When does play become personal? When does a person’s exploration of a dungeon or fantasy world turn into an exploration of themselves? For some, certainly the answer is “never.” The distance between the game world and the real world is enough to bar any introspection. Or perhaps their playstyle simply does not warrant it. Certainly, one would assume this was true for the fantasy tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in the 1970s when the wargame and simulation aspects of the hobby reigned. Yet, tabletop fantasy games embraced role-playing and world building early in their design, and by 1976 the player base had already expanded to include more than just avid wargamers. So for some of these players, tabletop gaming may have been a door to new experiences or understandings of themselves. Fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Runequest undeniably reinforced late-20th century perceptions of masculinity and heteronormativity. Yet, there are enough breadcrumbs in player notes, modules, and adventures to indicate that, early in the hobby’s existence, TRPGs allowed players to explore the boundaries of sex and gender in a socially acceptable, even communal, way.
I came to The Strong National Museum of Play in July of 2024 looking for material to use in my history dissertation. My project seeks to understand how the tabletop roleplaying community developed from the 1970s to 2000. I am historicizing the cultural and intellectual forces which were either reinforced or rejected by players through their gameplay. These include notions of masculinity, femininity, race, and sexuality. In short, I’m looking at what players did over what game designers intended with their games. While numerous media scholars and historians have rightfully pointed out the sexist, racist, and overall problematic aspects of Dungeons & Dragons and other games, it is equally important to recognize player agency in the equation. People consume products in ways not originally intended by their creators and diverse playstyles have been part of the hobby far longer than just this past decade.
The Play Generated Map and Document Archive papers were key to this project in many respects. This diverse body of resources allowed me to look through player creations dating back to the mid-1970s. John Redden’s files proved to be some of the most evocative for looking at gender in early games. Dating to sometime around 1982, Redden had taken care to write out a full guide to substances for his Airwhale Rider Adventure campaign. The “Sumdinian Guide to Drugs and Intoxicating Substances” included three intriguing entries. The first, “expac,” was an abortion drug, which has interesting implications since sex and unwanted pregnancies seemed common in early games. Indeed, the article “Women want equality – and why not?” published in The Dragon magazine #39, the official publication by TSR, inc., referenced women players having to deal pregnancy as a real threat to derailing their adventures either due to their own decisions or forced sexual assault at the Game Master’s discretion.
Indeed, in Abyss 16, also accessed at The Strong Museum, Dave Hargrave wrote about how sex should be a part of fantasy roleplaying to destigmatize it as a subject for players and lessen the “chauvinistic double standards of the past.” Hargrave also noted how in his group it was women players who were the ones seeking sex in the campaign.
This is partially backed up by Redden’s own adventure notes. In August of 1982, a character named “Liz” broke off from the party in the town of Foron to seek a partner for the night. Unfortunately, her dice rolls found her an inexperienced young guard. This entry was titled “Liz does Foron,” a play on the movie Debbie Does Dallas, and shows foremost why abortion and performance drugs were available in John Redden’s campaigns. While I need to dig into more sources, it seems Hargrave’s call for normalizing sex fantasy TRPGs was perhaps unnecessary as sex, either wanted or unwanted, seemed prevalent in game worlds.
One interesting aspect of sex in gaming came from the fact that gender was magically malleable. Typically regarded as a curse, gender changing mechanics often punished curiosity. As an example, David McLouth’s papers contained notes of a room in a massive dungeon called the “Orgy Room.” Inside, players were transformed into equal numbers of opposite sexes and forced to fornicate for ten rounds. The implication that an all-male party would see half of its members transformed into women before embracing each other is fascinating.
Certainly, this was intended to be a trap as many other rooms in the dungeon contained orcs and other monsters to fight. Yet this room attacked a player’s identity and not their hit points. Seeing gender swapping as a curse or trap indicates some anxiety over how malleable gender was both in game and reality in the last decades of the 20th century.
Indeed, this malleability could also be a boon in some cases. The player Kevin Diebold’s notes had a page dedicated to the Ring of Gaxx, a powerful item necessary to defeat the evil mage Mordenkainen in an adventure. The ring itself comes from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Book of Artifacts, published in 1993. This published version allowed dungeon masters to attribute up to eight spells to the ring which a user can activate at least once per day. Diebold’s ring not only provided invisibility, fireballs, and lycanthropy but a gender change spell as well.
These last two were considered curses in the Book of Artifacts, yet they pale in comparison to the published Ring of Gaxx’s official curse which turns the user into an abomination if they wear the ring too long. The mechanics of the ring also allow players to activate the spells at will once they learn all the ring’s available effects. This then changes the aspect of a curse into something tactical and desired. Even if intended as an unwanted affliction, Diebold’s ring could enable a player to quite literally play with their gender at will. So, while the mechanics of fantasy TRPGs tried to reinforce the idea that gender was immutable through the language of affliction, players could still find mechanically sound ways to circumvent the developers’ intent.
Lastly, among all these zines and papers were countless numbers of character sheets. I pored through endless pages of elves, fighters, dwarves, and magic users looking at equipment and spells. I am still in the process of sifting through many of the pictures I took and looking for patterns, but I will mention one specific sheet that I found. Among the collections of the North Coast Gamers, Penn-Ohio Chapter were numerous character sheets created sometime after 2001. While my dissertation project looks to end around the year 2000, this sheet was notable because of one word. At some point an unknown player created a red-haired gnome barbarian named Oom whose gender was described simply as “Both.”
This was the only character I saw like this in the fantasy materials dated before the 2010s. Perhaps it is nothing. It could have been intended as a whimsical addition to an orange gnome, but I think it is indicative of how easy it is to circumvent societal norms within a play setting. Further, the “sex” characteristic on character sheets were there for mechanical reasons. Player stats, spells, and other aspects of the game could be affected by gender. In some cases, women had hard limits to their strength caps. In others, charm spells would only affect characters of the opposite sex. Having a character defined as “both” throws a wrench into a lot of published mechanics, requiring more creative or inclusive game design from the game master. In short, this silly little gnome undermined 30 years of gender-based mechanics with the stroke of a pen.
What is amazing is that I have not shared everything that I found on this research trip. These were just some of the highlights for one aspect of my research. The amount of material I found which speaks to issues of race, sexual preference, and men and women’s experiences both in games and around the table is a few thousand pictures long. I found evidence of bullying in a high school game, references to early 20th century anthropological studies, a game about experiencing the Middle Passage, a player character whose entire backstory was full of kidnapping and sexual assault, and so much more that it will take my dissertation to write about. I offered here a taste of how The Strong’s archives were a boon to exploring sex and gender in gaming in the late 20th century. My next steps take me beyond The Strong to other archives and oral interviews, but what I found at the museum in Rochester is a necessary and unrivaled foundation of research for my project. Doing a history of sex and gender in fantasy TRPGs is an adventure in itself, but the resources provided by The Strong have greatly equipped me to succeed in it.
By Geoffrey Ramirez, 2024 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play