Legends Of The Gamer Chicks, Part 1: The First Session

Legends Of The Gamer Chicks

Part 1: The First Session

The all-female gaming group. It’s the kind of thing gamers tell their kids about as a wild, unbelievable bedtime story, or that groups of newbies whisper about in small, dark rooms during GenCon. Every so often, some crazy old coot will come along who claims to have seen one back in college, or had a gamer girlfriend (there’s another rarity!) who got involved. He is usually dismissed as completely stark raving mad. Meanwhile, in a hobby where women are at a premium, the possibility of a campaign completely free of Y chromosomes continues to fuel the legends and fantasies of each new generation of gamers. The all-female group is the Holy Grail of Gaming, often dreamed of, never achieved.

Okay...maybe the situation isn’t quite so outrageous as that. Still, demographically speaking, all-male gaming groups are quite common, while all-female groups (or female gamers, period) are hard to come by. Before I came to college I was accustomed to being essentially the only female gamer in my area, so I’d certainly never seen one (only dreamed of how cool it would be). It wasn’t until St. Olaf College brought me together with five wonderful fellow gamer chicks that I got the chance to experience it for myself. And now, my faithful readers, I’ve decided to share with you the tale of this very unusual group and how it continues to change my conception of what gaming can and should be.

The players and the plan

Demographically speaking, the Mage: The Ascension group in which I have participated since September 2000 is a bit unusual. The Storyteller somehow manages to juggle nine players, five male and five female, which puts us on the far right of both the group size and gender balance bell curves to begin with. Of the five female players, only two had prior experience (myself and one woman who had played in a few D&D campaigns in middle school). When we realized our unique position of having enough players for an entirely female campaign (and when we decided to live together the following year, forming a conglomerate which several of the members took to calling “Revenge Of The Gamer Chicks”), we had to go ahead with it. We agreed on Changeling: The Dreaming as our game of choice, I stepped up as Storyteller, the players enlisted a fifth woman who had never roleplayed before, and Thursday night All-Girl Changeling began.

Character generation: The Goth, the rock star, and the seven-year-old cannibal

One adjective springs to mind immediately when I think of the character generation process for this group: Bizarre. The defining and common characteristic of this group of changelings (and Changeling players) was a sense of risk-taking that produced one of the stranger character mixes I’ve ever seen, but also one of the most rewarding. The newest player, more concerned with learning the ropes than pushing the limits, created perhaps the tamest character, Althea, an eshu who told fortunes with a circus and had a young magician for a ward. The party loony (whose previous Mage character owned a Geo Metro fueled by self-satisfaction, if that tells you anything about her typical character concepts) remained true to form with Ayla, a wolf pooka and psychic vampire who claimed to be Bill Gates’ illegitimate daughter and had been fired from her job as a park ranger for “accidentally” shooting her boss in the butt with a tranquilizer gun. From there on out things got interesting. The group’s quietest, shyest player made a radical departure from her previous two characters (an elven archer and a priest, both of whom were almost as withdrawn as their player) to create Erin, a Gothic sluagh bartender who loved to go clubbing and be social. A fourth player’s satyr character, Nina, was a rock star who toured the country singing bitter, Alanis-Morissette-style songs of love and heartbreak. However, her concerts almost invariably degenerated into massive orgies, causing couples to break up out of jealousy and allowing her to ravage them for the resulting Glamour.

The most notable example of unique concepts, however, was the character the pastor’s daughter made. Her previous two characters were a swordmaster with no fixed personality and a friendly Cultist of Ecstasy. Her Changeling character, on the other hand, was a redcap. For the benefit of those of you who don’t play Changeling, redcaps are kind of the nasty, evil, murderous, sadistic, gross pariahs of the changeling community. Not only was the character a redcap, she was a seven-year-old redcap with an addiction to human flesh. (Her name began as a bad joke and then stuck: Annabelle Lecter.) Her gleefully grotesque character history detailed the way in which she underwent her Chrysalis while eating the family cat at age three, then cannibalized a fellow preschool student who annoyed her, and how her parents “sealed their doom by giving me an Easy-Bake Oven for my birthday.” Of all the players in the group, I would have pinpointed her as the least likely to play “the disturbing one,” but there the character sheet was right in front of me. And I couldn’t have been happier that people were finally challenging themselves as roleplayers, trying on different character types and trying to get inside their heads. I was only surprised that it hadn’t happened earlier.

Do I think the players’ willingness to stretch the boundaries of character concepts had anything to do with the gender composition of the group? Absolutely. Even before the first session I could see that these women were genuinely excited about these outrageous people they had created, to an extent that I’ve rarely encountered in gaming. Don’t get me wrong; during my years of gaming I’ve seen plenty of outrageous characters, but these were very different from the broadly drawn caricatures I’ve seen such experiments become. As their character histories began to appear in my mailbox, I noticed that even when the concepts were at their most outlandish, my female players wrote about their alter egos as though they were real people. That was something I’d almost never seen in mixed-sex or all-male groups. Of course, some of this could have been due to the fact that this was a group of relatively new gamers finally beginning to feel truly at home in their new hobby—but I’ve also seen a lot of new gamers get to this stage, and upon arriving very few of them have imbued their characters with the honesty and realism that these women did.

