Today on the site I’m delighted to give a peek inside This is How We Roll ed. by Rosiee Thor, a YA anthology out today that features queer stories about tabletop games! Here’s the gist:
The magic of tabletop RPGs lives in the creativity of the players. Given the chance to explore gender, relationships, and queer existence across vast worlds with completely different sets of rules, queer players throughout the years have found acceptance, camaraderie, and joy by rolling the dice and kicking ass. This anthology celebrates that TTRPG rite of passage with a diverse lineup of queer authors who are just as mighty with their pens as with swords… and shields… and spells!
This collection of fourteen stories includes critically acclaimed authors such as New York Times Bestseller Marieke Nijkamp, New York Times Bestseller Andrew Joseph White, Pura Belpré Honor winner Jonny Garza Villa, LAMBDA Literary Award winner Rebecca Podos, LAMBDA Award finalist Linsey Miller, Indie Bestseller Margaret Owen, and Morris Award finalist Akemi Dawn Bowman.
And now, let’s hear from the contributors!
“Gathering the Party” by Anna Meriano
Since my first EverQuest character in 1999, I’ve always played druids. But at some point in my adult life when fantasy RPGS became cool to talk about in public, I realized with shock that I had not, in fact, grown into a wise and tree-hugging wanderer communing with animals. Instead I was a city dweller with a brown thumb who made my entire living by entertaining children. I was clearly a bard. Even though literally all of my friends thought this was obvious, it gave me an identity crisis. I was pretty sure charisma was my dump stat, and strumming a lute is just not as cool a superpower as shapeshifting! Didn’t I at least have enough nerd cred to be a wizard? (Because of my refusal to read nonfiction, I did not.)
I was ruminating on this uncomfortable self-discovery when suddenly, with all the narrative relevance of a bus hitting a Mean Girl, I broke my pelvis.
Throughout my hospitalization and recovery, I learned that making jokes is an honest-to-chosen-deity survival skill, and that sometimes your quality of life depends on charming that racist ambulance driver with a good story. My contribution to This Is How We Roll grew from the sparks of that realization. Sometimes your own skills are not the ones you recognize as special. Fawning can be just as powerful as fight, flight, or fireball. And if you don’t know what else you are, but you desperately want to be part of the story… you might just be a bard.
“Captain’s Log” by M.K. England
I don’t know how I’ve managed to make it this far into my career without writing about queer high school band kids, but here we are. It’s time to rectify that. I lived for band in high school, so much so that I was drum major of our marching band for two years and went on to major in music in college. I’ve also been a massive sci-fi fan for my entire life, and while I’ve played a lot of different TTRPG settings and systems, the ones set in space have always been my favorite. My story, Captain’s Log, combines my big band kid energy with my love of sci-fi TTRPG shenanigans—laser battles, heroic missions, and somehow always geese. What happens in the back of the band bus stays in the back of the band bus… but when Colin gets talked into reading his Captain’s Log aloud to fellow player Sean during a late night ride, it reveals far more than he expected. Sometimes, playing a character lets us see what’s been right in front of us all along.
“Oathbreaker” by Andrew Joseph White
“Oathbreaker” was actually inspired – in part – by my own childhood. While I wouldn’t come out as trans until adulthood, I did grow up bonding with my father through Dungeons & Dragons. (3.5e specifically, for the curious.) We played our first game when I was six, just the two of us on the floor with a pile of dice and pencil-smudged character sheets. Through my life, my dad has organized oneshots with my friends and cousins, and I spent years tagging along on his weekly visits to his gaming buddies across town. It was part of our routine, our relationship, the way we understood each other. In the same vein, I also grew up funneling “gender feelings” into the characters I made. I felt the most correct when I was playing men – not that I would ever admit it. My coming out wasn’t the smoothest, either, and I’ve walked a long but rewarding road with my family since then. So when This Is How We Roll came around, I knew exactly what I had to write about. I can’t wait to show my dad what he inspired. Love you, Dad!
