#lbr i'm just five genders in a trenchcoat

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Do you play dnd? How did you get into it? I want to but I don't know how

[Follow-on, I assume, from this post.]

Yes, I do play Dungeons & Dragons!  I currently have two characters going:

Lin is a Level 6 lawful half-orc bard with a folk hero backstory.

He’s a cheerful, outgoing lad who likes befriending new people and also killing them.  He grew up in a family of traveling half-orc butchers who moved from town to town, killing animals that the residents of those towns wanted to eat but were too squeamish to kill themselves.  The youngest of eight brothers, Lin exceeded everyone’s expectations the day he stood up in front of a corrupt mayor and demanded fair payment for his entire band regardless of the craven humans’ fondness for tofurky.  Convinced that this was the spark of a great warrior, Lin’s parents scraped together all their money and sent him off to the big city to go be a fighter... but it didn’t exactly work out that way.  Lin spent the next several months working in a bar and hoping to be discovered, until court troubadour Aelowylan discovered that Lin might not have the spark of a great warrior, but he can sing pretty well.  Now equipped with trusty drumsticks that can turn pretty much any surface into an improvised percussion instrument, a variety of throwing knives that range from tiny darts to hefty daggers, a magical opal in place of the left eye he lost in a pig-slaughtering accident, and a fondness for unfortunate heavy-metal covers of pop songs, Lin is off for a life of adventure.  He’s hoping to chronicle and assist the grand journeys of his companions in the tradition of his personal hero Ethyl the Erudite.

Lin is loosely inspired by my fascination with Ed Brubaker’s modernist recasting of Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes (a somewhat different character from the MCU interpretation).  Brubaker writes a Bucky who is boyish and optimistic but who has also been thoroughly indoctrinated by imperialist propaganda — first American, later Soviet — and exposed to military violence almost since infancy.  Bucky’s bright naïveté, casual bloodthirstiness, and low threshold for absolute loyalty intersect in ways that are sometimes hilarious and sometimes horrifying.  I stole that weird combination to interpret the ways that a bard’s tendency toward optimistic trust in others would combine with a half-orc’s brutality.

Lady Iris is a Level 4 chaotic human rogue with a performer backstory.

She’s a theater-nerd-cum-assassin in the tradition of the kuroko stagehands who inspired modern ninja tropes.  She wields dual swords and dresses in black or navy blue except for the iris-patterned kabuki mask she wears during political protests.  The daughter of wealthy merchants, Iris grew up as a privileged theater kid until the youngest son of a feudal lord saw one of her plays and fell in love.  They dated, married, had two children, and lived happily for about ten years.  Over that time, Iris became ever more uncomfortable with her father-in-law’s treatment of his serfs, until she eventually confronted him over his barbaric taxation policies.  When he persisted, Iris killed him and fled to go rob the rich and feed the poor.  Her romantic ideals have run into the unpleasant realities of bad food and hard beds, but she persists in her mission and remains hopeful that she will be reunited with her husband (now the feudal lord hunting her down, which makes it awkward that they’re still very much in love) and the children she left behind.

Lady Iris is the product of my frustration with the treatment of Lady Ursa (the original Blue Spirit, hence the name) in the Avatar: The Last Airbender tie-in comics.  I have written overlong academic essays on the ways that gender roles intersect with imperialism in Avatar, including the ways that the Fire Nation embraces the privilege of radical gender equality...  And then The Search and Smoke and Shadow transform the morally-ambiguous self-reliant Ursa into a helpless maiden who suffers through an arranged marriage for love of her children, kills her father-in-law for love of her children, self-exiles for love of her children, and abandons a perfectly lucrative life as a theater manager for love of her children.  Ursa gets held up as a pure, selfless paragon of womanhood with very little agency and no sexuality.  It strips the uncomfortable implication of her love for the morally-bankrupt Ozai from the equation, fails to question the idea that she “should” drop everything to move halfway across the world in order to mother her highly-independent adult son, and quite simply violates the continuity of Avatar itself.  I opted to talk back to the comics with an alternate read of the same character.

Also there’s a whole thing where we played Avengers (2012) as an RPG in the style of Film Reroll, but that’s GURPS not D&D.

Anyway, I was lucky in that my siblings decided to start a game and then invited me.  It’s the three of us plus our respective SOs in a group of six, so we’re all connected in RL.  In terms of finding one’s own group...  I’ve seen invites before on Tumblr and FanFictionNet forums, and I know that Discord is always full of people looking for RPGers.  If you don’t mind GURPS instead of D&D, the Film Reroll Subreddit is always full of people looking for players to fill out parties based on movies.  Most parties meet on Skype or Discord instead of in person these days, so adventure is definitely out there.