#it certainly was an experience.

[uncanny-tranny]

Honestly, there is a certain type of fetishizing of violence that occurs when you are the victim of abuse - wherein people talk directly to you about how much they fantasize about your abuser/s dying and being killed - "all abusers must be killed!" they say.

As a victim of prolonged abuse, I never felt cared for when people indulged that information to me. It often feels like my abuse is being exploited for others to enact their own violent fantasies and secret desires - my abuse means nothing to them in the same way that I didn't matter to my abusers. It's not support - it's just another cycle of violence.

I'm begging people to care more about victims and survivors than they do about retribution of abusers. Nowhere along the way should your focus on the abuser outweigh the people affected by their abuse. If you truly want to support abuse victims and survivors, start with us

[lycandrophile]

if you’re young and transmasc and the people in your life haven’t been great about the whole thing and you’re starting to feel like it might be easier to just give up and pretend to be the person they want you to be, i need you to hold on. because the thing is, one second you’re 16 and a future where you get to make decisions about your own body and life feels so impossibly far away and you can’t imagine living like this for that long, but then you blink and it’s been six years and you’re in your car with the music blasting and your voice is lower than the guy in the song’s and your hair is long for the first time in a decade because you’re finally confident enough to grow it out again on your own terms and your chest hasn’t been weighed down in months and it’s the freest you’ve ever felt in your life and i promise it will be worth the wait. don’t give up on yourself.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[thecruel]

HOUSE M.D. 2.17 — All In

[trans-androgyne]

My whole stay in the hospital, after introducing myself with he/they and having he/him on my little wristband and charts and stuff, I only got called he without having to correct someone once out of the dozens of times I was gendered. Even by the other trans person there. They also marked me down as female even though my legal gender is X and everywhere they don’t have X it’s M. They did the same thing to the transfem I befriended, putting her down as M even though she’s legally F. But at least she got she/her’d most of the time despite not passing either :/

[scruncheduppaper]

14 year old girls who turn into gods and disappear from all of their loved ones’ memories and exist solely as a concept and have a homoerotic relationship with their close friend + 10000 trauma points

[confessionseddie]

9-1-1 2.01, "Under Pressure"

[gatoburr0]

[zoeythegoodgirl]

If you have a trans woman in your life, if you love her, you have to tell her. Make sure she knows. Don't wait for her to say she needs you to. Odds are, you could be the only one in her life that does.

[mrs-gauche]

Alas, so long as the music plays, we dance.

(Cole's cryptic comments + The Song)

[sysig]

Ah, childhood memories (Patreon)

[beresaad]

taash ✨

(pose ref'd from one of the shots of rhea ripley for wwe inked)

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[unluckyprime]

for old times sake .. ☀️ middle school me would be shitting himself if he saw this

[theresattrpgforthat]

How To Find Cool Games: On DriveThruRPG!

So disclaimer upfront: I don’t use the DriveThruRPG website nearly as much as Itch.io. Some of those reasons are practical (there’s no tagging system, the catalogue is rather D&D saturated,), while others are more… well, shallow (the website isn’t as pretty).

However, DriveThruRPG is a very good tool to have in your toolbox when it comes to finding cool ttrpgs, for a number of reasons, the primary one being that it’s for TTRPGS and only TTRPGs! Let’s get started.

The Search Bar / Categories.

You can start by doing a basic search for a game that you already know about, or by searching for a keyword, like “pirates” or “zombies”. You’ll get titles sorted by “relevance”, so things that have the keyword in the name will show up first. One of the biggest downsides of this strategy is that everything kind of gets lumped in here: supplements, maps, expansions, adventures, character sheets… the list goes on. However, you can narrow down what you’re looking for by using the toggles at the top of the website. I personally usually narrow down search results by selecting “Product Type” and then “Core Rulebooks”.

One nice thing DriveThru has compared to Itch.io is that you can combine categories, so if I wanted to brows say, Gothic Horror Core Rulebooks priced under $20, well I can do that! My favourite categories are for genre, but another set of categories that you may find very useful once you’ve familiarized yourself with some games is the Rule System category. There are categories for systems like the Year Zero Engine, Forged in the Dark, BRP (Basic Roleplaying), OSR, and so much more. There’s also “other systems” and “any system” categories if you want to find something that’s unique or that can be used across games.

DriveThru also has a lot of games published in different languages, and you can narrow your results to see what’s been offered in your language. I think there are more options on this website than there are on Itch, although you might benefit by finding one or two publishers in your language on DriveThru, and then check the publisher’s website from there.

The Homepage

Another reason to check out DriveThru regularly is the sales and promotions. The top banner of the homepage will typically advertise a few things: the Deal of the Day, current themed sales, and special offers that DriveThru RPG wants you to know about. Their homepage also has Bestselling Titles, Most Popular Games Under $5, Newest Games, Featured Titles, and, if you scroll down enough, Personalized suggestions. Unlike Itch.io, DriveThru does a lot of work to show you what’s new, what’s hot, and what’s a really good deal right now, which can all be really helpful things!

