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A few weeks back, a conversation on the Dice Exploder discord lead to a new game jam: the Femininomenon Jam, a jam about femininity and whatever that means to you, happening now on itch.io through February 11th. To help kick off your thinking on what a game in this theme might look like, today two of the hosts of that jam sit down to talk about the challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. In this game about a coven of three witches, the challenge deck is a bespoke oracle for conflict resolution. And right out of the gate we get to dive into the deep end with this jam's topic as we ask: is this mechanic "feminine"? What would that even mean?
Further Reading:
Wickedness by M. Veselak
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Transcript
Audrey: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week on the show we take an RPG mechanic and grind it down into a fine powder to apply to our cheekbones and highlight our facial structure. My name is Audrey Stolze. And my co host today is Seraphina Garcia Ramirez.
Seraphina is one of the mods of the Dice Exploder Discord and is also a co host with myself and our friend Kay of the Femininomenon Jam. We're hosting the Femininomenon Jam out of the Dice Exploder Discord. There's a channel you can go to if you want to participate or you can join the jam's discord. The theme of the jam is your relationship to femininity, things that feel feminine to you, things that help you interpret femininity no matter your gender identity or presentation. It runs until February 11th and we hope you'll join. It's going to be a lot of fun.
Which is why we are here bringing you this special bonus episode before the End of Year Bonanza, and the new season of Dice Exploder.
Sera is a game designer, all around excellent person, very interesting person to talk about games with who always has nuanced and measured takes, and I'm really excited to talk with her .
The mechanic we're talking about today is the challenge deck from Wickedness by M. Veselak. This game is published by Possum Creek Games, and it's about a coven of three witches taking you across three stages of play.
So without further ado, here is Sera, with the challenge deck. Thanks so much for being here today.
Sera: So much for chatting with me, Audrey.
Audrey: So let's talk about this challenge deck can you tell us a little bit more about the game structure and how that deck specifically fits within it?
Sera: Absolutely. Wickedness is a GM less game. It has three players, exactly three players, a deck of tarot cards, some pen and pencil, and that's it. That's the entire meat of the game. The challenge deck is how the game facilitates obstacles that the Coven will come across across the course of the game. These obstacles range in severity and intensity and theme and tone, but the deck itself is how they're moderated. The top card is flipped, and you refer to an interpretation guide.
That interpretation guide gives some detail, broadly, of what this specific challenge is. They range across a variety of things, both internal to the coven and external. And over the course of the game, these cards are collected and redistributed in a variety of ways.
Audrey: So it gives a little bit of structure to the GM list nature of the game. I know that that's like something I had written down in my notes was how does this kind of specifically differ from, a random table of obstacles, but it does actually I think function as a random table
Sera: the game itself recommends not just jumping into the interpretation guide, for a fear of spoiling the game. I think once you go through it and experience it, there's so many good ideas here for how to challenge a group of characters in a variety of ways in this sort of setting.
The default setting of Wickedness, is A little non specific, in terms of like, it's broadly fantasy, it's broadly that sort of like grounded, less, technologically advanced what one might call medieval in some senses setting, but the actual challenges themselves don't make a lot of specific references to that, they leave a lot of room for interpretation
Audrey: which I really appreciated because this game is more specific than some of the other witch games that I have played recently just in that when you're generating your characters, you're generating a kingdom, you're generating your sanctuary, you're generating an underworld, which can really just be any sort of other place, right?
It could be a literal underworld or it could be a criminal underworld or whatever you want it to be, right? But still, I think there's a lot of baggage attached to the word kingdom itself that grounds this game. So I did appreciate how open ended the challenge deck was.
Sera: Yeah, absolutely. pulls together all these different keywords the game references, you know, Kingdom, Underworld, Sanctuary but really there's a lot of room for making it custom to what your setting is, you know? I think there's one particular prompt which talks about a mob approaching the Sanctuary, right?
It doesn't specify why that mob's there or what it is they're angry about. It leaves that up for interpretation. And that creates a lot of room for making this feel really grounded and personal. Other parts of the game give each of these elements of the setting ownership to the three players in a way that's very connected to like the belonging outside belonging family and style of game.
I think somewhere in the game there's explicit reference that this is distantly related Design wise to Sleepaway by J. Dragon and I definitely see some of that.
Audrey: something I want to make sure that we touch on before we get too far into discussing just how cool the challenge deck is.
