The Faggot Games TTRPG Jam Review

An image of Darling Demon Eclipse, recolored and painted over to look like famous faggot games icon ‘Fag Girl.’

Before reading this article, please consider joining the Faggot Games Salon Discord! It’s where many of these games were conceptualized, workshopped and discussed.

I made the people of the Faggot Games Movement a promise - that I would read and blog about every game released for the Faggot Games TTRPG Jam. I will now honor that promise. Without further ado, here they come!

there is no self, only you by Geostatonary

The cover for TINTOY, or there is no self, there is only you.

I was given an early preview of this game, and I was immediately enchanted by it. As someone obsessed with clinical mind control scenarios, the concept of a game that simulates the intake, upkeep and completion of such a program activated some of my most miserable perversions. TINTOY, by Geostatonary, is the sort of thing I’m here for, and clearly the result of a lot of dedication-slash-desire.

TINTOY, as described on its Itch page, is a game about the Captor and Subject, as the Captor slowly makes the Subject take a form more fitting to the Captor’s wants. What Geostatonary brings to this project, which I feel no one else could, is an obsessive attention to procedure and process. It is medical and clinical, but also hot and penetrating. This attention permeates play and safety alike, and the safety recommendations here are distinctly Faggot — Geostatonary wants the Subject and Captor to discuss what this will look like and how comfortable they are doing this together. I am very excited to play this game with the cruelest hypnodommes in my life, and the most pliable toys.

Don’t Kinkshame God!!! by SoftieTheHound, RunRabbitBounce & IFeelOdd

Featured art for Don’t Kinkshame God!!!

My wonderful friend IFeelOdd and their wonderful friends Softie & RunRabbitBounce have done it dark and nasty style. Don’t Kinkshame God!!! takes a deeply ritualistic but also casual and playful approach to intimacy, flirtation and sex. It feels to me like a conceptual expansion on ideas explored in Lumpley’s Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, a series of scenes that define a three-part relationship and a series of roles for players to take in that relationship. What Don’t does differently is in its expansiveness and orientation around numerical mechanics - it’s a numbers game, baby.

To highlight favorite parts — I love the little locales where you might frame your scenes, the way the game uses ominous phrases to highlight parts of play, and the fucked up little art that dots the text. My favorite guy in the entire book is on page 22 — there’s this silly little gourd that I fear will be stalking into my bedroom rather soon. Overall, I am fond of the diversity and specificity present in this game, and I’m excited to see more from this creative partnership. There is a roughness, earnestness and darkness here that tickles me.

The Spear of Healing by After Icarus

The featured art for The Spear of Healing.

There are a few things I am naturally drawn to in this game. First, the theming — the evil sorceress versus the naïve and unstoppable berserker, classic sword and sorcery fare. The pairing of this setting, which might be a bit rough and unbeautiful, with calls for rich metaphor and poetic imagery, allows pain to be a thing that is fetishized and romanticized. It’s a torture game, ‘type-2’, but it wants both parties to savor the salty taste of blood.

Second, I love that this game is a complete engine, a series of instructions that carry themselves. There is no need to refer back, to consider alternative options — it runs by procedure. That’s a thing that’s been consistent across these first three games, an emphasis on procedure. There is definitely something enticing about a strict set of rules, and the bratty struggle against it. At the end of the day (and in The Spear of Healing), the brat gets the belt, and brats love getting the belt. That’s what makes it good play!

LIVING BREEDING by Devours-The-World

The featured art for LIVING, BREEDING.

I will admit, I am a bit biased! LIVING, BREEDING is a game by one of my longest friends, and my fondness for her only grows with her delve into TTRPGs. If I recall correctly, this game’s creation and publishing was a result of a half-joke within my own circles about a game that you impregnate. This is a deeply earnest version of that half-joke, finding the half that is not a joke and leaning in toward it, breathing heavily, dripping between one’s legs. I fear that when (not if) I play this game, I will find that my friend has only greater power over me. Real pervert magic.

I feel that the thin layout here really benefits the book, as it manages to speak in voice-through-color, black the voice of the rules and blue the voice of the designer. There is a page left intentionally blank so that one can fuck it. I also deeply appreciate the optional rules for competitive dollmaking, and the way the game forces you to create a garden of thirsty little reflections of yourself. I am excited to see more from my friend.

TWENTY SOMETHING YEAR OLD FAGGOT by Sandy Pug Games

The featured art for Twenty-Something Year Old Faggot.

This is a unique one, because I have a physical copy of it. You can too, if you’re one of the four people willing to spend a mere $12.50 on a gloriously high-contrast zine. It’s lovely that SPG has put such a focus on physical media, as I think part of the Faggot Games movement has to be low-cost physical media that you can make in a crowded apartment. I say this because I haven’t emphasized this enough in my own work, and I’d love to. Nem also said some lovely things about my own work toward making this scene glow, which I deeply appreciate and hope to honor through further action.

The game! It’s a good one. I actually haven’t played or read Thousand Year Old Vampire, so I don’t know what elements of this game are Nemesis originals, but Twenty-Something Year Old Faggot introduces the premise of creating faggot-memories via prompts, then hands over a bunch of levers to start (including a 150-word ‘post’ option as a way to immortalize your memories) and then uses them to devastating effect in its rows of prompts. It’s clear to me that this is a deeply personal work, and a lot of what Nem writes here reflects my own experience as a young transgender woman. There is an acknowledgement that queer difficulty doesn’t just come from the top-down; The faggot machine often breaks at its intersections and joints.

The City I Love, it speaks to me by Jellyfishlines

The cover for The City I Love, it speaks to me.

As a dame with a distant but unstudied fondness for the film noire aesthetic, I find this game’s focus on the gruff detective guy very charming. From Deckard to Dubois, there’s a clear interest in shlubby detective fucks in this game, and the cities they pour their gritty affection & violence into. There’s some real gender happening in the two forces that pull on the detective here, Man & Dame, and how Man relates to distance while Dame relates to affection. To call back to the detectives I referenced earlier, one can very easily imagine Deckard’s encounter with the last replicant in Blade Runner as a Journey’s End, while Harry Dubois’ encounter with something special in the church as Lover’s Meeting.

Speaking of these chapter names — I like the flow of this one. Sort of like The Spear of Healing, this game The City I Love, it speaks to me is a game that appears interested in aiding in facilitation through its own machine-momentum, the turning of its gears and the flicking of its traffic lights. The simple success/failure engine here, amusingly labeled You a Gambling Man?, inevitably drives the game toward only a few outcomes. Love a tightly wound scheme — very film noir.

Para-Phoria by VespertineanTess

The feature image for Para-Phoria, which shows a preview page.

First and foremost, I want to commend Tess for the ambition on display here. What Tess is attempting to make is something akin to a small World of Darkness or Cyberpunk game in scale, and I think that’s very admirable. The worldbuilding here is robust and interesting, and the idea of each player character being two creatures at once is really fun. I also love the transition goals here, and I am on the edge of my seat waiting to see what the Emperor/Empress option is, as a bit of a power dynamic / ego trip pervert. The present art is really fun — I especially love the corporate rubber drones and the weird science lady groping one of their chins.

I am very excited broadly to see where this game goes. I feel like the spaces that I run in, this level of crunch and variety is not very common. I love the existing strains, and I’m excited to see those finished. I’m also hyped to see what GM options are included, as those are listed in the to-do list. I will also add, with nothing but love, that I feel this game worries a little too much about what cishet & non-kinky people will think — this is the parasite fetish game. Let loose and assume gay people are using your game as an excuse to fuck each other, is the opinion of this twenty-something year old faggot.

The Ballad of Johnny 45-Dicks by Adam Seats

The cover of The Ballad of Johnny 45-Dicks.

Well, that’s a face I ain’t seen in the saloon in a long time! Take a seat, and I’ll tell ya all about a new digital pamphlet I’ve been readin’. Name’s The Ballad of Johnny 45-Dicks, an adventure created for Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive. It’s an intriguin’ little piece, with three adventure paths to play, all based ‘round Titan Port (and trust me, this ain’t the first time someone’s fucked in Titan Port) — one that involves Johnny 45-Dicks as a working man of sorts who fled a brothel, another that involves hunting Johnny 45-Dicks as a bounty, and a third that involves a bunch of folks gettin’ stuffed full of cowboy cum.

