Its not Even about the Robots

One of the stranger side effects of entering some very nice very cool online spaces fully of geeky transgender women who are on bluesky a lot is that all of a sudden half the people I know have read Warhound and have opinions about it. For those not in the loop Warhound is a serially published piece of mech-themed erotic fiction published by Kallidora Rho. It has recently taken off on Bluesky thanks to an enthused fanbase, some awesome fanart, and a broader network of other writers creating their own work in the emergent “mechsploitation” genre.

I’d actually been following Rho’s work for some time when this all popped off. She has been a consistent throughline in the various cycles of transfeminine kink-zeitgeists I’ve lurked on the edges of including but not limited to the peaks of drone posting and the Empty Spaces era. I say all of this to make you aware that I like this stuff and will be talking about it here in good faith. Like all transfeminine writers making work about taboo subjects Rho has done her time in the discourse mines, and the people who have discussed her work have done their time in the retaliatory discourse mines. I’m not here for that. I’ve no interest in the scabbed over wound plucking that is transfemme art and kink discourse. Instead i’m here to talk about how recent chats about Warhound and its relationship with genre have been really helpful for me when unpicking my feelings about my recent Lancer campaign.

To offer some more context: I have watched the 1979 original and a smattering of other Gundam series. Neon Genesis Evangelion profoundly effected me as young uncracked egg, then the rebuilds did it all over again when I was an out woman. I’ve built and painted Imperial Knights, stray second hand Battletech minis, and a fistful of gunpla. Luna-Terra from Heaven Will be Mine was my profile pic for years and in the wake of that profoundly beautiful game I dabbled around in the itch mech freak scene for a few months enjoying things like Extreme Meatpunks Forever, Can Androids Pray, and Psycho Nymph Exile. Finally, on the TTRPG front I got through Covid by listened to mecha seasons of Friends at the Table, have run some Beam Saber, and skimmed a lot of other games. Thats a non exhaustive list but overall I like to think I have a pretty strong if specific cultural context when it comes to Big Robots, but recognise its far from an encyclopedic.

There will of course be things you have read that I have not that are meaningful additions to the conversation i’m going to put forward here, but what im offering here is a specific subjective thoughts on the genre. An insight into my own personal cultural background. Nobody will ever have enough time or enough energy to read, watch, or play everything and so sharing our own experiences is I like to think valuable. We have only what we are, and what we give. So give generously. Be free.

Thats enough subjective context though. Know who I am as I write this, appreciate where im coming from, offer me that grace you need to and take from this that which you find useful. Now lets go have fun getting stuck in the weeds.

Playing Lancer

At time of writing me and a small gaggle of LARP pals are on the verge of starting mission 8 of a roughly 12 mission long Lancer campaign. Each of those missions has been between 2 and 5 sitreps longs and has been interspersed with RP heavy sessions aboard space stations and our characters home ship. It is being run by my good pal Tangent who, to the shock of everyone hearing about this game, thinks mechs suck. She does however really enjoy putting her friends through gauntlets of tactical grid-based combat and is willing to use big robots as the bait on the hook to get us into a foundry server once a week to start drawing shapes on maps.

As anyone with even a passing familiarity with Lancer will be aware we spend most of our time engaged in that tactical hex-grid combat. In terms of sessions we easily dedicate 3-4 to on the ground fighting for every 1 we dedicate to social roleplay and out of mech encounters. Out of game we spend tons of time talking over builds. Mulling over systems. Working out how to squeeze out the optimal advantage from our frames and how to handle the steady increase in difficulty as we face trickier and nastier opponents. We are deep deep into the weeds on it. I’m at a point where despite having a movement of 3 hexes im regularly clearing distances upwards of three times that entirely through skirmisher reaction fire provoked movement while dancing up and down my heat-cap on a gorgon-sherman hybrid frame. I am a firebreathing glass canon launching out death rays upwards of 5 times a turn through various bits of bullshit. It is sick as all hell. It is also, by this point, an entirely rote exercise.

My average turn can effectively, at this point, be broken down into a flowchart. I take one or two shots depending on my heat situation and how capable I am of weaving in stabilize actions or fuel rod shots, use the movement provided by those shots to place myself in firing range of new targets, pop off my Scylla NHP, and begin scanning between my turns for targets that provoke it. Between Scylla, my vorpal gun, my normal threat range reaction fire, and my two on turn skirmishes I can send five shots downrange a turn when all goes well. With the exception of objectives or turns where heat has become enough of a problem I need to spend more time on stabilizing I am a machine that turns action economy into reliable artillery damage.

This is the primary function of Rel’Ashar Killian-Mirroir, exiled scion of the House of Moments, who was raised to be the pilot of demonstration prototypes at garden parties run by her mother. She would sit in elegant cockpits in perfectly designed plugsuits and send shots downrange with pinpoint precision. She would make her family proud like the rote machine she was bio-engineered to be. Her skills and the mech they command a twinned pair of advertisements for the Karrakin associated wing of SSC. Even after leaving that context, going on a failed religious pilgrimage, and then ending up a mercenary in the outer rim her greatest act of rebellion against the house of her birth is the fact that she does this all in a Harrison Armouries frame with Horus parts bolted on the side.

This narrative context does not show up in missions though. We are moving through turns as quick as we can. We are playing out a wargame, and the fantasy the game chases is not that of the noble scion pilot but that of the mech bay engineer. Lancer is about tinkering with builds. It is theory crafting, running the numbers, optimising, squeezing the most out of the things you have to do the thing you need to do in the best way possible. The hex-grid battles are almost redundant, and if Tangent was anything less than an excellent designer making some incredible encounters for us to work through they would be actively dull to my sensibilities. Fortunately she is a wicked sick encounter designer and what we have is a compelling wargame where tactical choices matter and our job is to live up to the things we have built and ensure that we dont fuck it up. We manage resources, we scope out angles of attack, and we plan an operation.

This is absolutely about the robot, but it is not to me a mech fantasy. It is a wargaming fantasy. Its a game about hex-based tactical grid combat. Its why when I tried to run it as a mech pervert the game I ran fucking sucked. Its why when Tangent runs it as someone who enjoys counting shapes and drawing on maps its really good and keeps me coming back each week even if I get understimulated waiting for my turn.

