Glitter + Ashes

by Dave Ring

  Each setting element has a prompt for when to trade it away. You can also choose to trade it away any time the demands of playing your main character are in conflict with the demands of playing the setting element. If there are spare setting elements in the centre of the table, you may trade your element with one of those. Otherwise, choose another player and trade elements with them directly. You should always have exactly one setting element in front of you.

  When you’re actively playing a setting element, use its tips to guide what you imagine and narrate. The third tip is always the same: ask compelling questions and build on the answers that others give. That’s because world-building in these games is a collaborative process, and it gains power from curiosity and conversation.

  Setting elements have moves – prompts which can inspire your narration – just like with characters. None of the moves involve tokens. Setting elements don’t gain or spend tokens.

  Impala’s crew jacked an armoured grocery truck, while it was idling at a fuel stop. They’ve driven it to a quiet spot, but know there isn’t much time before the cops get to them. They need to liberate its contents, fast.

  IAN: Okay, Impala goes around to the back of the vehicle. I’m

  imagining that it’s locked down and secured in some way though, right?

  CARLY: I’m holding the Varied Scarcities, maybe I can jump in

  here? I’m imagining that grocery-jacking is a common issue once we start hitting peak scarcity, and so these trucks are kitted out with multiple security features. They can only unlock in registered cargo bays, and they require the driver’s fingerprint signature to do so. Have you done this before? Do you have a plan for how to get in?

  IAN: Nope. This was an impulse job. Impala is scrambling for

  a solution here.

  RAMON: I’m going to step in and play one of your gang here:

  Thumper, this scrawny butch who carries a rusty pipe everywhere she goes. She’s wearing an oil-stained tank underneath black overalls. “We have to smash our way in.”

  IAN: “That’ll never work. These things are built to survive

  artillery. Our best shot is to try and crack the security.” I think Impala carries around some disruption tech, but they don’t have a lot of practice using it.

  CARLY: It says to pick up the Digital Realm whenever “someone

  interacts with a digital device, or you have an idea about how digitization shaped this environment” – that certainly seems to apply here.

  The Digital Realm is sitting in the centre of the table, and Carly swaps it with the Varied Scarcities currently in front of her. This is the first time that someone has touched the Digital Realm, and so Carly has to circle its two desires. She settles on expanded networks and trafficked secrets.

  CARLY: Okay, here’s the deal: overriding the security measures is

  possible, but to do it you have to upload your own fingerprint scans. Which means they’ll have your fingerprints on file, giving them a solid lead on tracking you down. And it’ll be down to the wire on whether you can pull it off before the cops show up. Are you going to risk it?

  IAN: Absolutely. Impala pulls out a small toolkit out of their

  backpack. I’m imagining it’s just a paper bag that’s rubber-banded shut, but inside it are a few devices that’ll theoretically help them do this.

  Making Trouble

  What kind of story will you tell together? Will it be a story of camaraderie and growth in the face of hard times, of paranoid in-fighting as community crumbles, of grand upheaval? Dream Askew requires that you play to find out, approaching each scene with curiosity and seeing where it goes.

  Along the way, make trouble. Make trouble by playing your character as fallible and relatable. Make trouble by introducing minor characters with incompatible needs. Make trouble by picking up your setting element and throwing in an unexpected circumstance, just to see what the rest of the table will do with it.

  Why trouble? Trouble because adversity gives the characters a chance to prove themselves, to come up with makeshift solutions and use their peculiar gifts. Trouble because it creates dynamic tempo in our stories. Trouble because it’s fun.

  Your goal isn’t to cause suffering, especially not for the people sitting around the table. It’s to explore how marginalized folks build strange and powerful community together, and what they do when that community is threatened. The characters might suffer sometimes, yes, and cause each other suffering, but the goal of making trouble is ultimately to see how people rise to meet it.

  Your Lure

  Each of the main characters has a Lure. Lures prompt others to set your character up to really shine, playing to their strengths and goals. For example, the Torch has the following Lure: whenever someone participates in one of your rituals for the first time, they gain a token. This helps create a dynamic of leadership and weirdness between the Torch and the rest of the community.

  When someone follows the prompt of your Lure, they gain a token. That token is taken from the center of the table, not from you personally.

  Minor characters don’t have a Lure, and they can’t gain tokens from interacting with yours. Tokens are for main characters only.

  Minor Characters

  Each player has a main character under their control, but those are far from the only people in the world. Minor characters will appear frequently, many of them springing from relationships chosen during character creation. Some minor characters may even end up becoming an integral, ongoing part of the story being told.

  Whenever a minor character comes up in the story, anyone can step in to play them. Just say, “I’ll play Bramble during this scene!” If a minor character is obviously tied to a setting element, whoever holds that element can play them. Shuffle who’s playing which minor characters whenever it makes sense; avoid having a single player narrating both sides of a conversation.

  Minor characters don’t have a sheet to guide their play. They don’t have a Lure. They don’t have any moves of their own, though they may end up becoming the means by which you make your setting element’s moves. Minor characters don’t gain or spend tokens.