Ahuckgh. I think I had something stuck in my throat, and it wasn’t 45 loads of cowboy! These adventure paths are fun, and I like the very silly conceit that actually interacts properly with The Electrum Archive. These seem like fun paths to run or play in, and I like the additional post-path prompts. I’d love to see sex and sexuality suffused more deeply into The Electrum Archive in future projects by Adam and others, as I think it’s an inherently kinda hot setting with its emphasis on ink tats and fleshcrafting.

.AVI Maria by peaksykid

The cover art for .AVI Maria.

This game continues a trend present in a number of games in the Faggot Games TTRPG Jam, one that I have not yet remarked on — the destruction of the old self to make way for the new. That is the explicit motive of .AVI Maria, a solo journaling game where the player slowly transforms the human Maria to something far less human. I enjoy that this is the sole thing this game does, but the work takes an interest in making that process exciting and prompt-ful. The ‘protocols’, questions you might ask when turning your Maria’s traits from human to robot, are a great place to start, and then the game heaps on a d66 table of fun prompts for human and robot alike.

A favorite prompt — I love S (starting) trait 31, You think of yourself as generally vanilla about sex, which is notably not contradicted by another more kinky prompt in the D (delta) traits, but merely contradicted by the fact of its deletion. Peaksy was really smart here in avoiding the transformation attempting to contradict the starting state, and instead lets the transformation have its own flavor. D45, Coolant fluid and oil seep from parts of your body. D64, Your touch can transfer electric current. My inner robo-doll is shivering in delight.

SCREW ME HARDER: A Bodybuilding Game by Connor’s Art Room

The first and second page of SCREW ME HARDER: A Bodybuilding Game, as featured on the Itch page.

I pound my fork and knife on the table. “MORE ROBOT DOLL GAMES!” you hear, and my wish is swiftly granted. If you told me that this jam would result in an Exodia fuckpuppet game when I first made it, I would kiss you on the lips then and there. I am delighted by this game, in its clear men-loving-men homoeroticism, in its playful card-based robot creation, and in its wonderfully sexy endings. SCREW ME HARDER is another game deeply interested in a procedure that leads toward a few possible outcomes, which fits its focus on machinery.

I also love the clear instructions the game gives for making your bot from the cards provided, a fetish-making project that feels in line with games I discussed earlier in this blog. I would really love to see the bots, the “perfect men” of folks who have played this game, and I am now possessed with the thought of crossing this over with LIVING, BREEDING. These bots are very pretty-slash-weird-slash-hot-slash-playful — why not fuck ‘em?

For Steel You Are by Deric Bindel

The cover for For Steel You Are.

As someone who adores NaissanceE, this game was truly tailor-made for me. Unlike the prior robot-fag-games, For Steel You Are is focused more on metal-on-metal sex, the way a machine is broken at the touch of other much greater machines. It simulates being a 3DS getting jailbroken by a $3500 gaming computer — you stand no chance, and can only bask in its glory. I think the perversion of this game mostly comes in that, in the sense that the megastructure will inevitably change, rewrite, destroy, crush you… and it will teach you to love. It will make you whole and different.

In terms of its structure, For Steel You Are is very focused on the crawl into, around, out of and through the megastructure. I’d be excited to see how runs of this game play out over three, four, five iterations — will you OVERLOAD at the end of any given Location, or sputter out before you even get there? I love how luck here sort of informs the robot’s ability to locate truth, or something like it, before being transformed by the megastructure to adore it eternal.

Seething by Rookery Games

The cover of Seething by Rookery Games.

I am, first, flattered by the fact that this game includes my own A Stranger’s Just A Friend (Ashcan) as a point of reference. Similar to that game which is inspired by The Mountain Goats’ To The Headless Horseman, Seething reminds me of a song, perhaps only superficially — Jimmi Hendrix’s (Bob Dylan’s) All Along The Watchtower, with its fool and drowning sense of inevitability. Seething is a game with a literal thread that runs across many pieces of its art, which runs and wanes along the layout, and seems to shape everything along a single vertical line, until the thread suddenly and inevitably snaps at the end.

I adore the conceit here, and the focus on the literal titular Seething as mostly auxillary to the internal sexual pressure, the human Seething between yourself and the fool. The love and intimacy here is a cynical sort, granted to one another in fleeting moments outside of constant bickering and hatred. I love a hatefuck, and I presume you do too.

Helm and Shield by Sasha Reneau

A screenshot from Helm and Shield.

The circular nature of these two games was instantly exciting to me, the way one game leads into another. This is only made more exciting by the physical embodiment of both stories’ slow and insidious corruption, the use of a pencil, a stack of cards and an egg. Watching Sasha concoct this really unique resolution mechanic and connected it to a really excellent pair of games. Sasha has generally been an innovator in games, and I’m excited to see them continue their work in faggot games.

I want to highlight the language used here, and how the events are described on the page. It is not just that the Parasite conquers the Squire - it is that you “submit yourself, naked and shivering, to the parasite, and die at its leisure.” Extremely fucking hot. If it weren’t for the smell of raw eggs, I imagine this game would lead to some very weird sex… unless you’re into the smell of raw eggs, that is.

SCIENTROPHICATION by Nicolas Ambrose of The Horned Sphinx

The featured image for SCIENTROPHICATION.

It’s difficult to look at this game entirely objectively, as it is a hack of my own game, Biotrophication. I’ll start by exploring it as such. I think SCIENTROPHICATION is very reflective of my own recent philosophy around games using this two-character, act/scene engine. I’ve done some of it myself in my recent projects, and I think SCIENTROPHICATION hits it from angles that I’ve thus far missed. The use of tokens as a way of giving and taking control? Genius. I also think the prompts and scenes here are really solid, the circular flow of play has similar appeal to TINTOY, and the flexibility of tone here is lovely.

As its own thing, I think this game really lands in fulfilling a certain fantasy of the mad scientist and the willing/unwilling subject. I really can’t imagine a better game for this specific perversion than this. I see some little areas where this game could be expanded, and I’m excited to see those built on — I’d especially love to see more kinds of CHANGING VARIABLES beyond the manipulation of parts.

CHURCH FOR WILD DOGS TRAPPED IN THE BODIES OF HUMAN GIRLS by eat grass fool

The feature image for CHURCH FOR WILD DOGS TRAPPED IN THE BODIES OF HUMAN GIRLS.

I’m glad we got a lyric game ass lyric game in this jam. CHURCH hits a lot of beats I adore — dominant and submissive dynamics, dog girls, painful and strained social dynamics, and monsters on the edge of things. CHURCH doesn’t have mechanics, it doesn’t have a resolution system, and it doesn’t have playbooks. You are dogs, and you serve the priestess. One day, she might be a goddess. You can only follow the rules. I’m unsure if this is a game you can play, except if you run into the wilderness with a bunch of other trans women and start eating wild carrots from the earth.

This game is a great example of the outer edges of what one could consider a faggot game. It doesn’t contain any explicit mention of sex, but it is deeply interested in intimacy and bodies, in the roles we play for each other. It’s really fucking good, and I hope you give it a read.

SPLASH ELLA CINDER by Decadenza

The cover art for SPLASH ELLA CINDER.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this project also cites one of my -Trophication format games, that being A Stranger’s Just A Friend, as a major inspiration. I really feel that Decadenza captured a lot of what I was trying to do there in this game, in creating tension between two characters, in scenes specific to them, in a place specific to them, through the slow depreciation of a physical object. I think where SPLASH ELLA CINDER excels past my own work is in its efficacy and simplicity. It is remarkably tight, and keeps everything you need to know to a matter of 12 pages.

As its own work, ELLA CINDER is exploring some really quintessential and beloved sapphic sci-fi themes that the girlies will simply eat up. The dynamic between the upper-cruster and the peasant, each on opposite sides of a conflict, is immediately appealing and naturally fills in any gaps itself. The promise of so many different outcomes of these characters and the space to explore that makes me want to play this game badly.

DOWN the RABBIT HOLE by Aaron, Xiao and Miles

The feature image for Down the Rabbit Hole.

I’m coming at this game with the assumption that it was made in good faith, from someone who is subverting a cultural context that they are deeply aware of. The idea of a gay club that is being used as a hunting ground for a god who is both the patron deity of queerness and trying to feed on the hearts of mortals is immediately very compelling, both as a space for some really hot Hawkmoth-astride evil and to explore metaphors around the ways queer people violate each other. I was immediately drawn by the art and aesthetic of this game as well, wet and drippy and weird.

