I. Dear Reader,
I published an article on Rascal News this week about the Korean RPG scene and I thought I’d tell you the story of that story. Around late November last year, I was listening to the Korea episode of the World of RPGs podcast. In that podcast, the host Moritz speaks to a number of people from a country to try and paint a picture of that country’s scene. One of the people he spoke to was Oh SeungHan, who is a translator and indie publisher.
SeungHan tells a story about an incident in 2016 in the RPG community where an anti-feminist mob attacked one of the most prolific indie designers in the community for a t-shirt she owned. The t-shirt said, “Girls Do Not Need A Prince”. It sounds like a mild statement but due to complex political reasons, this slogan had become a rallying point for some very angry, right-wing men. The thing that grabbed me about the story was that SeungHan said that the biggest publisher in Korea, Dayspring Games, came out strongly against the hate on display. Apparently, this was the catalyst for an influx of women into the hobby and led to the demographics of the community shifting – from majority male to majority female.
I was fascinated. So I reached out to Moritz for SeungHan’s email. Then, I reached out to SeungHan. I thought I was just going to talk to them but they amazingly put me in touch with Choi Mika who was the woman at the centre of the incident in 2016. Luckily, Mika was kind enough to speak to me. I didn’t really ask her a lot of questions–since this was email and I wanted to the conversation to happen in Korean, I basically said, “Can you tell me what happened in your own words?” and let her tell it how she wished.
Mika sent me two long emails telling her story. SeungHan acted as the official translator but despite the language barrier, it was clear to me that Mika was a really clever and funny person. Even Google Translate was good enough for that!
I had initially reached out mid-December but by the time, we had gone back and forth twice, it was suddenly February. Emails were missed, personal events got in the way, you know how things are. Sometimes that’s how long it takes.
Then, through Chaosium, I got the email of Kim Sung-il, co-founder of Dayspring Games, and exchanged emails with him to get at what he remembers about the incident. He responded instantly and explained why he felt it necessary to make a strong political stand–a risky action because at the time, the majority of the country was voting the other way! (When the same thing was happening to employees of videogame studios, almost all of them bent over backwards to assuage the haters.)
It’s rare to find a story where a terrible incident (that Mika still finds it difficult to talk about) led to something positive. And honestly, the truth might be more complicated than I can perceive. But both Mika and Sung-il tell me that no such incidents have happened since and RPGs are now seen as a safe space for women. At a pre-pandemic convention that Dayspring organized, about 70% of the attendees were women.
It was such a blessing to share something as wholesome as that and I couldn’t resist another chance to talk about it.
Yours hopefully,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
- The Weird Place youtube channel has an interesting video flipping through a whole bunch of TTRPGs from Japan. Gabriel, the host, talks about their layout and shows off the wide variety of form factors available. It’s a pleasant almost ASMR experience.
- If you’re interested in Ennie-award winning solo game, Colostle, but haven’t bought the game. Legends & Dice Cafe has a nice flip through of it.
- Also, I was on the Brainwaves podcast talking about Rascal News. Shamelessly!
- You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
Articles
- Sidney Icarus has another great newsletter about the four types of mystery games. Staying true to their descriptivism, there’s a clear breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages for each type, rather than judgment about which is best.
- This is a nice review of Swyvers by Luke Gearing that praises the setting while pointing out the rules might be a bit too quirky.
- Kieron Gillen writes about his new game, How Do Aliens Do It: “It’s a game which is silly, but I hope captures the desperate confusion of our adolescence, approaching some big stuff lightly. What is normative? What is queer?”
- The Geekarati newsletter has a good review of Paul Czege’s My Life With Master: “This game is one which really tries to meet Costikyan’s definition of game. By this I mean that it attempts, and I think succeeds, to create art.”
- Clayton Notestine has a thoughtful post about what makes a good community space.
- Old but gold: Chris Chinn of Deeper in the Game has a great post about different types for antagonists for factional or interpersonal games.
- Like this one: “The Hater (Helps your side, hurts you) This guy is totally on the side of your faction, but thinks you’re useless, or even, dangerous. They’ve got nothing good to say about you, attempt to shut down your ideas left and right. If they’re worse than that, they’re looking to get you demoted, exiled, or imprisoned. Worse than that? They’re lying and trying to frame you.”
Misc
- There’s a charity bundle raising funds for disaster relief in Valencia, Spain and there’s also this bundle raising funds for, well, disaster relief in California.
From the archive:
- On the Save vs TPK blog, this great post by Paul T about the value of making decisions: “In an OSR game, failing to choose left or right when there’s no real info to go on will just stall the game. In a dramatic game, similarly failure to decide whether you hate your mother or whether you want to poison or sleep with your rival will stall the game.” (First shared in Issue 86, March 2022)
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- WARDEN is a classless, attributeless, and universal d20 game on Backerkit until March 12th! Come and see how it explores further than just combat and fantasy in the d20 space!
- Forgive me for I have sinned 🙏 Join us for Sisterhood, a 1950s Nuns TTRPG full of guns, cigarettes, and things they don’t teach at Sunday school 🪐 Follow on Backerkit here.
- 🛡️ INITIATIVE is a fun to-do list and habit tracker for your real life, designed as an RPG character sheet! Currently live on Kickstarter!
- Escape a prison succumbing to failing power, rising groundwater, and strange horrors emerging from within the inmates. Emergence is a new funnel for Mothership on Kickstarter now.
This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.
- Adventures of the Potbellied Kobold and other low-level adventures for D&D 5e
- You Are The Hero, a history of Fighting Fantasy bundled with some solo gamebooks
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
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