While D&D is still seen as a very male thing in mainstream culture, queer women across London huddle together to create safe spaces for their favourite fantasy characters.
Lorelei is in her room, getting ready to play Dungeons and Dragons with a bunch of strangers on the internet.
She designed her character, Masha, on the tube back home from work: “She’s gonna have red hair, and it’s gonna be tied into big poofs, pigtail kind of things. She’s gonna have a big gap between her front teeth,” she tells me.
“She grew up in a monastery, surrounded by clerics, priests, and also by monks. But basically, she just had no skill at fighting, and she didn’t really fuck with that religion stuff. See? Inspired by my real life.”
Lately, Lorelei has been searching for the perfect group of people she could play with on a regular basis.
So far, she’s had mixed experiences. A lot of the games she joined were dominated by white straight men – not what she was looking for.
After “desperately looking for a space just for women,” she found an exclusively non-men queer D&D group on a Discord server called Sunset Tavern. Tonight will be her first time playing with them.
“So she’s a highly intelligent character who’s really studious,” Lorelei says of Masha. “She ended up becoming a wizard because she realised she could learn magic through writing and reading.”
She finishes tying her hair into Masha-like bunches. She props up her laptop with the Discord server open. She’s trying to choose which set of dice from her collection she should play tonight.
“So that’s who I’m playing,” she concludes.
For the uninitiated, Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game (or TTRPG) that first came out in 1974.
Players generally have a lot of freedom when designing their characters. They choose their species (dwarf, elf, or human) and class (wizard, rogue, or fighter) from predetermined categories, but the rest is up to each player’s wild imagination.
The characters embark on quests, collect treasures, gain experience, and fight battles with monsters.
The ‘Dungeon Master’ is the game’s non-playing director who decides the outcomes of each character’s actions after they roll dice.
But the game is mostly improvised, and its rules, according to the official rulebook, are meant to be broken.
For a while, D&D was stereotyped as a very male thing.
There were actually no playable female characters in the original game, and the official rulebook only referred to male players.
Still, after female characters were introduced, they were automatically given lower charisma and strength points than their male counterparts.
Meanwhile, Queer-coded characters and “Black-coded” characters like tieflings or dark elves were also profiled as villainous and untrustworthy.
It’s no surprise that “it had a period where it became very much for one type of young boy,” as Lorelei tells me. “The first few times I played, it was truly what I expected, which was just 30-year-old men. Straight men. I’ve played in places that were not not friendly to queer people. But I was not very excited to be there.”
Despite this, D&D is more popular among women than ever. According to a study conducted by Dr. Emily Friedman, more than half of the surveyed players in each age group identified as women or non-binary.
Another study found that playing D&D had positive effects on queer players’ mental health, especially if they were dealing with gender dysphoria, while another found that young queer people recognise the oppressive systems upheld in the game, but enjoy and benefit from playfully subverting them to create their own perfect fantasy worlds.
This is why Reese, the creator of the D&D Discord server, Sunset Tavern, thinks it’s important to create exclusively female and queer D&D spaces.
“The event and the server are for women and non-binary people, including trans women,” she explains. “My short way of saying that is just: no men. If you’re a man, you’re not allowed.”
Once a month, the group books a room and plays board games, but mostly D&D. Reese sees it as just “a bunch of girls hanging out.”
“You just feel less judgment,” she says. “If you don’t know something, it’s much easier to ask a woman than it would be to ask a man. Even if they’re a lovely dude, there’s always going to be that fear of judgment or condescension.”
Having games where the characters flirt with each other and “make out” is affirming to Reese and has helped her to settle into her identity.
She thinks the game provides a sense of escapism that really speaks to marginalised groups: “I think in general all fantasy is inherently queer. There’s a lot of parallels between being queer in real life and stories that you see of…children going to this magical place and being loved for who they are.”
D&D provides this space for people where they can experiment with gender and sexuality within the confines of the game before they are ready to come out in real life.
And because gender and sexuality are not inherently the focus of the game, they can be approached creatively and playfully. For instance, if you’re already playing a mollusc, thief elvin, or a goblin, being non-binary feels like less of a big deal.
So maybe it’s not right to say that D&D provides a sense of escape from real life, when to its players, the world it opens often feels just as vivid and impactful. It’s a type of reality that both extends what is possible and gives repose from the unbearable.
“Sometimes you can’t really do a good thing in real life, and then you’re like ‘Oh, I killed this dragon!’ And that feels good,” Lorelei explains.
“If you’ve had a big character moment in one session or a big battle or something, you go home and still think about it. And people take it home. If you play every week, you spend the whole week preparing for your next session, and then when the session’s over, you think about what you did, and you prepare for your next session.”
I wonder if that isn’t quite consuming. “This is a game played by nerds,” Lorelei tells me. “And nerds are generally quite consumed by the things they like.”
In a couple of days, Lorelei will be running her first women-only in-person D&D session. It’s inspired by Hansel and Gretel, a cottage made out of candy, and goblins and children that are held captive.
“You have to know the battle maps, you have to be prepared to narrate and have music and snacks, and it’s so much prep that goes into it,” she explains.
She will DM (run the session) for the group of women, which was assembled under a TikTok post that asked if there were any women in London who wanted to play D&D. Thousands commented “yes”.
In the end, D&D is a collaborative game. So, while exploring your identity through the game is encouraged, the most fulfilling moments are often ones of accomplishing a goal together as a group.
“It’s about a rag-tag team, coming together to fight a big bad monster. It shifts the focus from personal identity to being part of a community,” Lorelei says.
“What can you do for your community? What are your rules within your community? And I think, indirectly, that’s very linked to how queer communities work.”
All images courtesy of Lorelai.