This game does something interesting with PBTA, which I haven’t seen very often — its moves have multiple different picks on a 10+ and 7-9, with moves interacting with this structure in different ways. While I think this could be laid out slightly more elegantly (bullet points might make it a tad more legible, at least for me) I really adore this and think there’s potential to get super fucky with it.

Let Me Be Your Thrall by Milkboy Games.

The cover for Let Me Be Your Thrall.

This game intrigued me because I originally chafed around how it introduced itself — it started by saying what it is and what it’s not, and establishing that the love between its Vampire and Thrall is not abusive and not unrequited. I worried that this would be too restrictive, that this was an early and unnecessary caveat. However, on reading through the book I realized how intentional this is. This is a game about bloody, beautiful queer dom/sub love, and uses vampirism as a metaphor for that. I am extremely happy to say that all of my initial reservations were quashed within a few pages, as I encountered the Vampire and Human questions. The Human is directly asked - What do you want the vampire to do to you? This is vampire-as-dommy-sex-object, and I’m so here for it.

I’m also very fond of the base system here, which gives the Vampire and Human a deck of cards, then has them play values and suites against each other / adding them together to determine the scene they’re playing and the vibe they’re bringing to it. I think it’s worth mentioning that if this sounds like your type of game system, Let me Be Your "Jam" Jam is currently active. The designer of this game created an SRD for the game as well. Get in there and make something slutty!

A Game of Mecha-Hedonics by Lex Kim Borrow

The cover for A Game of Mecha-Hedonics.

Dude, fuuuuuck yes. I was really excited to read the game by creator of TittyRPG Jam Lex Kim Borrow of Titanomachy, and I was not disappointed with this one. The description in this game, of being born into this world as the mech-monster or as the pilot within it, invokes so much about the body and the creeping nature of being, whether that mean tearing your way through the digital underside of the universe like Gergiev of Wham City Comedy’s The Cry of Mann (it reminded me enough of that to link it here) or being born to die in a stupid war.

…and then the game dumps you into the Play section, and you understand Lex’s prestige here. This is not going to be a game with a bunch of fancy weapon tables and range-bands, no! This is a game about getting close to another person and trying to hold and grapple and drop and pin and bite and tear and eat and kill them… and kiss them, and probably fuck. This is a game where you fuck. Really big fan of this one, and I am hoping to play it soon.

MEATGRINDER SICKLOVE by D.S. Quiet

The cover of MEATGRINDER SICKLOVE.

I like that this game suggests that all heroes should use ‘it/its’ in this game. There is a deep interest here in demeaning heroes, as understanding them primarily as things that deal immeasurable violence and then become someone else’s thing… or their nightmare. I like the fact that the heroes are immortal, so when they lose they become TOYS or BEASTS, losing control of themselves and their armies. The emphasis on battlefield rape here is especially interesting to me, and how it is both perverted and fraught.

The mechanics here are fun as well. This game fits into the ‘adding new rules to chess’ category of TTRPGs, which I do not say as an insult in any way — I love that this game is played via repeat games of blackjack, with winners and losers indicated by those games. I also love how the game instantly leaps back into character at the wrap of each game to deal with the consequences, as I imagine it keeps things moving quite well.

Spill Your Fluids by Infinite Citadel

The cover for Spill Your Fluids.

I appreciate how much of this game is about the presentation — without much theme writing to go off of, there’s a lot here that someone might assume. This game, on some level, says “I am about genderfluidity in a fluid universe; what characters, settings and stories might fit that?” It then invites you to answer however you may, and I think that fluidity is beautiful. I am curious to hear what sorts of games the designers had in mind for this, perhaps after I play a game or two of it.

This game, despite being oriented around the inscrutable, has a very space-and-structure oriented game style, where one’s Traits are moving around a board which change their ability to act. I find this version of the CALTROPCORE engine fascinating, and I’d be interested in seeing it used in a more solid game as well.

EROBOTICS by OLOStudios

The cover for Erobotics.

I like this a lot, and I think it’s very commendable for the creator to acknowledge it’s in a bit of a preliminary state! The writing and theming that is here is really fun — I love that this is, on some level, a robot dating game more than anything? You go from meet-cute (which might just be the robot’s creation), to spending time together and building up arousal, to eventually fucking nuts & bolts style. I really like how the stat system is impacted by so much, including the answers you give and the traits. This game also gives you so much space for worldbuilding through play, which is a plus for a game that wants you so invested in its characters.

I’d love to see the stats here move around more during play, as I think that’s one of the fun prospects about a game with really mutable stats like this. I’d also be really excited to see this game take on a slightly more confident tone in its writing, perhaps after an edit pass. There’s a lot of great, sexy, weird stuff here and I think the game has earned being a bit more pushy in its rules.

A River is a God: You are a River by ginandcats

The cover for A River is a God: You Are A River.

I have to admit my bias as this game was created by the person who, to my understanding, was the first person I realized had blue eyes. While writing this I did smile and audibly say “man, Gin is so cool.” I love how the language here orients itself so quickly around accompanying the player, and how that cooperates with the chosen font and layout approach. There’s a real aesthetic and thematic confluence here that makes it feel like someone familiar is asking hey, wanna make a river together?

The ‘action’ prompts here are also perhaps some of my favorite prompts I’ve read in this jam, including gems like:

• Kneel for a minute. You are a god.

• Smack your bare ass. You deserve it.

Very cool.

I Want You To Find Me Out by LambOfDawn

The cover for I Want You To Find Me Out.

Huge shouts here for this game including a section titled “Alternatives to Lines and Veils” which contains the absolutely kino line, “It is your job to know when you need to take a break or stop completely.” It’s really important that we build a playerbase for TTRPGs who are active participants in the table’s safety, and this sort of thinking encourages a lot of agency and involvement in keeping yourself and others safe. This game otherwise has a ton going for it — a Belonging Outside Belonging game with an interest in clocks and stats, a book that is loaded heavy with tables, and a PBTA-style move list for a BoB game.

I am not much of a killer person, but I do like Mark Kozelek’s track You Missed My Heart (popularly sung by Phoebe Bridgers, but we give credit on Eclipse Dot Gay) which is a good vibe for a killer-victim chase. I adore the aspect of kink and violence here, how the killer gets off on all of this. Also a little Ichii The Killer, now that I think of it. I’m sure part of the point of a game like this is to let players say ‘I wanna be this killer freak from my favorite killer freak movie!’ which, fuck yeah.

Glistening World by Games, Ink

The cover for The Glistening World.

Uh oh, you went into the gaping sphincter! Bad news, guy. I think one amazing play here is that when your Thirst (read: Lust) maxes out, you don’t actually have to go fuck one of these monsters or jack off, but you’d do anything to get off. The game trusts its players in a really great way, expecting that they will roleplay to the specifications of the game to create situations for their protagonist to get mutated and fucked by fleshthings. This game is full of little clever decisions like this, like the fact that you gain benefits when you gain a few Discovery points on a critter, then either downsides or upsides as you gain more depending on the fiction.

I like the variety and weirdness of things one might find in the flesh world, the inclusion of a downtime system (I was not remotely expecting that) and the sheer mechanical robustness present. Fundamentally, Glistening World feels like a game of surprises. It’s also fun to remember that this game was conceptualized in the Faggot Games Salon Discord, and was first imagined by one designer who didn’t wind up going for this game concept, and then another picked it up.

To Sleep, Perchance by GriefSoDeerly

The cover for To Sleep, Perchance.

This is a game that allegedly contains mechanics for playing it with a Jenga Tower, but like all good brats I am reluctantly accepting the fact that this game has asked me to have consensual somnophilic sex with my beautiful girlfriend. This time, and only this time, I’m going to take the bait. I’ll report back when I have more findings — I’ll be studying this subject in the field.

worldling activities faggot by Peripheresence

The featured image for Worlding Activities Faggot.

This is a compilation of little games, art, songs, stories and other material. Much of this is very internal writing, coming flow-of-consciousness from the writer’s mind and experience. I think this is a really beautiful thing to see, as you can see the places where the designer decided to jam in the frame of a mechanic, and the places where the designer opted to keep things in a prosaic place. These feel like games and pieces made in urgency, and I deeply appreciate that about this project. Much of this is deeply political, specifically abolitionist and pro-immigration, which I think is really beautiful.

