Trans Awareness Week: Trans Themes in the TSL Playbooks
over 3 years ago – Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 09:49:53 AM

This Transgender Awareness Week, I’d like to talk about some of the trans allegories in the playbooks of Thirsty Sword Lesbians. As a transfeminine person, I’m most comfortable talking from my own experience, but I’ve also heard from people with other experiences—even beyond queer identities—about how the feelings embodied in the playbooks speak to them, as well!

There’s no single playbook that is “the trans playbook.” We’re all varied human beings who experience life in different ways. Instead, there are elements of every playbook that have the potential to speak to the experiences of some subset of trans people. And, of course, you can play trans people whose most significant emotional struggles, the ones represented by their playbook, have nothing to do with their transness!

The Beast is very explicitly about the pressure to assimilate, to suppress your self-expression in favor of a dominant norm. All sorts of marginalized people experience this, and for trans people it can mean either remaining closeted or expressing yourself according to cis narratives. It’s easier to “pass” if you don’t stand out in any way. It’s easier to get respect from cis people as a flat-chested trans woman if you wear breast forms. It’s easier to get respect if you change your voice—but what if you love your voice? The Beast playbook celebrates your uniqueness and shows the high cost of suppressing your true self in order to appease a toxic society. Not everyone can be out safely in real life, of course, and not everyone has the option to pass or mask or blend. For some, though, the Beast’s story will be empowering, cathartic, or familiar.

The Nature Witch feels very new to interacting with other people, hungry for new experiences. This touches on the feeling of discovering who you are as an adult and trying to make up for lost time or navigate the new scripts that people are applying to you. The playbook is anchored by a connection to their environment—animals don’t treat them any differently now than before, plants haven’t changed how they work just because the Nature Witch has a newly-discovered gender, and for the Techno Witch variant, their code still runs just like before. It’s just people that relate to you differently—in some good ways and some bad ways.

The Seeker represents a different kind of newness, where you’ve figured out that the things you’ve internalized about how to behave aren’t right, but they still hold sway. Sometimes the personal experience of rejecting the identities and behaviors assigned to you by a toxic authority translates into a broader rethinking of values. You can earn Tradition by following your Commandments, but Tradition isn’t good for much—just appeasing the Authority for a time. Rejecting those Commandments to write your own Convictions is more powerful and more fun!

The Trickster is afraid that people won’t like them anymore if they reveal who they truly are. This is hardly an experience unique to trans people, but it’s extremely common in media and real life for trans people to be rejected or harmed when a cis person learns of our status. It can be scary to open up, but it also hurts to keep it in. The Trickster’s arc usually sees them finding trustworthy people who will love them for who they really are.

The Infamous is someone who has firmly rejected their past, yet is still haunted by it and is seen as a villain when they are not. Some trans people have guilt around pre-transition behaviors, often behaviors demanded for their assigned gender, and many trans people are simply villainized unfairly. The Infamous can explore either or both of these feelings of guilt and villainization, with enough of a fictional narrative remove to make it fun. (And really any playbook can touch on the villainization themes, especially the Beast and Spooky Witch).

Speaking of the Spooky Witch, their conflict with society comes from their interest in acknowledging and socializing with monsters and with the Unseen—those society villainizes or doesn’t want to perceive at all. They might be analogous to anyone who could enjoy better treatment from society if they abandoned their friends (perhaps because they “pass” as cis more than their friends or enjoy other privileges).

The Chosen could tell a story about someone who isn’t yet out as trans, who is elevated but only if they pursue their socially-enforced Destiny in accordance with their assigned gender.

And the Devoted and Scoundrel also touch on themes that could easily be given a trans flavor. The Devoted struggles to do self-care—maybe because they’re depressed and have low self-esteem due to the way society treats trans people. The Scoundrel has trouble connecting—maybe because they haven’t figured out something fundamental about themself, such as their gender (or sexual orientation, for that matter).

Again, all trans people are different and all of the playbooks are open to a variety of interpretations. This is one advantage of using metaphors, and another is that it helps create distance between real-world experiences and the fiction. And you can create fictional societies that don’t enforce the marginalizations we experience in real life—or you can make toxic societies and tell stories about resisting and remaking them.