  When playing a minor character, trust your intuition and say what comes naturally. Remember to keep the story focused on the main characters, at least most of the time.

  Minor characters might include children running through the enclave, old lesbian farmers who keep the community fed, drifters, marauders, members of the outlying gangs or the society intact, mutants being harbored in back rooms, nihilistic revelers, traveling storytellers, or nervous youngsters who ran away from home and showed up hungry.

  Wrapping Up

  Throughout the session, scenes will generate loose threads and compelling drama. As some of it gets reincorporated and explored further, major themes will emerge in your story. Often, everything will start to point toward a cluster of overlapping conflicts. The best sessions are the ones that hit upon a satisfying yet messy sense of resolution right around the 3-4 hour mark. Players can even angle toward this kind of outcome, by glancing at the clock occasionally and adjusting the tempo of their scenes and how much trouble they’re making.

  Some groups will agree on a specific end time before they start playing. If the session seems to be gearing up for a grand finale, leave yourself a good thirty minutes to explore it. It’s sometimes surprising how long that final scene can take, and players may want some time for denouement or epilogue afterwards.

  Don’t try to tie up every loose thread. Leave some chaos and unanswered questions scattered about the story.

  Future Sessions

  If the group wants to, you can make a plan to meet back up and play a sequel session, continuing the story of your community and its struggle. Ask everyone to record the number of tokens they ended the session with somewhere on their character sheet. Save all the play kit materials and name tents in a safe place. If you have time, make a few notes about what happened during the session.


  When you get together to play again, hand everyone back their character sheets and ask them to pick a setting element. Share your recollections about what happened last time, and let this flow into idle dreaming about how things progress from there. Ask questions and talk excitedly until a scene emerges. Play to find out what happens next.

  The Next Generation

  If you’re excited to return to the community you’ve made together, another option is to skip forward in time and play as the next generation or wave of community members. The possibilities are going to depend on what sort of queer community you made together. Were many people raising children? Were leadership roles well defined and supported in the community? Were waves of new arrivals showing up every day? Let your next batch of characters spring forward from the community context.

  As a group, look over the enclave worksheet and talk about how the community has changed since the last session. Decide together whether you want to re-do the whole worksheet from scratch, or simply modify the map to reflect ways that the community has adapted over time. Print off new character role and setting element sheets, and fill them in from scratch. Play to find out how things have changed and where they’re heading next.

  Carly, Ian, and Ramon play two sessions with their enclave. Cookie takes on an assistant to help run the boarding house, a fiery trans girl named Eliza. Impala breaks their leg jumping from a rooftop, and cedes leadership of the gang to Thumper. Rabbit begins manifesting strange psychic powers. Everyone is delighted with where the story has gone, but they want to shake things up a bit. They decide that they’ll play one final session, set four years ahead in the future.

  CARLY: I’d love to play Eliza for this session. I think she’s taken

  over the boarding house at this point, and is starting to use it as a base of operations for a community defence project. Cookie’s out of the picture; he drifted out of town a few years ago.

  IAN: Eliza and Thumper have emerged as such fierce figures in

  the community. Are they working together on this?

  CARLY: Oh, what if they’re in love with each other? And while

  they’ve only been dating for a few months, it’s had this really transformative effect on the work that they do, and now Thumper’s moved her whole crew into the boarding house?

  IAN: I love it. I don’t think that I’m going to play Thumper,

  though. Impala was really action-oriented, and I want to switch it up a bit and play someone different.

  RAMON: Is it cool if I play Thumper, then? I just love her so

  much.

  IAN: Absolutely! I’m imagining Eliza is going to be another

  Hawker, and Thumper is a Tiger? I think I’m going to make up an Arrival. Every year, the crackdowns and blockades in the Society Intact are getting more severe, and people keep getting edged out. And so I’m going to play a young man named Jordan, who shows up here because he’s not sure where else to go. He doesn’t want to go in with bikers or sewer rats, and we’re the only other group he knows about.

  Genders of the Apocalypse

  Creating a character in Dream Askew involves contending with gender, but it’s a gender exploded, extracted from the society intact and made mutant. What do some of these words even mean?

  Some carry storied legacies from the real world, already infused with meaning – femme, androgyne, genderfluid, and others. A few are tied to racial community, positioning a character intersectionally, like two-spirit and stud.

  Others are genders of the apocalypse. Ice femme and dagger daddy take existing queer identities and recast them in ways the real world has yet to experience. Gargoyle and raven emerge entirely new.

  When you encounter a gender word, imagine. Ask your fellow players. Flirt with a search engine. If nothing comes up, invent. No matter how you come to your initial understanding, it’s yours to continue to define through play.

  How Things Break

  Electricity requires upkeep. Without human intervention, a coal plant would likely go down in less than a day, and a hydroelectric dam in less than a fortnight. Failures anywhere in the grid can have far-reaching effects, potentially pulling the whole thing down. Private, off-grid power systems require knowledge and upkeep too, and parts will degrade over time.

