Thirsty Sword Lesbians Meets “Clue” at PAXU?

Recently on my fitness walks–which sounds like such a pretentious thing to call them, but I don’t jog or run, just walk faster than usual. Anyway, lately those moments of exercise thoughts similar to shower thoughts have been going back over the Thirsty Sword Lesbians game I ran at PAX Unplugged last year.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

I was new to the system, I didn’t know who would be at my table, and I picked a scenario that was more vibes than explicit plot and NPCs. And ended up sort of making it into a mystery that even I didn’t know the ending of until we started playing. If you’re unfamiliar with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, it’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game, all players have default actions they can take in addition to selecting a unique playbook which represents a theme-appropriate character archetype with their own special actions and attributes.

Basically, it’s be hella gay, you get a sword, flirting is optional (but encouraged), and the main thing of any TTRPG… have fun. Which, while I was very nervous, is what I focused on. If I could make sure the players had a good time, then I would feel that I had done a good job. Thankfully, all of my players were new to the game, having heard of it or financially backed the game, but none of them had played it. So for a roughly 3-hour game with newbies, I did go very rules-light while keeping the core elements of the game.

The book provides a lot of sample adventures with pitches and hooks, and I chose one that was much more open-ended, didn’t have a lot of locations or NPCs because I knew that in the moment, I wouldn’t remember them, and–this feels so weird to admit–I’m not great flipping around in PDFs (or physical books) on the fly. So the more I can improv as we go and the less I have to refer to, the better. Which does fly in the face of my need to overprepare, but I never said I wasn’t a complex person.

Constellation Festival

Pitch: The Joyful People range far and wide in the Valley of Three Rivers, between two mountain ranges. Despite the great distances, each community of the People sends a delegation to the Island of Stars every year to share news, ritual, and camaraderie.

Hook: The climax of the Constellation Festival is the fire dance, where representatives light their fires from the Eternal Star, a stone wreathed in flame that never goes out and doesn’t burn living things.

Early in the festival, the PCs discover that the Eternal Star is missing! It would be conspicuous for anyone to leave the Festival early, so it can’t have gone far…

I liked it because it would most likely be combat-light and roleplay-heavy, and easy to change on the fly. My idea for the delegations was to pattern them after recognizable pop culture femme groups: movie stars, drag houses, girl groups, even the Golden Girls. And the characters were assigned to keep everything going smoothly during the festival.

Dramatis Personae

Our cast of players gave us: Quinn, The Trickster. Jett, The Spooky Witch. Syl, The Devoted. And Isobel, The Seeker. (See the Thirsty Sword Lesbians Playbooks for reference on each archetype.)

For the delegations, I described each as “The House of…” Sky, dressed in all white, the leader patterned after screen stars like Veronica Lake. Void, dressed in fashionable black, the leader giving spy/dominatrix vibes. Destiny, fashion and leader liberally stolen from Beyoncé’s Renaissance era. And Wisdom, a delegation of older women inspired by the Golden Girls.

Allons-y!

After going over safety tools and giving each player time to fill out their sheet, I had everyone describe their character and then had each player contribute something about the world: who they work for, what the island is like, what happens at the end of the festival, etc. in the hopes that they felt more invested. And when it came to their investigating the Houses–the most likely suspects–I also had the player whose character most matched (completely by chance) the vibe of each House describe an attendant, which gave me a chance to flex my mostly non-existent character voice talents.

Here’s where the “GM Soft Skills” come into play. Obviously having a grasp on the basic game rules and story, but also keeping an eye on the time, making sure to fold your players’ actions into the story vs. it being on rails, and something I realized as they were playing: I didn’t really write an ending.

whodunit?

I can’t say if it was intentional or not, but I absolutely ran a mystery and didn’t know the solution until near when we were done playing. The characters did some investigations, I threw clues and red herrings their way. Wait, is it a red herring if the author doesn’t actually know the ending yet? Hm. But mostly it was their actions and the specific set of characters they chose that shaped the story.

In this case, they were assigned by their boss to handle things as they saw fit. They then went to each delegation, interviewed/interrogated the leader, and moved onto the next. I introduced an element of “anxiety” that their characters could feel the Eternal Star missing and perhaps get a feel on its location, which I intensified as they kept questioning delegations. Clues pointed back and forth, until the characters found themselves at the House of Wisdom, facing off against some very intently knitting grannies and aunties who, in this version (a la Clue) had taken the Eternal Star because they thought it granted wishes.

Along the way, I was able to tailor the events to speak specifically to the character archetypes they chose and what I could tell the players wanted to do, so I feel really good about the adventure I ran. Even if I wasn’t able to incorporate every gameplay element of Thirsty Sword Lesbians, as I said earlier, if my players had fun, I’m proud of the job I did.

That’s How it Could Have Happened…

Lately I’ve wondered about running this again, either using the same adventure and system, or possibly porting the basic elements to a different system. I love Powered by the Apocalypse games, but must admit that I’m probably most familiar with D&D these days. Or really just adding that extra bit of “You never know what’s going to happen,” to a one-shot that, because of the way of TTRPGs, is already going to be nothing like what you intended. So maybe remove the intent in the first place? We’re all making it up as we go along, why not lean into it?

The fact that I unintentionally (honest!) applied the movie Clue to the TTRPG I ran makes me happy and reinforces what I mentioned in my First Time DM series of posts: the person running the game is also a player, so I’m glad I was able to take a stressful situation (another first, at that) and make it fun for the players and myself. And while it wasn’t as heavily mystery-focused as Brindlewood Bay, I could see myself throwing that element into other games.

Since all of the players at the PAX Unplugged game were new to the game and also strangers to me until that game, I do hope that they had a good time. I glossed over the finer details of the session because this post is already too long as it is, but if you ever see me at a convention and want to ask about it, I still have my notes!

And who knows, the next time I run a game, I might sprinkle in some alternate endings, or purposely not read to the end of the campaign module so we all discover the ending together! (Please ignore the massively long documents that I write in preparation for any game I run while still pretending I’m winging it.)

But Here’s What Really Happened

All in all, I went into preparing for that game terrified. All of the impostor syndrome, thinking of all the things that could go wrong, feeling bad because I am not good at assimilating new systems quickly, that I might get a table full of racist white dudes (I did not, everyone was queer and came to have a fun time), and cooking up all kinds of worst-case scenarios.

But once I introduced myself and started passing around handouts, I weirdly felt in full control, I could see that these people were trusting me with the next few hours of their day and were just as invested in having fun as I was. And I need to remind myself of that more often when I take on tasks like this.

That doesn’t mean I’ll accept the next opportunity confidently, but, y’know… it’s a process. 💖