Hearing about ways that the playbooks speak to people with other marginalizations has been a deeply rewarding aspect of sharing Thirsty Sword Lesbians with the world. Fundamentally they’re about feelings, and one of the reasons that this game can be used to tell stories in so many different kinds of settings is because we’re focusing on the emotions and relationships between people, anywhere people are found. Even better, the number of playbooks will double thanks to the stretch goals you all funded! That’ll be nine more themes to explore and I’m confident they’ll be super queer, too.

  ~April~

Thirsty for answers? Drink up!
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 11:31:10 PM

Hey there folks! Fred here. Wonderful to see you again. 💖

Just wanted to drop in and give a few quick answers to the most frequent questions we're getting at this phase. Here goes!

When are you going to send me the preview PDF?

Backers already have access to the preview PDF.

Yep! We made the preview PDF available at the start of the campaign 30-something days ago; you can find the link to download the preview PDF and other early rewards like the VTT tokens and graphics in the backer-only update #1. 

You can just follow that link to get there, or if you lose track of it, go to the Campaign tab of the Kickstarter page and click on the big "looking for the preview PDF?" graphic right under the video. 

It's clear a number of folks missed that clickable graphic during the campaign, and that's our fault. We should've mentioned Update #1 explicitly in the reward tiers, but that didn't occur to us until it was too late to update the reward tier descriptions.

Where do I give my address/configure my pledge? 

Right now, nowhere! 

We need to get a few more moving pieces locked in before we can launch the pledge manager (we'll be using BackerKit) to take your address information, your reward tier upgrades, and make any selections and add-ons (like additional physical copies, or things like the Roll20 module or contributions to the community copy fund if they weren't included for your reward tier).

So, rest easy. When it's time (see below), we'll reach out in multiple places to gather your info and add-ons and pledge configurables.

When will the pledge manager launch? 

We should have our backerkit pledge manager for TSL launched by the end of February 2021, if not before.

Can I change my reward level?

You can't right now, but when the backerkit is launched (see above), you'll be able to upgrade your reward tier to a higher level tier. Will do my best to remember to tell you how when the time comes.

I missed the Kickstarter, can I still back it?

You can't; Kickstarters are limited-time-offer style events, and we want to respect that. We gave 30 days and a big online marketing campaign to get y'all to come on over during those 4+ weeks. 

But!

When we launch the backerkit pledge manager (see above) it will include a public preorder so folks who missed the KS can still secure a copy of the game (with complimentary PDF; no need to buy both formats separately if you buy the physical book, same as all of our physical books).

Potential preorderers may also be wondering how to get the extras from the Kickstarter outside of the campaign:

• Stretch goal settings and adventures once complete will be compiled into a PDF to give to the backers, and that PDF will be put up for sale for non-backers at a reasonable and likely low price (community copies likely as well).
• The Roll20 module, once created and published on Roll20's marketplace, will sell for $19.99, which is only $6 more than we've charged backers for it. (The character sheet we developed is already available for use in your games on Roll20, completely free.)

Will Thirsty Sword Lesbians be available at my local game store? Are you putting TSL into distribution?

After we ship the books out to backers (targeting June 2021 or earlier)—backers deserve to get their stuff first!—we will release the book to general distribution. At that point it'll be possible for your game store of preference to place an order with one of the many distributors we work with, to get supply to their shelves and ultimately into your hands.

Will the stretch goals be made into a physical book?

Too early to say! 

Typical formula is that a physical supplement will sell around 25% of what the book it is supplementing has sold. (There's a wide variance in that formula, tho, so it's always a bit of a gamble.) Given that, and the fact that we work in a setup where we typically need a supply of 3000 copies of a book to spread around in distribution, that suggests we'd need to be on track to sell 12,000 physical copies of TSL itself to justify production of a physical stretch goal book. (The KS itself is going to account for maybe 5000 units of those 12,000, and it's also unlikely we'll print 12,000 units as the first printing; we're considering between 8k and 10k at the moment.)

And that's assuming that the stretch goals in total make sufficient pagecount for a physical book in the first place (seems probable, but we'll know when we see it). 

