually be real or all sorts of those things.
April: Maybe you're going to ask a question about relationship anarchy.
Dedeker: Oh, we probably will. I think that's actually a good segue into our next question here.
Emily: Into thirst.
Dedeker: Questions about thirst.
Emily: Let's talk a little bit about thirst, the thirst in Thirsty Sword. In the Kickstarter description, it's mentioned that the characters of thirsty was sword lesbians. They fundamentally crave connection, which is really cool. Again, it sounded almost as though you were not talking about usual D&D where there's a lot of violence and people are killing each other and stuff like that. This is just about emotional connection. That really is unheard of for a role-playing game, for the basis of a role-playing game. How did you come to that, and how does that end up playing out in the game? That connection.
April: You're exactly right that the thirst is for any deep emotional connections. Like I said before, it could be romantic. It could be physical, or it could not be. It could be platonic. There are a lot of stories about found family that emerge from it. There are several games that built pieces of mechanics that help you center emotional stories. The three that are the biggest influence for me would be Masks, Monsterhearts, and The Watch. Each of them introduced a way of thinking about either relationships or feelings.
The way that conditions are done in Thirsty Sword Lesbians is very similar to the way that they're done in Masks. The concept of strings as a measure of emotional closeness or savvy is somewhat similar to Monsterhearts, but in Thirsty Sword Lesbians, it's a bit more value neutral. If I'm vulnerable with you, you're going to get this emotional leverage that you can use to help me or to hurt me.
Emily: Interesting.
April: It's an act of vulnerability, and mechanics that shape your experience as a player and give you a taste of what your character is experiencing are my favorite bit of game design for bringing out feelings. There are ways that your character might wind up tempted to do something, and it's always your choice. You always have control over how your character chooses to act, but if you do the bad idea and you kiss this person, then you'll get an XP for it. Often, all people meet as an excuse to make the dramatic choice. An XP is a cool thing, but also, it's permission be like, "Yes, I can tell a story about someone who's giving in to temptation, and then we're going to play out the complications that derive from that".
I definitely condensed what I had seen in other RPGs and stitched it together and added some other mechanics. I'm really proud of the smitten mechanic, which is just whenever you find yourself smitten with somebody, basically what happens is we ask a question that comes out of your archetype about why it would be challenging to pursue that relationship. If you're the trickster and your whole emotional deal is that you crave closeness and you fear vulnerability, then you have to answer the question: what secret do you have that you're sure would cause them to reject you?
Emily: Wow.
April: That's making sure that we have an interesting romance story with obstacles or an interesting other connections story. There are obstacles to it. You're not building up love points or whatever, mechanizing relationships that way. It's not something I was excited about, but you're saying, "This is important to me. Everyone at the table at the player level now knows this is a plot point that you can poke for drama that I'm excited about, I'm invested in". That helps the gay master as well as the other players to tell the story with you and spotlight your character.
Jase: Did you just say gay master or game master?
April: I did.
Dedeker: Oh my gosh. I like it.
Emily: Love it.
Dedeker: I want to talk about relationship anarchy and non-traditional relationships because I do think that sometimes the way it feels anyway is it feels that there's fundamental difficulties or roadblocks in portraying non-traditional relationships, queered relationships in games in general. However, just when you made that comment about building up "love points", I realize like, "Oh yes, that's also the way that monogamy is portrayed in a lot of games or video games or stuff like that". It's like we even have a hard time just portraying relationship and gamifying relationship at all. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on that and your experience with that.
April: I definitely haven't thought of it as gamifying the relationship. I think there is an element of that to strings, but a lot of it is making sympathetic interesting people who have a network of interconnections. When you make characters, there are some relationship prompts that demonstrate what your initial sentiments about each other are going to be ,and then you get to choose how many strings you have with each other person or how many you give to each other person. How much do I think you get me? How much do I care what you think? Et cetera. That's the first act of vulnerability where--
Giving someone a string in a game where that's adversarial, that feels bad. That's like, "Oh, no you're going to mess with me". In Thirsty Sword Lesbians, this is like, "I hope you use this well". If not, it'll be dramatic and fun, and I'll be mad, and we might have a sword fight and then make up and make out about it.
