Roll That Gay Saving Throw!

https://e.issuu.com/anonymous-embed.html?u=gaymeon&d=rollfinaldraftlink

Written By Sarah Garcia; Cover Art By Sarah Garcia

Click on the blue links to go to an external webpage or make choices throughout the story!

To Buy a Print Version: http://www.lulu.com/shop/sarah-garcia/roll-that-gay-saving-throw/paperback/produ...

To Download, Click on the PDF File Below.

The main inspiration behind this game came from my weekly sessions of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). I first played D&D during my sophomore year of college, in Fall of 2016. I briefly played in my friend’s one-shot, and afterwards, I thought that might be the end of my dabbling into D&D. However, my friend then asked me to become a part of their regular D&D group, which was in need of new members. This was a time very shortly after the 2016 presidential election, so I was honestly hoping for some new outlet in my life to vent my anger, sadness, and frustration. My Dungeon Master and my fellow players clearly felt the same way because the session involved gladiatorial combat where we fought and defeated enemies called “Drumpf" and “Milk Pants”; I think the names implied here should be obvious. Since then, I’ve been adventuring with this same D&D group on a weekly basis. What I’m trying to say with this anecdote is that, to me, D&D has been a constant comfort and coping mechanism for the everyday harshness of reality. It’s a way to build not only creative skills but teamwork as well. Therefore, with these things in mind, I wrote this choose-your-own-adventure story in order to pay homage to my own history with D&D and to show how this medium of game can help foster a sense of community and allow groups like queer people to enact their identities and desires in fantastic spaces. I’ve used the choose-your-own-adventure genre to recreate this feeling of multiple options within the setting of D&D, which itself fosters a queer sense of space and time with its unlimited narrative possibilities. I’ve also used a comic book format to allow queer people to be heroes when they are often vilified and ignored in real life. The characters from all the previous games make appearances here to allow them to exist in a space free from their own game worlds, where they can reflect on their pasts or forgot their past traumas. Because I cannot hope to truly capture the spirit of D&D within a book or any potential medium, I often had to limit myself and my story choices in the creative process for this game so I did not produce an even more ridiculously enormous text. I hope that my story conveys at least a fraction of the freedom I feel when playing D&D. Lastly, while this story has several choices and moments of random chance, I have chosen this to be the one game within the collection where there is only one ending. This was a deliberate choice on my part to express how, even when queer people have experienced moments of pain and trauma as in the other games, they can always fall back on queer communities to support them, give them comfort, and keep them grounded in these queer-identified spaces where they control their narratives and the specific paths they follow when deviating from the heteronormative timeline.