We are talking about this game because we felt like it was a good example of a game that would fit within the Feminine Nomadon jam that we are hosting. That's part of why we're doing this episode, which again, thank you Sam for supporting the jam and having us on the show.
But can you tell us a little bit about what the jam is about? What's our premise for the jam?
Sera: So this came out of a conversation we had in the DYS floater server about a comparative or perceived lack of feminine coded games in the RPG space. And that's a very deep and complex conversation that I'm sure we could spend a entire mini series talking about. But the core of the conversation was, , what does it mean for games to be connected to the feminine in us? everyone takes their own sort of lessons from conversations like that.
Ultimately my perspective on it is, I think assigning gender to a game is almost as foolish as assigning gender to a person. But I think there's a lot of room for interpreting how games connect to what we feel is gendered within us.
I'm certainly not going to declare Wickedness is a feminine game in and of itself, but I think there's a lot in here that connects to what my femininity is like. And a lot in here that connects to what my journey as a feminine person has been. I think that by no means means a masculine person won't find a lot to connect with in here too.
Broadly what we're looking for with the jam is to hear more from the community, right? To see a wide range of how people's femininity within themselves influences their game design and how that experience connects to what they find interesting in playing games with people.
Audrey: I think that both of us are pretty aligned in that this game isn't about labeling, like slapping a label on a bunch of games and saying, these are games for girls. That's not what we're doing with this jam. Though if you find that the collection of games that comes out of this fits exactly what you're looking for, then great. I'm very excited for you.
But we invited everyone, regardless of gender presentation, regardless of gender identity. You can submit a game to this jam about, you know, your relationship to a lack of femininity in your life. And that's something that some people have already discussed in what they are hoping to create for the game.
I know that my own submission for this game that I'm currently working on is about the way that my relationship to femininity has changed over the years. Because my pronouns are she, they. I have identified as genderqueer for several years now and that is something that, as you might expect, is kind of fraught when you are discussing the feminine and especially because I am a parent and so that whole relationship changes a lot, especially in the eyes of society, I think, when you don't necessarily present as entirely the idealistic feminine.
And so the jam is definitely something where I'm using it as an opportunity to kind of capture some of those feelings and also translate them into gameplay in a meaningful way. And I think that that is something that we see in Wickedness too, because The most obvious way, at least to me, that it is potentially perceived as, a feminine game is that you're talking about a coven of three witches, it is very directly inspired by Macbeth, the witches are feminine in Macbeth, and often throughout you know, history and myth, like the three fates throughout a lot of settings, witches are perceived to be feminine.
grounds the game by itself in this idea of femininity, I think, even if that is a premise that is quickly shed.
Sera: the game I think pretty consistently says covenmates instead as its own word but even the word coven is going to connect back to witches. It's going to connect back to femininity for a lot of people, even though not necessarily for everyone.
I'm a trans woman. I've, been openly a woman for five years now, and a lot of my experience with femininity has, is directly connected to how people have rejected my femininity. how people have decided that I am not feminine and the game I'm writing is a horror vibes trick taking experience specifically about what it's like to be a young boy, in heavy air quotes trying to fit in among other boys while wrestling with this interior femininity which they can clearly understand does not fit in with the group they're around.
So the game I'm writing has a lot to say about masculinity and a lot to tangle with about, about gender in its all its forms. But ultimately, I'm submitting it to the jam, because it's very deeply connected to my experience with femininity. And my experience with how that doesn't exist in a vacuum.
None of this exists in a vacuum. Gender is performance, gender is something that exists because we all are connected and observing each other. And when I observe wickedness, I see a lot of that in myself as well.
Audrey: with the challenge deck itself, how do you feel like that in particular, I would say enhances or distracts from some of the feminine elements in this game. I think that that is maybe a loaded question, because it's a whole deck of cards, right? We probably could have narrowed in to just one or two cards, but I don't want to spoil all the cards, because that is literally what the game tells you not to do, and I agree that it is a stronger game if you don't read through all the cards in advance.
Sera: I think going from the base structure, the challenge deck is a series of challenges and automatically that asks the question, how do you overcome these challenges?
Game presents you with three approaches for resolving a challenge, or attempting to resolve a challenge. Falling prey to a folly. Solving it with wisdom and solving it with true magic. These are options that each of the three Covenmates will have an opportunity to approach the challenge. They will get to pick one of these options and then after all three Covenmates have made an attempt, the challenge is either excessively overcome or failed.
