Pride Month may officially be winding down, but that doesn’t mean the queer community stops celebrating. For many players, tabletop gaming has become their favorite space to experience and engage with their queer identity. With that has come a growing cohort of LGBT designers and, naturally, games with LGBT themes. While many may think of the big, dramatic games like Thirsty Sword Lesbians, one of the sleeper hits in this genre has been a game with…the name LGBT. Which in this case stands for Longsword, Glock, Bat Taser. Designed by Jonathon Boyle with art by Brighid de Danann, and released by their publishing company Bright Bard Games, the 2024 release has gotten a brand new second edition that funded on Backerkit earlier this month. To learn more about where the game came from and what’s in this new edition, I sat down with Jonathon and Bri for a chat.
Dan Arndt: So, tell me the exact origin point for this How do you go from a Tumblr post to something that you thought could be a game
Jonathon Boyle: We transport ourselves back to Pride 2024, which I believe is 10 years after the original posting of the meme that this was referencing.
Brighid de Danann: 2014 I was in high school
Dan: Don’t say that
Jonathon: It makes me feel ancient, because I remember when this started circulating back when I was in college. Somebody posted “longsword glock bat taser” and then somebody drew art of four people holding each one of those weapons. It went kind of viral on Tumblr and has been immortalized in the annals of Tumblr history.
Then we were on Twitter, back when there was a tabletop community, and one of our friends had seen that posted somewhere and tagged Bri in it and went, “Hey, is this a game yet?”
I was kind of in this game jammy mood where I was like, “All right, I’ll jam a game out of this.” So I wrote down “Longsword Glock Bat Taser” as your four stats. I’ve always been a big fan of Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, and that sort of whimsical video game world was the aesthetic around which I built the game. It’s Pride Scott Pilgrim versus the world Tumblr post.
Dan: How did you think about the way you wanted to manifest these weapons and the actual mechanics of the game?
Jonathon: It was really important for me for dice mini games the heart of it. So that playing each gun felt really different as you played your dice roll. I only had to do six guns for that. There are a lot of different shades of queer identity but I didn’t want to necessarily sign myself up for having to make and do the research for this huge stack of different dice mechanics and then try to figure out how I could represent every possible queer identity in a dice mini game. So what I did instead was take the titular four stats and translate those into your core stats that you use to build your dice pool. So I just made them characteristics that were loosely inspired by some tropes and jokes and fun kind of turns of phrase that run around about each of those four queer identities.
Jonathon: Bri and I had a conversation early on about representing these different identities, but it wasn’t necessarily like “I’m using taser to build my dice pool, I’m doing a trans right now.” It’s more like my character is doing I think one of the things I write in the game is write a manifesto or try and figure out a good turn of phrase, make a plan of action. So the stats are a little bit more high level, then you have the option to choose a different weapon for your character. If you’re not one of those titular four or you have additional identities labels that you apply to yourself, you can choose a different weapon for your character to manifest that represents that. And then anytime you incorporate that into the scene it adds some bonus dice to your pool. So that’s kind of how I handled that because it felt like best way that we can facilitate it without pinning people into very strict stereotypes or interviews that we don’t necessarily like share or understand
Dan: It definitely has that kind of energy of being around your queer friends and talking about these kinds of things. And anyone who’s been in a queer friend group knows that there’s a lot of fluidity going on in there
But with a lot of game companies, there’s the more sort of “mechanical, combat-y”, pick up and play type games, and then there’s the ones that are the more performative or emotional. And you guys have a little bit of both here. How did you marry that with the performance, the monologuing you might see in a Lasers and Feelings type game.
Jonathon: The Havoc Engine usually has some form of dice roll, a once per game dice roll mechanic that players get. In this game we called it “your time to shine”, which is when we record scratch and cut to your character. At character creation. you choose a theme song for your character in the way that you might have the title OST start rolling in a very important moment and then you add some when you do that you roll really you biff or really important or something like this moment it’s really important to your character and you want to make sure you succeed and so you can choose to have it be your time to shine and then your character sort of gets the spotlight in the scene and you add a bunch of dice to your pool and reroll any dice that aren’t already successful. One of the things that I try to do at the top in the tone and safety section is suggest to people what I expect the tonal experience to be, given the way that I designed the mechanics of this game. What do I expect the emotional experience to be? This could be kind of just like a fun, silly, like jokey dice rolling time. But you could also choose to engage with more personal or deeper sides of the conversation around queer identity. Because pride’s a lot of things to a lot of people, so just make sure that you talk to your table about what you want the content of your story to be.
Dan: How did people respond to it?
Jonathon: We got some really enthusiastic feedback last year during Pride. We were at a show in Minneapolis [EN: Where Jon and Bri are based] and somebody stopped by the booth and had a double take when they saw LGBT sitting on one of our little racks.