April: There's no tracking binary relationships strength, or comparing it, or being exclusive. You can be smitten with as many people as you want. That's a question that sometimes people ask like, "Can I be smitten with more than one person?" You can. You can do that.
Emily: Hell, yes.
April: You will wind up probably being vulnerable with multiple other characters, and the way that your relationship forms is going to come out of the story and who your characters are and what experiences they go through together. You could wind up having one partner that you are into romantically, and that's the one for you, or your whole party could become a fully connected polycule.
Dedeker: Oh my God, this is why I wanted DM something like this. I've just-- It's just exciting
Emily: GM.
Jase: GM, gay master.
April: In the scenarios, there are references to polycules as well. It's absolutely a part of the canon worlds that are presented and part of the glossary in case someone comes to the book without being familiar. Then there's some sneaky mechanics that are in there. The devoted is the archetype that's exploring toxic self-sacrifice where you give so much and don't take care of yourself. They have a move that basically gives them a bonus when they help someone that they're smitten with be with somebody else.
You read that from a monogamous point of view, you're like, "Oh, the angst. That's going to tell such good jealousy and heartbreak stories". You read that from a poly point of view, and you're like, "I can get points for conversion, like being happy for this person I care about. That's fantastic. Let me hit that button". There are a few places where there are little Easter eggs where the way you read might shake your experience of it, but there's also room to discover that it actually can work in a different way as well.
Jase: Very cool.
Dedeker: It's so exciting. It's a little bit bittersweet because at the same time I think the reason people are so, so, so excited about this is that-- People have just been desperate for these little bits of representation for so long. I'm coming at it from the non-monogamous perspective of just that, of just like, "Oh, yes, I'm just seeing this really, really tiny way", and that produces this almost inappropriate level of excitement about that because I feel like so many people have been so starved of this for so long.
April: We definitely are a very queer team, a very diverse team. We have five authors who contributed settings in addition to me. I'm the designer. I write the rules stuff and one of the settings. Now there are over 20 of them. I didn't write most of them. The game absolutely benefits from having all of those perspectives. It's just getting better and better, which is really exciting. There's Thirsty Sword Lesbian content that I didn't have to write. I just get to see this neat stuff that's out there. I get to have that experience as well that you're describing.
Jase: That's super cool. You mentioned earlier about maybe there's some conflict in that relationship, and you're going to have to have a sword fight and maybe make out afterward. Let's segue into talking about swords. A lot of role-playing games rely on combat systems. That's the bulk of the die rolling and the math you're having to do playing a game is based around how combat works. A lot of RPG storytelling revolves around combat, so it seems like you're trying to do something different with that game design where you might be able to resolve a situation through something like wit, or flirtation, or a really good zinger one-liner.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? How does it work? How does that play out, and then also, how do the stakes vary compared to something where you might be clashing swords all the time?
April: For sure. I'll talk about six first actually. I hinted at this a little bit earlier in terms of like when you get into a fight, there's not a chance that the dice are going to tell you you've been dismembered or something. That's not what's at stake. What we're interested in is how it's going to change the relationships between characters. It could be the people fighting. It could be someone you're fighting for or with, but the question that we're fundamentally asking when we get into those scenes of intense conflict are how does this change the character is relationship.
To some extent, the swords are metaphorical. There's guidance for you could do this with intense chess games where you're peering at your opponent and flirting with them, and that one's called queen takes queen. They're all puns. My creative process is highly pun dependent.
Emily: That's fantastic.
April: That's fundamentally what's at stake. There may be what I would call situational stakes as well. In the narrative, we need to get past this person in order to turn off their laser or whatever. There's still a question because in the conflict, how do you get past that person? Do you just bop them until they stop fighting you? Do you gaze deeply into their eyes and understand something fundamental about their soul and motivations and then talk to them about it and persuade them that there's something else they should be doing? Do you just seduce them and make out and then forget to turn off the laser because they're too hot? There are a lot of things that you can do.