  Gasoline goes stale quick. Depending on oxygen exposure, temperature stability, container material, and whether there is an added fuel stabilizer, that time can vary from one month to a few years. You can’t siphon usable gas out of a car that’s been abandoned on the side of the road since last year.

  Paved roads will last a few decades before breaking down to the point of being treacherous or impassable for cars. The exact timeline depends on weather, use, and the earth itself.

  The amount of time it takes for industrially-canned foods to degrade depends upon the integrity of the container. While best before dates expire within a few years, the food inside can remain edible across many decades, though colour, texture, and flavour will degrade. Once the can becomes compromised or dented, however, oxygen and bacteria quickly invade and make the contents unsafe.

  Dried foods can last a lifetime if kept in a cool, dry environment safe from oxygen and life, though their nutrients will slowly degrade over decades.

  When things break down, how does your community react to their varied scarcities? Do they go without, broker uncomfortable deals with profiteers from the society intact, make their own from scratch, scavenge, or something else entirely? How do they prove themselves to be resourceful?

  Tone and Inspiration

  Dream Askew was directly inspired by Apocalypse World, by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker. Apocalypse World is about sexy badasses who have complicated histories with one another, trying to figure out how to live after the collapse. A psychic maelstrom whirls just outside their perception. Dream Askew started as a remix of Apocalypse World, and slowly took its own shape.

  There are two books which together perfectly capture the spirit of Dream Askew: Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic novel which remains intimately human in scale, about what it means to build culture up out of the rubble, about how we never really escape one another’s legacies; and Black Wave, about what it means to be queer and heartbroken when the world is crumbling all around you, about how break-ups and apocalypse aren’t dissimilar.

  The movies that most inspired Dream Askew are the works of Gregg Araki. His carousel of irreverent, cynical, campy, satirical, and at times painfully earnest storytelling has always hit me really hard and been super thought-provoking. I watched the Teen Apocalypse trilogy as I was figuring out my own sexuality and identity, and Nowhere and The Doom Generation are both inspirations. 2010’s Kaboom! is another on the list, a movie about how it takes more than a mystery cult and overwhelming existential dread to keep college students from acting dumb and horny.

  The game is also inspired by fiery, radical, queer community-building in the real world. I’m looking to groups like STAR, Radical Faeries, Gay Shame, the Bash Back! network, and The Degenderettes.

  Dream Askew frames the apocalypse as a perpetual process, and the queer enclave as a contemporary artifact, and that’s because it’s a truth about the world as far as I understand it. The AIDS crisis was a queer apocalypse, with enclaves formed – and obliterated – as a result of it. That’s not the first or only time. From Radical Faerie communes to post-war dockside communities struggling to keep alive the queer connections people found in the service, from STAR House to tentatively-staked gayborhoods everywhere, the enclave is more than just a speculative device. We are constantly falling outside of the society intact. And so while Dream Askew is a work of strange fiction, it’s also a reflection on what precarity means for actual queer people.

  Mediography

  Movies: Kaboom!. Pride. Mouth-to-Mouth. How to Survive a Plague. Nowhere. Beats Per Minute. Pose.

  Books: Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel). Black Wave (Michelle Tea). The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin). Year of the Flood (Mar
garet Atwood). The Marrow Thieves (Cherie Dimaline). Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown).

  Games: Apocalypse World. Queers in Love at the End of the World. Who We Are Now. The Next World Tarot.

  Design Notes

  I first wrote Dream Askew in 2013. There was a handful of pages to explain the game, and plenty of open space to figure it out yourself. Returning to the design and continuing to develop it four years later has been wild.

  The biggest difference about Dream Askew now is that the world around it has changed. Or maybe it’s just that I’m less sheltered, having watched more of my community fall out of the society intact. It doesn’t feel as speculative any more.

  In 2013, I waffled on whether it made sense to include the digital realm as a setting element. Since then? Dear friends have suffered through years of Gamergate harassment. Doxxing and swatting have become familiar terms. Meme-fueled hashtag nazis have broken electoral systems. Silicon Valley has used the language of disruption to digitize and exploit our relationship to food, romance, travel, and neighbourhood. We now know that the digital realm factors into the collapse, and that it won’t go away quietly.

  Dream Askew feels more timely and relevant every day. These are the stories I want to be telling with my friends. And it’s because they’re stories about the collapse of civilization that don’t wallow in suffering, terror, and militarization. They’re about figuring out what comes next if we work together. About making community even when we’re all sick, crazy, and afraid of each other. About finding abundance in the rubble. About playing to find out what happens next, in a fictional world but also in our own.

  So much gratitude to everyone who helped bring Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die into this challenging reality.

  That starts with the folks who backed and amplified the kickstarter. Putting together projects like this require more capital that a brand new small press has lying around, and getting that financial support from backers was a gamechanger. Thanks as well to the folks who signed up for Club Serpentine, and didn’t know what they might be in for!