Transcript
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I always imagined Petty Dreadful as the incarnation of trans rage.
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Petty's there to play to win, because the world's never had her back, so why is she gonna have anyone else's?
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I have a whole essay in me that's gotta be written at some point about how actual play and reality shows are kind of the same thing.
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Community is not something you can have that's a one way street.
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You're gonna win trauma! That's what you're gonna win in Deathmatch Island.
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Hello friends! Welcome to Characters Without Stories.
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A TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled.
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I'm Starr.
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This episode I'm joined by Rowan Zeoli.
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Rowan is a journalist covering the intersection of progressive thought and niche cultural movements.
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She is co founder of Rascal News, a worker owned, reader supported tabletop journalism outlet.
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Her work has also appeared in Polygon, TripSitter, Autostraddle, and The Fandamentals.
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where she's covered gender, psychedelics, and the largest developments in actual play, from award winning indie programming to big budget productions.
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She is also co founder of convention slash nonprofit Write Hive.
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Rowan, thank you so much for joining me on the show.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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I really appreciate it.
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So I am a big fan of rascal news.
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I'm a subscriber or slash, I guess, one of those, uh, reader supported readers.
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Thank you.
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I really appreciate that.
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I think what Rascal is bringing to the table is so new and fresh and there really was a craving for it.
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So I'm glad that we have somebody filling that niche.
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Yeah, we are trying our best.
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We are celebrating our one year anniversary right now, which is huge.
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Uh, we're doing our year, like our anniversary pledge drive to try and make it so we can keep doing this for another year.
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Because, surprisingly, independent journalism doesn't pay super well, and make ourselves at least get somewhere closer to a living wage.
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Yeah.
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Please, everyone, go and check out the pledge drive and donate if you can, or sign up and be, uh, one of those readers supporting the news.
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How did you get into games journalism?
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Yeah, so it's actually a bit of a winding path, as most things in life are.
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I going all the way back was a standup comedian and I did that for a couple of years and I was, I was pretty good at it.
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I like to think, but then I did a show called the not so late, late show.
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It was basically like last week, tonight kind of vibes.
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And I did, like, comedy journalism a bit there, and I was like, Oh, I really find this very fulfilling.
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And then through that, I started doing comedy journalism, writing about comedy.
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And so I was doing that, and then I got a piece with Autostraddle where I was talking to trans comedians, and did a couple roundtables with some trans comedians.
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And that was really profound and important for me to be like, Oh, actually, I like this a lot more than I like doing the comedy itself.
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And so I started doing that.
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I was writing freelance for a while.
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Uh, and then I pitched to Trip Sitter, which was that psychedelic publication.
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And I ended up becoming a contributor there and writing about the intersection of gender and psychedelics.
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And that was something I never expected to be doing, but it was very fun and very cool.
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And then I started doing a report on, I did a deep dive investigation into people saying that their stimulant medication like Vyvanse or Adderall was no longer as effective as it once was.
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Went down a real deep rabbit hole there.
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Had some very spooky things happen to me and then was like, this is not worth it.
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Actually, I am not getting paid.
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I got paid 300 to write this article.
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That's like, I've been doing this over the course of like six months.
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I'm burnt out.
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I need to do something else.
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I saw Dungeons and Drag Queens by Dimension 20 and went, Oh.
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I love this.
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I can write about this, maybe.
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I pitched it out to Polygon, Charlie Hall gave me a chance, I wrote it, it ended up being super successful, and then I just kept kind of doing it.
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I started writing for The Fandamentals, which is a volunteer run site, and then, uh, Lin Kodega, who is one of my co founders at Rascal, who did the OGL reporting, reported on the Pinkertons with Hasbro.
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Some really big reporting ended up getting laid off from io9 because media in general is getting consumed by venture capitalism and getting stripped for parts and so layoffs were happening and we were like there's really no other option for us but then to make our own site.
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And so that's how Rascal kind of came about is we were like, all right, well, this is our only option, I guess.
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And then we brought in Chase, that ended up working out really well.
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Then Lin got a fancy job out in Hollywood writing for Interview with the Vampire or being a writer's assistant on Interview with the Vampire.
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And then we brought in Calen Ellis and Thomas Manuel, and now we're a four person strong team at Rascal, and it's just been the most rewarding thing in my entire life.
