Thirsty Sword Lesbians offers a fun queer time
April Kit Walsh’s Thirsty Sword Lesbians is the product of a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign that was picked up for publishing by Evil Hat Productions. As one of the backers, I was eager to get my hands on it and give it a go with my all-queer group. What we found was a well-designed and mostly fun game that unfortunately also came with some frustrations.
It should be noted that we played before the Advanced Lovers & Lesbians expansion came out, so we didn’t have access to the materials in that book at the time.
My group played the “Gal Paladins” pre-written adventure in three sessions as a way of trying the game out. It’s a fun story that required me to fill in a lot of the details as GM, since what you get in the book is pretty bare-bones.
We were all somewhat familiar with the Powered By The Apocalypse system because we’ve played a lot of Monster of the Week, but it was still a new system to learn, so we wanted to take it slow. It’s entirely possible that some of the frustrations we had with the system were because of our previous experience. Monster of the Week is tonally very different, and we may have subconsciously tried to apply that way of playing to this game.
My group took their time investigating the villain of the adventure, whereas I get the feeling they were just supposed to kick her door in and confront her after asking around a bit. That’s how what was supposed to be a one-shot turned into three sessions (five if you count session 0 and the post-game debrief).
The system is built on very solid foundations. Its flexibility and fiction-first gameplay is a good fit for a game where player characters want to be extravagant and do things simply because they’re impressive. You don’t want a more complicated system to bog you down in the minutiae of multiple skill checks.
Counterintuitively, one of the system’s main weaknesses is occasionally being overly specific with its Moves. Many of these character abilities are flavorfully appropriate for the Playbooks, but over the course of play, a lot of them didn’t really feel like they did much to help the characters. For example, The Scoundrel’s “The Main Attraction” move came up a few times during play, but we never really found a reason to use the first two of the four options. And we were lucky that some of The Nature Witch’s moves came up at all, because I can easily imagine many scenarios and adventures where most of that Playbook is mechanically useless.
In fact, the Playbooks in general are another unfortunate gripe we had. Considering they’re the archetypes that you pick during character creation and define most of your character’s abilities, I like the idea of each one being built around an internal tension – in theory.
The Beast has to choose between conforming to polite society and being themselves, the Devoted has to choose between self-care and self-sacrifice for the sake of others, etc. The problem this presented was that my players felt like their Playbooks pigeonholed them into role-playing them in a very specific way. There are sections at the end of each Playbook description that seem like they were supposed to be helpful tips, but ended up feeling rather prescriptive.
However, I do want to commend Thirsty Sword Lesbians on its use of safety tools. This game heavily focuses on interpersonal relationships and those can get pretty messy. Tools like The X Card and the Lines and Veils system are introduced into the book very early on to emphasize their importance.
The Palette is also an excellent new safety tool that not only includes consent, but story elements, tone, and overall playstyle that everyone establishes in a pre-game discussion and can get changed during play as players are encouraged to frequently check in with each other to make sure everyone is still on board.
The actual writing of the book is also a lot of fun. We all appreciated how committed it is to inclusive language and its lighthearted tone because stories in Thirsty Sword Lesbians are meant to be inclusive and undeniably queer. There’s a glossary in the back of the book with queer terminology and a special section devoted to how to respectfully tell trans stories. Moreover, keeping the language fun and inclusive throughout shows a genuine commitment to making sure Thirsty Sword Lesbians can be played by as many people as possible without compromising its vision of a game for queer stories.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians was a very easy read, though I did find some explanations of mechanics a bit vague sometimes. Take Strings as an example. They’re a currency you can use to influence rolls and entice people to do things. Strings is an interesting system that we understood, but one we found difficult to use during play. I can imagine that they can make gameplay very dynamic as you help your friends with rolls or find out new things about NPCs by influencing them. Unfortunately, we didn’t end up using it to the extent that the game seems to assume we would.
GMing this game was also just a wholly different experience than any other games I’ve played. For one thing, you need to be comfortable running lots of NPCs that can be romantically appealing to the player characters, which is something I know I was pretty bad at. That definitely detracted from the experience, and I’d be very curious to see what it would be like from the other side of the screen. It should be noted that you can play this game without romance. There are guidelines for adjusting the rules to accommodate not playing with a lot of romance, but the default rules do assume a large amount of flirting and romantic connection, so that’s how we played.
Despite the issues we had with the game, we still had a lot of fun. One of my players mentioned during the wrap-up session that some of her other friends would be a perfect fit for it because their personalities match the extremely extra tone this game is going for.
I have a lot of respect for Thirsty Sword Lesbians, because it knows exactly what it wants from its players, and if my group wasn’t a good fit for it, that’s not the game’s fault. What we found to be frustrating might be exactly what your group is looking for. I can absolutely see myself trying it again in the near future, and now that we’re more familiar with how it works and what it wants from us, there’s a good chance our play experience will be a lot smoother.
To quote one of my players: “the first will rarely be the best.”
As long as you’re doing the type of dramatic and highly emotional storytelling that the game is designed for, you’ll have a good time.
Score: 3.5/5
A copy of Thirsty Sword Lesbians was purchased by the reviewer
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