A look at the Roll Inclusive Kickstarter and one of its editors, Frank Reiss

For the most part of my gaming career I was just a player or game master for TTRPGs in my home group. Only in the recent 1-2 years I became a little more involved with the gaming scene by connecting with peope via social media. Even then, I simply went to conventions and met new people. A year ago, I began to discover more and more web articles, blogs, panel talks and the like on representation of marginalized people in RPGs. As as queer person myself I immediately got interested in the topic. At that time I knew a lot of indie-rpgs that dealt with queer themes (like Monsterhearts 2) or tried to get good representation of marginalized folk in their mainstream products (Numenera or D&D 5 for example), but the overall lack of recognition of this important topic, especially here in Germany, inspired me to seek out people who shared the interest in changing that. Roll Inclusive is the first project I work on as a professional writer and editor (I work as psychotherapist and supervisor in my everday life). I’m also writing my first contribution for a German fantasy RPG at the moment and if people like my work, there may be more in the future 😉

The lack of good representation in rpg products was something I noticed over the course of my gaming career, although for a long time, that was “normal” for me. As part of a marginalized community myself I didn’t expect to be represented in the media. That expectation changed a lot when videogames like Dragon Age or Mass Effect allowed same-sex romance option or there were games like Gone Home that focused on queer experiences. RPG like Numenera which explicitly took a stance for diversity in their game worlds. I then began to realize that the claim for adequate representation is something I can expect even from mainstream publishers. With two like-minded people that became friends over the course of this project, Aşkın-Hayat Doğan and Judith Vogt, we hosted the first German panel on diversity at a convention last year. The feedback was (against our initial expectations) overwhelmingly positive, so we wanted to do more. That lead to the idea of a collection of essays on diversity and representation in tabletop roleplaying games. We contacted lots of authors (many with diverse backgrounds themselves) and now we are 14 people contributing to this project, each one writing from their perspective (as people of color, as queer people, as people with disabilities,…) and from their professional backgrounds (as historians, as illustrators, as psychologist, as social worker,…). The project went live on Kickstarter last week and funded in under 6 hours, which was something we never expected to happen.

As I do not have much experience as a professional writer yet there is little I can share at this point. When I am designing for an rpg product or preparing sessions as a gamemaster for my home games I try to feature a good amount of diverse characters with different ethnic backgrounds, genders and the like in important and relevant roles. My goal is to kind of normalize the appearance of marginalized people in stories by putting people with all kinds of diverse backgrounds in positions of power. They have to be part of our stories despite the fact that they are in some way different from the dominating group of people in game worlds.

At this point our project funded and we unlocked a whole lot of stretch goals. That is amazing and I think it shows the interest but also the necessity for us gamers to talk about representation, inclusivity and how we can make the ttrpg hobby a safer place for everyone. Nevertheless I really hope we can recruit more people to the cause, even inspire publishers to think about inclusion in their products. Maybe not just by including a diverse cast of characters in their products but also by thinking about publishing formats for people with disabilities, by making conventions safer spaces or by actively recruiting more diverse authors.