And all of that comes after we do the work of writing, editing, layout, art direction, art acquisition, and proofing — at minimum. Work which didn't start until after the campaign launched, and per stretch goal no earlier than it getting funded. 

So! The cart is firmly ahead of the horse with this question. Many variables at play. As variables resolve into certain constants, we'll be able to say more.

Will you also make the module and character sheet available for [insert favorite VTT here]?

In the interests of not overextending ourselves, probably not. 

Roll20 has the easiest sheet and module development environment for us (and it can still take months of ignoring-other-work work to make a solid go of it) as well as a well-developed marketplace and robust player base, so that's where we're centering our VTT support efforts right now. The tokens and such that we made available as a part of the rewards for all backers can be used anywhere, of course — they're just graphics.

This campaign funded big! Where will the campaign's money go?

I'm going to round this to nearest $1k in for most of these in the interests of brevity & ease of comprehension & also pfff math why is it even looking at me like that, but here's how it breaks down.

Core Book

•  Layout, project management, crowdfunding management, and writing: $0. I (Fred) do layout as a main function of my job running Evil Hat, so we aren't charging the project anything for that. Ditto Sean's project management. April (and Evil Hat) gets paid out of the profits left after expenses are covered, per our publication contract. 
•  Editing, existing artwork, system development, sensitivity reading, and non-April contributor writing: ~$13k. (much of which was spent prior to the campaign launch). 
•  Art budget for art that does not yet exist, inclusive of stretch goal pay boosts and art direction: ~$19k. 

Manufacture and Fulfillment

•  A print run of 10,000 books: Estimated at $42k, but we're waiting for a quote from the printer we'll be using so we can dial this number in more accurately when we're printing at that scale. May drop a bit, might not, depending on economies of scale vs. supply chain issues and pandemic impacts.
•  Freight costs to get the books to the places they'll ship from: ~$2500 (estimated)
•  Shipping costs for everyone: ~$52.5k (estimated; could cost more, could cost less, once the shipping plan makes contact with whatever state the world's in by early-mid 2021)
• Roll20 module codes for backers receiving them: ~$13k.

Stretch Goals

•  Stretch goal writing budget inclusive of stretch goal pay boosts and projected editing costs: ~$30k. 
•  Stretch goal art budget inclusive of stretch goal pay boosts and art direction costs: ~$23k (estimated). 
• Blacksmithing course for April: ~$500.

Marketing and Other KS Supporting Fees

•  Marketing expenses incurred promoting the campaign: ~$20.5k (steep, but it brought in around $60k in pledges, so worth it; we used backerkit's ad promotions team for this)
• Kickstarter's 5% cut: ~$15k.
•  Payment processor's cut: Caps at ~$15k, we'll know in a couple weeks what the actual impact is.
•  Backerkit's 2% setup fee: ~$6k. (Could be $9k if we wanted not to pay them 5% of any add-on value, but we'd need to hit over $60k in add-ons to make that the right call. 5% it is!)

All in all that's about $32k to spend on the core book pre-manufacture; about $110k to spend on the manufacture and shipping of the book; about $53k to spend on the stretch goals; $57k to spend on the marketing and other KS supporting fees, for an estimated total of $252k in expenses.

Yup! Making all of this happen is set to cost us about a quarter million bucks when it's all said and done. The good news is that's vs. the funding level of $298,568, so if all of our expenses behave and don't exceed the estimates given here, that'll leave around $44k for April/Gay Spaceship Games and Evil Hat to split up as compensation for that $0 work mentioned up top. If the expenses don't behave, that $44k above the top should at least give us a sizable buffer for absorbing overruns. But hopefully we've correctly estimated or slightly overestimated all the expenses. The next 6-8 months will tell how on target we were!

I have another question not answered here.

Ask it here in the comments if you don't mind getting your answer in public view. 

If you've got private information to discuss (like details of your pledge or address info, for example) please feel free to reach out to us via Kickstarter direct message or (better) by email at [email protected] — email's better because more people than just Fred can see and respond to that!

That's it. Hope this helped clear things up for some of you, and hopefully it didn't muddle anything too. And thank you as always for your support!

