Bluestocking's Organic Gaming

It's not very often I stumble across a game that personally resonates with my lived experiences. It's also not very often that I leave a game feeling empowered. It's not an emotion I angle for and it's not something I often get out of a game, because I often play women, and the women I play aren't usually in situations where they're fighting. Or if they are, as in the case of a hunter, they're fighting their friends and that's not empowering, it's just painful. Of course, the solution would be to play more traditional "going out and beating the bad guy" games. Except they don't give me the emotional payback I want. So when I was talking to Andrew Medeiros and he mentioned his new game he was working on with Anna Kreider, about women warriors being badass and fighting against this invasive force called the Shadow, I was like "Oh my fucking god, yes please!" We playtested it within the week and I've been playing sessio...

Have you ever had a game go sideways and you're not really sure how or when it happened but man, oh, man, did it every go sideways? It didn't just go sideways, it crashed and burned and everyone at the table sat there in actual shock for a few minutes? Or worse, someone got hurt and didn't say anything until they couldn't bear it anymore and you feel awful but the damage is so far gone at this point there's nothing you can do but flail at them and hope they hear you past their hurt? This happened to me recently. I wasn't the wronged party. I was the one who had stepped in shit and didn't notice I was causing the whole place to stink. Honestly, I should've seen it coming. I should have picked up what was happening but instead, I was too busy engrossed in the fiction and playing a character and feeling a lot of feels that made me incredibly (beautifully) uncomfortable. After this game exploded and the GM wisely called it, I felt powerless to fix th...

There was an article recently published on the toxic belief that wolves have a hierarchy that is controlled by an alpha male . In human society, specifically American culture, the alpha male has come to represent something between the man men want to be and the man nerds hate with a passion. Most of can conjure some sort of image of the alpha male, and just how often he appears in pop culture, specifically nerd pop culture. And yet, he doesn't seem to be welcome at the game table, either as a character or as a player. When I began to do some research into alpha males, it wasn't because they were a problem for me, or ever have been a problem for me. It was because of that stupid wolf article. I'm a huge fan of werewolves. They're my favourite supernatural being. But I hate how it's always very male centric feeling (yes yes, Gingersnaps), because it's always this person who has a hard time containing the animal, and they get aggressive and pretty toxic and the...

I'm going to start this by putting a big  content warning on this article. I didn't when I wrote about abuse in gaming, and I hurt people. That was shitty of me. So in case the title didn't give it up, this article is going to contain a conversation around rape. In this article, I will discuss the inclusion of rape as a theme, a trope, and a tool in gaming, and a bunch of stuff around that. If this will make you hurt or uncomfortable, I recommend not continuing. If you feel comfortable, please proceed, but with caution. When I was eighteen, I met a guy. He saw me, he liked me. We became a couple. He was abusive. Physically, emotionally, verbally, and eventually, sexually. I had to do things for him to be able to just walk by him. He'd hold me down when I was sleeping and rape me. I didn't know this wasn't normal. We broke up. I started casually seeing someone. We had sex. We got drunk a lot. I said I don't want to have sex anymore. I got drunk. He had...