In this system, when you and an opponent have your swords drawn and you're clashing, you're not necessarily rolling the fight move. You might be rolling to figure them out. You might be rolling to entice them. You might even be giving them emotional support depending on the conversation that you're having as you fight. If there's someone who just really needs to stop doing what they're doing, you have the option of fighting, of piling on conditions. They're going to get very emotional, and then they're going to be unable to continue. You don't have to redeem or seduce everybody. It is possible to just overcome somebody because sometimes that's the way that people are or that threats are. Not everybody is redeemable, but in this game, more than you might expect will be. People are very dramatic when-- Opponents also will take conditions. As you progress, your opponent might become angry and lash out. They might become insecure and jealous about somebody and take action based on that. We're going to get to see a bunch of dimensions of that character over the course of that conflict. I didn't win a fight in my game that I wrote. I did not win a fight until last month.
Dedeker: Congratulations.
April: I have had lots of fights end in flirting. I had a great fight end with me getting impaled to a wall by a robot cat girl, and then I was smitten with her because that was amazing.
Emily: Isn't not a win though? What is winning, really?
April: Exactly. It's not about winning in that sense.
Dedeker: That's so interesting. The more you describe it, it's like this weird combination of-- Tabletop role-playing games I feel like historically had a long basis in fantasy, in escapism and getting to step outside of yourself and getting to express yourself in this totally different way or take aspects of yourself and dial them up to 11 or something like that. By adding these things and by making it more connection based or making fights or clashing be not just about physical conflict and stuff like that, it's this weird combination of both making it even more fantastical and also more realistic at the same time.
I think even just having this basis of no single character really being perfect and all of them having a particular flaw, I think really drives that home.
April: There are a lot of things that are not featured in the line of RPGs that come out of wargaming that are a part of the experience of being a human being and are fun to tell stories about and are definitely a part of this game.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. We're going to move on to talk about lesbians.
Emily: Lesbians.
Dedeker: First, we're going to take a really quick break to talk about the sponsors for this show, how you can help support us so that we can keep having this content come to you for free. We are back. You have mentioned in other interviews that your storytelling has been inspired by LGBTQ fanfiction, by slash fic. I have noticed that this happens in the polyamory community as well, like this tendency to want to ship people together, to want to ship a queer relationship or especially shipping a multi-partner relationship. Jase and I are currently making our way through the '90s Highlander TV series, and we've shipped so many triads-
Jase: So many.
Dedeker: -in that show. It's great fun.
April: That would work for Thirsty Sword Lesbians. You could be Immortal Sword Lesbians.
Jase: Oh my gosh. Dedeker, can you gay master-
Dedeker: Jase. Jase.
Emily: They're just freaking out.
Jase: Sign me up. I'm getting us the books. Don't even worry about it. We're going to do our Highlander.
Emily: We are going to contribute to the Kickstarter and get our other books, for sure.
Dedeker: I'm just curious. I know that we've talked about this a little bit already, but I'm like, "What do you think it is that really drives that tendency for so many people?" The slash fic phenomenon has been a phenomenon for as long as I could remember being on the internet.
April: I think it's very human to want to tell stories and, say, want those stories to speak to you. A lot of the stories that we're given by legacy corporate media doesn't. There are a whole bunch of old white men who act as gatekeepers. I'm not sure I could name a TV show or Hollywood movie that has good-- Could I just go with representation? Not quite, but it's not that far off. There are good shows out there, but they don't reflect the reality of the world, and people want stories that do.
Thanks to this new cultural commons and the internet reducing barriers to publication it's a lot easier to find the audience who is going to be excited about that with you. You don't need to have a bunch of money. You don't need to have a rich patron. You don't need to own a broadcast company to write a really hot fan fic or write a story about Bucky and Steve and their whole polycule negotiating things for 20 pages. I didn't make that up.
Emily: Buckeroony, right.
Jase: Sounds great.