To me, this core structure, going past the specific details of the deck itself, says a lot to me about my femininity. Falling prey to folly you refer to your character sheet, in essence, to what follies your witch might have, depending on what major arcana card you've got at the beginning of the game.
And it doesn't work. Falling Prey to a Folly is an option you take knowing it's not going to beat the challenge. Instead, what it does is it lets you draw a card from the deck as Wisdom in your hand. And Wisdom is something you can use for that second option later in the game, where you can play three times the value of a challenge, To beat it with wisdom.
I think my personal relationship to masculinity, femininity is that masculinity has always felt to me about hard lines, hard categories. Things are about success or failure, strength or weakness. Femininity has always felt a little more blurred to me personally. And about, you know, this complicated journey that I've taken in my life. the complicated ways I'm viewed by others and the complicated ways in which I engage with the world around me. And part of that is I've made a lot of mistakes.
And this core structure of choosing to have your attempt be unsuccessful in accordance with one of the follies that your coven mate has and taking onto that, how that might be an asset in the future speaks a lot to me about femininity in a way that, you know, at least the masculine and the patriarchy in our world tends to associate failure with weakness, failure with debilitation.
And the women that I've taken inspiration from in my life and what I've done in my life that inspires myself has always been how these mistakes and these tragedies and these traumas leads to that wisdom moving forward.
Audrey: I think that that makes a lot of sense and I think also of how often throughout history and in literature a woman's downfall is viewed as she's being hysterical or you know she doesn't know what she's talking about or nobody believes her kind of thing. And that is not necessarily a folly in that like, she is a fool, but a folly just in that is the way that historically women are often viewed. You are set up to fail sometimes, no matter if you have the knowledge.
And so taking that experience of, well, this was never going to work anyway, here's how I can make it work in the future, is a very anti patriarchal thing, at least to me.
Sera: The way that these witches these coven mates are described is just beautiful, I think. The old soul my power is best used to seek knowledge, but is also used to pass unseen, lay curses, conjure spirits.
And the coven mates in this game are defined by their sources of power and by their follies, most broadly. And they're sources of power, like, for the old soul, I'm not gonna read through the whole thing, but On the surface, I am tidy, harmless, and lively. Deep down, I am honorable, unsure, and have hope for the future.
I see in this so many women that I've known in my life. So many people with the feminine inside them that I've known in my life. this is power. You know, like, these are descriptions of the character, but ultimately, the fact that the old soul is tidy, harmless, and lively is real power that they can use over the course of the game.
Which I think touches on the third option that you're initially presented with for approaching challenges. So we talked about how you can Fall, pray to your folly, you can overcome a challenge with wisdom, and the final option is solving it with true magic. you are defined at the beginning of the game by nine sources of your true magic.
For the Old Soul, it's being tidy, harmless, honorable, and sure of these things. At any point, instead of playing wisdom from your hands to overcome a challenge, you can invoke your true magic and strike out one of these things about you. It becomes no longer true. one of those things could be stricken out again later in the game and become blackened and replaced with a different trait.
Audrey, I'm curious what you think about the distinction the game draws between surpassing a challenge with wisdom and surpassing it with true magic.
Audrey: To me, the Folly and Wisdom options are like tied to one another in a way that the True Magic one doesn't feel as cohesive initially, but then it's like, Thinking about this again in comparison to my own life. And again, I want to be clear, like, this game has done a phenomenal job stripping out gendered language.
And I appreciate it so much, but I do think that there is a particular relationship that I have being raised as a girl, and a girl who was always a tomboy, and in a very traditional household, and, you know, having the freedom to present myself however I wanted and then still be called a girl is something that the true magic feels like to me, where, okay, so I'm being told that like name brand jeans and being interested in makeup and Britney Spears, that's what it is to be a girl here, but that is just not who I am and it's not.
worth my time to pretend it, right? And so it is fine for me to say, well, I'm bookish and athletic and that is still me being a girl, right? Because that time in my life, that was how I identified and it didn't feel like it didn't fit. And so true magic to me is definitely a lot more central to that idea of identity of saying, well, I can, you know, declare this thing about myself to be the actual truth.
I'm still me,
Sera: I find it really interesting the contrast that's drawn between the truths that are come before being struck or blackened and the truths that come after. By no means is this as plain as good and bad traits, There's a lot more complexity and depth in here. There's certainly a darkness that comes with these traits being struck and then blackened out.
I think that's a lot of that is the darkness of trauma.
Audrey: The loss of innocence, right?
Sera: Later in the game, you're presented with another option for challenges which is to learn from your past mistakes.