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So was Dungeons and Drag Queens your first exposure to TTRPGs, or had you been into them for a while?
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So I had been into them for a while, but kind of in the closet about it a little bit.
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Like in high school, my friend for his 16th birthday organized a game of like D&D 3.5.
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And I was like, oh, this is really interesting.
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And I was always a theater kid, like hence why the standup happened.
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And I was like, Oh, this is, I can really get into this.
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And then it kind of went away for a couple of years.
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I was at a party for a theater after show, and I heard someone talking about Critical Role.
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And I was like, What are we saying here?
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And so I got really interested in that.
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Started watching Critical Role from like episode 20.
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So really early on, I jumped in there and got really on the actual play bandwagon from there, but kind of like watched it in secret.
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And then I went to college and due to some unfortunate situations ended up not being able to go to college for a semester.
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And during that time, while I was working full time, I ended up playing a session and running a session for those same friends.
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And that was great.
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And I was like, oh, I really like running these games.
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I'm getting more immersed in the world.
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And then it kind of went away for a couple of years because as life goes and you don't have any more free time, it's hard to organize these games.
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Hence the very theme of this show that I'm on right now.
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And then, yeah, I saw Dungeons and Drag Queens because I had been watching Dimension 20 through like 2019 and been like, oh, this is a different take on the actual play thing, got really into it and then watched Dungeons and Drag Queens with my partner who was like, you should write about this.
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You're a writer, like you have a lot of thoughts about this, you should go for it.
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And it was life changing, honestly.
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But yeah, so D&D has been, was the on ramp to it, and now has broken open the whole world.
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Yeah, I see a lot of other games, games besides D&D, covered on Rascal, and there's a lot of, you know, even some very indie games, some of those one pagers and zines and things like that.
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When did you start moving into playing other games besides D&D?
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Yeah, so at that time when I was home, the friends I was with were into some other games.
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Like, they played Call of Cthulhu, they played Shadowrun, and so I was like, oh, this is interesting.
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One of my friends even, uh, made their own version.
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They called it A3.5, which was like this really interesting blend of like AD&D and 3.5.
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It was very fascinating.
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I was like, oh, like you can do a lot with games.
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When I got into writing for The Fandomentals, my world kind of broke open a little bit as I started seeing actual plays that were doing non D&D games, like My First Dungeon runs a lot of indie games.
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Uh, this actual play podcast, which is incredibly well produced and they played a season of Elliot Davis's Project Echo, which I was like, Oh, this is like art and it's an, it's a game about time travel that's played through a planner.
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Oh, cool.
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Very interesting.
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Yeah uh, and then they played Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, which is Jay Dragon's incredible game about a bed and breakfast run by a witch and it's very cozy and cartoony It's very cool.
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And I was like, oh there's so much you can do with this and then just kind of dove in headfirst from there And then once I started writing for Rascal, I was like, oh I need to learn more about what this world is.
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And then finally getting to go to my first convention.
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I was like, oh I am a little baby.
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I don't know anything.
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I meet and interview a lot of people who I think a lot of people would consider babies in terms of they, they just started playing when COVID hit.
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It seems to have been a big point where people really started getting into games.
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Personally, I mean, I'm, I started playing like almost like a month after COVID hit, just because it kind of forced us into spaces outside of in person games, which are very difficult to organize.
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And yeah, when you have so much free time.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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So I think, you know, playing online has been amazing at giving me opportunities to try a lot of different games.
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So it's great to find all these new worlds.
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I'm totally with you there.
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There's so much weird stuff out there, which I really love.
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Like that's the best.
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And I find someone who makes a game that I'm like, oh, you have a perspective on the world.
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That's my favorite thing.
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We're talking today about a game called Deathmatch Island, which is a really interesting game.
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Can you give my listeners kind of a elevator pitch or one sentence description of Deathmatch Island.
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I can.
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It's quite literally my job.
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Deathmatch Island is basically, uh.
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Survivor meets Hunger Games meets corporate horror.
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You're dropped off on an island, you wake up, no idea who you are, you randomly roll a personality, and then you play through this Battle Royale style, Survivor style island game.
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Uh, and it's just horrifying in the best way.
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I got to play it once recently and I just really loved the game.
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It's so much fun.
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Personally, I'm a big fan of the, the question of break the game or play to win.