April: People want stories about themselves and are not given them by mass media, but use those common cultural touchpoints as ways to connect with one another, and hence slash fic.
Dedeker: Then here we are today.
Jase: Here were are. You mentioned earlier that one of your first stretch goals was adding male characters, the gaylords, to the game world. On your Kickstarter, you talk about this a little bit, but if you could tell us since this game revolves around queer storytelling, what happens if you want to play a character who's not a lesbian or who isn't a gay man either? What are the options there?
April: The game doesn't require you to pick from a list of options. I don't think there's anything in the game that specifically cares about your sexual orientation, which means it's queer already. That means it's not a cis set game. It's not telling you that your gender or orientation restrict your options. That's the way that it's queer. The sword lesbian is something that I love, and I wanted to center lesbians and I did. In a way, that doesn't exclude anybody who is not a lesbian.
I think particularly since the kinds of connections you can make between people don't have to be based on physical or romantic attraction, you can absolutely just as written have a group of completely mixed genders and orientations. You don't need any modding. The idea that men are a stretch goal was not true. It's more funny than true, but I didn't have content that centered gay men until the stretch goal. That's not an experience that I can speak to.
The title talks about what's getting centered here, but it's not exclusive. It's not the talking about queer identities in a way where our goal is to build walls and keep people out. It's more like the guidepost's sense of identifying ways of being. Believe me, I have four pages of rejected names for the game, and I wanted to signal queer action romance. As a sword lesbian myself, I also wanted to put myself in the game that way as well. I used to be a fencer and do kenjutsu, and you'll see on the Kickstarter my history as a sword fighting ballerina is in there.
Emily: That's awesome.
April: It's sort of about centering something that I want to celebrate and care about while also welcoming in a wide variety of identities, both LGBTQ and otherwise. All of the contributing authors in the core book are people of color, and the contributors are diverse along a bunch of other axis as well.
Dedeker: Now related to that, you did leave, it seems, in the Kickstarter almost this ominous warning that you can play a cis set character if you want. Just don't be surprised if the game turns them queer.
Jase: Gotta love that.
April: The game isn't going to enforce patriarchy for you. In fact, it's going to show you that that's not required, which is all that it takes to turn people who may think they're cis set. Not everybody. I'm not saying everybody, but there's so many people who are only-- It's compulsory. Compulsory heterosexuality is a term for a reason. The mechanism for that sentence is that the game is going to free you from those enforcements of patriarchy and let you explore what the character wants without artificial constraints. You might discover that like, yes, you are cis and het, and that's okay, but you might discover something different.
Dedeker: It sounds like the gay agenda to me.
April: I'm pretty sure it's up there.
Emily: Because patriarchy, unfortunately, is alive and well still in our society, the word lesbian makes people be like, "Oh, this is maybe pornographic", or something like that just because of the title. I know that you said that or you've talked about the fact that some people have assumed that. Can you discuss that a little bit more just what some assumptions have been by simply seeing this title that has the word lesbian in it?
April: Honestly, I should not have gone and searched the internet to find people who didn't like it, but I did.
Emily: Understandable.
April: They were extremely mad when they discovered that it was not male gayzy, that there are fat lesbians. They're like, "This game could be good, but they're ugly and whatever". They're not. It's okay if they are. Part of that is the name working as intended in the sense that it attracts the people that I would want to share a table with and that I would think are more safe for the queer person reading this book, looking for a group to share a table with. It repels people who are going to get upset that it's not for them or going to sneer at the progressive content. A bunch of the people on that thread were mad that it wasn't for fascists, serfs or bigots. What a thing to get mad about in the year 2020?
Emily: I saw that on your Kickstarter. It was like, "If you were these things, sorry, this game isn't for you".
April: Yes. The book it's very much behavior focused. You have to respect trans people. You have to respect racialized people. You have to respect neurodivergent people. You have to respect sex workers. It's not like your identity is wrong. I didn't say no Republicans can play it, but I said you have to show all these forms of respect or else don't.