The creator makes clear that they (I could not find pronouns for this designer) are homeless and that Food Not Bombs feeds them. Please check out the page and use the QR code to support the specific Food Not Bombs chapter that supports Peripheresence. If you made this project and are seeing this blog, I’d love to hear from you if you’re able to reach out. Drop me an email at darlingdemoneclipse@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss the process of making this game.

Play Faggot Games, Win Faggot Prizes

Welcome To The Penis Carnival

Fag-Girl and her amazing fish freak pet, named ‘Prizes.’ There’s lore now.

Games that suck you through your clothes. Games where you openly jack off during. Games that burn a third moon into your head. Games of cum and blood and trash. Faggot games.

The people have made, will make and are making faggot games. I detailed that truth in my last blog, and I will reiterate it here. Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning was a warning, yes, but also the characterization of an existing movement. The transgender macro vore sisters are eating well, but my hope is that they devour the entire city. With that in mind, I dedicate this blog to the faggot games that are, to games from a diversity of TTRPG environs and styles and sub-eras. I celebrate the freaks who are and the freaks who have been.

I dedicate this blog to exceptional faggot games, discussed in no particular order. Play these faggot games, and perhaps win my beautiful faggot prizes… (there are no prizes, sorry…)

PRAISE THE HAWKMOTH KING CHAPTER ZERO: ALLOSTATIC HYPERVIOLENCE

Featured art from Sage The Anagogue’s Chapter Zero: Allostatic Hyperviolence.

Duh, bitch. Playing this game led me to write the first faggot games blog, and this game appeared multiple times when I sought recommendations for this blog. It figures - Sage has constructed something really exceptional in the realm of games that take the sexual seriously. Often when I post some self-concerned thing like “sometimes I feel like everyone else making kinky TTRPGs is into such darker shit than I am, I’m just a wet gormless little sweetheart” it’s because I just read something exceptional and fucked up from Sage’s latest draft of Praise The Hawkmoth King.

It’s an evil game, which I mean in the best way — its world is a death trap for its teenage protagonists, where death and supernaturally sexual assault are the only things worth playing with. It is interested in humiliation, snuff, the violence we inflict against the young both sexual and structural. It is bold enough to make its sex directional — one does not have sex, but instead fucks or is fucked. By the end of a typical session, your character sheet (or your actual body) will be so adorned with written mockery, you may as well get the boys around to jack off onto it.

Praise The Hawkmoth King didn’t seem like my kind of thing, but I found it deeply accessible and appreciable. This was partially informed by playing with Sage, but I think the cleverness of the game’s design and the immediately gripping nature of its premise made it very easy for me to slide into it. Snuff game is good. I’m really excited to see what Sage does with it next.

Several Miles From Heaven

Cover art from Sharang Biswas’ Several Miles From Heaven

I promise every game in this collection will not involve teens, but it’s certainly a trend. There’s a confusion, fluidity and rush present in teenage sexuality that makes for really urgent, compelling stories. In the same way that a story about a hitman racking his first kill would make for a compelling narrative, I think it makes sense why we return to young people for games of sex and sexuality… not to say sex is an inherently violent act, unless you’re Hawkmoth-Chan.

Several Miles From Heaven is a distinctly more sweet game than the last entry, with an emphasis on the connection between the body, self-image and the stories of demigods. It is a game that takes the concept of loving someone ‘warts and all’, and makes that a celestial process. Players physically mark themselves with Adorations and Secrets, then slowly remove their clothes to reveal those marks to each other.

I have not had the blessed luck to play this one yet, but I assume it gets really fucking hot. There’s something very intimate about the process of removing one’s clothes for another, and slowly building your shared history through looking at things you once hid from each other. It also seems like a sort of play that could bleed out of the game, into a process that helps one see their body as divine.

I am perhaps biased by the nature of my work, but I think games which produce and encourage positive, sweet and earnest feelings around sex and the body are incredibly valuable. Faggotgamology has room for blood, snot and vomit on the left scale, and three communist faerie girls making out sensitive style on the right.

Princess With a Cursed Dick

Art from Princess With a Cursed Dick by Anna Anthropy

I just think it’s a very cool game. I’ve definitely written about this one once or twice. In fact, it literally is mentioned in the first blog!

It’s not terribly common to get a game that explores this particular kind of submissive girl, a young woman who is faux-naive, desperate and determined to get it all to work. I am a switch, but when I am submissive this is an angle I enjoy playing — the thing which so desperately wants to fuck, to cum, to be given release, but also wants to be cute enough to do some princess shit. Something that’s really exciting to me about faggot games broadly, no matter what era they come from, is the potential they have to model exceptional and loveable types of faggots, to allow kinksters and queers to be seen.

I know I say shit like this all the time, but I think you could easily play Princess With a Cursed Dick as a solo journaling game between sessions of Sapphicworld. I love and make fantasy that is obsessed with letting go of reality to get off and create interesting situations. There is a suspension of disbelief in Princess that permits a medieval masquerade to be full of rope and leash perverts, perpendicular to a desire by the titular princess to be courteous and mannerly. It doesn’t make sense if you think about it for too long, but it’s a game called Princess With a Cursed Dick — it’s at its best when you take what it tells you and roll with it.

It’s also worth noting that Anna Anthropy has been making games in this genre for years, across a variety of mediums. I read Star Wench recently, which I deeply enjoyed. Check out Anna’s Itch, and you’ll definitely find something you enjoy / something that turns you on.

Toxic Sword Lesbians

Cover art from Ryui Smallbird’s Toxic Sword Lesbians.

If I am being frank with myself and you — I wrote Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning in contrast to a number of great queer games.

Relatedly, Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a great game made by great people, and I find myself being more and more critical of it over the years. I was overjoyed this year to encounter Toxic Sword Lesbians, a game that clearly loves the original and cuts down its more liberal qualities. A great example from the text itself:

“Call on a Toxic Power becomes Invoke Power. Oops! All Power Is Toxic. Even the kindly queen of your nice feminist country? Yeah. Even the leader of your noble rebellion? Yep.”

— Toxic Sword Lesbians, pg. 11

If you’ve played or read the original Thirsty Sword Lesbians, you’ll know that a lot of its original settings have a sort of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power quality. Good states, good queens, good revolutions. I deeply understand the utility of this in the sort of game TSL is, but Toxic Sword Lesbians encourages players to challenge the urge for perfect and clean heroes and powers.

ToxSL is also queer vs. queer, in ways that the original game is often not. There are no settings in the book where the enemies are homophobic — instead, its villains are just as fruity as its heroes, and conflict can exist on more complex lines.

Toxic Sword Lesbians is not interested in just, or even mostly being a critique of its predecessor, however. It adapts the original’s moves, playbooks, and structure into a new paradigm. It has its own settings, and tips for adjusting elements of the original settings. It’s a great game in its own right.

Whoring Out

A drawing I made specifically for this blog. Censored versions of Doll.bod, WE LIVE FOREVER, Can You Host? and Euphoria 2180 covers cum all over me.

I make faggot games, and my friends make faggot games. I hope drawing a bunch of game covers cumming all over me makes up for the fact that I’m about to plug my work and my friends’ work (that I haven’t mentioned already). Without further ado, a list of faggy projects made by myself, my friends, my partners and my comrades that I think you should check out. This is not comprehensive, but here’s a few highlights:

• Doll.bod, created by my partner Wendy Ribston. A game about people who have sold their bodies and become agents of death, sex and victimization. The game has a wonderfully pronounced distinction between the role of the GM and the role of the players — it’s great for any domme with a TTRPG-playing polycule of subs.

• Euphoria 2180, created by my partner Lilith Lilac Leviathan. I’ve playtested so much of this tactical survival game, including some games that are basically excuses to fuck my friends. Lots of weird augments, mutations, psychic powers, and cool weapons. Check it.

• WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live), created by myself and IFeelOdd. I think me and Crowley have made something special, sexy and horrific with this game. Get fucked and transformed by a terrible pactmaker. Go to the black and suburban End. Live forever.

