We’ve been playing Trollbabe for a while at Spelens Hus, featuring these characters:

• Grolta, played by Natte, red-haired and sexy
• Gretta, played by Jessie, also red-haired and sexy
• K’Sha, played by Yaroslav, bald and scary
• Monique, played by Jonas, red-haired and scary

Our character sheets are particularly wretched scraps of paper, which I confess I prefer these days; also, these are the current versions after five sessions, somewhat marked up.

The adventures so far

I cannot manage to express how much Rod’s map for the game contributes. It’s like having a whole other GM involved, in a good way.

The sessions so far have seen us at these places:

1. Grolta, Gretta, and K’sha at Gyfrshall
   • Ghosts from a battlefield + captive trolls + dysfunctional elites
   • Gretta makes an enemy
2. Monique at the Smoldering Shores, then joining the other three for the conclusion at Gyfrshall
   • An emerging lava spirit (or something) is saved from hunters but flees from further contact
   • K’Sha might have thrown the most egregious privileged person out of a tower window; Gretta’s enemy, Oskar, becomes her friend
3. Gretta at the Ice Palace, K’Sha at the Lazy Bog
   • A person is saved from her weird isolating mirror-self frozen spell
   • A troll family finally digs up and shatters a god’s skull, with help
4. Gretta and K’Sha at the Smoldering Shores, Grolta at the Lazy Bog
   • In which both places show evidence of divine power, one on the rise and one diminishing
   • Oskar is tragically killed in defending Gretta
5. Gretta and K’Sha at the Rotten Teeth, Monique at the High Lake
   • A tragic denial of a person’s inner nature opens the gate to unfortunate cosmic things
   • Also, there’s a really nasty monster at that lake

If you mentally create a little graphic with colored arrows by trollbabe and by session, you will see that they’ve crossed paths a lot and we’ve seen at least two places following someone else already having done things there.

As instated systemically, we’ve encountered lots of drama at each location, as I hope you can see from these notes. Or rather see the implication of it as these aren’t any kind of instructional text for anyone besides me.

Here are the location maps for them, or most of them, as sometimes I used the little inset from Rod’s map when it permitted a fairly easy word-picture during play.

“What’s going on”

The players have increased Scale each time once they got the idea, so it’s currently at 4, going into session 6.

Given the events of play, given the repeat visits to places, and given the jump up in Scale, I’ve found myself integrating some things into significant great big events.

• We had a possibly-feminine lava spirit, as well as the spider-skull of a gender-nonspecific spider-god
• Both of them were curtailed or stopped from fully manifesting by a trollbabe
• During the second adventure at the Smoldering Shores, I almost randomly said something about the “four corners of the world”

Without reflecting much, I poetically interpreted it as the four corners of the map, which in locations terms gives us the Smoldering Shores (visited twice), the Lazy Bog (visited twice), the Rotten Teeth (just visited, due to this comment), and Mount Yawny. Therefore, evidently this is all about the rise of the goddesses, cue scary orchestra.

My experience is less of a planner than of all these notions creeping up and grabbing me, so I’m a little at sea regarding anything good or bad about it. Contingencies of play have basically established these goddesses or their collective appearance as a threat, or kind of a bad thing, or at least physically destructive toward the ordinary communities in their presence. I’m not really sure I’m happy about that. After this concept was established at the Smoldering Shores/Lazy Bog events, I played the cosmic-ish events at the Rotten Teeth as less interpretable in morally good or evil terms, with the values-topic at hand (Ermund’s gender dysphoria) being an entirely personal and family-conflict thing.