This kind of ate away at me for a while. I think about the image of the Gorgon from the core book. The way it extrudes this horrible hypnotic paracausal basilisk that worms its way into the ocular field of enemy pilots leaving them hemorrhaging out of the eyes as their mind snaps under the weight of its depersonalizing fury. A memetic hazard the wounds you just by looking at it. Why didn’t that excite me? Why did I stick to the Sherman frame as my baseline with its efficient HA heat management when I could be the horrible many-limbed monster that hurts just to look at? Its because that wondrous idea, that narrative kernel, it gets boiled down to a systems save to avoid being stunned when you attack someone near it.

I don’t want the horrible 4 armed bio-mechanical hell frame to make me make a systems check. I want it to pin down my mech, tear open my cockpit, and wrap my pilots body in an impossible mess of all too intimate agonies. I want it to go feral, start taking bites out of the wreckage, great chunks of blood and oil spilling out.

I don’t want my NHP to take control of my mech when it gets unshackled and start using my abilities to shoot at my allies. I want it to unfurl like a flower and start shaking the foundations of the reality. I want the head-piece of the frame to stretch against the armour that locks it in place until its raw and lipless teeth emerge.

I want the world to fall apart in a riot of collapsing subjectivities, and perhaps more importantly I want that to happen against my wishes. I want my character to be forced to eat shit in some hyper maximalist display of pseudo-religious images while a choir sings and trumpets blare and everything explodes around her while she hurts and lashes out at everything for being so fucking unfair…

Then the music cuts out.

She is in a clear white room. A machine next to her beeps and hums. There is stillness. Silence. A shot that holds on nothing for what feels like hours. An unfamiliar ceiling.

This is not a fantasy that Lancer can give me. It has no musical accompaniment, no loss of control. It cannot subsume me beneath a wave of images because every feeling, every character beat, is executed at our leisure and our pace as players at a table. We are sat on a discord call talking as friends and we decide where the story goes.

Powerless Fantasy

This feeling, to me, is the core of the fantasy I find in a lot of mech media. It is the idea that no matter how big and powerful you are you are always going to find something bigger and worse to fuck you over. If Shinji Ikari cannot save the world in unit 01, if Amuro leaves a won battle only to lie in bed weeping, if the rebellion hero can get her mind broken by a leather-clad handler then maybe its okay that I cant save the world either. Maybe if I had a seven story killmachine I could get to the end of waiting lists faster or stop climate change or take the bins out on time. Maybe it would make a difference. Maybe its okay to admit that no matter how strong you might be, no matter what tools you might have, you’re still going to suck sometimes.

This fantasy is not one that relies on the mech.

Which is maybe why i’m okay with it when a bit of erotic fiction pitched as “mechsploitation” ends up being more about pretty traditional pet-play dynamics with some sci-fi paint on it. I don’t get mad that its not even about the robots, really, because Evangelion wasn’t really about the robots. Gundam isn’t really about the robots. They are about parenthood, they are about war, they are about coming of age, and they are about struggling with powerlessness.

Take any bit of mech fiction you love and ask; would you still love this if it was about fighter jets rather than mechs? Does the core story still work if we just tweak the aesthetics? Has any of the good stuff ever really been about the robot?

Lancer fails to me as a mech game (and succeeds as a wargame) because it is about the robot. It is about a sequence of well engineered parts coming together to make a designed machine execute on a plan of action within set parameters. Warhound to me succeeds as a piece of mech fiction because despite barely mentioning mechs at all for the chapters of it that I have read it gets the the core of the fantasy that I enjoy. It understands that enjoying a show about a big cool toy robot is at least in part about watching that robot get torn apart, and then gives me that same satisfaction by having the pilot of its fictional mech get torn apart by a kinky powerful woman.

This works in Warhound because its a work of linear fiction being written by someone else. I do not have agency. I do not have control. I, like the pilot in the fiction, cannot stop the dreadful apocalyptic bad end that is bearing down on me. I get to experience the power fantasy, and then I get to have it stripped away. I get to see how hollow the fight is, and then I get to scream.

This is very hard to achieve in a tabletop roleplaying game. Like I said above when we sit down to play a roleplaying game we rarely if ever lose control. We are authors, not readers. We are the gods of the world we create, and even when the GM is willing to go hard on authorial control and the adjudication of the world in keeping with a more OSR-y tradition they are still a person I can negotiate with as a friend.

This could perhaps be solved by having a GM that was truly ruthless. Someone with whom I have pre-arranged permissions to make moves as hard as they want. Someone willing to indulge the idea of powerlessness. Even then though, I struggle to be subsumed by a roleplaying game. I cannot be arrested by its images, shocked by its sudden violence, or moved by its music. The ways in which it moves me are entirely different. It moves me with slow words, negotiated moments, abstract ideas, the intersections of systems, and in the moments me and my friends work out the story we are telling together. The inevitable, the terrible, the bad ending; it cannot exist because if the ending was pre-written we would not be playing a roleplaying game. Or, at very least, we would be playing a very different kind of roleplaying game to the one we see at most tables. A design space worth exploring, perhaps.

Works in Translation

This messy array of gut feelings about taste and preference can I think be summed up as a problem of translation and emulation.

When we take a work from any one medium and attempt to move it into another parts of the original will be lost due to the limitations of that new medium. When the film Annihilation got made we got a pretty solid ecological sci-fi thriller that utterly failed to capture the full nuances of Jeff Vandermeer’s surrealist writing. When Lancer got made we got a pretty solid mech themed tactics game that utterly fails to capture the rich interiority of the pilots we spend most of a mech story following. Both attempts to emulate a work from another medium make for a fun toy to play with or watch, but they don’t really capture the real juice of the originals.

When bringing mech fiction to TTRPGs we often, I think, get a little too hung up on trying to emulate the robot. We see the aesthetic of the thing we love, the raw and magnificent image, and then we try and pin that down with prose and collaborative play. We forget that the medium we are bringing the genre into has its own affordances, and instead try to warp it to fit the most obvious shape of the thing we already love.