• Can You Host? is actually an up-and-coming TTRPG by Natalie Pudim, with bits of work from myself and many other wonderful folks. I’ve said this directly to Natalie, but I love how this Belonging Outside Belonging game highlights and valorizes gay bars and in-person queer life specifically. Perfect for NEET-girls like myself, who often are anxious about IRL queer life.

Lightning Round

My Volt, from Warframe. He’s a lightning frame, you see. I’m very clever!

I’ve been working on this blog for a solid month, as I’ve been in and out of training trips for work. There are a ton of other games I’d like to do deep reads on and highlight, but I’m out of time here.

• Deadly Weapons by Adira Slattery. Dark, risky girl-gun-game. I’m really excited to give this one a greater look and potentially play it.

• Every Kind Of Touch by Geostatonary. Monster-fucker and fucking-monster game. Also, keep an eye out for TINTOY from the same creator — extremely good mind control game.

• Hard by Kenneldogs. The game literally opens with a sentence containing the phrase ‘black-flag faggots’. Kill your rulers and fuck hard.

• That game you’re making right now, that draft in your Google Docs. I’m excited to see it, when the beast goes free.

In Conclusion

An old piece I did for one of my Patreon blogs, which said many of the same things as this blog. One day I may repost that one, hm…

There are a lot of games I didn’t mention here that are faggy, beautiful and bold. This will not be the last time I highlight this sort of work, and this will not be the end of the faggot games movement. Here are a few things I’ll be doing to keep things moving:

• Keep an eye out — once some other similar jams are over, I’ll be putting together a Faggot Games Jam!

• Also, check out the Faggot Games Salon to be in-community with folks doing this sort of work, do work-trades and hang out! We’ve been having a ton of lively conversation and creative collaboration in the server.

• I’m going to keep working on my own faggot games — Sapphicworld, A Stranger’s Just A Friend, and the currently-backing Dracotrophication.

Thanks for reading, and go fuck something evil for me.

Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning

TAKE MY GAY LITTLE HAND

A young woman I drew a little while ago - I don’t have my digital art things with me. She has brown hair and glasses, and a golden halo. She wears a green mantle, a green sash and green boots. Beneath, she wears a chainmail bikini. She carries a knife in one hand, and a sweeping scimitar in the other. She reminds me a bit of myself.

It's Sunday, January 12th, and I'm on a train, nursing two bags. I'm on a one-week work trip upstate, and when I get back the U.S. may be substantially different.

I may be asked to dump my medication, to use the wrong restroom, to throw the name change forms I've been waiting to file in the trash, to die and disappear. It's hard to know what they'll actually do, but I'm ready for the worst.

I agree with the leading philosophy - death before detransition. They'll have to take my estradiol from my cold, dead hands, etcetera. But, more crucially, death before normalcy, before assimilation, before agreement.

I'm going to make TTRPGs far worse, far angrier, far sexier than I have already, because it's one rebellious act of many, and because it feels like the rules are gone. Sure, there will likely be some anti-pornography laws floated or outright passed in the coming years, but it didn't hold any weight when the liberal institutions protected us, so why should we take their censorship seriously? There will be means to make and distribute our art - I believe this.

How do I express this to you, the faggot game designer who is most likely to read a blog about TTRPGs with such an aggressive name? You have to do it now, and loudly, and into the future. You have to make faggot games, faggot game designer.

MAKE FAGGOT GAMES

What is a faggot game, you may ask? Well, it's not really my place to define that for you, but some traits I've noticed among the best include:

• Loud queer sexuality, without a desire to make play more comfortable for cishet people and prudes.

• Departure from popular axioms around player and character consent, and broad rejection of the modern safety framework for something more interpersonal and robust.

• A central role for fetish, kink and sexual fantasies. Faggot games aren't always necessarily /about/ these things, but they loop back to them as much as possible.

• A focus on challenging and unexpected visuals. Blend the cozy and the macabre, the outside and the mainstream, in ways they didn't know they even wanted. Keep them guessing.

I am asking you to do this thing, so I should give you the tools to do so. To start, I recommend that you start making faggot games by…

• Grabbing a TTRPG that you love and perverting it. This can be a hack, a love-letter, or one of the former that becomes its own thing.

• Making friends who make faggot games. I don’t know all the spaces where folks are doing this stuff, but my Discord is a good starting and sharing place, and I hope to make it even more friendly to sharing in the future. Bluesky also has a ton of folks doing this work.

• Looking deep within yourself, and seeking old fantasies. Maybe ones you forgot, or cast aside because you believed they were wrong.

I think it's worth noting that this is not a new thing. I'd like to point toward Anna Anthropy's Princess With a Cursed Dick, for example, as a game from years ago that hits basically all of these areas. So, why does it feel like we’re seeing more of it now?

I mean, if I’m being honest? It’s fear, finally breaking. We’ve been afraid, understandably so. It’s terrifying to put kinky, disgusting work out there when people are so rotten-hearted and puritan.

YOUR BODY CAN’T HANDLE MUCH MORE OF THIS

A frame from Bunlith’s exceptional animation, captioned “me after 3 days of progesterone”. Relatable.

When Nightmare Kart designer Bunlith posted an amazing video of her goth rabbit girl avatar running, yelling and emoting to the audio from the classic 'Takeshi Sex' video (warning, loud), Bunlith got walloped with the classic response transphobes have to trans women having fun online — the freaks came out in droves to call her a pervert, make up shit about her commissioning inflation art, and harass her. Obviously it’s fine to be a pervert and commission inflation art, but they were using this as a method to hurt her and to discredit her.

A trans woman posts something earnest, or sexual, or funny, and the world bites down on her. What was stunning to me about Bunlith’s treatment here, and has been stunning since, has been the failure of the remaining internet to even remotely protect a trans woman joking about sex. See, not only do trans women face the pressure of directly antagonistic transphobes, but their 'allies' then post shit like:

"Bunlith is corny and this video is kinda cringe, but I don't think people should be mean to her."

This might seem innocuous, if you’re not familiar with the dynamics of social media, and especially Twitter. When someone says something like this, it enables the first guys, the transphobes, to be even worse. The world’s worst are gleeful when they realize that no one really likes the person they’re attacking, that even their allies have caveats and realize that this person is, secretly, cringe.

You see how that pressure would make the prospect of creating earnest, horny art seem structurally impossible, right? Not only do you get hit by your abject enemies, but then the people who are supposed to protect you take pot shots. Even alluding to sex as a trans woman makes you a target.

Still, you have to make things, and you have to make horny things. Much like Takeshi’s body cannot handle much more screaming about sex (?), your body can’t handle worrying every time you create something. If they’re going to hate you no matter how much you do, do it all. Run down the highway, screaming. Sex. You must, at some point, become sex.

ENTER: THE FAGGOT LATTICE

A honeycomb. Imagine this, but it’s made up of beautiful transgender perverts. Sweet.

I don't like overestimating my personal impact, because I am fundamentally just a girl with a slick, hot desire for more pornography to fill the world. However, people have said this to me directly - my work has encouraged folks to make faggot games. I'm very proud of this.

I'm not special, though. You can do it too. Making faggot games in your part of the TTRPG space will make the faggot next to you feel more comfortable. We can protect each other from the social murder machine, fight for each other's work hand and limb, and build something beautiful in that sopping lattice. I believe in carrying each other’s weight, in allowing each other to rest, in discussing our fears and hopes and desires in concert. A body cannot handle this, but our bodies can handle this.

This is why you have to make faggot games now, because we need to build that network of security now. We need voices that can stand and shout for each other, that can guide the lost in the coming dark. We need games that tell people it's normal to want to bite girls, and that it's normal to make games about wanting to bite girls. Let’s make art that makes us really, really normal about each other. Let’s trap each other inside psychic prisons for self-gratification. Any sort of connection, but let it be strong and let it be rife with blood and honey.

I am a slutty little honeybee, and you have to pin me down by my wings. We have to repopulate the hive.

THE LIMITS OF FAGGOT GAMES

Photomanip art from WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live) Complete Edition. A color-drained, negativized parking lot with a hand reaching into it from the dark.

I talk a lot of tough shit, but I am not as active and organized as I'd like to be. I don't really go out after work (I do social work, which can be taxing) and I'm mostly creating art for commercial purposes.

I want to change both of those in 2025. I'm going to look into getting involved with my local DSA, and I want to make more free projects and text-only versions of my games for people to enjoy. I give a lot of myself, but there's a lot more I could give.