They’re like, ” My god, you’re the authors.” Then they proceeded to spend the next 5 to 10 minutes telling me about how they had just played it on the East Coast with their mom at a game store for a pride event. They had used their weapon of choice, an ashtray, to reflect light from the sun into the fireplace of a haunted house to exorcise homophobic Satan from it. Which was not a constellation of words that I had expected to hear that day. People have found a lot of really fun ways to revel in queer experience as part of playing through this
Bri: So many people that run queer game stores or queer community spaces that were doing TTRPGs, told us ” I ran this game with my group, or we did this for our queer get together TTRPG night, and I didn’t know you guys were the authors!” Everyone has had such a blast with it and we were so blown away by the reception not just at our booth, LGBT seems to have broken containment in a way. It’s all over and we don’t know the people playing the game. It’s super cool to see how much it’s spread throughout the US for all of the queer TTRPG people that want an explicitly queer game to play.
Dan: I think as the queer TTRPG space has developed, it’s developed this reputation as either very heavy and emotional or it’s all flirting and romance. Not to say there isn’t a lot of that in every queer friend group, but I think it’s nice that LGBT is just fun. You don’t have to have people thinking they’re going to come in and have to deal with something, to go through therapy at the game store. They can just show up.
Bri: It’s celebrating the queer excellence. It invites you into the space where we’re having fun. It’s not about trying to overcome your trauma. It’s not about trying to kiss your best friends. You can’t
We’re not saying you can’t do those, of course, you can. But the point of it is to revel in the community rather than whatever our perceptions of the social workings of queer identity are.
Dan: Especially right now. You started making it in 2024 and then making the second edition right now…it was only two years but a lot of things have changed
Bri: A lot of have changed
Jon: It’s been a very long two years
Bri: A lot of things have happened that has made being queer in community spaces hard. We just want to sometimes just celebrates that we’re her, we’re having a good time and that’s all that matters.
Dan: But you have all that response you’ve got it developed. Why make a second edition now?
Jonathon: We’re better game designers now, we’re more experienced game designers and so in a way these are good games that we made in 2024…but now we’ve made several more. We have a different standard for instruction and there are things especially if these are going be to continue to be as evergreen as they are.
I had originally done the layout in Microsoft Word because at the time I did not know how to use Affinity or the other layout programs. This time we were able to give it then to a professional layout artist who has done some really cool things using the game and comic book inspirations in the visual style of it. There’s a bunch of really fun rainbow halftone shading throughout the whole book.
Then we kind of just went through the whole book with our editor and tried to make the game instructions the best they could be and revamped a lot of the adventure prompts so that they’re easier to bring to the table. It requires a little bit less of the GM to fill in spaces
Dan: Now if I’m straight or an ally, can I still play LGBT?
Bri: You can! In play testing, we’ve had plenty of queer/straight mixed tables. We’ve had moms and dads that are straight and not part of the community play with their children. You can 100% mix it with your identity. As long as you are respectful and kind to the people you are playing with, it doesn’t really matter.
Dan: I think obviously some of your games are very clearly more open than others, but with the family-friendly aspect, is that something that you were kind of surprised by or did you plan that out?
Jonathon: It’s been really a heartwarming result because I think when I wrote the game, I expected the audience it would find would be people Bri’s age and up, the ones who remember the post, or even college students now because it continues to circulate on Tumblr. It’s just part of that deep lore that exists on that website
Bri: Young adults and up is usually what we think of.
Jonathon: But especially when you start getting into teenagers who are discovering those identities for themselves that a lot of times means that their parents are playing with them. That’s been a really heartwarming discovery for us is that you have parents who are like, ” I’m going to get this for my kid. I’m going to get this for my niece, I’m going to get this for my nephew.” Because they just started playing D&D with their friends and I think they’ll really like this for this reason or that reason.
Bri: I think it also really helps that we weren’t explicitly talking about in a lot of ways. A lot of the huge criticisms of queer things is it’s very sexual right? Sexuality is about being sexual and sexual desire and things like that. And it happens more frequently in a lot of ways, but sometimes it’s about the community and the game itself is about the community. You can add sexual themes, you can add innuendo, whatever you want. We build our games so that people can have a building block that they can add on to using the prompts that we have. If you really like innuendo, if you really like kissing your friends, if you really like whatever the BDSM community or whatever you want to do, you can 100% do whatever you want with it. But also, it’s also so vague that kids can play with it and it’s not weird.
This is a book about queer identity and queer identity isn’t about being sexual always it’s about being okay with loving other people and finding a community in that space when so many other people are trying to shut you out of what community spaces and kids deserve that.
You can follow along for updates on the LGBT Backerkit or at the Bright Bard website, where you can pick up a copy once available. You can find Bri, Jonothon, and Bright Bard on Bluesky.
Images via Bright Bard Games
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