Thanks to over 8,000 backers, Thirsty Sword Lesbians are coming your way!
over 3 years ago – Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 02:43:43 AM

I thought we'd made a neat game that would resonate with some queer corners of the Internet and bring a spark of joy to a hard year. I didn't expect to become one of the most-backed indie RPGs ever! I cannot wait to see the game on people's shelves and streams, being played at cons, and welcoming new people into the hobby. Not to mention all the neat hacks, scenarios, add-ons, and custom rules people are cooking up as we speak! It's incredible what we've achieved over the course of this kickstarter, in extraordinarily difficult times:

• Over 8,000 backers
• 50 goals met
• Dozens of authors working to provide a toolkit for telling your stories
• Double pay for contributing authors
• More-than-double pay for artists
• Nearly $300,000 raised in total to make it all happen
• And countless wonderful stories of fictional hijinks and real-world community

This community is something special. The game is unapologetically queer from the front cover to the back, and I hope that means the people excited to play it are people you'll want to game with: people whose eyes light up when they hear "Thirsty Sword Lesbians" and just get more excited as they discover it's written from a queer perspective (multiple queer perspectives, in fact) and wants to welcome people, not gatekeep labels or punch down.

And on top of all that -- y'all are sending me to a blacksmithing class! I'm going to learn to forge swords!!! I can't say enough how charming it was when Sean and Fred at Evil Hat sprung this surprise for me, and the delighted reactions from all of you out there. I'll definitely keep you posted on the sword progress (once it's safe to go out and take classes).

Speaking of Sean and Fred -- this game would never have gotten where it is without their support. Thank you for knowing how to make an RPG book and run a kickstarter, and for taking a chance on Thirsty Sword Lesbians! Big thanks to Karen the editor for making me sound less like a thousand-year-old robot and Trivia for lots of fun art direction times (and all the hard work and creativity)! And of course Jess and Jammi for sensitivity consulting that has indisputably made the game better and more welcoming, plus all of the stretch goal authors and mentors who helped talk me through both game design and business considerations! I can't tell you what a joy it is to read TSL material that's brand-new to me, instead of words I've known well through ten different versions. Can't wait to play them all! I'll also be highlighting these authors on my twitter at https://twitter.com/gayspaceshipgms so you can learn about their other fabulous projects (and mine, for that matter...).

I also want to send special thank yous to Kanesha Bryant, our incredibly skilled artist for the cover and iconic characters (who will also be doing some of our interior illustrations!) and Hannah Templer, who designed our logo and will also be doing some interior illustrations! Both of them bring the visual fun that our sword lesbians deserve and I'm sure they both deserve big credit for the success of the kickstarter!

In the coming weeks, we'll be putting together a pledge manager through backerkit, so if anyone missed the campaign there's will be another chance to get in on the ground floor and get TSL shipped your way as soon as we've got everything ready. We'll update you when it's good to go!

Once again, thank you all for making a sword lesbian's dreams come true. I'm going to take a short break from the internet and go for a walk outside, then take an evening to celebrate and marvel at all we've accomplished!

<3 <3 <3

~April~

In the Final Stretch, the Final Stretches!
over 3 years ago – Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 08:13:51 PM

We’re down to the final 48 hours of the campaign and ready to roll out the last of our stretch goals. Over the weekend you unlocked:

• Three more pay bumps for the talented artists who’ll be working to illustrate the rest of the book and all these many, many stretch goals.
• New Adventure! A Sea of Pink, White & Blue by Maria Fanning. The transgender pirates of the Tuath Alliance rise up to strike down the fascist marines of the Imperium Navy and protect their oppressed siblings across the sea of Bunús! A nautical adventure of transgender solidarity where queers bash back.
• New Playbook! The Investigator by Ash Chesire.  Inspired by detectives like Jessica Fletcher and Miss Marple, The Investigator is a queer elder with a sharp intellect and keen eye for detail, as well as a heart full of heavy knowledge of others' cruel potential. She is cunning, witty, and clever... And her greatest challenge will be to learn to let her intuition whisper to her heart and not just guide her head.
• New Adventure! Era’s End by Emily Care Boss. The Land of Dalmeya has enjoyed a precious peace balanced on a marriage bond but that bond has now been severed by death. You and your sisters are fighters, seekers and diplomats entrusted with helping to calm the deep-rooted flames of conflict between the various factions vying for the throne.