So, make faggot games, yea, but get out there and do something meaningful as well. In the U.S., the next few years are going to be brutal, so I think it’s important that I include this acknowledgement here. Making queer, horny art alone will not save everyone, but it might help one person be more comfortable, free, relaxed. It's worth doing, I believe. It's one of the few things I'm sure of.

Come and do it with me? With us? Please? I’ll be a good girl…

The Treasures, Realms & Guys Manifesto (Part 2)

Into the air...

In her song It's Okay To Cry, the late great SOPHIE explores the protective shells we put up, not just over our emotions but over our internal worlds, the fantasies we make for ourselves, the homes we build inside of ourselves.

There's a world inside you

I wanna know what it feels like

I wanna go there with you

It's a deeply intimate song, and a deeply intimate thought - to touch another across the hills, mountains and skies that hum inside.

I don't know if I believe in 'love languages', but if I did, this would be my love language. I want to know the great Treasures, Realms and Guys in my love's heart. I want to know the stories of the Treasures, I want to travel the Realms, and I want to kiss the Guys.

I love games that let you make your own worlds, but there's something special about being invited into another writer's secret place. It's a less romantic thing than what I described in the last paragraph, but it can be intimate in a different way.

There is a certain affection written into Ultraviolet Grasslands, an expectation that it will be known. Even more sparse worlds like that of The Electrum Archive fuel me in ways that worldcraft tools just can't.

In the first part, I told you what shapes Treasures, Realms and Guys can cut in your book, and how you can use them as tools. In this part, I'm going to go deeper, and try my darndest to give a convincing argument for setting-specific TTRPG design, and give some tips for how to deploy it. The last blog was about works I've enjoyed, while this is the self indulgent one, perhaps a slightly egoistic one. I want you to have the specific autism I have.

The Specific Autism I Have

The Craven Citadel from one of my first games, Warehouse Bitches, and my first with a pre-written setting.

One might threaten, through gritted teeth - Eclipse, if you intend to create a whole ass setting, why not write a damn book? I would then pull the knife from your hand, and look into your eyes, and smile. My friend, my reader, it's because I want you to devastate the thing I've made.

It's a painful and joyous process, to see someone take the world you've made and do their own dance with it. I dream of pulling this great and gnawing worm out of myself, this thread of mountains and plains, and nestling it inside of someone else's brain.

I want others to obsess over the relationships of my Guys, the histories of my Treasures, the great castles on the edges of my Realms. I want to be infected with other people's brainworms, rebuild their worlds in my heart, and bring that reconstruction to the table.

Love, art and play intersect as wrought worlds come to the table. This has been extremely clear to me as I've created Sapphicworld, as people's little theories continue to dig their way into the book. The setting transforms around them, and ideas greater than any I could invent spring up randomly.

What fascinates me, what grips me about a pre-written setting, is the potential for order and chaos to meet, for research and meticulousness to be completely, beautifully fucked over by interpretation and desire. I am a person who outwardly longs for control, but deep down I want to lose it. One of my partners described me once as a free-use poet; I would be a free-use poet, who reads and plays so very many free-use poems.

A World That Demands Your Attention

Art of Sapphicworld's Skull Hold. Ignore the reflection. Ehehehe...

I think the best argument I have for setting-specific writing is Sapphicworld, a game I haven't released yet and likely won't release for a while. If you're a Patreon subscriber, you've got access to the whole damn thing, so maybe you already get what I mean by that.

Sapphicworld is a huge, kinky, mythopoetic fantasy TTRPG with a very specific setting, and an overabundance of Treasures, Realms and Guys. It has 100+ NPCs, a ton of places to go, and a few dozen Relics which are magic items that almost act like mini-playbooks. Somehow, despite this, it all works in playtests. People lean in rather than leaning away, and I think that's because I've hit on something - while some TTRPG players want to bring the same OC to every table, others come to the table hoping to be drawn into to a truly unique world.

To refer back to the previous blog - players want to be freed from the woods. Many, many players have been lost in a setting-slog for years. I think this helps make my writing for Sapphicworld work.

The person in this world who has probably thought more and better about Sapphicworld than me is my friend and peer Ira Prince. Besides creating some lovely art of its Sapphicworld OCs, Ira's posts on Tumblr about the game have said it better than I ever could. One element Ira hits repeatedly is the fact that Sapphicworld wants you to be deeply involved with it. It wants you to make an OC for it, rather than bringing your same bisexual tiefling to the table. It's a world sculpted for play.

Sculpting A World For Play

Some more kinky Sapphicworld art. I mention pirates in this section, and this art takes place on an island. Kapeesh?

So, beyond vague philosophizing, how do you make a world that works well for play? That's where our Treasures, Realms and Guys come in!

See, more than anything, TRG (Treasures, Realms & Guys) is a framework for designing games with specific, rich settings. It's how I think about my own games when I start designing them when I want to explore setting as a major organism of the game. I always start by writing a rough mechanical framework, and then if I decide the game demands a distinct setting, I answer the following questions at one point or another:

• What Guys will you meet in this game? Will they be hyper-specific (i.e., The Wifekisser) or more generalized (i.e. Wifekissers, as a faction)? Both?

• What Treasures will you find in this game? How will they interact with the mechanics, and how will players connect to them?

• What Realms will you visit in this game? This is an important one, as it shapes the outer limits of the other two questions. For my own sake, I often ensure the answer to this one is short.

Once I have these questions answered, I often categorize and produce examples of these elements. If I'm creating a TTRPG about pirates and naval adventure, I might write out a few loose ideas for islands (Realms), unique ships and trinkets (Treasures) and other pirate crews (Guys). I'll also often use this opportunity to create templates for each element - with a pirate crew, for example, I might need a brief description, a picklist and some basic stats, for example.

This is an important part of the scoping process for me, as it helps me understand roughly how much work I'll need to put into a project overall. Despite how long Sapphicworld is, it has been scoped out in this exact way. I know the rough limits of its setting, and I know the types of characters and things I want players to discover within it.

Example: Creating Autopsy Feast

Autopsy Feast's cover, minus its logo.

A solid example of this TRG-rich process can be seen in my work-in-progress Autopsy Feast, where I think I really solidified this mode of game design. The development process of Autopsy Feast went like this:

First, I conceptualized the gameplay. For those who don't know, Autopsy Feast's main mechanic is a body grid, as you can see below, which you slowly add to and alter by befriending and fighting other creatures. The body grid below is specifically a Skelite, one of the imperial machines you might fight. In each sphere, the top word is the 'type' of body part, each of which has its own loose capabilities, and the lower word is the specific part.

I came up with the idea for the body grid because I wanted to create a very 'material' and 'scientific' Star Wars-like game that still had room for poetry and fiction. Ultimately, I landed on a mechanic that emphasized the physical buildup of characters, ships, machines - the little bits and pieces that make up an exciting sci-fantasy creature, gadget, weapon.

Ideas like this kind of come as they will - it's not something you can force. If you're ever lost on this step, I recommend considering why you're going for a TTRPG first, and then looking elsewhere for inspiration. Video games, board games, movies, TV and even bureaucratic systems are great places to find inspiration for game mechanics. Our world is rife with norms and structures, and all you have to do to make a great game is identify them and use them.

The structure for the body grid, for example, was inspired by old chemistry sets I used in high school, the ones with the ball-and-rod system. I loved the idea of slowly adding spheres to a character, ship or building's body, and then losing a bunch when a core piece breaks off.

The body chart for Autopsy Feast's Skelites.

Second, I figured out the bounds of the setting. As mentioned previously, this is where I set up my Realms. In this case, this was a few planets. I wrote a little gimmick for each - one was a weird nail of twisted metal, another was a great and misty sea-planet, another was the home world of the ruthless empire. These gimmicks gave me a great sense for how to do the final step.

A big part of this process was also detailing out all of the different basic body part types, which would wind up being my Treasures. In a game so focused on gathering and using body parts, it was important that they had flexible, memorable uses that interacted first with fiction and second with mechanics. For example, the LIMB is described as such:

A long and wiggly thing. No one really understands these.

Useful in gripping, standing, balancing and moving carefully.

There is obvious utility in this, and that's what helps it be Treasure-ful despite being fairly concise. You know immediately what it does, what it might look like, and how it works. It does something no other body part does, and the way it's described is unique to the world of Autopsy Feast. This calls back to something I discussed in the first part of this blog - specificity really makes Treasures shine.