Reflections

I’ve been thinking about Trollbabe in the context of all my fantasy role-playing design:

• After a couple of fun earlier attempts, there’s Gray Magick in the early 1990s, which even then disconnected good/evil from classically white/black magic
• Arguably Sorcerer & Sword beginning back in 1991, coming to fruition in PDF in 1998-ish and book form in 2001; this was my main effort to recover pre-WWII pulp fantasy + its psychedelic application into role-playing
• Fantasy for Real in 1998-1999, which at the time was a mess of trying to get sex-positive + trying to get whimsical
• Trollbabe (arguably preceded/processed via Sex & Sorcery) in 2003, which is arguably some of all the previous things in far more honed and personal-in-play fashion, heuristic rather than didactic
• S/Lay w/Me, 1999, which finally pulled the sexual and phantasmagoric, not to say self-indulgent aspects into real interactive play form, in its own space as it were
• Circle of Hands (i.e. heir of Gray Magick) in 2015, looping back almost twenty-five year previously to recover what I’d wanted to do, without distractions of the other aspects of fantasy
• Most recently, two years ago, recovering Fantasy for Real for its own virtues, now that sex and pulp were accounted for elsewhere, in their own spaces

So it’s a history of specific elements being highlighted and placed appropriately as time went by. Sexuality in Trollbabe is far more about context and meaning rather than the activity, for example.

I’ve been enjoying the kind of deep-feeling, decisive actions that I’ve come to know well in playing Trollbabe, from its earliest days over twenty-two years ago. In this it’s very different from Fantasy for Real. Yaroslav and Jessie commented about playing really effective female characters, and how that turned into “what did I just do” or “that feels different” moments in play. I think whatever uncertainties they may have had at that point shifted hard into focused characterization upon Oskar’s tragic death.

Yaroslav also asked me about my processes in terms of story creation. He’s played a lot with me, as you know if you’ve checked out the AD&D game and several others, so it made sense to him when I said that I simply did not plan or expect outcomes, whether for actions, scenes, sessions, or arcs. If it’s my job to play (decide) whether something happens, I do it, or if some things are fixed to occur and are beyond the characters’ scope or opportunity to affect, then they occur … but those aren’t special, in terms of play process, any more than a person’s statement that their character walks around the room. In terms of active, present characters and entities, I play them exactly like people play their own characters in exactly the same state of uncertainty about where it’s going. We’re all playing in the context of one another’s statements and activities.

This was a good conversation to have specifically in light of playing Trollbabe, which is especially process-transparent. I showed him the relationship maps as part of situational context, not that they were guides to what would happen, but rather helpful and very intuitively-playable aspects of a given situation.

• For example, the troll family K’Sha met at the Lazy Bog (prep 3 above), which featured some very different personalities but no real internal strife; also, the stakes conflict was about the whole family at Scale 2. I’d played the dying grandfather, the tough silent grandmother, the grumpy dad, the worried and grieving mom, and the spunky daughter vividly and enthusiastically (as I fell in love with them during play), and Yaroslav could see how the family dynamic was integral to the general issue of the spider skull’s resolution. It was a useful contrast to the very War of the Roses dysfuntional elite clan situation in the first session, in which the family dynamics were themselves the source of local strife.

Finally, to get back to the gender issue, I found my preparation for the Smoldering Shores in the fifth session first lean, then dive hard into the topic of a young person experiencing gender dysphoria in a cultural and family structure which had no way to help them. Ermend saw the rite to raise the goddess as synonymous with their deeply-desired gender transformation. Their aunt and friends were more or less humoring them and actively seeking to stop the ritual to raise the goddess behind their back. And the trollbabes arrived fairly well determined to prevent the goddess’ rise.

This is some edgy shit, frankly. In simplistic terms, if the whole thing is about “bad goddess, stop the rising,” then basically Ermend is a villain, similar to the trans villains of 1980s and 1990s movies, tagged as unnaturally evil because they’re pervertedly “confused.” Which is pretty much exactly how Ermend’s companions regarded them. It was important to me to hold clear that the goddess would rise no matter what (unless stopped), and Ermend was psychically tapped into this event, not causing it, for understandable reasons. When Jessie rolled a great magical result regarding understanding the events, this separation of issues became clear to Gretta, so it was possible to support Ermend and quell the rising, which otherwise would have been impossible because the two things were tragically inextricably linked.