Bluestocking's Organic Gaming

There's a dreadful moment in a feminist's life when they wake up, open their inbox, and are flooded with messages. From comments about how gaming is a male dominated hobby and women shouldn't be allowed in, or allowed to organize, or allowed to well... do much besides play, maybe? To messages about how I should be sent to Syria so I could get raped and know what true oppression felt like. Maybe I should be raped to death by a pack of dickwolves?  What do you do when someone asks you what's giving you life and you struggle for an answer? Not because there aren't great things happening, but because so many of those great things are dramatically shadowed by the indifference to evil and the evils themselves that are happening. I'm not one to get into good and evil rhetoric. It's not my style or a place I'm comfortable being in. Yet there's a threshold where we need to start discussing what makes a person a bad person. And sometimes, when it's push...

I choke and suffer on the smoke long before I feel the flames. Then the heat rises in waves of agony that makes the face of my murderers shimmer in a haze. They each do nothing. My last breath catches and fails. My scream is a guttering flame. Though it means my death.            - Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne Witch: The Road to Lindisfarne is a game where players take on the rolls of those escorting a young woman who has confessed to the sin of witchcraft to the holy isle of Lindisfarne where she is to be burned in absolution. The characters will decide whether to believe she is innocent and spare her, or guilty and burn her. Should they decide wrongly, their own fates will become as dark and twisted as the road they travel.  I picked up Witch right before Christmas because I had heard about it on the Gauntlet and it sounded right up my alley. I used to practice WitchCraft and had studied the witch trials extensively for a project in s...

The easy solution to every problem in an RPG is to kill it with fire. Or swords. Or guns. Or hell, rocket launchers if you're into a Resident Evil style game. Regardless of your personal weapon choice, the fact of the matter remains: we default to physical action as consequence or conclusion. We take tiny steps and there the conclusion of physical action lies. Now, if you're playing a game, it's pretty likely that your course of action will draw blood of some kind. When did violence become so casual to us gamers? When those dice hit the table and they roll up snake eyes or the dreaded critical fail one, we turn our anxious gaze to our GM and fear but anticipate their next move. You know it's gonna be real bad. You fucked up real good, son. Something is about to hurt. And you want it. Like a submissive who can't quite get enough punishment, we pony up to the table and ask our GM to make our lives hard. The GM will smile. Maybe smirk. There's probably some...

Last year I was sitting down at my desk (see: couch) and going through all my NPC cards for my Urban Shadows game. As I put them in neat little piles for their individual factions and updated the back of their cards with their recent drives and needs, I glanced at their pictures. I had Julius the Fae , Dallas the Angel , Essex the Wizard , Andreas the Hunter , Ruth the Werewolf , Lexi the Tainted , Morrigan the Fae , Amith the Immortal , Gabrielle the Immortal , Amy the Hunter , Fahad the Tainted , and many more. There were some more white characters, but overall, I felt actually pleased with myself as I looked over my cast of NPCs. And then, as I began to pick out more for the next slew that would come up in rumours, and I looked at my pictures, I realized I never searched for Asian faces. Ever. I made a point of adding characters with a variety of ethnicities, because it was capital I important to me, but for some reason, I didn't have Asian characters. I was a Marvel movie...