Hello Role Players, and welcome to our first Weekly Encounter newsletter! 

Our love for the RPG community goes far beyond the work we do at Role, and we look forward to sharing our discoveries with you every week. This week also happens to be Transgender Awareness Week, a topic that is dear and important to everyone on our team. Role playing games have always been a powerful way to explore identity. For some (myself included) these games provided the first place we could experiment with gender performance, pronouns, and more. In recent years, the RPG industry has also seen an explosion of trans and nonbinary creators. Thanks to the passionate work of our community, you can play many games from these creators on Role today! You’ll find all of this and more here in the Weekly Encounter – today and in weeks to come. 
So thanks for reading, and remember…

You can play with us!

Play

Wanderhome

We’ve noticed some of you creating sheet templates for Jay Dragon‘s Wanderhome on Role!

Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy Role-Playing Game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change. It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine.

You can try out Wanderhome on Role using the following sheet templates thanks to our fabulous community members, Peridotted & Trickfurey.

Advanced Lovers & Lesbians

Thirsty Sword Lesbians has a new expansion supplement up on Kickstarter, delightfully titled: Advanced Lovers & Lesbians. 
Evil Hat Productions has finished the art, editing, and layout to complete a massive 272 page, full-color expansion, a must have for any fan of the original, Thirsty Sword Lesbians. This expansion features works from countless talented world builders in the TTRPG space and allows players to explore a world that is diverse, expansive and unabashedly queer. 

Watch

Death2Divinity | 14 Episodes

Death2Divinity was born when producers Jude Valentin and Katie Mae teamed up to create the first all-fat and all-queer D&D Adventuring Party. They both noticed a lack of body diversity in the TTRPG space and had dreams of changing it, and now, they are! There are currently 14 Episodes of Death 2 Divinity available for streaming on Twitch & Spotify.

Community

Alex Viney on playing trans characters

Alex Viney writes about how playing trans characters in RPGs helps her understand herself.

“…aside from a blip at 16 when my DM told me about a cursed D&D item that changes a character’s gender and I thought about it non-stop for two months. It took more than half a decade of playing – and actually coming out as a trans woman – for me to realise those two sides of my life could crossover. And even on purpose.”

Affinity Keys for Marginalized Creators

Check out the community project to raise money to provide Affinity keys to Marginalized Tabletop RPG Designers, run by Sinta Posadas who is an incredibly talented RPG designer. We love seeing opportunities arise to help members of our community. If you’re looking to start making games, this could be worth applying for. If you’re looking to help out your fellow community members, consider helping support these efforts.