A few things happened in my Dungeons and Dragons world in the past few weeks. First, my Dungeon Master moved to Oxford so our (half-queer) game went digital . Second, since a friend and I longed for a physical, real-tabletop gaming experience once again, we decided I should DM for a group of our writer friends. I anticipate good things from a group where five of six members have graduate degrees in fiction. As a player, I always roll butch lesbians because I think I deserve to see myself reflected in tales of other worlds. And that’s the beauty of playing a tabletop RPG—you can just do that. But now that I’m DMing, I have the power to do more. SO. MUCH. MORE. I can write the gayest NPCs, encounters and storylines in the history of the world. I’m mad with power. But the question remains: how much is too much? You tell me.

A.E. Osworth is part-time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates the art of digital storytelling. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit), is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing (April 2021) and is available for pre-order now. They have an eight-year freelancing career and you can find their work on Autostraddle (where they used to be the Geekery Editor), Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, and drDoctor, among others.

A.E. has written 545 articles for us.