When you land on a game, you’ll be able to see whether or not DriveThru sells physical copies, some basic information like book size, rule system, publisher & author, and a blurb describing the setting and other general information about the game. DriveThru has a side panel with “Customers also Bought”, which is great for showing you things that you might like, either because they surround the same theme, they work for the same game, or they are in a similar genre. (Another thing that Itch isn’t quite as good at.)

You’ll also be able to see (and leave) reviews for game, including the ratings left by other people who have picked it up. Occasionally I’ll find really useful information in the reviews, as reviewers might talk about mechanics they love or loathe, or recommend styles of play that they feel the game matches.

Finally, like Itch, DriveThru will let you know if you’ve already bought the game, and provide you with a download shortcut.

Publishing House Pages

Larger publishing houses typically have their ttrpg content sorted very nicely for you on their publisher pages, to help you find the things that you want. Modiphius is a great example, sorting Star Trek, Dune, Fallout, and their 2d20 games all in special categories.

Many publishers also have a Community Content section, which is great if you’re looking for assets, new adventures, hacks of a game system and some very reasonably priced (or even cheap) game additions. Similar to Itch, DriveThru has a Pay-What-You-Want feature for many games, although, unlike Itch, most PWYW titles require that you pay a non-zero amount.

Newsletters

When you create an account on DriveThruRPG, you can sign up for various different kinds of newsletters. Some come directly from DriveThru itself: this includes the Follow Your Favourites and Deal of the Day options, as well as weekly/monthly newsletters carrying information about new releases, special promotions, and (often) a free ttrpg product of the month.

However, on top of that, when you purchase a game or follow publishing pages, you can also get emails about new releases specific to those creators, as well as updates if a new version of a game you bought has been added. Often if it’s a game you already bought, this means you own the new version too - something that DriveThru has in common with Itch!

The Follow Your Favourites announcements will line up with whatever you’ve chosen to follow on the website. I’ve asked for updates about new Core Rulebooks, and I also get updates from the Onyx Path and a few other places where I found games I really liked. I also check the Deal of the Day offers fairly regularly; sometimes there are really really good deals offered and if it’s a game you know or like, then you don’t want to miss out on a sale!

Wishlists

DriveThru allows you to add games to wishlists to look at later, and even gives you the ability to sort your wishlists, although the process feels harder to look through than Itch does; I think it might be a UI issue.

However, because it acts like a wishlist, you can move games from the wishlist into your cart and vice versa, as well as move the games to another list. One really nice thing about the wishlist section is that DriveThru will alway show you when something you want is on sale, and how much it is normally - Itch does this too, but in this case, DriveThru is much easier to read!

I mostly sort my wishlists into Core Rulebooks and Supplements, because I don’t have nearly as many games bookmarked on DriveThru. If it exists on Itch, I store it on Itch - but there are plenty of other, “someday’ games, that I want to be able to find again in the future.

Your Library

DriveThruRPG has an app that you can download onto your computer or your phone, and it basically acts as a library that you can look through. In both the webpage and the app, you can sort your purchases alphabetically, from new to old, by publisher, by whether or not they were updated, and using similar categories as the search bar on the store front.

Free things can definitely be found here, even if they’re harder to look for. On DriveThru, most free products are things like character sheets, playtest games, or Quickstarts. However, some publishers do put up their stuff for free. Whenever I can get a Quickstart of something interesting, or if I find something being offered for free, I add it to my library. Free games are how I got started in ttrpgs, and QuickStarts are wonderful introductions to a system that usually give you a good idea of what the game is going to feel like.

Conclusion

Overall, DriveThruRPG is great for folks who like certain big publishing houses, and folks who like a good deal. I personally usually end up on the site because something in my emails caught my eye, which is the opposite of how I navigate Itch. DriveThru was my home base before I discovered Itch.io, so I still have a little fondness for the website, even if looking through it is a little bit of a slog.

One thing that might be a bit of an annoyance is that if you own something from a certain company, they might be able to send you a lot of emails for every sale and new product. If this becomes too much, you can choose to opt out from those publishers.

If you don’t want to have to actively engage with the website as much as say, Itch, DriveThru’s email system is also a big help. You can customize your subscriptions to match what you’re interested in, and then just check your emails once in a while to see what’s on offer. After a while you’ll also learn about yearly events, like the Summer Sale, which often provides big discounts on a lot of different games.

DriveThru is also a great place to start if you’re looking for print versions of games: I don’t know what shipping is like to places outside Canada, but I definitely appreciate that it’s an option, and sometimes all you need to do is find a game or publisher - once you know that it exists, you can google that publisher, check out their website, and figure out the best place to order from there.