On deck we’ll continue to boost the artists’ pay even further and commission a new adventure from Vylar Kaftan: Fashion & Slashin’.

Paris. The lights. Cameras. Runway. Yes, it's a fashion design competition, but how will you win? Design the most fabulous outfits? Seduce your competitor? Cut the clothes off your rival's models? Whatever you choose, we know you won't play it straight!

Our final stretch goal is a very, very special one.

At $268,000 we’re sending designer April Kit Walsh to The Crucible for blacksmithing lessons so she can forge and wield her very own blade!

April’s extraordinary vision and commitment to championing the queer experience have made Thirsty Sword Lesbians the phenomenal success that it is. It’s truly fitting that she gets the opportunity to forge her own blade as the capstone of the campaign’s conclusion.

We’ll need your help to get there. With less than 48 hours left, now’s your last chance to drop a reminder to your fellow gamers or post a link on social media. Tell your friends: the thirst is real.

And thank you, as always, for your support!

Design thoughts: the difference between mechanising feelings and evoking them
over 3 years ago – Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 03:19:31 AM

As we head into the final week, we’re still going strong! New people are discovering the game every day and getting excited about it, and we would really appreciate it if you could help spread the word and share your experiences far and wide.

Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about what it means to me for an RPG to focus on feelings.

An RPG can tell you to feel things, but it’s much more fun and effective to shape situations and experiences that evoke those feelings.
For instance, a number of mechanics in Thirsty Sword Lesbians invite vulnerability. At the very beginning of a TSL game, you hand out Strings to the other PCs. They can use these to help you or hinder you, to influence you for good or ill. Several playbooks and basic moves create the same dynamic: inviting you to put trust in your comrades and seeing if they reward it or let you down. This fosters emotional stories and trust by giving the player a tiny taste of the feelings that the character would experience as their vulnerability is honored or not.
The game also emphasizes communication, and the Smitten move is an example of both of these elements in concert. You signal to the other players where the pain point is for your PC, and trust them to use that information to help tell a dramatic story.

Conversation is at the heart of roleplay, and the back-and-forth built into basic moves like Fight, Figure Out, Entice, and Emotional Support helps to emphasize that all of these interactions are relational. The stakes of a fight are how it affects the relationships among the characters in the story. And we care about how a person chooses to respond to enticement and support at least as much as we care about how it is offered.

Another feature you’ll notice about Thirsty Sword Lesbians is that there’s no move to compel an NPC to do something they don’t want to do. You can try to figure out what they care about, you can try to entice them or tempt them with something they desire, but they do have motivations and desires—they aren’t tools or prizes for the PCs. This is essential to foster feelings of connection and to avoid the creepy feeling of mechanics overriding a character’s personality.

Finally, Conditions! Brendan Conway did incredible design work in the Masks RPG by crafting Conditions, focusing the stakes of conflict on the characters’ emotions. TSL includes the core loop of gaining Conditions and then either having moments of support or engaging in destructive actions to clear them (with updates of course to make them mesh with the rest of the system and shift some of their focus). Since these difficult emotions are frequently things we experience without wanting to, the game takes a little more liberty in assigning them to PCs—though the player retains a great deal of control over which emotions to choose and how to act on them. This way of using mechanics to engage with emotions is different because the game isn’t trying to make players angry or frightened, but to highlight the PCs’ difficult emotions as a roleplaying prompt and story tool. It can be delightful for the players when a character creates drama by acting out because of a Condition they’re experiencing. The characters can be imperfect without the players feeling like they’re failing at playing the game, and imperfect characters make for good stories.

Different emotions and story beats call for different mechanics, to evoke those feelings or to hold them at arm’s length. Ajey Pandey’s stretch goal for Tragic Duels is an example that deviates from the feel of the core rules: your character will feel bad and you will feel bad for them as characters up the stakes and break their hearts to ‘win’ at a duel.

I can’t wait to see what other variations the community comes up with, and I’m glad so many of you enjoy the way the feelings-oriented mechanics are calibrated in Thirsty Sword Lesbians!
As always, thank you so much for your support! Brighten someone’s day and help us unlock more fantastic stretch goals by spreading the word!

~April~