We might be better served, I think, by looking deeply at how the robots make us feel, and then focus on translating that feeling instead of emulating its aesthetic. Rather than asking how to properly setup mechanics to make a mech work ask how to properly set up systems that will give your players the same emotional kick as seeing one on screen. Take the image, boil it down into the rawest feeling, then build up from there using the things that medium is best at facilitating.

Once we are free of that idea of emulation, of the tangle of images, we can start working out new approaches. Find genuinely new ideas. Translating the raw material into something thrilling, something that recontextualises our love for one genre in one medium into something that exploits all the best parts of another.

Unscrew the housings, peel away the plates that wrap up her chassis. Get your hands in amongst the wires. Break a few things. Twist it into a shape not quite its own to the point you barely recognise it at first glance. Understand that really grasping how a thing ticks, then translating it into a new form, is a deeply intimate procedure.

Do not be afraid of how erotic such an act can reveal itself to be.

Rhythm ZerOSR

The other night I was hanging around on call with a couple of pals talking about OSR stuff in some big sweeping terms. I’d just finished reading Rowan’s blog post about the OSR Onion earlier that day and was turning it over in my mind the difference between Adventures and Situations.

Despite my apparent (and deliberately cultivated) ignorance there are some parts of OSR design that I have already internalised. One of the main ones is the idea of prepping contexts, worlds, and situations that you depict and adjudicate authentically rather than prepping a story with narrative, plot beats, or arcs. This is something I’ve actually held to be true long before touching any OSR stuff, and reading that OSR Onion post had me kind of scratching my head about how an Adventure could be the core of an onion when the word Adventure felt, on the surface, like it was just another word for story.

The rest of that little part of our evening chat was dedicated to removing from me this idea that an Adventure was inherently about story. That it was a kind of shibboleth. That within an OSR context what Aventure means is context. A frame, a world, and environment. That it is a clockwork orrery that you build up, fill with tension, and then pop your players in and tell them “good luck babes!” before seeing how the whole thing falls apart. We were it turns out all on the same page; its just that language and context had us tripping up over our own feet.

It was around this point that I brought up Marina Abramović’s performance art piece “Rhythm 0” off hand sort of assuming that everyone in the room would know what im talking about. They didn’t, at least not until I jogged a few memories by explaining it, but it did surprise me that just saying “Rhythm 0” produced a room (voice call) of blank faces (people saying “who?”). Its not an obscure work by any means, one of the most famous bits of performance art of all time, but it was still kind of wild for me to assume that just because that artwork was fundamental to my understanding of games design it was something all game designers would be familiar with.

This was a verified XKCD geologists moment. However, I think that meme gets used a little too often used by folks who undercut how wicked smart they are. The true joy of realising that you’ve overestimated the average understanding of something in a field is that you get to be the person who tells them about a cool new thing! Its like show and tell but for nerd shit. Its amazing. You can blog about it. In fact, im going to blog about it right now and you cant stop me.

Rhythm 0 is a 1974 performance in which the artists, Marina Abramović, sat in a room for 6 hours and allowed the public to do whatever they liked to her. To explain this to the public she wrote the displayed the following words in the gallery:

Instructions:
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object…
During this period I take full responsibility.

Now if you’re going to look up this performance be aware that the public did some pretty wretched stuff to her. It was kind of a brutal oscillation between very sweet gestures and very cruel ones. The primary conversation about this piece in the public consciousness is about how it reveals some of the horrible things that people will do when told that someone else will take responsibility for their actions.

That reading is a bit played out to me. Its… fine? Like yes she clearly had a horrible time, it was probably pretty traumatising, and its stuck with her a long while. Thats worth acknowledging. However there is a part of me, the part that likes to design Contexts for Games, that sees this takeaway as a kind of failing of the popular art commentary to understand OSR design principles. I will however excuse this failing given that Rhythm 0 was actually directly contemporary to OD&D’s release and the OSR probably took at least a few years to get going after those first zines dropped [1].

The true sickos among you will have noticed by now that Abramović didn’t just sit in an empty room. Instead she decided to bring 72 objects in there with her. Those objects are as follows:

1: Gun
2: Bullet
3: Blue Paint
4: Comb
5: Bell
6: Whip
7: Lipstick
8: Pocket Knife
9: Fork
10: Perfume
11: Spoon
12: Cotton
13: Flowers
14: Matches
15: Rose
16: Candle
17: Water
18: Scarf
19: Mirror
20: Drinking Glass
21: Polaroid Camera
22: Feather
23: Chains
24: Nails
25: Needle
26: Safety Pin
27: Hair Pin
28: Brush
29: Bandage
30: Red Paint
31: White Paint
32: Scissors
33: Pen
34: Book
35: Hat
36: Handkerchief
37: Sheet of White paper
38: Kitchen Knife
39: Hammer
40: Saw
41: Piece of Wood
42: Ax
43: Stick
44: Bone of Lamb
45: Newspaper
46: Bread
47: Wine
48: Honey
49: Salt
50: Sugar
51: Soap
52: Cake
53: Metal Pipe
54: Scalpel
55: Metal Spear
56: Bell
57: Dish
58: Flute
59: Band Aid
60: Alcohol
61: Medal
62: Coat
63: Shoes
64: Chair
65: Leather Strings
66: Yarn
67: Wire
68: Sulfur
69: Grapes
70: Olive Oil
71: Rosemary Branch
72: Apple

Now is it just me or does this feel a lot like a d6>d12 sparks table from Mythic Bastionland? Like each one of these could be at the bottom of a page underneath an Omen or Knight to help spark some thought in a GM? Because I cannot look at this list without instantly thinking about how tables like that get designed. How they are engineered by designers and writers to create a very specific view of a very specific world.

It says a lot, for example, about the role that birds play in the world implied by Chris Mcdowall’s text that there is a knight for owls, gulls, magpies, vultures, pigeons, and doves. It also says a lot that all of these connections to birds are entirely metaphorical, and none of them have say a bird companion. Birds are symbolic then in the world of MBL. They are, somewhat obviously, mythic in their resonance.

