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It’s kind of hard to get a grip on this supplement. It’s about relations between genders in role-playing games. But it’s about that in many different ways. It’s about how boys and girls, men and women behave towards eachother when they play. It’s also about how scenarios can be designed in different ways to tell “male” and “female” stories. It’s about the relationship between birth, death and insanity. And so on.
There’s a lot to cover here, and it isn’t always clear why the authur presents things the way he does. The ideas are often good, at times very good, and generally easy to understand one by one, but the connection - except for the underlying thematical one - is often unclear. This can be seen most clearly in the scenario/story/rules supplement chapter “Paragon”, which consists of a short story in fantasy Japan, a short game-focussed description of what happened and why, and a set of rules for martial arts (!). You’re left with the feeling that the author has a lot of ideas he’d like to express, but that they don’t necessarily belong under the same roof.
But some chapters really hit the bullseye. The scenario “In Utero”, which is about pregnant demons, demon foetuses, betrayal and love, is discomforting and wonderful. It shows a lot of things at once: How sex can be used in role-playing games, how human drives and desires make the best scenarios, how sorcery and sex can be treated both as reality and metaphor in the game, and how characters become more believable if you don’t leave out their most basic human traits. The chapter “Gender and stories” provides thoughts and techniques for different sorts of adventures, and describes gender-based approaches for scenario design - men’s personal morals versus the demands of society, the power that comes from women’s gift of bearing children.
One of the most exciting ideas arrives at the end of the book, as a small section in the chapter “Way past the edge” (which is a heavy read, since all the examples are from the chapter “Azk’Arn”, which is about an insectoid society where the names are of the sort “Rr’zz” and “Zz’ktt”, a bit hard to remember and keep track of for us human types). Here there are rules for how the players’ genders (not that of the characters!) can affect the characters’ successes. If players of different genders help each other in specific situations, they’ll get bonuses to their die rolls. If a character exorcises a demon, the result will be positive only if the player had another player of the opposite sex along to help. And if a character hits Humanity 0, the character is lost unless the player manages to weave its story together with that of a player of opposite sex. In other words: Players of different genders are given an incentive to cooperate, independent of the characters’ genders.
How will this affect play? On the one side it can seem like a nerdy way to force people to interact (“hokay, Brian, if you talk to girls you’ll get a plus one”), on the other side it’s pretty cool to try to affect the real world by way of a game, and let real-world facts affect in-game reality. I’m fascinated, and left wondering what it would be like to try out these rules.
In all this is a good supplement - at times excellent, at times hard to get through. The ideas are generally brilliant, but they’re not always well delivered. Still I don’t hesitate recommending it to Sorcerer players, and players of other games who are interested in addressing themes of gender relationships.
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