Playing Past Fascism in Thirsty Sword Lesbians

I’d been running our game of Thirsty Sword Lesbians for about eight sessions when I stopped to ask myself: am I making these (former) fascists too sympathetic? I never thought I’d GM myself into this position.

You’re Probably Wondering How I Got Here.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a TTRPG created by April Kit Walsh in the Powered by the Apocalypse lineage: it acknowledges Masks, Monsterhearts, and The Watch as its most immediate influences. It is not a game about playing sensible, cool-headed characters: the player’s agenda asks them to “Feel Deeply and Powerfully and Often” and “Bring the Action”. Each playbook has an emotional conflict at its core: The Scoundrel is bold, daring, and will sweep you off your feet but finds it difficult to think before acting and tends to leave things (and people) behind. The Devoted’s duty gives them meaning and purpose but is so central to their identity they can grow self-destructive in its service. Two of my players chose the playbooks for The Beast (played by C) and The Infamous (played by A), whose core emotional conflicts and fictional positions, in conjunction with our setting, precipitated my predicament.

Our game borrowed the pastel-toned and mundanely magical setting of Christine Love’s Get in the Car, Loser! because 1) As a GM I liked the premise of a road trip game, 2) it’s a game about queer messes saving the world, and 3) it was freely available at the time and by start of game three out of four people in our group had played the whole thing. That’s more familiarity with the setting than I usually secure for my games! GitCL! is not subtle about what its villains are: the Machine Devil cultists speak like Richard Spencer impersonators (occasionally borrowing his hair, too) and the game UI calls them Black Shirts (a name given to paramilitary wing of the fascist movement in post-WWI Italy). Wanting to avoid the dual pitfalls of setting our tabletop game in the shadow of the “real story” and making the adversaries neo-nazis in a game where one of my GM principles is to “Make the Adversaries Appealing” I set our game post-GitCL! in a world where the Machine Devil was defeated unconditionally and fascism was crushed, but the Divine Order (neoliberal centrism with a theocratic flair, complete with angelic cops) remains in power. I charged our heroes with investigating a new development: the rise of the Cult of the Egoist Ascension, a more loosely-structured group characterized by libertarianism, individualism, and self-determination outside the milquetoast liberal political order. For their ideology I drew broadly from libertarianism of various stripes, in particular egoist anarchism.

Coming back to those playbooks: C is using the playbook for The Beast, which centers on how the character’s cultural norms clash with those of the society around them with regards to appearance, mannerisms, and personality. The playbook has a “Feral” track which shifts up and down as the character balances conforming to societal norms and expressing what makes them powerful, honest, and fulfilled. Reaching one extreme forces The Beast to shift into their socially unacceptable bestial form while the other temporarily cuts them off from their playbook moves as they successfully assimilate, losing touch with their “true” self. C plays a Beast that is blunt, brash, and disinclined from thinking about social issues with even a modicum of nuance – a true inheritor to Grace Morningstar’s legacy.

A is playing with The Infamous, a playbook for a character that lives in the shadows of their past wickedness. As I’d anticipated when A suggested the playbook, she was angling toward playing this character as a former Machine Devil cultist. This was done in conversation with the group and there was a lively discussion around the table how “deep” into that milieu we wanted that character to have been and how seriously they should be implicated in the various forms of violence perpetrated by fascist gangs. Even when not in active use, the safety tools outlined in Thirsty Sword Lesbians book were great to have available in carrying this discussion forward. I won’t share the details of these conversations–this was a matter of deciding as a group what people were comfortable playing with and against–but the important outcome was that we now had a character whose core conflict revolved around how to move past being a fascist.

To recap, I am running a game where:

• The primary antagonists are a group feeding off desire for individual liberty and dissatisfaction with the existing social order
• One character is a former fascist trying to make things right
• Another character thinks about politics in extremely reductive terms bordering on sloganistic

While it was by no means the “right” or “only” choice, this is what led me to introduce multiple characters that were part of a fascist death cult into my disaster lesbian roleplaying game.