It also says a lot, for example, that Abramović chose to have the gun unloaded and place the bullet separate to it. It says a lot that she didn’t do the same for the polaroid and the film that it shoots. Is the world that she chose to depict within the game that is Rhythm 0 one where violence requires more intent than voyeurism?

What does it say that she included a hair pin, safety pin, nail, and a needle? Is the act of piercing so nuanced in this world that we require four different ways to do it? Why does the nail get a hammer and a piece of wood while the needle gets no thread?

Why are there two different kinds of knife? And perhaps more importantly what on that list is it possible to cut? When she wrote the 1d6 random food table why did she go for bread, honey, cake, apple, grapes, and a sprig of rosemary?

Why didn’t her copy editor catch the fact that she left bell on there twice?

All of these questions just jump out at you the moment you stop considering Rhythm 0 as a piece of commentary about our real normal day to day world and instead start to consider it as a game written by an artist with the intent of facilitating play. In other words: Rhythm 0 is an adventure.

Now again I should pause here to remind you, dear reader, that this performance was especially harrowing for Abramović. These questions are all interesting to pose as hypotheticals that respect her as an artist operating from the assumption that the whole thing was lain out with a kind of intentionality we cannot be sure about. Back in the day when I was studying this sort of thing I never really stumbled upon much work meditating on this aspect of the art. Other accounts you will find of this work, maybe rightly, focus very intently on the gender politics of the way that an audience of men exploited the moment Abramović presented to them to do violence. On the other hand there is something violent about this too, that the curation and selection of implements to evoke reaction and emotion is flattened into some worn out statement on an imagined human nature rather than allowed to be what it is: compelling design.

Regardless, its a useful thought experiment. Plus the performance is over 50 years old now and I like to think that what harm it did is faded enough that we can engage with it in good faith and learn from it. We can hone our own tools, work out our own implements, and the next time we make a work of art (adventure) we can be real fucking deliberate about it. We can lay them out all stylish like in front of our players, sit down, and tell them that we as facilitators (designers, dungeon masters) are willing to take responsibility. We can give them a situation, and we can set them free.

By way of conclusion I’d like to encourage anyone else with some wild outside-context take to share their own in their own blogs and tag me in them when they write them. I remember hearing somewhere (I think maybe a Mountain Goats podcast) that the best ideas come from translation. From moments where fields collide and new approaches can be experimented with from contexts unknown. A great example of this is Katt Kirsch’s recent blog post about Leonard Cohen’s poetry advice, which is one of my favourite reads so far as I delve deeper into OSR blogging spaces.

Theres actually one particular thing from it that I would love to highlight here: the idea of speaking before a meeting of the Explorers’ Club of the National Geographic Society. In that blog the quote presented makes a point of saying how you shouldn’t insult the hospitality of an audience by explaining shit they already know. The counterpoint to this is that if you’re really excited about something the people in the room don’t know you can and should share it with reckless giddy glee. Every new insight I get from every little blog post I print out and read on the tram is a gift, and I cannot emphasise enough that I want to read about all the little special things that inform your life experience that I never would even think to glance at. It is a joy to become part of such a vibrant community of shared practise.

[1] Hey are you proud of me! I know what OD&D is now! I am actually starting to understand what an OSR is! Fucked up that none of you told me it was just Zines all the way down. I love zines.

Three Games that Matchgirls Play

The City of Lakes sprawls along the edge of the seaward upper strands of the Great Mire. Once its myriad libraries held true words and its streets were illuminated by magestones that spoke light itself into being. In the wake of the Linguisticide they have been left with empty shelves while scribes work day and night to restore their trove of knowledge. They do so by light of lamp, candle, torch, and any other flame they can get a department head to sign off on.

This situation has made the previously poor and shivering Matchgirls very fucking happy. They’re making out like bandits. Electrum flakes piling up in their purses faster than they can get their younger sisters to glue them together into “shards” to fob off on two-bit Rousing Lads who don’t know better.

Thanks to this success the previously austere and mournful Matchgirls have started making time for play in their routines. These games have emerged across the city, and formal lines are already being drawn based on recreational allegiances. It’s only a matter of time before some kind of Matchgirl civil war breaks out over it, but such developments have thus far been waylaid by an inability to agree on the rules.

Runoff: “Tig”

The Matchgirls of Runoff play a game called “Tig” which the local Rousing Lads insist is just “Tag” but all Matchgirls (even those from outside Runoff) know that “Tag” is a different and much worse game.

During “Tig” one girl is “It”. She can tag (tig) another girl by touching her and saying “Tig you’re It” to make her “it” instead. If they say “Tag” by accident (Which could happen for any number of reasons that are totally unrelated to games played by idiot Rousing Lads) then the person who was just “Tagged” may respond by yelling “TAG YOU’RE AT” which makes the person who just “Tagged” them “It” again.

Being “It” is bad and it is understood to be sort of like being a monster. Some Matchgirls (and Rousing Lads) find themselves really enjoying being “It” instead of “Him” or “Her” and this is generally considered fine but bad for the sport. If you like being “It” you don’t try hard enough to run. Such people are often told to go fuck off and go hang out with the horses because the stables are a neutral ground where neither Matchgirl or Rousing Lad fight out of a healthy respect for the large animals that can kick their heads in if spooked. This has led to a local demographic spike of non-binary stablehands which Academy Statistactitians are yet to find the source of because all Runoff children, regardless of gender, know that lying to academics is funny.

The game “Tig” formally ends each day at sundown when the local Stewtender bangs the dinner pot thrice and shouts for dinner. Whoever is “It” when this happens is forced to be “It” overnight. For those who don’t enjoy being “It” this is understood to be a heavy burden that shouldn’t be foisted on someone too often. As such there is an unspoken tradition of one of the faster girls getting caught on purpose if a slower one has been having a dire run of luck. This is sold as a kindness, but is mostly just about making sure the game isn’t boring.

Dranit: “Bulldog”

The social pressures and myriad graces and curtsies and niceties that form the scrabbling crab bucket of Dranit’s middle classes weigh heavy on the soul of the humble Matchgirl who knows in her heart she is a wild spark doomed to sell fire to amateurs. To vent all the stress these pressures cause the girls of this district to meet to engage in a violent bloodsport called “Bulldog” in abandoned lots on the edge of the suburbs.