It doesn't allow you to solve the situation, but you recover one of your stricken traits. Which feels to me so hopeful, so much of what's presented as feminine is, you know, this sense that the innocence is lost and never comes back. that's absolutely so disconnected from what's real about femininity to me, which is healing, and hope, and courage.
Audrey: you were saying, none of this exists in a vacuum, right? Everything is intersectional, and like, being raised in a traditional household, like, there's a lot of ties to purity culture that I see in that. There's just the idea of growing up and being like, okay, well, I'm the weird girl.
And then that turning into, I'm not like other girls, which is like this kind of bitternessthat can really fester into something unhealthy if you don't reality check yourself, but then the fact being, you can reclaim a little bit of, of something that maybe you denied.
and realize that there is more nuance in life and in yourself, that is all something that I think is inherently tied to growing up, and not necessarily inherently tied to femininity, but I do think that like what you're saying about hope, there is a lot more rigidness expected of the masculine, and just patriarchally, I think there's a lot more expectation that like, once you've changed, you've changed. And that's it.
Sera: this idea of linear journeys, of going from a young boy who is, you know, wild and unsure and undisciplined to a man who is strong and powerful and defined, right, and rigid. Again, certainly not healthy, just on the face of it, right?
And certainly not realistic to what it really is to be masculine. But I think a lot of what I found in of strength in my femininity is embracing the complexity. is embracing how my journey is not linear, how it comes in circles and loops and whirl de whirls, and how things keep happening.
Things keep moving forward, lot of, like, when you strike out a source in wickedness, you overcome the challenge. But it does hurt, Like, you spoke to your bitterness before, you spoke how you felt compelled at one point to push away these things. I can't speak to your experience, I think for a lot of people I've spoken to, that felt like strength, that felt like overcoming challenges was to push away these parts of yourself, or to redefine yourself so radically in these ways.
I think that the challenge deck in particular is in service of kind of these feminine themes that we've been talking about of growth. Because without it, the game has no momentum whatsoever. Like, the challenge deck is explicitly the way that the game moves forward.
The options you're presented with for approaching challenges, you know, one of these is solve Oshu magic, one of these is overcome it with wisdom, but you're each going to get one action in the scene, having all three of you overcome it with wisdom doesn't make sense mechanically, strategically at least, right?
For the overall goal of the game. So you're pushed to embrace this. Some of you are going to make mistakes, In this scene. Not everyone's gonna be powerful. Not everyone's gonna be successful and perfect people are going to reveal their own complexity, and they're gonna learn from that.
falling prey to folly doesn't solve the challenge, but it is. You're rewarded with wisdom. Wisdom, which is ultimately very important to the game. at the end of the game in the epilogue. Each of which is presented with a final challenge, which I'm not going into detail here with, but in those challenges, your only option is wisdom. if you don't collect wisdom over the course of the game, and you don't keep some of that wisdom, the epilogue is going to go very, very poorly for you. you are pushed to lean into your own complexity, lean into your own flaws, and learn from them, and grow, and collect this wisdom that becomes incredibly powerful over the course of the story.
Audrey: let's touch on a couple of examples because I think that there are some really evocative ones and even though I didn't want us to like go through the whole deck because, again, this game is really awesome especially if you don't read the whole deck in advance, there are some examples I think we can give that give an idea of how these are presented.
Sera: a lot of these are just so, the writing is so strong here. I go right at the beginning, Ace of Swords. One of the kingdom's leaders has died under mysterious circumstances. Strike them out and worsen the kingdom's ignorance and despair as conspiracies and accusations run wild. The pure heart will tell us who died.
The wild spirit will tell us the likeliest culprit. Can we solve the crime before stray fingers begin to point to the coven? , the ultimate, negative consequence here is not, some circumstance in the kingdom, although that may come up in the story. The ultimate, like, default is people are gonna start suspecting the coven.
As throughout history, people have suspected wise and smart and powerful of the feminine persuasion in these ways,
It is maligned. It is made malevolent. You mentioned Shakespeare and Macbeth. the witches were not the heroes of that story. to what extent is that really reflective of the reality of wise women throughout the world?
Audrey: There is something to be said for the dichotomy you get between the whole respect your elders attitude and the amount that that doesn't often extend to women.
The challenge is it's always putting it so that the witches are not necessarily directly under threat but the potential is there and that also feels extremely feminine because I cannot think of a woman or feminine presenting person in my life who has not walked across a parking lot at night with her keys between her fingers.