As a side-note, Templates are so important if you're creating a game that's very modular, which many TRG games tend to be. You'll thank yourself for, early on, examining each module-type's needs and creating a template that fulfills those needs. That template may change eventually, but it's worthwhile setting up a baseline.

By having all my Treasures, Realms and Guys use three, maybe four templates, I allow myself to enter a flow with creation. When every guy, or place, or chapter, or act, or relic reads the same as the other ones, the differences matter more. There's more space to play with the form, to add special rules, and to have fun with it. I find templates very freeing.

Third and last, I filled in the gaps. You've probably heard me use that terminology a lot if you've read any of my monthly blogs, and it's one that has defined my approach to TTRPG design. 90% of the work I do isn't in building the framework, but in filling it in with details - descriptions, mechanics, special moves, and yes, Treasures and Guys. I wrote out lists of characters you might find on each planet, little locations you might visit, and rewards you might receive from all these worlds' myriad places and people.

Referring back to my earlier templates was extremely helpful here. With Autopsy Feast, I was very careful not to make my templates too elaborate, and that really helped keep my workload to a minimum as I wrote out all my Treasures, Guys and micro-Realms. Each element was at most two paragraphs, and there was usually at least a sentence that tied back to the game's mechanics.

A Harmonious Approach

Art from WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live), featuring elements from myself and IFeelOdd.

The ultimate reason one might use the setting-first TRG approach I describe in this blog is, in my opinion, harmony. I can only speak from my own experience, but thinking about TTRPG design from this perspective has helped make my games feel connected within themselves. They also let my games connect to others, let people create their own versions of the world I've made. It's a joyous experience.

On the play end, I always love when there are bounds that I'm asked to restrict my character to. I love making a hero for a specific table, for a specific set of people, for a specific fictional land. My care is a sweet and inebriating liquid, and I'd rather pour it into a vessel than pour it into nothing at all.

Obviously, this is just the way I do things, and it's not always the way I do things. Biotrophication was made without this setting-first approach, and while I'd argue that it still has TRG qualities (distinct places to go, people to be and know, transformations as Treasures), it's mostly a normal lyric game. I highly recommend new creators diversify their approach to creation - what I present is just one model, and it's not a model I use all the time!

Still, I think there's a lot of value in exploring specificity, in 'cappy' games, and I hope to see these design philosophies extrapolated into the future. I hope reading this has given you some inspiration for your own TTRPG design approach, and god bless the Treasures, Realms & Guys theory forever.

The Treasures, Realms & Guys Manifesto (Part 1)

A quester's rest...

I've mentioned it a couple times elsewhere, but I did my undergraduate studies in journalism. For many of my stories I drove to remote edges of Long Island. I was focused on marine sciences stories, so I wound up talking to a lot of fishers and dredgers on quiet, cold docks - some did it for pleasure, others did it for work.

By the end, I'd met an ailing and retired clammer, plenty of shuckers and restaurateurs, a saltwater savior with a seagull companion, a couple who mistook me for their former student and promptly kicked me out of their house. Kindness, cruelty, unstoppable disaster, vast and sweeping fortune, and the daily grind of it all.

There's still a clam in a plastic bag in my freezer. The aforementioned retired clammer gave it to me. His ship was wiry and broken, duct tape and exposed fiberglass, old machines latched onto new ones. I'm glad I was able to take a part of that little world with me on my next journey.

This, to me, is the emotional core of the theory that I'll be describing in this post.

An Introduction

When one plays a more adventure TTRPG that requires the table participants to invent much of the world and its material or use a pre-established but lightweight setting (think Fellowship or Armour Astir: Advent), there is a vast space for creativity. To be very clear, I adore games in this model, and I don't want them to ever change. I love creating a setting with my friends, and I'll snarl and bite in advocacy for games like this to continue existing.

What I think these games lack, and what I hope to see more in the years to come, is specificity. Specificity can be toothy, it gives a game well-made places, characters and items can stick with a player character for a long time and shape the adventure to come, and ideally stick the participants at the table. A great world lives forever, made great by the little things it hides.

Part 1 will explain Treasures, Realms and Guys themselves, while Part 2 will elaborate on ways to combine them in your design!

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Ava Islam, Josh McCrowell et. al. are doing a blog on a similar subject over at A Knight at the Opera. Go check that out! It's on Capsule Games, games with complete or partially complete 'encapsulated' characters, locations, adventures, ideas, all of which serve the game. It's a great analysis of a certain style of game and I think those folks are creating language that TTRPG designers are going to be using to discuss their work in the years to come.

But that's Just a Theory

I still really like the little slime guy I drew for this, hehe...

In early 2023, I posted this image which continues to draw a lot of attention across the TTRPG scene, to this very day. My precious and beloved TREASURES, REALMS & GUYS THEORY (TRGT) is a TTRPG design philosophy, though you can certainly extend it to what makes a good GM's Treasures, Realms and Guys work so well. It's a philosophy of location, of specificity, of history, of materiality. A setting made with TRGT in mind sinks its talons into both readers and participants in play.

I stand by everything I wrote across this image for the most part, except for a few key notes:

• In my opinion, Treasures, Realms and Guys all make life easier for the GM, since they don't need to invent cool stuff to give or cool places to go.

• Guys can be intrinsically connected to Treasures beyond just telling you about them, which I'll get into!

• Guys can also be in Realms, which I'll talk about!

So, I'd like to do an in-depth breakdown of the ways Treasures, Realms and Guys connect, stand on their own and can make a TTRPG really exceptional. Join me on a journey through my twisted mind... uehehehe...

Treasures

Used to fill these fuckers with jewels and coins and gems... oh LEGO chest, my beloved!

Oh, my treasures! I must locate my ten magnificent cryst - Ahem. Treasures are the clams the player characters keep in their freezers, the strange fragment of glass they find on the beach, the old couch they nab from the side of the road. They are wet with the world's soak, and should read as such.

When I say Treasures, I mean a variety of things. Items that come with playbooks, at the end of dungeons, as the possessions of creatures and baddies... these are all Treasures! Treasures can also be the deeds to castles, the strange and wonderful things that happen to your characters, relationships with strange Guys, and secret stairwells that lead to exciting Realms.

As noted in the initial text, you can get so tonally silly with Treasures. I'll probably write a blog on tone and voice sooner or later, since it's a really important element of design for me.

Objects Unique to the World

From Roll 4 Tarrasque's Brave Zenith, p. 43

The best Treasures are invitations into the world, incentives worth pursuing and gleefully discovering.

A great example of this that I read through recently is Brave Zenith by Roll 4 Tarrasque. Brave Zenith has a very loose setting, but the items available within tell you so much about the world it's asking you to expand on. For example, the Pinball Gun, which players can buy during character creation or at a store, or find on an adventure:

Although called a gun, these weapons do not use any type of gunpowder. Rather they harness the mechanical prowess of the eldritch pinball machines of yore. Pinball guns may either use pinballs or sea urchin spikes as ammunition. When they fire, they make a really obnoxious sound. Ammunition goes into equipment slots, as long as it’s there, you can shoot.

We can learn so much about the implied setting just through this description: Brave Zenith's world is post-apocalyptic, but also marine, whacky, and time-bent. The Pinball Gun could exist in any world, but this Pinball Gun exists in Brave Zenith's setting, The Archipelago.

As a reader, this makes me want to play this game and concoct a character who fits this setting. Perhaps my character is a literal pinball wizard, who wields a Pinball Gun and treats it as if it's a magic staff! There's so much potential with just this item.

So, what can we learn from this? Well, it can be really exciting for a reader to give your items a clear connection to the world itself, and ideally some wonderful flavor text, if it's appropriate for the structure and layout of your game! Flavor text can be as simple as the sorts of adjectives you find attached to items in Wanderhome, or as intricate as what Brave Zenith does.

Treasures can absolutely be non-objects, too! For example, I think a transformation in To Change is a Treasure, advancement in a PBTA can be a Treasure if it's compelling enough, and a specific win-state in a war game can be a Treasure. Overall, creating Treasures that fit your setting is about giving the players truly gorgeous incentives.

It was her Sword! She was Number One!