To play the assembled Matchgirls first argue about who has made the most sales that week. The winner of this argument (only very rarely the person with the most money) gets to be the “Bulldog” and the rest of the girls line up on one side of the lot with a hand on the fence.

At this point it is traditional for the “Bulldog” to stalk up and down the line growling and yelling at her inferiors to scare newcomers. Once she has made a display of her ferocity she begins the first round by loudly barking “BULLDOG”, at which point the girls must let go of the fence and sprint to the opposite side of the yard while attempting to avoid a full body tackle from the girl in the middle. If tackled, you join the initial “Bulldog” in the middle, increasing the total number of “Bulldogs” the runners need to dodge in future rounds.

Many meeker matchgirls have observed throughout the years that the brash among them often end up losing first, and often end up not even being tackled very hard. Any who accuse the “Bulldog” of going soft on their friends so they can gang up on other girls inevitably ends up being the target next round as punishment.

The game ends when there is only one girl left running. If she can make it past every single other girl playing on the “Bulldog” team then she alone wins. This is very rare, and Matchgirls who achieve such a feat are honoured as the best in the sport.

Despite the apparent brutality of this sport there is some social etiquette that has emerged from the mess of scraped knees and bruised egos.
1: No hair pulling.
2: If you rip a girl’s dress you have to fix it for her.
3: No kicking once they’re down.

Lycea: “Stuck in the Mud”

The matchgirls of Lycea think they are better than all the other Matchgirls. They have little uniforms (jaunty sashes to wear over their mismatched clothes) and on occasion the Stewtenders of the student dorms leave a few spare suet dumplings in the broth they serve up. This is, within the ragged hierarchy of the Matchgirls, sufficient to make them veritable aristocracy. Outside of said ragged hierarchy their social standing is about as low as any other door to door spark trader.

Because of their elevated status these haughty Matchgirls disdain simple games like “Tig” or “Bulldog” in place of the the far more refined “Stuck in the Mud”. This is considered the most erudite of games because it has four words in its title, which is 400% more words than any of the other districts can come up with. When this is brought up in mixed company Matchgirls from Dranit say stuff about how “brevity is the soul of wit” in voices that imitate their absent mothers. Matchgirls from Runoff don’t bother reasoning with the posh girls from Lycea; they just start throwing rocks at them.

The game itself can only be played in Lycea because Lycea is the only district to have public greens upon which you are not allowed to walk without at least three degrees. These greens are an important part of the game, and anyone with a sufficient number of degrees to be allowed on them is considered ineligible for play.

To start a girl is selected by lot to be “it”. This is considered meaningfully distinct from and not at all like being “it” in “tig” which is a common game for people who don’t have any real class. If any of the Lycea Matchgirls enjoy being an “it” rather than a “She” they don’t show it. Mucking out horses for a living sucks, and its much easier to just play pretend for a while then write a sad admissions essay about it to get onto one of the academy’s gender studies courses. News of postgraduate employment rates have yet to reach the Matchgirl community, who mostly assume that matches will pay the rent forever.

Once the “it” has been chosen the girls assemble on the edges of the green. This is done shortly before the start of the academies noon classes, and the ringing of the midday bell to summon the scribes forth to their work is used to signal the start of play. From that point on the Matchgirls must, at all times, remain on the green or be considered “off side”.

From this point onwards the “it” must try and “tag” (never “tig”) the other girls to make them become “stuck”. When they do so the girl that has been caught must spread her legs into a wide stance and hold her arms out wide as though she is making a silt angel. From this point on she may not move until such a time as one of the other girls who is not “it” crawls under her legs to extract her from the mud. This is the only way to become “unstuck” and moving without first being freed is considered a “yellow card” offense which can get you banned from further games if you get enough of them. Such cards are inconsistently handed out, and are mostly issued spuriously to ice out any girl the in group thinks has the wrong hair, shoes, temperament, or sales technique.

The game ends when the bell signalling the end of the scribes shift is rung. At this point a number of people who absolutely do have permission to be on the grass emerge from the halls of the academy and begin to yell at the Matchgirls who have dared to break time honoured tradition. Those girls who are “stuck” at this point are doomed to a lengthy session being berated by stuffy tutors who expect better of them, while all the others girls leg it. If the person who is “it” managed to get every single other Matchgirl “stuck” she is considered a right prick who should have let at least a couple of them get away. They do, however, usually make absolute bank on the evening match-selling circuit while their competition languishes beneath the weight of the academy’s tedious disciplinary lectures.

The Academicians have attempted to have the game stamped out to stop their beautiful grass from being ruined. Unfortunately (for them) all attempts to do so have been stymied by reactionary periods of scholastic terror that make a small number of the younger professors wonder if living through the Linguisticide would really be that bad. The older professors laugh them off.

They know exactly how bad it was, and are just happy the girls are having fun.

Don Quixote & Dragons

Ever since my amazing debut blog about What An OSR Is I have become incredibly famous, and reblogged several times. In many ways a Niche Internet Microcelebrity. This has gone to my head immediately [1].

Unfortunately the one failing as a #influencer is that I have not, in fact, settled the discourse once and for all. If anything people are doing way more discourse. This is awful. Not because discourse is bad, I think it might actually be the most important part of an OSR, but because now instead of sending me texts about how much they adore my general vibe beautiful women on the internet are now sending me zip files containing old books. This cannot stand. I’m not reading all of that. I’ll just pick up traveller 5E when that comes out.

Anyway.

The way to solve this is clear. Having written the best blog post about an OSR maybe ever it is now my job to write an OSR. A thing many are requesting of me. Hogs, the lot of them.

The Goal

Okay enough of the ego shit its ill fitting on me and it runs the terrible risk of someone thinking i’m being sincere. Basically, the nice women (and Luke(s)) from the previous post have been egging me on to try writing an OSR and it seems like fun. Unfortunately im a weird art girly at heart and so I cannot do it normally.

