Design Notes: Seven-Part Pact and Queering

I'm writing this design diary inbetween two of the most stressful possible weeks of my life. Possum Creek is having a rough time (something which I'll be able to talk more about after Gencon), and while through gumption and wit we've been able to string together some possible solutions, it's taken an enormous emotional toll. And, while all that's been going on, I've been touring around Yazeba's and preparing for the biggest con of the year. I can't believe we're even gonna be able to make it to Gencon this year, frankly, and yet somehow we'll be there. If you're there, I hope to see you. Either way, I decided to draft this design diary to clear my head from all the administrative stress, but Seven-Part Pact development outside of this is probably paused for at least the next week during Gencon.

So I've been thinking a lot about gender in Seven-Part Pact, specifically the insistence that all Wizards are men, and why that matters to me. It's a strange nod to patriarchy, and will definitely impact the marketability of the game. It makes the Wizards read less cleanly as a power fantasy and more allegorically. It creates complications and frustrations where there otherwise wouldn't be. When I was showing Seven-Part Pact to another game studio, they commented on it, and recommended that either the game be more about patriarchy, or to cut that insistence entirely. 

I get where it's coming from, but I'd argue that Seven-Part Pact is built entirely around that core insistence, that all wizards are men, it's a critical part of what makes the game function as a work of art, and its secretly a vital force for shaping how people queer the text.

I've been thinking a lot about queering-as-a-verb as it relates to TTRPGs lately. I've never been interested in "inclusion" or "diversity" as buzzwords, but rather I am extremely interested in the ways queerness acts upon players, or the way queer players act upon games. 

There are arguably two ways queerness can emerge in a tabletop game. If there's more, I haven't figured them out yet. 

The first is what I'm gonna call Endogenic Queerness, in which the game text or the game mechanics queer the gamespace the players have created. For example, Monsterhearts is designed to produce queerness by eroding the players' confidence in a character's sexuality. (I have more to say on that, hopefully in the form of an article at some point.) If a group of straight people sit down to play a normal game of Monsterhearts and follow the rules as written in the book, playing straight characters, their characters will inevitably arc towards homosocial desire. 

The second I'm gonna call Exogenic Queerness, in which the group of players take a game-text, regardless of that game-text's queerness, and produce a queer game from it. We could all sit down to play the most unremarkably heterosexual game in the world, but if we're all determined to play queer characters in a queer world, we can read queerness into the game-text. Dungeons & Dragons has nothing which itself is fundamentally queer the way Monsterhearts does, but as players we can choose to make it gay anyway. 

Tensions emerge when players who are used to exogenous approaches to queerness encounter games which provoke queerness from within. Frequently exogenic queerness is predicated on the social norms of the players, and may take for default concepts like identity politics or gender essentialism. When the game challenges this queering by provoking an alternate mode of queerness, this ideally will produce self-reflection, but more often than not will produce discord.

Seven-Part Pact is written assuming queerness will be brought to it exogenously. The game presents a distressing patriarchal world, of male wizards too stressed out with work to spend time with the people they love, and a king surrounded by wives and mistresses. It's a game that's harsh and loud with gender, but no mechanic forces you to examine or reject the way gender is depicted in the game. It's arguably a weakness of Seven-Part Pact, that you can play it all the way through as a shitty guy wizard and at no point will the game stop you.

Instead, the game begs for a queer interpretation. It's built to both fight against and embrace this reading, to produce meaningful art in the conflict generated by attempts to wrangle it into a queerer world. Much like the rest of its structure, it begs to be ripped apart by the players, for them to find some method by which the system of the Pact itself can be destroyed and undone. This will be hard, of course. The Throne-Keeper knows:

Maleness and power are intertwined. To successfully be a powerful man is to be a member of an exclusive club, where women are eager to please and other men vye for your attention. Everyone benefits from this hierarchy, as long as they're willing to play by the rules. A noblewoman can call upon her husband or father to protect her from the common folk, and in that act of violence she too benefits from that consolidation of power (as long as that woman never challenges or undermines his own authority in any way).

The system of the game is a model of the system of power. You can lean into that system of power, and embrace the arrogance and cruelty of wizardry. The system will inevitably steer you towards making crueler and crueler choices in the name of selfish utilitarianism. And you can resist, and push queerness into the game. The game will fight back, of course. But that struggle — to be queer in a game that refuses to give you the time or comfort to be queer — is one of the mechanisms that makes Seven-Part Pact function.