In case something was gonna happen. And it's just the kind of thing that you have to think about all the time.
Sera: All the time. And a lot of these challenges also speak to community. The game explicitly says that you create a leader for the kingdom, and quote, Leaders hold most of the power in the mortal world, and are primarily concerned with keeping it that way. And then all these challenges play into that. Challenges which tear apart the kingdom, which come from that leadership, which come from the populace, and ultimately it's put upon the shoulders of the coven to save these people. Save these people that at other points in the game will suspect them and malign them and threaten them.
Audrey: And again, it's not that someone who identifies more with the masculine, or strictly with the masculine, wouldn't necessarily get these connections out of this game, because that, to me, is also a part of femininity, right?
Is being a woman. breaking down patriarchal ideas of who is allowed to be vulnerable and who is allowed to be afraid and who is allowed to need other people. It's everyone, by the way, everyone needs other people, but there are traditionally gendered ideas about that and deconstructing those traditionally gendered ideas is also, to me, something that this jam is trying to focus on.
Sera: Question. We were talking the other day when we were talking about games that connect with our sense of femininity with how that tangles with games that connect with our queerness. Like, we're both queer people, and as we, you know, went through, and we're talking about these games, a lot of these games also connect with queer themes.
Wickedness specifically I think in the marketing or on the Itch page, talks about it being a story about queer community as well. What are your thoughts in how your experience with femininity tangles with your experience with being queer.
Audrey: think that there is a lot of overlap, but it sometimes is the kind of overlap where you're experiencing similar things for different reasons, or the reasons behind the way that you are being treated or the way that you're perceiving something. Might look the same, but it's vastly different depending on whether the way that I'm being perceived or the way that I'm reacting to something is because because of my femininity or because of my queerness.
But, again, none of this exists in a vacuum. Everything is intersectional, and there's gonna be, I think, a lot of overlap between the idea of femininity and, literally the values that you find in queer communities because I think that both Women, traditionally, and queer communities have been spaces where vulnerability is not only allowed, but encouraged.
Sera: I think community is a big part of this too, ultimately being, for me at least, being queer and being feminine has been a lot about community, about relying on those around me and feeling connected to them. I mentioned three of the suits in the challenge deck before.
Cups follow different rules. You don't overcome them in the same traditional way. They have specific prompts that come with them and they're all about, you know, What's happening within the coven, how those relationships are going inside the group. One here the High Priestess reads for the Five of Cups.
I become withdrawn and alarmingly I've lost interest in my usual fixations. How do each of you check in on me? If your attempts to connect with me can draw me out of my rumination, you may draw a wisdom card. But if I reject you to continue my deep and somber vigil, I'll draw a wisdom card. Then, if I have no wisdom cards, we fail this challenge.
Audrey: that one really specifically connects with me because I have always been the mom friend. Just, you know, the reaching out when someone is struggling, which again, interpersonal relationships matter so much.
Sera: the coven in Wickedness succeeds or fails as a unit, each of the three witches is presented with an ultimate challenge. It is not enough for one witch to succeed. If all three are not succeeding together, there is deep and drastic ramifications. so much of that comes down to these connections within the group. wanted to mention about the challenge deck is the way that the challenges are presented to the group. Notably, at the beginning of the interpretation guide's entry for each card is a note about who reads the card to the group, and who has authority on different elements of the prompt.
And this is determined by those major arcana you're drawing at the beginning of the game. And there's an element to me here where GM less play feels feminine. But I'm thinking back to this Gygax quote that goes around.
Gary Gygax talked about his experience with his children playing roleplaying games. So, in this quote, Gygax talks about some of the first playtesters for, one of their D& D games, his son Ernie and his daughter Elise, playing the game together. Talks about how Elise played for a few months and then lost interest. And then Gygax talks about, her younger sisters, Heidi and Cindy, also getting into D& D having, Luke DM for them when he was very young, and then eventually Gygax discovered that these two young girls were telling their DM what treasure they found.
And then the quote here, When he complained to me about that, I set him straight, and shortly after that, his sisters quit playing. The greedy power gamers.
Audrey: Oof.
Sera: Yeah, and Gygax ultimately takes this as a lesson in biological determinism and male and female brains being different, deriving different satisfaction.
Absolutely horrifying. I'm not taking this as a case study or an example or anything, but it brought to mind this sense of these two young girls were finding a lot of enjoyment in the game when it was an experience they had a lot of input into. And when I was more collaborative with them, and the moment that their DM was told by an older male authority that no, you tell them what happens, they lost some interest and they quit playing.