Therefore, instead of writing an OSR by doing something so foolish as playing or reading one I will attempt to follow in the example of the historic (fictional) author Pierre Menard. Menard is notable for having (in a short story by Borges) written around 2 chapters and change of Cervante’s book Don Quixote. Not translating, not transcribing, writing. Originating from first principles the old text, and in doing so transforming it into something new and strange without changing anything.

(Its a great story, you can find a PDF just by googling “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. You should just inhale Laberynths, it was my favourite short story collection as a ratty closeted undergrad. Some of the best conceptual art you will ever read)

My goal is similar. I will, through some manner of lived experience, recreate an OSR from first principles. This is a lot easier than creating The Quixote, because that is a singular text and something against which Menard’s end result can be compared. An OSR on the other hand is just one small part of a larger genre space informed by the opinions and whims of a number of people who used Google Plus [2]. Appealing to their whims and having them all applaud my excellence upon completion should be sufficient to determine if I have succeeded. Fortunately, as I am learning due to my reading, having them tear it apart as a vile departure from the true excellence of the form would also be a sign that I have been entirely successful. Arguably, I should really be aiming for both to happen.

Methodology

Now we know what I am doing its time to start thinking about how to do it. Menard, bless his cotton socks, started off by trying to learn Spanish, become Catholic, and return with a V to 1602. I do not think this is particularly applicable in my case, as im fairly sure Gary Gygax wasn’t around until at least 1609 and regressing that far back would make me both a boy and also not alive yet. Neither of those things are conducive to writing a good TTRPG.

Instead I will follow in Menards latter example. I will attempt to recreate an OSR not as its writer(s) intended, but as Juniper intends, inflected with all the rich context of the current moment. My knowledge of D&D generally, the various contemporary blogs I have started reading, and the input of the baying hogs in my mentions shall form a sort of terroir from which I can draw insight. There is some discourse (ha) to be had here about how rich a soil to cultivate though…

The first option available to me is to earnestly engage with source material. To keep reading blog posts, keep Listening and Learning, and maybe even let the hogs whisper in my ear a little. This kind of community engagement is what you would do if you wanted to actually learn what an OSR is, and is something I actually intend to do once this is all over. Unfortunately they have already started a private discord thread and are running a game of bingo about what does and does not make the final cut, so all advise I might get from my peers is compromised from the get go.

The next option available is literally just stealing things. I can print off a few books that I have been sent or recommended, take a pair of scissors to them, and start assembling a jumbled hodgepodge of ideas through petty vandalism. I am going to do this some day, but not quite yet. There is time to make many an OSR, but I can only be naive of them once.

Perhaps the best way is to split the difference, and allow myself mere cultural osmosis for the time being. I will read what takes my fancy, but I will not research. I will snip out little fragments of what excites me, but I will not search out the books that aught deserve such respect. I will do it as I do everything, as a haphazard but well meaning synthesis of ideas, impulse, and inclination.

In short, I intend to be a little bit of a freak about it. Put the soundtracks from Demon Souls, Ico, and old Armoured Core games on loop, and allow a kind of spirit to take me in the moment. OSR is, I hope, mostly about going with gut instinct and justifying yourself in post.

If it isnt dont tell me, im having fun playing in the mud.

Three Fragmentary Blog Posts

As my previous post elucidated an OSR is at least in part when the rules live in three fragmentary blog posts rather than a PDF [3]. In the spirit of avoiding scope creep (the death of all good fun) and in keeping up a decent creative output on this site I’ll be delivering the first draft of Don Quixote & Dragons in this fashion. Each of these posts will roughly correspond to one of the ‘classic’ books you need to run an OSR. Theoretically you would also have at least one adventure supplement to go with them, but fobbing that off on one of your mates seems to be how the rest of the scene handles it, so I’ll probably force my friend Tangent to write me a dungeon or two on a lark.

To round out this first entry in my Borgesque hexcrawl-in-the-dark Gearinglike I’ll outline my current very rough plan for these three posts. At this point I am just posing questions to myself, things that I need to ask to understand answers. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to answer them for me. Or do. Im not a cop. If someone tries to tell you what to do spit in their fucking eye.

The Players Handbook

What is an Adventurer?
> What Stats should they have?
> What is a Skill?
> How do you know how dead you are?
> How big should the backstory box be?

What is a class?
> Upper, middle, or working?
> What genders can witches be?
> What genders can fighters be?

What sort of things can you own?
> How many electrum can you get for a ruby?
> What are the Killing implements?
> What are your clothes like?
> What random tat is there? (this is the fun part)

Player Two’s Handbook

What should the dungeon master be called?
> Should you roll on a table to decide this?

How mean should you be?
> Can you kill the players?
> Can you kill their characters?
> Can you kill their pets?
> Can you kill their characters pets?
> Is murder a sensible way to deal with someone who doesn’t bring the snacks you want to game night?
> What is a social contract, and how do you find loopholes in it?

What is an adventure?
> Should maps have hexes or grids?
> Should you have maps, even?
> What is the theatre of the mind, and where can I buy popcorn?
> What is the difference between a story and a situation?

What about all that other shit?
> How do traps work?
> Can you call them that in this day and age?
> How much stuff can you carry?
> Can you hire some sort of mule to manage this?
> Can a man be a kind of mule?
> How the fuck do you come up with puzzles?
> Do people need to eat?
> What is Lore?
> What are magic items?
> Can Magic Items be Lore?
> How much of the latest book you read can you put into a homebrew setting before you have to start citing the author as a source?

D66 Bastard Men

What is a monster?
> Are they evil?
> Are they people?
> Are they sexy?
> Can you sleep with them?
> Do they want to sleep with you?

Can you come up with d66 of them?
> Probably.

What sort of stats should they have?
> Can these stats be reduced to some sort of poem?
> How do you encounter balance a poem?
> Are poems NSR, Story, or Lyric games?
> Can a poem have a strength score?

An Addenda

Following my last post I said I would not be elucidating any further. This was a lie. I provided one small addenda via Bluesky that has proved funny enough that it deserves to be here too.