Getting introduced and getting in a fight, or, How my players left me speechless for the first time

The first session of All-Girl Changeling was primarily dedicated to getting this disparate group of characters together. To make a long story short, the PCs met up at a Goth club called Spiderwebs, where they were summoned by a rogue noble named Lady Stavroula. She claimed that the upcoming film version of a book called The Amethyst Key was causing a dramatic increase in the Banality present in Los Angeles, but the duke refused to believe her. The characters, she said, stood to gain tremendous power and influence in the area if they helped her stop the movie from becoming a source of Banality in the world. After some dissent, they agreed, and they adventure began. (The full version, if you so desire, can be found here—or go here for some humorous quotes from the session.) But things didn’t get really interesting until the characters left Spiderwebs and got in a minor scuffle in an alley.

It happened like this. Annabelle was starving for some human flesh and decided to peek into the alley in search of a random homeless guy to eat. She thought she saw someone sleeping underneath a pile of newspapers, and began to poke him with a stick. It turned out to be a troll. Another troll came out of the shadows, and a sluagh attacked her from behind. She screamed for help, and the other PCs came running. Annabelle tried to get free of the sluagh’s grasp but failed. Nina won initiative, walked up behind the sluagh, tapped him on the shoulder, waited for him to turn around, then punched him in the face. The trolls started attacking the rest of the party. Erin and Ayla defended themselves. Althea cast Wayfare 2. Ayla ducked around the corner and turned into a wolf. The sluagh tried to stab Annabelle with a switchblade but failed. Annabelle responded by attempting a bite attack—on his face. She rolled for damage. Eight successes. Picture that scene in “The Silence Of The Lambs” where Hannibal Lecter escapes from prison, replace Anthony Hopkins with a seven-year-old girl and the guard with a scrawny little sluagh boy, and you’ll begin to understand the chaos this feral and just plain nasty maneuver caused. Then Ayla sicced Moro, her chimerical wolf companion, on my poor NPC, and he went down hard.

Next combat round. Nina won initiative again and cast Sovereign 2 to command one of the trolls to restrain the other. Althea used her extra attacks to walk up to the trolls and start poking them with her dagger. Annabelle spent her turn squirming out from under the sluagh and Moro, who was still chewing on his neck. The sluagh rolled over and started drawing a Bunk for Wayfare 3 on the ground. Erin noticed and kicked him in the head, doing enough damage to incapacitate him. Seeing their leader’s plight (and Annabelle looking at them with blood dripping off her chin), the trolls failed their Willpower rolls and screamed for a truce. In less than two combat rounds, five non-combat-oriented characters who had just met managed to subdue three physically stronger adversaries. Any doubts about the tactical gaming abilities of women should be laid to rest indefinitely by this incident.

What happened next, however, was what really amazed me. I had planned for the PCs to take considerably more time in defeating their adversaries, after which the sluagh could be persuaded to reveal that the duke had sent him to keep an eye on Lady Stavroula’s doings and rough up anyone who tried to ally herself with her. Instead, I had a combat that was over in 10 minutes and a crucial NPC knocking at death’s door. At the Storyteller’s discretion, one of the trolls magically developed Primal 4 and healed the sluagh so he could talk to them and give up the needed information. After that he begged to be released. What ensued was a discussion at least three times the length of the combat about what to do with their defeated foes. Ayla wanted to let them go back to the duke. Althea wanted to turn them over to Lady Stavroula. Annabelle wanted to kill them. The sluagh was adamant about wanting the first option (as was I). Althea asked him how they could trust that he wouldn’t be back. The sluagh swore he’d never trouble them again, since he had no particular love for the duke and was just following orders. He told them he wanted the adventure the duke’s court could offer. I was trying to give him personality enough that they’d feel guilty about just killing him and would release him, possibly to meet up with him later on. The effect was very different.

“All right,” said Althea, “then why don’t you come with us?”

From then on things worked out quite nicely. The party turned the trolls over to Lady Stavroula and hauled the sluagh (whose name was Stuart) back to Lady Stavroula’s freehold with them. I had never once planned for this NPC to be anything more than a plot hook, but the players thought otherwise. They treated him as though he were a real person, and thus picked up an ally I never thought would be important. I had never seen a gaming group do this before—and I liked it.

With their new NPC in tow, the PCs went off to the freehold to dream pleasant changeling dreams and prepare to infiltrate a movie set. I won’t get into painstaking detail about what they did after their first battle together. The rest of the session was full of surprising plot twists and exciting little moments, just as much for the players as it was for me. And none of us could wait to find out what happened next. In the end, our session may have lacked the presence of anyone with a Y chromosome, but it wasn’t deficient in any other way.

Coming up in part 2: Adventures in cannibalism, meeting the Malkavian prince of Los Angeles, the boys bite back, and more. Plus: You won’t believe what causes the characters’ first argument!

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