I Reach For the Crown

It’s 2010 and I’m playing a RPG for the first time. Our friends’ friend invited me and some friends over and I’m excited and curious. Games were always in the distant background when I was growing up, something that happened in comic book shops or were played by boys or existed parallel to my world but completely outside of it. Nerd culture wasn’t though — sci fi and fantasy and comics were a huge pillar of my soul and if RPGs had been available back then, I would’ve latched onto them with my back teeth.

But it’s only 2010 and I don’t know I’m trans and I make indie comics and work as an admin in publishing and I’m only 3 years out of living under my parents’ thumb and pretending to be who they think I am, and I’m still not comfortable taking up space in public. Of being loud. My high school friend and I go to Halloween Adventure in Union Square and buy cheap domino masks for fun. She wants us to wear ours outside onto the subway and is gently confused when the idea fills me with cold panic. I don’t know how to explain how dangerous it feels to be perceived.

So. Our friend is running In a Wicked Age, a oneshot about contenders for the crown of a corrupted kingdom. The rules are simple, much easier to digest than Dungeons and Dragons. It’s my first RPG, so I assume it’ll be 2 hours and of course it turns into 6, but we’re having so much fun we don’t care. It’s the GM, me, a comics friend, and the GM’s sister, the first out trans woman I’ve ever met.

One moment stands out: we go around describing our characters: names, appearance, gender and when it comes to that last one I firmly refuse. My person has no gender, I insist, when the GM presses me for one. “They’re masked. You cannot see their face.” Weirdly, the GM seems genuinely annoyed. My comics friend offers that it sounds like David Bowie. We move on.

We begin and I find myself carving through the story with a confidence and a hunger I never knew I had - infiltrating guards, assassinating courtiers, climbing tower walls. I’ve never been less self-conscious before, except when I draw. I can do anything? Let’s go!

All of our players are racing for this crown. But I am bold and the dice are kind so: I end up grabbing it! The GM graciously gives me the moment to describe my triumph, so with a brand new kind of exhilaration thrumming in my veins (that I assume people who play sports feel) I actually stand up from my chair, pretend to hoist the crown in one hand, and with the other, rip off my character’s mask to reveal … a completely androgynous face! The GM’s sister throws back her arms and cheers.

For reasons I won’t understand for 8 more years, this memory sits on the shelf and glows with self assured joy. Whenever I take it down and hold it, it warms me with the knowledge that, the minute I was given the freedom to act without fear, I instantly and indomitably just fucking went for it.

It’s still one of the reasons games are so precious to me. Years later, after I start running and playing them, my friend Kenan and I chat about GM’ing and how cool and powerful it is that everyone kinda ends up playing the character they need to be at that moment. Like, “tell me who you are without telling me who you are”, but also play to see what you want before you know you can want it.

When Lucy Dacus played at her actual high school for Tiny Desk Concert, it made me wonder, if I could go back to middle school, to high school, to that scared kid believing in their existence like an imaginary creature, what would I give them? If I somehow went back to those hallways and those classrooms and did something in the hope that it’d reverberate through time, to exist in the same space as that ghost, just 20 years too late? Of course, it’d be a game.
I play with this image in my head: after school; in some empty English classroom: moving the desks into the center, taking out my screen, handing out dice and talking through their character sheets. Giving them the space and the spotlight, and finally, finally inviting them out.