Jase: Just don't.
Dedeker: You got plenty other games to choose from.
Emily: For sure.
April: We haven't talked deeply about safety tools, but who is at the table with you is something that I think of as the first level of safety. If my game can repel assholes, then that's brilliant.
Dedeker: Can you actually talk a little bit more about safety tools? Because I know you've teased that a little bit about that being built into the game.
April: Yes. I think that safety tools in four different levels. Who's at the table is the first one. If I run a game at a convention, I will say like, this is a game that centers people who are marginalized on the basis of sexual orientation and gender. If that doesn't apply to you, then you don't take the first slots. If there's still slots at the end, sign up, but make space. That's a safety thing because you can more deeply and genuinely explore some elements of your experience if you're with people who are at least not going to be hostile to that experience.
Ideally, you can share some of it and compliment it. Then there is the culture of play, and a lot of the goals for describing specific safety tools is just making it clear that the thing that's most important is everyone's well-being. If we need to pause and take care of somebody because they got triggered by the content, then we're going to do that, and we're not going to whine that like, "Oh, but the story was going to be so good if we just had this offensive scene". That's not what's going to happen here. That culture is very important and so are the literal mechanics of play. There is no way that you can roll a die and force somebody to do something. That's not an option, particularly for player characters. I also discouraged thinking of NPCs as instruments of the player's will as well. There isn't way that like I just roll and I persuade the NPC. You can try to figure them out and see what they care about and what you might persuade them to do the thing that you want them to do. You could flirt with them and try to get some leverage, and then they might be more amenable, but they always have the option of saying no. That's really important for telling stories about intimacy because if there's anybody in the story who can't say no, it's just creepy and bad feeling.
That also ties into the idea that temptation is fun. Getting told like, "Now your character does this", is not fun. Being told, you could do this foolish thing for an XP like, "Oh, yes. I'll challenge the queen to a duel. That sounds like a great idea". Then at the very bottom of it are formal safety tools so things like the X card where anyone can throw up an X and remove content from the game or checking in.
The palette is one of my favorites. At the start of a game, you will identify things that you do want to see and things that you don't want to see. We're going to get stuff that like you're hyped about, and the stuff you don't want to see, there's not a high bar, like "I'm sick of dragons. Let's not have dragons in this game". That's fine, and it normalizes the idea that it's okay to say what you prefer, and you can change that at any time. A lot has gone into trying to make this game that features physical conflict and high emotions something that tells fun, positive stories and steers you in a direction of good melodrama rather than anybody getting hurt by the experience.
Dedeker: I think related to this you've talked about it's like this is a game that's meant to be centering people who are marginalized in particular ways. There's definitely some inherent challenge in that in creating a game that appeals to a wide variety of marginalized people, including people whose lived experiences are different from your own. I'm curious to hear about your process of building your team when it was that you knew that it was time to bring on other writers, bring in sensitivity consultants. I'm curious to know a little bit more about your creative journey in that regard.
April: I have my day job where I do lawyer things, and then when I have time I work on RPG. It was a long process. Our first playtest was either late 2017 or early 2018. I occasionally say that this game came out of the same gay stew as Shira. It's not like a Shira based game, but we had some common thoughts back in 2017, 2018 that we wanted sword lesbians and cat girls.
I did a lot on my own for a while, and then I did a beta release on Itch, and then people got excited about it. Then Evil Hat, the publisher, got excited about it. Do I want to sign up with a publisher? They're saying all the right things about wanting to reach a new market and not compromising the queerness of the game. Fortunately, it has panned out that way that they are supportive. They know the business stuff really well. I couldn't have done this without them, but they also take my direction on places where I'm the cultural expert.
We've had two different sensitivity consultants who looked at the text--
After the playtests before the Kickstarter version when there was still time to make significant edits, my thinking is basically that I want sensitivity reader as soon as I have written most of the things and early enough that I can make big changes if they're needed. I don't want to be at the end of the process and hear that something I built in as a fundamental currency of the system has a racist connotation or something. If I got that feedback, I would change it, so I want to get that feedback early enough to act on it without messing up the rest of the timeline.
