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In the world of tabletop roleplaying games, or TTRPGs, players can do the impossible. They can slay dragons, encounter unknown horrors, and save the world. Players can also become whoever they want, fully embodying their characters. As TTRPGs progress, this includes the capability to fully inhabit LGBTQ+ identities, both in roleplay and game mechanics.
Though it has always been possible for a player to build an LGBTQ+ character in TTRPGs, it has not necessarily been encouraged by the game itself. With indie TTRPGs on the rise, many developers have created unique environments where a character’s gender or sexuality is equally important to the game as their selected skills are.
10 Blue Rose: Romantic Fantasy
Blue Rose, a TTRPG run on the AGE engine, purports itself to be romantic fantasy. Blue Rose‘s developers describe romantic fantasy as being adjacent to traditional fantasy but with slight differences. In the romantic fantasy of Blue Rose, sexism and homophobia are either flaws that societies and entities strive to overcome or qualities of enemies that the heroes must conquer. Magic is not a rare, complex field of study, but an innate gift that is just as much a part of someone as their own body. This game prioritizes stories of found family, nature preservation, and discovery of the self.
9 Monsterhearts And Monsterhearts 2: Exploring Sexuality Through Genre
In the honored tradition of its inspirations and predecessors, Monsterhearts uses monsters and magic to tell stories about adolescence and growing up. Both the first and second editions of this game put the players in the shoes of high school students attempting to understand the natural and supernatural changes they’re going through.
The developer built Monsterhearts on personal experiences of being LGBTQ+ in high school. Additionally, multiple pages of the sourcebook describe how Monsterhearts players can use the system to explore queer themes and content.
8 Thirsty Sword Lesbians: Excellent And Exactly What It Sounds Like
Evil Hat Productions’ page for Thirsty Sword Lesbians aptly describes it as “a roleplaying game for telling queer stories with friends.” This Nebula Award winner includes exactly what the name would suggest: sapphic swashbucklers taking on alluring enemies and making emotional connections with the people around them. Thirsty Sword Lesbians has nine character types for players to choose from, each centering on a particular kind of emotional strife. The beautifully illustrated Thirsty Sword Lesbians sourcebook includes various setting options and story seeds for gaming tables to build off of and turn into adventures.
7 Dream Askew: Decide Who To Be After The End Of The World
From the same developer as Monsterhearts 2, Dream Askew asks gamers to tell the stories of what happens next. This GMless, diceless game was nominated for several awards at the Gen Con ENNIE RPG Awards. It explores the concept of queer characters rebuilding a community after society crumbled around them. Dream Askew doesn’t shy away from marginalization or oppression, instead inquiring as to how they would affect how individuals experience the collapse of society. It sets the characters in an apocalyptic world with a simple mission: protect each other and survive. Each character type has several unique options for their gender description, look, and wardrobe style.
6 Together We Write Private Cathedrals: Remnants Of Historical Love
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Though there is abundant historical evidence of LGBTQ+ people and relationships, historians are often quick to gloss over it. Together We Write Private Cathedrals by Ben Roswell is a two-player writing-based game exploring how lovers in past eras communicated their relationship in code and secret. This game has each player writing to one another, with a die roll determining how openly they can express themselves in each piece. If either player rolls a one, their writing is destroyed at the end of their turn and lost to history, as so many queer writings are.
5 Sleepaway: Summer Camp Adventures In Gender
In Sleepaway by Possum Creek Games, there is no Game Master. There are only camp counselors trying to defend their summer camp from the monster that lives in the woods.
Each of Sleepaway‘s character types comes with a list of attributes players can choose from to build their camp counselor. One category is labeled: Describe Your Gender. Options range from “Nice Boy” and “Priestess Femme” to “A Cloud Over the Sun” and “Lighthouse in the Darkness.” For those who experience gender differences, “Crossing Past” can be far more descriptive of who a character is than “Male,” “Female,” or “Non-Binary.”
4 #IHunt: Monster Hunting As A Side Hustle
Described in the developers’ own words as “a game by and for the LGBTQ+ community,” #IHunt is about what happens when urban fantasy meets the gig economy. When the #IHunt app premieres, promising more money than most gig workers have ever made, people immediately jump in and become app-endorsed monster hunters. #IHunt is a FATE-based game using urban fantasy to take a serious look at societal marginalization and criticize the construction of the gig economy. There are also several novels and short stories set in the world of #IHunt that gamers can enjoy.
3 Be Gay Do Crimes: Heists, But Gayer
Created by Evan Saft, Be Gay Do Crimes is a game about an LGBTQ+ friend group and all the drama that comes with them as they attempt to execute the perfect heist. In the honorable tradition of other one-page TTRPGs, Be Gay Do Crimes uses a simple single-die system to encourage player engagement and roleplay rather than number crunching. The two stats the game runs on, Gay and Criminal, determine action outcomes and character developments. If at any point either stat reaches six, the character leaves the party either after confessing their gay feelings or succumbing to a life of crime.
2 This Party Sucks: Coping With Breakups, The Game
This Party Sucks, by beatingthebinary on itch.io, is a narrative-building game about the characters going to parties and desperately trying to not think about their ex-partners. Along with the base rules, the developer includes a random character generator and additional gameplay tools they developed based on player feedback. Per the game’s description, every character is intended to be either queer or trans.
This Party Sucks is a heartfelt game about the vulnerability that comes with exiting a relationship and sharing the story of that relationship with others. Each game and each table will experience this process differently, but it’s a topic that almost anyone can relate to.
1 Lichcraft: Live Long Enough To Become Yourself
Laurie O’Connel’s Lichcraft is an independent TTRPG about becoming an immortal necromancer in order to make it to the top of a healthcare waiting list. In Lichcraft, players attempt to learn a ritual that will grant them immortality so that they can eventually make it to the top of the British National Health Service’s waiting list for gender-affirming healthcare. This game takes a serious contemporary issue and approaches it through humor and hyperbole. Each bit of flavor text in the game’s manual is infused with the particular flippant apathy that comes with situations when people have to laugh or they’ll just cry.
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