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I think there's some really nice tension between thinking about how survivor type games are like on television, like reality shows.
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There's this secret machination happening in the background and then you get to see the people in front and not really necessarily seeing all of these machinations happening.
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Yeah, I think reality shows, like competitive reality shows in that way are so fascinating.
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I have a whole essay in me that's gotta be written at some point about how actual play and reality shows are kind of the same thing in a lot of ways, and Deathmatch Island really brings that to the forefront.
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Yeah.
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Character creation in Deathmatch Island is, is very easy and breezy.
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It reminds me a little bit of OSR games in that most of it's on roll tables.
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Of course, with any roll table you can always just find something and pick it if you have an idea.
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But when you built this character, you came to the table and just rolled on it?
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I had this archetype of an idea because actually the character that I wanted to bring to the table I had from a different game that ended up never getting to get played.
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Characters Without Stories, you know.
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I was going to play DIE, which is Rowan, Rook, and Decard's game based off of Kieran Gillian's comic about a bunch of people who start playing a tabletop role playing game and Jumanji style go into the world.
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Yeah.
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Also an incredible game.
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So good.
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Wish I got to play it.
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Would have been great.
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Yeah.
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So I had this character in mind and she didn't get to exist in that world.
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So when I rolled up a character in Deathmatch Island, I saw that it like kind of already worked.
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And I was like, well, just going to slot this in here then.
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Rowan, who are you bringing to the table today?
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Petty Dreadful.
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Excellent name.
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Thank you, thank you.
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If I was to see Petty Dreadful across the room, what am I seeing?
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If you're looking across the room, you're seeing a woman who it depends on when you see her.
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If you're seeing her in like her prime, she's just gotten off stage at a drag show.
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She has makeup kind of running down her face a little bit.
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She's wearing a really rag tag thrown together, crunchy drag outfit that is just made of whatever she was able to find at a thrift store, and she has a little bit of a scowl on her face all the time.
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On Deathmatch Island, one of the things you roll for is your uniform.
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So what's her look on the island?
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Her look on the island, she is disgusted by, it is just a orange jumpsuit with a number on the back of it that is not her color.
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We know this character only through her drag name.
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Does she use her non drag name on the island?
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No, she does not.
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And that was actually a very interesting point of the people that I was playing it with.
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The game that I was playing it with, I ended up playing with a bunch of really incredible people.
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Elliot Davis, who I mentioned before, from My First Dungeon, Gina Susanna from Blackwater D&D, Cameron Strittmatter from The Panic Table, and Kurt, I do not know his last name, unfortunately, who was the best GM for it, but the most horrifying we got to play.
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And like, I'm not an actual play performer and the rest of them are.
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And I was like, Oh, you're good at this.
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Oh boy.
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But it was delightful because we got to have this really interesting emotional arc and.
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She never said her real name.
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She was maybe going to at one point, but unfortunately, everyone died before it could happen.
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On the island, she's wearing this jumpsuit.
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Is she wearing makeup or wigs or anything like that?
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She had makeup, again, running down her face.
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Did not have a wig on.
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She, she looks disheveled and upset, for sure.
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Outside of her drag persona, because she's not really living up to drag, I'm not somebody who does drag, so I don't understand maybe the intricacies of how your identity intersects with your drag identity, but for her, what does it feel like to be a drag queen using your drag name, but not be in drag?
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Yeah, so I always imagined her as a trans woman for sure.
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And drag queens can be of any gender.
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You can be any gender to do drag.
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You can be a drag king, a drag queen, whatever gender conform you want to do.
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But she always definitely found drag as a way to express femininity through a performance when she maybe couldn't feel it for herself.
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That was a big part of her character was In the flashback mechanic that happens in Deathmatch Island.
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One of the things that happens before she, like, leaves the world is she, unfortunately, got, like, kicked out of her house because of unaccepting parents.
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And the reason why is because they caught her putting on makeup to go out and sneak out and do a drag show.
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And so, drag has always been kind of this defense mechanism for her.
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She's able to be a more jovial, exciting, welcoming person in this performance, but without that shield, is much more cynical, is much more closed off.
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I always imagined Petty Dreadful as like, the incarnation of trans rage.
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What is it about your experience with gender and with gender expression that led you to want to portray this trans rage?