Those are the two competing polls that I want to be done enough that I'm not going to add stuff later that slips pass, but I also wanted to be early enough that I can make really significant changes if that's the feedback for what it needs to be. One of the really neat things has been hearing from people who have marginalizations that I don't that like the beast or the secret playbook really speaks to a biracial experience or the spooky witch speaks to an autism spectrum experience and then working with those people to polish that a little bit as well as the recruiting first for stretch goals. They are-- I don't even know it.
The first one that was pitched was a playbook that focuses on queer parenting and caring for other folks. I'm not a parent, but Alexa Sarah is, and she's writing this really cool playbook where you can have a literal or metaphorical family that you are caring for. It's similar in flavor to the devoted where you're balancing the needs of people with your own, but there's also a sense of them being dependent on you as well, which makes it a different equation from the devoted who's doing this toxic self-sacrifice thing.
The Sun Hand playbook is all about baking bread and being OCD and is exploring both of those things in a way that can be connected to or can be outside of the setting that Tenbear is writing. Tenbear is a Native American who is writing a setting where a bunch of people were dumped on a planet by a colony ship and are trying to coexist with the ecosystem there. There's a whole bunch of like what's an ethical way to relate to this ecosystem that were not a part of getting written into that one. Those are two of the 30-plus stretch goals and contributions that have come in.
It was always the plan to have stretch goals in the Kickstarter to broaden the perspective of the game. I was talking with one of my sensitivity readers about how valuable it would be to have it in the core book. Like everyone who picks up this book has got other perspectives on the same footing. I thought that was really smart and important and pitched it to Evil Hat, and they helped make it happen.
Thanks to everybody involved, including the five authors who came up with really cool stuff from sex worker, holy warriors in the Arctic to 1920s inspired steam funk poet to make swords out of words to fight the bosses and a bunch more. I don't know. It's great, and it's important. If somebody is hesitating to do it, you're going to get to read some cool stuff that connects with the things that you're deeply invested in, and that's awesome.
As the Kickstarter has done well, we surprised all our contributors, and we have now doubled what we're paying them. We had contracts, and then we're like, "How about more money", which I think part of being in a creative community. Evil Hat is not a company that's there to extract all value from you like a fruit. You're not getting juiced. You are a person, and investing in the community reflects that. Evil Hat has been really--
It was nerve-racking signing a publication agreement. Now I'm going to be bound to these guys who don't necessarily get it, but they have a good way of engaging. So I trusted them, and it's panned out. That's really fortunate and really important because I have heard a lot of experience of marginalized creators who try even through small publishers to get their voice out and have a bad experience with it.
Jase: That's great that that's worked out so well. Speaking of the Kickstarter and all of these stretch goals and things, by the time this episode comes out, your Kickstarter will be done already. Could you tell us first just how has this gone compared to what you expected? Was there any surprises? Were you surprised at how much interest? Are you surprised at any backlash?
April: Yes. I was surprised that there are so many people getting excited about it, to the degree that I was told to expect that the middle of a Kickstarter would be uneventful and nothing would happen. It would be mostly flat for a while. We've had sustained linear growth the whole time. What that tells me is that people keep discovering it and getting excited about it. We haven't exhausted the demand. It's just a matter of getting people to hear about it and brighten somebody's 2020. Tell them that this exists. That was a surprise. I was worried about doing it in the middle of COVID and recession, and a lot of people are struggling. There were always going to be community copies, but that's part of why it's so important. A community copy is basically other people have chosen to fund freely available PDFs that once they're done, you'll be able to go and just download them. If you're a person who the game speaks to but you don't have the money for it, I still want you to be able to participate in this culture, in the storytelling. That's part of how we're making that happen.
In terms of the hate, I've actually been surprised that no one has come at me with it. I had to go looking for it, and it was a bad idea. Sometimes we do bad ideas like read Twitter or searching.
Jase: I like that: bad ideas like read Twitter, period, full stop. Change of thought.
