Appendix January 2026

Perhaps an odd thing to do at the monthly level? This month has been useful for digging down into the sort of work I want to undergird my game. This game is meant to develop within an alternate autobiography and history, one in which my sense of what role playing could be was nourished by queer, Black, and spiritual-mystical perspectives. I want a role playing game that could have emerged from games that were contemporary with Octavia Butler in more than just the loosest chronological sense, for example.

So, here, a couple more pieces of the 1970s and 1980s that I imagine alongside this alternate trajectory.

A Wind in the Door (Madeline L'Engle)

Let's start by saying this is so, so far removed from both the Black and queer threads of my project. The Murry family's adventures are ensconced within a midcentury straight, white liberal innocence that boggles me (how, Meg asks at one point, can Charles Wallace be bullied in America). The best of this book breaks loose from that framework, though, even if it never escapes it.

I read this one as a child, circa 1987, and my sense of the world was itself hemmed in on all sides by the sort of straight, white innocence, though perhaps being nascently queer and bullied cut me off from participating fully in that world. I was quite sick at the time and my recollection was mostly of fever, cherubim, and mitochondria, which isn't a bad summary about the coolest parts. My reread drew out old affects, of scientific and spiritual wonder fused together in ways that drew no conflict between the two. The alien rhythms of spirits are informed by the interconnections between disparate microscopic and macrocosmic entities.

It reminded me of Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard which impressed itself on my young imagination similarly (and that book deserves its own Appendix entry alongside Duane's Door into Fire).

The Wind in the Door also features kything, a special sort of pre-verbal intuitive presence to each other that characters sometimes accessed to communicate with, support, and understand each other. While L'Engle reduces most of that communication to a sort of telepathic dialogue, she suggests here and there with striking images that it is something much more than just talking by other means.

There is much I want to work with there. We talk a lot about role playing being a conversation, and kything has me wanting to ask about how we listen, how we might slow down the conversation to give each other just a little more time to attend to our sense of our selves in the moment and how we might express that in the shared conversation.

What happens when we invite each other to respond imagistically, impressionistically, to the situations that occur within the worlds we share?

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (Larry Mitchell, illustrated by Ned Asta)

This book is so lovely. The prose and illustrations approach the simplicity and elegance of the best children's books to explore often enthusiastically sexual queer life in the margins of a fictional city not so far removed from 1970s New York City. It is the sort of belonging outside of belonging that I wish a game like Dream Askew emerged from, and as I think about that, I think about how Mitchell put this book together.

He begins with the city as the faggots and their friends navigate it first. He tells us about the big divisions between them (faggots, queens, faeries, strong women, women who love women, queer men, and the men themselves) and the different ways they live and celebrate their lives under oppression. He gives us "faggot wisdom" and "women wisdom" pages to share the values of these people.

More than sixty pages pass like this before we get our first scene between specific people. It is another ten pages or so before he names a single character.

From there he traces out sexual and communal relationships, oftentimes identifying the way sexual passion eases into long-lasting, powerful friendships. He winds into the neighborhoods, looking at the houses of specific people, the various "tribes." And only after that do we get vignettes about any of the characters came to this world.

It leaves me with this wonderful sense of how these people found themselves with each other in and through these communities, of how people emerge within worlds that give them substance. The world births the characters, and that I want to hold close as I proceed forward designing.