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Well, so I came out as trans, like right before the pandemic hit, and it had always been something I was kind of navigating because I had, as again, being a theater kid for a very long time, had only portrayed femininity when I was on stage doing like a comedic character like the mom in Hairspray or like the drag Queens in La Cage Aux Folles.
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And so it was very much that femininity was a performance and a costume and something to be laughed at when performed by someone in my body.
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And so that was very much the way I felt navigating it and especially having the kind of world turn against you.
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The thing that I thought was really interesting about Deathmatch Island, kind of what you said before about.
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Do you try to break the game or do you play to win?
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Petty's there to play to win because the world's never had her back, so why is she gonna have anyone else's?
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And that's not something I really let myself experience in my day to day life because while I do find a lot of frustration and anger at the world, I don't find myself to be a person that's fueled by rage.
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There are absolutely people that are and I think that's super valid.
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But it's not something I let myself tap into a lot because I think like, a lot of marginalized identities displaying anger as anyone other than a cishet white man makes you a bitch, makes you aggressive, makes you whatever, and so giving myself permission to just lay it all out there in that way was something I was really interested in exploring.
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I can imagine that that might have felt cathartic as well.
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Oh yeah, for sure.
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And then, like, having Gina there, me and Gina were able to, like, girl out a little bit and be like, these fucking idiot men.
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Connecting about femininity in that way, but also then, like, having that distrust between two women, especially like a cis woman and a trans woman, and like navigating that distrust as there is trans misogyny and internalized misogyny, I think was a very fruitful place to explore.
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Do you find yourself when you play in games often wanting to explore this kind of catharsis or emotions that you maybe don't express as much in your real life?
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I think sometimes, it definitely depends on the group.
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I find myself exploring these different things and Sometimes it's about, like, being evil and getting to, like, really let that rage out.
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Sometimes it's about, like, feeling like a hero and feeling like the world is, like, there's possible for good in the world.
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So I do find that there is a lot of catharsis that comes through playing these games, but that usually doesn't arise until I'm sitting down at the table with someone, unless we've talked about it beforehand.
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Considering the state of the world right now, vaguely gesturing and everything,
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Oof.
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Maybe it doesn't have any sort of impact on how you play characters or what characters you play, but I'm curious whether it makes you want to play that heroic character that changes the world, or whether it makes you want to play that character who's angry at the world.
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Great question.
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I think that I tend to try, I have a bit of a hero complex in real life.
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Maybe the, hence why I go around starting nonprofits and worker owned outlets and trying to actively change the world in my day to day life.
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I try to live my life by that a little bit, where every place I go, I try to be the best version of myself for other people and be compassionate and be kind and it's something I really love about myself and something that is so difficult and draining all the time.
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It's exhausting to always give people grace and compassion as much as I wish it weren't, but living in this world it is.
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It's very hard.
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And so using a space for play as being like, okay, here I can kind of, I don't have to have, either I don't have to have a set agenda where I'm trying to make everything better, or I can lean into my worst impulses with people who I trust and care about and we can have that mutual understanding that this is like a magic circle where anything that goes is held for each other is something that I really enjoy.
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And sometimes I just like to be silly.
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Sometimes I just like being purely absurd.
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Like, again, I'm mentioning Elliot a lot, uh, in this podcast, but I think Elliot's a great designer.
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So everyone should go see the work that he does.
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He wrote this other game called Rom Com Drama Bomb, where you are playing.
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Yeah.
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That's great.
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You're playing as a, it's a three person game.
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One person is an evil villain who has strapped bombs to two people and their love interests.
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And the villain is like, you must act out a romantic comedy.
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Otherwise the bombs are going to blow up.
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Right?
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A great concept.
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And so I just love being silly in that one.
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I'm like, all right, yeah, fine, I'll be, I'll be goofy.
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Okay, but were you the evil villain or were you one of the people in the rom com?
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I have been the evil villain once and I have been the rom com person twice.
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And I like being the oblivious love interest.
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I think that's just real fun to just be a little bit stupid.
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You've wrote an article about your experience playing Deathmatch Island, and one of the things that you talked about is wanting to play at least a morally ambiguous character, a character that was out for themselves, everyone else be damned.
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Mm hmm.
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One of the things you talked about was the difficulty of playing a character like that.