“Sneak Attack” by Tara Sim
In “Sneak Attack,” I took a lot of inspiration from my own D&D character, a tiefling rogue (SHHHH I KNOW) who has some…complications with her ex-boyfriend, a prince of thieves. I love the setup so much that I wanted to explore it in a different way, without my character’s specific hangups and in the POV of a teen girl, Tabby, who finds it much more tumultuous considering how much it reflects her real life. And like my D&D character’s love interest, Tabby’s–both in-game and out–is transmasc, which lends an interesting dynamic in terms of his role as a prince of thieves as well as (ex-)boyfriend. Writing some good old fashioned teen angst just can’t be beat, and if it involves thieves, even better.
“You are my Favorite Song” by Jonny Garza Villa
Uani, my half-elf, noble, banjo-playing bard protagonist in “You’re My Favorite Song,” is based off my very first Dungeons & Dragons player character, and writing this story, I was able to revisit all those incredible and chaotic moments and feelings of stepping into TTRPGs for the very first time. The nervousness that comes with inhabiting a character and looking at a digital sheet with so many numbers and words that I’m being told mean something. From spending my first combat underneath a carriage to the excitement that comes from watching these characters bond and fight for each other. It was these first sessions, with friends and a party that was completely BIPOC and majority queer, that truly facilitated what is now surely obsession. And I feel so very blessed that I got to write something not just for me but for my own adventuring party.
“Silvery Barbs” by Linsey Miller
The heart of “Silvery Barbs” is the line, “There was something intimate about hate. It was safe.” I’ve always been fascinated by how the enemies-to-lovers (or they’re-not-enemies-just-insecure-to-lovers) trope functions for ace characters. The story uses Much Ado About Nothing as a base and plays with the idea of players vs. player characters. Hero and Claudio are the player characters of Beatrice and Benedick, and Beatrice uses the game to explore romance in a way she believes an ace teen wouldn’t be allowed to without pushback. The fear of her classmates questioning if she really is ace has made her use sarcasm and aggression as a shield. She can hate Benedick as much as she wants with no one questioning her asexuality, but the moment it’s anything else, they might refuse to believe she is ace. It’s a fear I know well and love exploring through the lens of TTRPGs. So, Beatrice as Hero romances another player character in an anonymous game session. It doesn’t go as expected, though…
“Haunts for Heathens” by DeAndra Davis
My story highlights on being between worlds in more ways than one, both the tabletop RPG world and between the religious world and who you really are. My main character struggles in a way that she can’t be herself with her family, and it doesn’t have this magical moment where she’s able to confront that, because unfortunately some of us don’t have that space. Some of us create and discover safe pockets and stay there or use what we can to move to spaces that are safer. Some of us can’t be as open as we’d like to be with our identities in certain circles while still loving our families. It’s complicated and messy but it’s also life and I wanted to explore that complexity. I also wanted to consider how we can use the safe spaces to create greater opportunities for ourselves as creatives. How gaming brings us together when we think we have so many differences. And how in the end, sometimes a fictional space is the most ourselves that we can ever be.
“Pippin and Genie’s Grand Adventure” by Marieke Nijkamp
To me, roleplaying games are inextricably linked to self discovery. To the ability to try on different characters and explore different sides of yourself. To play in a world where the rules are clear and explicit. And in my experience, someone introducing you to that whole entire world of possibilities, especially when you need it the most, is its own kind of magic. That’s the vibe I wanted to recreate with this story. That first step into a world where you can be anything you want to be–and where you can be yourself.
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Rosiee Thor is the Pacific Northwest Indie Bestselling author of Tarnished Are The Stars and Fire Becomes Her, the picture book The Meaning of Pride, and tie-in novels for franchises like Life is Strange and Firefly. Their short fiction appears in anthologies including the Lambda award nominated Being Ace, and they are the editor of Why On Earth: An Alien Invasion Anthology and This is How We Roll. Their debut cozy mystery, The Dead & Breakfast, is forthcoming from Berkley Press. Rosiee lives in Oregon with a dog, two cats, and an abundance of plants.