To avoid any further confusion allow me to set the record straight about walking simulators:
> World of Warcraft is Trad
> Life is Strange is Story Game
> The Stanley Parable is OSR
> The Beginners Guide is a Lyric Game

Anyone who disagrees with me is welcome to write a lengthy blog post about it.

—

[1]: You can mostly tell its gone to my head because that wasn’t my debut blog post lmao.

[2]: as an aside, I am informed google plus was something akin to a strange proto-cohost used in the internets pre-cambrian era

[3]: This was a little joke about Cataphracts by the way. A post O/U game of it just started up and i’m living it large as a diplomatic attache to a very sad young man. As penance for my joking about it go read Sam’s design diaries, they are very good: https://samsorensen.blot.im/cataphracts-design-diary-1

What is an OSR?

In the weeks following the conclusion of Over/Under I have found myself falling into a scene that seems pretty neat. It has helped me re-ignite my passion of tabletop games in a big way, and has me excited to try out loads of new games and a style of play I’ve never gotten to play around with before. I have been reliably informed that this scene is called the OSR, but nobody has told me what an OSR is and every time I try to define it people who do know seem to find it funny. As such I have decided to summarise a few things that I think the OSR might be here for your appreciation.

If you are someone who does care about what an OSR is please do not explain it to me. I am enjoying not knowing.

An OSR is a kind of Printer

When I was studying at university I really enjoyed the bookbinding workshop, and within those hallowed halls the most beautiful of creatures was the risograph machine. She is my favourite device.

With an A3 sheet I can make three internal double spreads with a single slice of a knife and fill it with all sorts of mischief. If i am clever I can format some double sided magic and get myself a saddle-stitched masterwork of indeterminate length. I did this a lot to make poetry chapbooks about geese that I sold at a few print fairs.

It flows naturally then that an OSR is a lot like a risograph printer. Some cheap and shitty way of producing small books full of scrappy writing that you sell and swap at in person events. When encountering the word online on the edges of my limited social circles I assumed it was some kind of much cooler printer thats way better more interesting than a risograph and that I couldn’t know about it because I was not sufficiently punk rock. This made the risograph feel like a sort of strange bourgeois middle class indulgence when compared to the true and mighty white whale of the OSR.

To my mind the OSR printer is single tone black and white. It uses thermal paper, like a receipt printer, and you have to buy all that paper secondhand because its been off the market for years. Somehow, despite this scarcity, it is still super cheap. This is because the paper used to print OSR zines is so bad that you cant even sell it to the kind of people who think polaroids are cool.

The only alternative to this theory is that an OSR is just what americans call a risograph, but also because its american it is in some way larger and also worse. Single colour only. An Oh-Es-Arrrr Machine rather than my humble and quaint Riso girly. The same, but different, with their own bizarre cultural contexts spiraling out from one another.

An OSR is a discord server full of transgender women

My understanding of an OSR as a printer fell apart quickly once I started hanging out with people who seemed to have opinions about OSRs. I met most of these people playing Over/Under, and it is important to bear in mind that during my time in Over/Under I was playing a large dyke who went cruising in bars for casual sex. This meant that almost all of the people I spoke to at any length out of character were the nice transgender lesbians who now hang out in my phone.

Now because everyone I knew who knew what an OSR was a transgender lesbian who enjoyed large women I came to assume that an OSR was a kind of discord server where they all hung out playing roleplaying games. The acronym probably related to Old School Runescape, which I imagine many of these women have opinions about and perhaps even zines discussing.

These TTPRG games were probably cool, like mothership (a game I had not really heard about before O/U), or at very least in some way related to D&D fourth or 3.5 or first edition. It was apparent to me at very least by this point that caring about a specific edition of D&D was a particular sticking point. You could have plenty of transgender women in a discord but if they all listen to critical role then they are probably not OSR transgender women.

Pathfinder is likely insufficient, I already know some transgender women who like pathfinder and they are almost certainly were not OSR. They are my friends from LARP, which is its own kettle of fish we don’t have time to get into.

In the final days of O/U I had the pleasure of being invited to one such discord server, and am pleased to report that even if a discord full of transgender women is not an OSR it is at very least nice to have.

An OSR is a blog made by someone who knows what a Luke Gearing is

The cisgender person I spoke to the most during O/U was someone called Big_Dog Beefstink. It was a common refrain in OOC spaces for people to say things like “OH MY GOD BEEFSTINK IS LUKE GEARING”. I didn’t know what a Luke Gearing was, I mostly just knew that he was on the same timezone as me and was also stupid enough to stay up late about it. After hearing this refrain a few times though I decided to check out Beefstinks bio on discord and discovered that he had a blog.

At this point I had long suspected that blogs were in some way important to an OSR. They seemed to be where all the cool kids hung out. Well, maybe not the cool kids. OSR blogs seem to be made by the kids who are maybe four and ten years older than me and have big opinions about cohost being shut down. People who remember when the internet was less shit and have just enough attention span left in their burnt out psyche to make an RSS feed.

Unfortunately I am just young enough that I only remember when the internet was mostly shit, (as opposed to it being the Hell That Spawns All Woe). This means that until someone works out how to make an OSR based on those flash games about stick figures performing terrible acts of violence I will never know peace.

Perhaps in time we can make a sufficiently narrow Luke Gearing, download an old copy of flash, and place him on some kind of road. I am told that meeting him on a road is very important and very funny.

Areas for further research:

Beyond these three main kinds of OSR there are a number of other things I think an OSR might be, but do not currently understand enough to know if they are or are not an OSR. This list is non comprehensive, and is the only conclusion this post will be getting.

• An OSR is when the dice are very specific, and also hate you.
• An OSR is when you do all your layout with a knife and some tape.
• An OSR is when the rules exist as three fragmentary blog posts rather than as a PDF.
• An OSR is an cheap and easy way for cisgender people to try out the transgender experience of passing the same £5 around.
• An OSR is when you get mad about hexcrawls, but for really particular reasons.
• An OSR is when a game has spark tables.
• An OSR is a game where its okay to kill hordes of disposable depersonalised goblins but only because you hate the adventurers you are playing as more.
• An OSR is when you call the dungeon master something else.
• An OSR is like an indie game, but more erotic.
• An OSR is any space where it is safe to assume that everyone present hates critical role.
• An OSR is any space where you can mention Clementine Kesh and have more than one person know what the fuck you are talking about.
• An OSR is when you write directly into a google doc that is automatically uploaded to your blog live without an proof reading or edit passes.
• An OSR is when you describe what you used to think an OSR is and people tell you that you should write a blog post about it and then you do.