Collaboration feels more feminine to me. Personally, I don't think that says great things about our world and about the gender dynamics we're forced to live in but I think there is a lot there that, you know, this sense of not, like, listening to a central authority figure does feel like it connects to my femininity.
I'm curious as to your thoughts, Audrey.
Audrey: I think, in some ways I agree, in some ways I disagree. Partly because I think that the worst group projects that I have had have all been All female groups and that's not to say obviously that that couldn't also happen in an all male group or in a group where I was the only woman and I'm sure it has but the ones in the all women groups I think also can happen because we are
internalizing a lot of this patriarchal nonsense, essentially, that can make us, make us, view other members of our own perceived gender as Obstacles. And so I think that that was something that I thought was interesting with the Cups suit is this idea that like there is internal conflict and you don't have to choose to resolve it.
it can go unresolved. It's not great if you choose that, but you can still choose that sort of conflict to deal with. to benefit one person over another, or to ultimately go unresolved and cause problems in the future just based on the amount of wisdom you have in your deck at that point.
Audrey: I do see where you're coming from with, like, the idea that collaboration is more feminine inherently, because I think the alternative to solving something with brute force is to cooperate. And. Girls are encouraged to do that, to compromise.
Sera: Yeah, I like how this game does not present its protagonist as clean, uncomplicated people. there's an extent to which throughout media, protagonists of various kinds, and in the real world, women various types, are forced to be. Cleanly understood, either as pure, innocent heroes, or as complicated obstacles that should be overcome. And this game doesn't fall into, this simplistic point of view. A lot of the problems that the Coven might face in these ways might be internal, like you say. But if they succeed, that's because they succeed together.
You know, I don't want to imply that a group full of women never has any issues and is inherently better at collaborating.
Audrey: I don't think anyone thinks that. And everything that we're saying in this episode, right, this is based heavily on our own experiences and our own viewpoints and things that we've experienced in our lives. And so, it's not going to be a blanket thing.
Inherent truth. Because again, I think both of us are pretty aligned in saying that gender stuff is really fucking confusing. Like it is all over the place and you can't box someone in.
Sera: Yeah, I, speaking to anyone hearing this, you know, if you hear what we've identified as feminine in this game, and it connects to the masculine in you, that's fantastic. That's fascinating. Yeah,
Audrey: That's awesome.
Sera: And if you hear all this and it connects to a feminine in you that maybe you didn't recognize in the same way beforehand, That's incredible too.
I think ultimately where, progress is made globally and where understanding is gained is when we embrace complexity. When we embrace the idea that none of this is going to be put in a clean box. as our conversation wraps to a close, I have so many more thoughts, I have so many more questions,
Audrey: I feel that we could easily talk for like another hour about this, especially because we've talked a lot, I think, about identity and about social issues and community and things like that. Probably a lot more than is usually discussed on Dice Exploder and, and less, I think, getting granular in terms of like, how is this mechanic specifically making this game work?
Or how could this mechanic be presented in other games? Because ultimately The challenge deck is just another take on the Oracle deck, It is a very finely tuned, very confident in what this game is, Oracle deck, but that is what it is.
Sera: it's carried on the strength of its writing, on the strength of the systems that's built around it but ultimately, when I think about what makes this game feel feminine to me, it's a lot more about me than it is about the game. It's a lot more about my experience and, my femininity than it is about any objective truth.
Audrey: And I think that that is always going to be true. what we see of ourselves in games is going to be less about what the author wrote and more about ourselves. Always.
Sera: I think that's magical. I think every single game I've ever played has been better than it was on tech because of what everyone at the table brought to it.
Audrey: 100%. And that's the joy of games and the joy of the jam, hopefully. So we are really, really excited.
Thank you again, Sera, so much for being here today. It's been awesome talking to you.
Sera: thank you for your time and thank you for your thoughts.
Audrey: You can find Sera's work at seraphim-seraphina.itch.Io. You can check out the Femininominon Jam on itch. We have a link to that in the show notes. You can find me at LadyTabletop on itch. io. You can also find me at Alone at the Table, a podcast where I play solo RPGs and invite listeners along for the experience.
Dice Exploder can be found at DiceExploder. com, the Dice Exploder Discord, and Sam Dunnewold on bluesky at diceexploder. com. logo was designed by Sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray, and our producer emeritus is Sam Dunnewold.
And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.