Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a game that didn't grab me when I first heard about it, largely because I couldn't figure out what it was for. Most games have some kind of elevator pitch that sums it up, like 'space western' or 'modern day urban fantasy' or 'investigative horror' which tells me pretty quickly if it's something I want to know more about. TSL didn't seem to have that, so it was hard to find the appeal.
I finally did find the appeal when a game pitch went up at MK-RPG for a game entitled 'The Three (Thirsty) Musketeers. Now it made sense. Swashbuckling and romance! Having grown up watching Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds I was absolutely willing to give this a go. Unfortunately only one other player was interested, and we all felt that two was an insufficient number of musketeers, but I was now interested.
So a group of people from the Good Friends of Jackson Elias assembled to give this game a go. We were invited to pretty much create the setting from scratch. We unanimously agreed on the idea of being space pirates and decided we were going to do a heist.
Slightly more complicated was picking playbooks. Like most PBTA games, TSL uses playbooks with a set of archetypes, each having their own special moves. This is one of the things that initially put me off the game, as I couldn't really relate to the archetypes, especially without any context to fit them into. With some actual context (space pirates!) to work with, they were a little less confusing. I went for the Trickster as I could see how she could fit into the pirate crew with her deception based skillset. I could then work from there in making sense of the rest of the playbook and how it worked.
I found a lot of constrast here with two other queer-friendly PBTA games, Monsterhearts and Dungeon Bitches. Both of these have much more defined themes: high school supernatural romance for the former, traumatised dungeoneers for the latter. I had little trouble coming up with a character for Dungeon Bitches, and could probably do the same with Monsterhearts if I didn't absolutely refuse to play anything focused on teenage romance.
With our setting and characters sorted out, we proceeded to the heist, taking place at a society wedding at a mansion on a private asteroid owned by a billionaire socialite who I suggested we name Ellen Musk. All the rich people would be bringing valuables that would get stored in Ellen's safe, and we could use the wedding as cover for our crime. We went in with very little plan, in the great traditions of Blades in the Dark, figuring that the actual heist was less important than the relationships we made along the way.
The hardest part for me was getting into the romance mindset. Romance as a literary genre is something I just plain don't like. (I've been known to accidentally pick up crime novels that turned out to be romantic crime novels and then spend half the book yelling at the protagonists to stop kissing and solve the goddam murder.) But I'll happily watch a good rom-com, or the thematically similar friendship movie, so I do technically know how it works. It's just a very new thing in RPGs for me.
But I got there in the end, and the heist went off in dramatic style, ending with us absconding with the entire safe, a pirate from a different crew, and the bride.
Overall I found this a challenging game to play. The themes are unfamiliar, the lack of a standard setting makes it hard to contextualise, and the mechanics are a little confusing. But it also forced me to step outside my comfort zone, think about characters in a different way, and ultimately roleplay something really fun. Challenging but worthwhile.
Accordingly, I've backed the kickstarter for this game's supplement, Advanced Lovers and Lesbians and will pick up the main book at the same time. And here's hoping one day we'll assemble sufficient musketeers.
No comments:
Post a Comment