{"id":171,"date":"2022-07-05T23:08:24","date_gmt":"2022-07-05T23:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spatblog.com\/?p=171"},"modified":"2022-10-23T23:08:30","modified_gmt":"2022-10-23T23:08:30","slug":"playing-past-fascism-in-thirsty-sword-lesbians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spatblog.com\/index.php\/2022\/07\/05\/playing-past-fascism-in-thirsty-sword-lesbians\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Past Fascism in Thirsty Sword Lesbians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’d been running our game of Thirsty Sword Lesbians<\/em><\/a> <\/em>for about eight sessions when I stopped to ask myself: am I making these (former) fascists too sympathetic<\/em>? I never thought I\u2019d GM myself into this position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You’re Probably Wondering How I Got Here.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Thirsty Sword Lesbians<\/em><\/strong><\/a> is a TTRPG created by April Kit Walsh in the Powered by the Apocalypse<\/em> lineage: it acknowledges Masks<\/em>, Monsterhearts<\/em>, and The Watch<\/em> as its most immediate influences. It is not a game about playing sensible, cool-headed characters: the player\u2019s agenda asks them to \u201cFeel Deeply and Powerfully and Often\u201d<\/strong> and \u201cBring the Action\u201d<\/strong>. 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\u2019s 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<\/strong>) and The Infamous (played by A<\/strong>), whose core emotional conflicts and fictional positions, in conjunction with our setting, precipitated my predicament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our game borrowed the pastel-toned and mundanely magical setting of Christine Love\u2019s Get in the Car, Loser!<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>because 1)<\/strong> As a GM I liked the premise of a road trip game, 2)<\/strong> it\u2019s a game about queer messes saving the world, and 3)<\/strong> 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\u2019s more familiarity with the setting than I usually secure for my games! GitCL!<\/em> 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 \u201creal story\u201d and making the adversaries neo-nazis in a game where one of my GM principles is to \u201cMake the Adversaries Appealing\u201d<\/strong> I set our game post-GitCL!<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coming back to those playbooks: C<\/strong> is using the playbook for The Beast<\/strong>, which centers on how the character\u2019s cultural norms clash with those of the society around them with regards to appearance, mannerisms, and personality. The playbook has a \u201cFeral\u201d 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 \u201ctrue\u201d self. C<\/strong> plays a Beast that is blunt, brash, and disinclined from thinking about social issues with even a modicum of nuance \u2013 a true inheritor to Grace Morningstar\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A<\/strong> is playing with The Infamous<\/strong>, a playbook for a character that lives in the shadows of their past wickedness. As I\u2019d anticipated when A<\/strong> 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 \u201cdeep\u201d 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<\/em> <\/strong>book were great to have available in carrying this discussion forward. I won\u2019t share the details of these conversations\u2013this was a matter of deciding as a group what people were comfortable playing with and against\u2013but the important outcome was that we now had a character whose core conflict revolved around how to move past being a fascist<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To recap, I am running a game where:<\/p>\n\n\n\n