Sister / Sestra / Juniper / Yula

One of the most peculiar quirks of playing over/under this past month or so was the fact that at the game start I had no idea I would be leaning so hard into playing a character the whole time. I understood that on some level this would be a social game, that it would involve acting out a character, but expected RP to be pretty light. Because of this I made the same mistake as several other people and did not change my discord handle immediately upon joining.

This isn’t so bad for some people, and others still changed their name up fast enough that it didn’t stick around as a problem. I however didn’t and ended up sharing a name with my character the entire month. This, predictably, has had some side effects.

Before delving further into that though its worth saying that Juniper is already a chosen name. Had a different one before that, and I actually still use a different one in almost all legal or professional contexts offline. This is to say that as names go Juniper is the one I use almost entirely in social contexts, among friends, and among people I trust to treat me (a trans woman) well. It is a name that represents that most intimate and personal part of myself and I have spent many years training myself to accept that it is a name I am allowed to use. That it takes precedent over the others that might slip out due to convenience or necessity in other contexts.

As you can imagine letting this, my most sacred name, be used carelessly and for a character that would worm their way into my brain was a whole fucking choice to make. Even if by accident.

The first thing I did to try slow down the train of reckless nominative bleed was to append the title “sister” to her name. I did this because in my weekly Lancer game I play a character called “Sister Rel” who is a former Karrakin priest, and I like the idea of playing into that archetype as something I had quick to hand in my head those first few days of Over/Under. This is also around the time I locked in a solarian conversion that would last the whole game, and I decided that my character would be a sort of weird space nun.

Cut forward a few days and my bid for a cardinal position is going poorly. I had joined the Bratva by this point and was leaning into the idea of being a kind of corrupt religious figure. Not just a nun or woman of the cloth, but a weird corrupt one who offered out bribes for nominations. The church did not take this well, I was exposed, and decided to publicly out myself as a member of the Bratva. At this point I changed that “Sister” at the front of my characters name to “Sestra” to fit the Russian mob theme.

This name, “Sestra Juniper”, became the thing I would use for the vast majority of my playtime. Occasionally I would do small joke variations, but I kept it pretty consistent. This led to a couple of strange interactions emerging.

First, in almost all of my narrative description I always referred to the character as “The Sestra” or “The Ses”. This is because its a title right, and something like “Sister enters the room” or “Sis enters the room” just doesn’t parse right, even with the “i” swapped to an “e” to make it more Russian.

Second, almost nobody else bothered to do this because everyone assumed that “Sestra” was just a first name. This led to a very strange almost dehumanising experience where a character that shared my first name was constantly being referred to by a title without even the respect of correct grammar. This was especially uncanny when it happened in the narrative text of other players. Their accidents creating a strange dissonance where the world itself seemed to want to deny her an identity, a name, a true self. It reduced her to a title, and didn’t even understand that part.

As you can probably imagine this was weird. Really weird. I at once was brushing up against being a character called “Juniper” while being called Juniper while also having “Juniper” constantly misnamed in the esoteric space of other players narrative text. It was like peeling off a second self and then watching her get deadnamed over and over for weeks.

At about the halfway point I decided to try and put back a little distance and give her a last name. Something that was truly separate from myself and without baggage. I choose to do this in a secret intelligence dossier that I was handing over to a character that “Juniper” was dating. That surname became a sort of secret; something that you only got to know if you had a certain degree of intimacy with “Juniper”. That name was also a joke, and literally just the Russian word for “Thirsty” with a few letters moved around. Lesbians right?

Finally, in the very last few days, around the time of the third fall of the Syndicate, I decided to give her a real first name. By this point I’d decided that “Juniper” just didn’t really work as a name for a Russian inspired mobster nun, and that it made most sense that the named “Juniper” was instead a chosen name. Sort of like when the pope takes a new one on after getting promoted, or when someone changes or chooses a name at a christening or confirmation.

That name was the very last thing communicated between “Juniper” and “Big_dog Beefstink” in a private channel they had been using for almost two weeks at that point sharing over 3500 messages. “Juniper” revealed herself to be called Yula, while “Beef” revealed himself to be Babak. It was a tender moment capping off what felt like a lifetime of back and forth. A final show of trust between two characters that had grown incredibly close.

This name, Yula, became something of a lodestone for me. It was secret. Private. Known only to people who were gifted it in private or who paid incredibly close attention to her in a select few messages that involved her using her full name. I can list the number of people who ever used it on one hand.

This might sound familiar to trans folks. A hidden name. Something tucked away and shared only in intimate moments…

The bleed here was fucking overwhelming.

Every time someone called “Juniper” Yula i just melted. It was like they finally knew me. The real me. The one that was being kept hidden behind a mask.

Except that wasn’t even true! Juniper is my name!!! My real actual name that I had, while away from the game, finally actually gotten put on a deed poll of all things. My own actual OC name made “canon” in the eyes of the state and mere days later I start using a new one. The character that I had spent more time embodying than my own self that past month hijacking this core piece of personhood and driving it like a stolen car.

There is a part of me that really wants to keep it. So few people ever got to call me that in game. So few people got to know the real “Juniper”. So why not let them know Yula? The person imagined in the long brimming over epilogue that spills out if I let my brain run wild in these afterglow hours following the games conclusion…

Just describing it makes me want to cry; something this game has done to me dozens of times now. Constant tears for a woman I am not and never was but nevertheless was the most me of any character I have ever played through sheer chronic exposure.

And it is a very pretty name. Yula…

But fuck me is the bleed not bad enough already.

How to make scanned maps Extra Pretty

In my experience running Mythic Bastionland there is something really really nice about having very detailed hand drawn maps. Sure you can use an online generator or hex-painting tool or whatever, but you always end up running against the contours of what those generators can provide.

I’m not a huge fan of “