Emily: Scrolling Twitter.
April: Exactly. I had to go looking for it. No one who has read it has said bad things about it that I am aware of, and that surprised me. As a person who has anxiety, that was not necessarily what I expected. Or I was worried that the lesbian discourse would happen like people would say, "You take a stand on exactly who is allowed to be a lesbian and who's not". One of the nice things about being a public interest lawyer at a place with a press department is they remind us all the time that our time is too valuable to just let people get a piece of it by tweeting at us. If trolls tweet at us, our time is better spent doing our mission, doing our work, and engaging with our constituents.
Emily: That's a great message for everyone.
Dedeker: Life lesson.
Emily: Time is better spent working on what you're working on, not engaging.
Jase: Can you hire your press team become coach us for a day on how to do that?
Emily: I love it.
April: I did expect it to be a more difficult. I expected there to be trolls, and that might still happen. People came for Fate of Cthulhu when it went to retail because it said that HP Lovecraft is racist, which he was. Then the cranks came out and hated it. Some of them actually saw that Thirsty Sword Lesbians was coming, and they typed frothy, incoherent things which is exactly the reaction that I want. To the extent I think about that demographic, I want them to just wail and clutch at their heads in dismay that something this gay exists.
Dedeker: I just want to put it in perspective for our listeners. The original Kickstarter you were hoping to raise, what was it? It was $20,000 or something like that?
April: Yes.
Emily: That's like 10 times.
Dedeker: As of the time of this recording, you're at $200,000. Clearly, a handful of people who were ready for this to be in the world, for sure.
April: It's possible that this is the biggest Powered by the Apocalypse Kickstarter ever which is a family of games in the RPG sphere that have some mechanics in common. I didn't expect that. People are now saying this is what people are going to think when they think of an alternative to Dungeons & Dragons. I'm like, "No way. My game? I don't know about that".
Dedeker: I hope so.
April: I hope so. Yes.
Emily: As of recording this, the Kickstarter is just totally exploded and done so well, and now that it will be over by the time this airs, what can people expect next?
April: It's going to go up on BackerKit at some point. It might not be up by the time this airs, but if you go to sword.gay or swordlesbians.com, I will keep those URLs updated with the latest place to go to either preorder or get notified. Evil Hat publishes physical books. They publish beautiful physical books. We have an arrangement now that's going to let us ship to a whole bunch of destinations outside the US, which we didn't have at the start of the Kickstarter. Check it out, sword.gay, and it will be something that you can ask your local game store to preorder once it has the ISPN and everything.
It's not at that point right now as we're recording, but you'll be able to get your hands on it. Hopefully, you won't have to wait too long. All of the backers have the PDF without all of the art that we are paying for through the Kickstarter, so we are in the process of doing art specs and getting people to draw a whole lot of queers. That's its own reward for me. I wanted to raise money so I could pay people to draw sword lesbians and friends.
Jase: That's awesome.
Dedeker: I love it. What's the best place where people can find more of just you and your work separate from Sword Lesbians?
April: My RPG Twitter is Gay Spaceship Games, Gay spaceship G-M-S. That's all the characters that they have on Twitter. My Twitch is at gayspaceship.com. I have a couple of other things up there that you can check out right away, including End of the Line which is a GM-less storytelling game where you are the crew of a Santian vessel on the way to being scrapped, and at the end, you'll be asked if you say goodbye. Besides that, if you're interested in the civil liberties legal work that I talked about, I'm Pril Kit at P-R-I-L K-I-T on Twitter. That is where you'll get a mix of the gay shit as well as the activism and digital freedom work.
Dedeker: Excellent. Definitely go check out April's work. Keep your eyes on Thirsty Sword Lesbians. We are going to stay on the recording with April to talk a little bit more in our bonus episode. In our bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers, we're going to be talking a little bit more about the archetypes in Thirsty Sword Lesbians, talking a little bit about the ways that they are not quite perfect, just like all of us, even though I would love it to believe otherwise about myself.