Pizza Friday's Electro-Kantele & Greatsword, from Sapphicworld

Treasures can and should be about the past, the future, about people, about change.

Okay, so I hate to self-aggrandize, but I think this might be one of the types of Treasure where my work is especially unique. For example, my kinky queer TTRPG Sapphicworld has a number of Relics (special items with their own moves and histories) that are tied directly to specific NPCs, including Pizza Friday's Electro-Kantele & Greatsword, and Maxrum's Opulent Collar. The description from the Pizza Friday's Relic:

These items are clearly Pizza Friday’s, adorned with cute stickers and charms. Her Electro-Kantele appears to be made of a hollowed pike fish jaw, and its strings are made of her hair. Her greatsword is white as fresh-fallen snow, and its edge could cut Vestiture Tower in half with enough effort.

This, in my opinion, is a fascinating item to obtain. This specific one is most easily received by developing a relationship to Pizza Friday, which then quickly encourages the player character to continue and expand that relationship. This is especially great for a game like Sapphicworld that's largely about relationships and their qualities, whether they be tender, strained, sweet, toxic, obsessive, cold, fetishistic, etc.

This isn't necessarily just about a Treasure belonging to a person, however - this is about Treasures that belong to history. When I open a chest and pull a sword free from it, my hope is not to just receive a +1 Longsword. I want the blade clearly forged by a blacksmith seeking use for her old master's supplies, the blade roughly made with love with the pommel of cork and the haft of birch. I want to find that blacksmith's grave, and meet her family, and learn this was her last blade. It's about stories, because in real life our objects are never just our things, they carry such stories.

In actually designing for this effect, I think there's a lot to learn here from lifepaths and playbooks. Not all items need to be journeys, but it can be so exciting to create a few that invite the player to tell a story alongside the item. A Treasure can be a little character in its own regard, and then give the player a chance to hold tight to it or let it go in exchange for something else.

Realms

From Evil Hat's Blades in the Dark

Now, you might be asking - didn't you already talk about how Treasures connect to the world? And, I say, you absolute rube, you fell for my most fabulous trick! A Realm isn't just a setting, it's a place. In the map above, Blades In The Dark's Doskvol is not a Realm, but The Docks are, and Silkshore is. Realms are distinct locales with their own traits, places to go, Treasures to obtain and Guys to meet, for the purposes of this theory. They are traversable, and invite the players to use their character's qualities to maneuver their unique shapes.

Specificity of Place

From Possum Creek Game's Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast

A crucial element of Realms is that, like Treasures, they aren't just physical places, but they are always use specificity to their advantage, to give a location or moment character. Realms can be entered, and can be left - they are bouquet, and at their best they are all-encompassing, enrapturing. They use their details to dig their nails into the reader. They can be moments in time, pre-defined story beats, or in the case of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, Chapters.

Yazeba's, or Zeeb, is one of my favorite games of 2023 for this exact reason. To highlight one particular Halloween-y chapter, Hey Kid Goes A-Guising, just look at all of these little details you get at the end of this chapter's card draw list:

KING OF CLUBS: A thin mist rolls across the street, and we suddenly become deeply lost. How do you help us find our way back to the streets we should be on?

ACE OF CLUBS: In the distance we can see an enormous striding skeletal figure, moving through the clouds. Its single eye resembles the moon, and it seems to be looking for something. How do you keep its spotlight from shining on us?

JACK OF SPADES: A group of kids dressed as monsters invites me to join in a Silly String fight. How do you keep me safe while still letting me have fun?

QUEEN OF SPADES: An older kid dressed in black robes with a terrifying mask stops us. She demands a candy tithe. How do you help her deal with her loneliness?

KING OF SPADES: I haven’t noticed the ghostly individual that’s been following us for the last few houses. How do you get rid of the ghost without me noticing?

ACE OF SPADES: A gang of older kids “dressed” as zombies, who call themselves the Ghoul Gang, are harassing us. How do you chase them off without picking a fight?

To me, this is an exceptional example of both making this Halloween environ incredibly specific to the weird 90's suburban-mystic setting of Zeeb (the Silly String, the striding skeleton, the mist, the kid demanding a candy tithe) and also ties into some of Zeeb's Guys in the form of a Ghoul Gang cameo, a Guest who might be unlocked already, or might be unlocked later.

Zeeb also uses excerpts to this purpose, with each chapter bearing its own five-ish paragraphs of narration before the actual chapter. In a location, this might be your little bit of flavor text or full-page prose before you get into your pick lists and more workmanlike descriptions.

In design, I love looking back at an area I've written and seeing just lush picklists, and my hope is that this sort of specificity brings GMs joy when they can present that to the table. I highly recommend, if it fits in your game, writing even some rather cursory locations - specificity doesn't always have to mean density, and you can give your readers such a great sense of what a place means with only a few words.

Vibes Everchanging

The world map from Freehold Games' Caves of Qud

When people ask me why I stopped playing D&D 5e, I often say that I got tired of the fucking woods. By this, I mean I got sick of the same introduction in every game - the tavern, the plains, the trees, the rocky caves. Where are the donut swamps and the ruins that stretch for miles, choking all life? Where are the factory-cities of cold glass, the rococo moons?

I like my variety, and so variety is something I aspire for in my own Realms, and appreciate in world design more generally. I adore a map like that of Caves of Qud above, because it says so many interesting things about its setting - this is a world that nature has reclaimed from the ruins of something vast, with crystals and pale deserts and a spire and buildings dotting the jungle canopy. As you actually play Qud, you can tell where people live and where they don't live, and why.

The best maps contain many little Realms with diversity and definition, places that people imagined with their chests puffed and their minds open. It takes a certain level of confidence to make a forest of banana trees and killer flies, you know? To designers creating distinct places, I recommend confidence, research and exploration. Think about the world around you - how can you remix elements that you see into something that will truly fascinate your readers?

Then, take that idea, and think about what elements of it are playable, what might be a Realm or a Guy, and then define and expand upon that. This should give your reader, and especially your GM (if your game has one) a chance to immerse themself in this space, imagine playing the game and bring that to the table.

This is the power of thinking in terms of Realms - to enchant, and to create play experiences unlike anything else.

Guys

It's lowkey true though...

I write a lot of Guys. I love to write a little character, give them a silly little name and send them off to become someone's fetish. I think the pre-written character is a vastly underappreciated part of TTRPG design, and was a big part of why I initially made that tweet! Still, there are lighter ways than my thousand-word Sapphicworld characters to create some awesome Guys, some of which I've done myself.

A Guy is exactly what it sounds like - a complete character, ready to be used by a GM or player. This can be as light as a name, a profession and an adjective, or it can be as complicated as some of the bouquet baddies you see in something like Pathfinder 2e. A Guy is, of course, not exclusively a man. I used to call my LEGO minifigures "LEGO Guys", and I guess old habits die hard.

Themed Attraction

Crooned Symphony from WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live)

Guys are at their best when they say something about the game rather than just filling in a space. After all, your game is a work of art!

When me and IFeelOdd created WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live), we had a very specific tone and set of themes we were going for. We wanted something dark and urban, but also Jim Henson. We wanted something transgender and thrilled with the prospect of transforming that also showed the terrors of change, the ways the world can be warped by our lust for devastation.

When we made our Pactmakers, NPCs who manipulate and use the player characters with the promise of ever more cataclysm, we considered this tone and these themes. We made characters who were puppetlike, jazzy, occasionally kitschy, and almost always scary. We especially made sure that the consequences of accepting full dependence on these creatures was devastating and game-ending. We created strange wolf-ladies who give you perfect knowledge of the universe but gag you eternally, terrible women who turn you into a living viola, and big alligators who eat you when you finally give in to them.

Of course, this is an extreme example, but I do think tying your Guys into your themes, tone and broader ideas is a great way to tie everything together. Your Guys will be the life blood of your game, and they should feel like it. It's also fun to contradict your tone a bit - if you're making a comfortable game about running a zoo, what does it look like if one of the zookeepers is a big butch dragonslayer? What are her regrets, and what pulled her into this place?

The possibilities in combining tone and character in a TTRPG are so exciting. I mentioned it earlier, but I think Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast especially succeeds here, as many of its characters feel like they would be monsters or villains in a traditional fantasy game, but are able to be more humanized in a story about people living together in a joint space.

That's all for Part 1. Here's Part 2!