Circling back to the question I was asking myself: How do I make these non-player characters sympathetic without being sympathetic to fascism?

Playing Past Fascism

My starting point has been that I don’t give screen time to current fascists and people actively doing fascist shit. As established by our game’s setting fascism has already lost and the “true believers” went down with the Machine Devil. The characters I’m introducing to my game have moved on to other ideological and social positions more aligned with the values that drew them to fascism in the first place. The avaricious totalitarian becomes a capitalist dictator under the rhetoric of libertarianism; The girl who was looking for family finds it in a “fuck everyone but us” gang of ungovernables; The demonic spawn of the Machine Devil itself continues to seek out fights for the sake of fighting but, no longer being pointed at society’s most vulnerable, lives for the thrill of a worthy challenger.

To varying degrees, these characters are shitty people! Who did and still do shitty things! Importantly though: they aren’t spouting fascist shit. They aren’t pushing for genocide or race purity. Those with expansive ambitions are aligned much more closely with bog-standard neoliberal imperialism (and we hate them for that!). I leave it to my players and their characters to decide who deserves forgiveness and on what terms. And to give credit to my players, they allow their characters to be fallible: our Beast has been ride-or-die for our Infamous since they met but defaults to hostility and distrust whenever an NPC’s past affiliations arise. The Infamous, for her part, is constantly recognized as “one of us” by other former fascists who expect she’ll cut them some slack, help them reintegrate into society, or otherwise be more accommodating to their bad habits (and The Infamous, for her part, certainly gets a range of receptions from the people she meets).

This approach has obvious limitations. It does not reckon with the full harm of fascism: This would not match the tone of the game and is a sensitive topic for some of our group. This approach (and, I would argue, Thirsty Sword Lesbians as a game) isn’t equipped to answer questions about what we do with the worst of the worst and so we don’t. We instead think through whether there is room for reconciliation and rehabilitation for those that made selfish, cruel choices and hurt people, possibly even killed people, and what that might look like.

At the second stop of the road trip the party met Wendy Maple. She was a Machine Devil cultist that, like the other cultists in the town of Tallawang, was forcefully exiled by direct action from antifascists many years before our game. When the cult dissolved and the exile stood she and her last true friend in the cult spent the next thirty years living in an abandoned mine on the outskirts of town, stealing supplies and rustling cattle to sustain themselves. The party met her exploring the mine…

…and discovered she was still a shitty person. So they fought her! Won her over! To the Beast’s delight they took her back to town, having Solved Bigotry with Heart and Blade.

That very night at the diner, Wendy’s social conservatism (which living in a cave for thirty years had not changed) caused the Beast to walk out, unable to tolerate her and shattered that undoing decades of ideological indoctrination was not the work of a single afternoon. The next day a portion of the townspeople were ready to run Wendy back out of town–there’s no place for fascism in Tallawang. The Beast doesn’t stand in their way. The Infamous stepped in to mediate between Wendy and the townsfolk, putting her own conditional acceptance at stake.

There were people in the community that had been harmed by fascists, by Wendy specifically. She’d also spent thirty years in a cave resenting the defeat of the Machine Devil and the collapse of her entire social support network–conditions hadn’t been especially conducive to personal growth. After cooler heads gathered to discuss, The Infamous helped those involved reach an understanding: there are some people in town with the positionality and patience to work with Wendy, rehabilitate her, help her make amends and reintegrate into a caring, inclusive world. There are also people and places here with good reason to have nothing to do with her and it will be made sure they don’t have to.

Our party’s on a road trip and much to the Beast’s dismay problems like this aren’t solved in a few in-game days. Among the players and myself there’s an understanding this isn’t for us to resolve with a few dice rolls in a couple of sessions. As the characters pile into their pickup truck to continue their quest, we as players remain hopeful for the hard, painful work that must take place “off-screen” in the rear-view mirror. I hope it will happen.