Hello! All this week Eurogamer is marking Pride Month – on this, its 50th anniversary year – with a series of features celebrating the intersection of queer culture and gaming. This afternoon, as part of a special Pride-themed edition of Dicebreaker Recommends – a series of monthly board game, RPG, and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker – Alex Meehan dives into the messy, glorious world of Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
And while we have you here, if you’ve been eagerly awaiting a restock of Eurogamer’s Pride t-shirts, we’re happy to report that more – in two ravishing variants – are now available for purchase. All profits will be split between LGBTQIA+ charities Mermaids and Mind Out.
Queer pride is sometimes a personal, intimate thing to love, cherish, and hold in your hand like a little bird. Other times, it is a grand, bombastic affair that you want to sing about with bright lights, dazzling tassels, and loud airhorns. Neither approach is wrong. But tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians most definitely embraces the latter, rather than the former.
Based on the Powered by the Apocalypse gameplay system, which also serves as the basis for other LGBTQ+ TRPGs such as Monsterhearts 2, Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a tabletop RPG about being queer in the most shining, stylish, and hopeless way possible. Created by April Kit Walsh and published by Evil Hat Productions – the studio behind Blades in the Dark – Thirsty Sword Lesbians is, as its website description states, a game about “disaster lesbians”. Players are encouraged to be cool and do cool things, but they’re also just as capable of being a complete horny mess as well.
The key elements of Thirsty Sword Lesbians perfectly encapsulate this ethos. If players are not fighting, then they’re probably flirting. Sometimes, player characters are doing both at the same time. Thirsty Sword Lesbians takes the classic swashbuckling adventures of the 1980s and ’90s – it even includes direct references to properties like He-Man and She-Ra – and showers them in glorious sapphic imagery. Stoic warriors clash swords with fabulously adorned rogues in ancient castles, neon-lit cities, or spaceships flying through starry galaxies. It’s not meant to be subtle, but it’s all the more fun to play because of that.