Vicariturgy: an Unknown Armies adept school

Firstly, if you are a member of Fuck the Moon, do not read further!! I will know if you do and there will be consequences....

 

 

 

 

This bizarre corkboard image spawned a whole adept school to explain itself. Bravo.

 

 

 

 

Right. So this is basically an unholy amalgamation of thanatomancy, plutophagy, and cthonomancy, I guess?

The Vicariturge 
AKA karma whores, Fausts, commodites

Vicariturges are the boddhisattvas of late-stage capitalism. In an era where content creators are turning every aspect of their daily routine into Youtube vlogs and Patreon extras, and an increasing portion of the population can only pay their medical bills by panhandling with a sob story online, it’s no wonder an adept school has come about, too.

Where normal people are motivated by money to do this, or sometimes in the maligned hopes that expressing their suffering to strangers on the internet might help them heal, Fausts, like any kind of adept, are only in it for the peculiar mystical power of such digital flagellation.

Central Tension: Vicariturges devalue and desecrate their most precious experiences, beliefs, and connections in exchange for assigning them a dollar value.

Generate a Minor Charge: All vicariturgy charges come from the creation and sale of vicariturgy fetishes, somewhat like those of thanatomancy. Each fetish is a physical embodiment of meaningful loss, grief, or trauma experienced by the adept. The charge comes from the exchange of the fetish for money (which can be received in digital form).

Charging only works if the buyer has no prior personal connection to the vicariturge.

There are a couple other important things to note regarding vicariturgy fetishes of any charge level. First, they must be made incorporating a symbolic or physical part of the pain they represent (more details below).

Second, selling a fetish in no way unburdens the karma whore. (At least, not emotionally or spiritually. Selling a fetish made from the corpse of your boyfriend murdered by unnatural entities can at least kill two birds with one stone as far as avoiding police questioning.)

Not only do they not feel better after selling it, but doing so also prevents them from healing that pain. If a fetish was made from a failed stress check, for example, that notch cannot be healed in therapy. If it represents the loss of a Relationship, and the Faust later reconnects with the ex in question, they can never get close again enough to recreate a mechanical connection with each other via the Relationship rules.

It should go without saying that there is a limit of one fetish per instance of suffering.

Lastly, there’s no particular restrictions on the materials fetishes are made from aside from the aforementioned representation of the pain. A gold-plated locket with a strand of hair and a tongue depressor dipped in blood from the same person are worth the same in mystic terms to a vicariturge. Likewise, the price is irrelevant to charging. Being able to offload fetishes for a quarter is often a boon to Fausts who make off-putting art objects from living remains.

That said, creating fetishes is an emotionally laborious and highly meaningful process for karma whores. They aren’t known to half-ass it, even if they need a charge in a hurry. If the end result is a tongue depressor dipped in blood, then most likely acquiring the blood was itself a complex and ritualized process, with personal significance to the karma whore.

With all that out of the way, vicariturgy fetishes worth a minor charge can either include a symbolic representation of a lost Relationship (the person needn’t be dead, just gone from the commodite’s life) or a physical part of a beloved pet or friend (not one who’s “top 5 relationships”-tier), or an item related to a failed stress check or an abandoned objective which was tied to the commodite’s obsession or one of their passions. For example, a commodite who was stabbed in an alley (failing a Violence check in the process) might make jewelry incorporating the bit of knife tip that got fished out of their chest cavity at the emergency room.

Generate a Significant Charge: Significant-value fetishes must include a physical part of a lost Relationship (again, they don’t need to be dead; nail clippings are enough if you’re squeamish or insufficiently vindictive.)

Because this is highly limiting, innovative Fausts have found another option: you can sell a minor fetish for a sig charge if and only if the manner of selling it or the buyer is upsetting enough to provoke a stress check itself on the Faust, and they fail it. For example, the gaucheness of selling part of your dead child’s body to your own parent as some kind of awful keepsake of their grandson is likely to cause a Self check. Or, perhaps they’re selling the mummified paw of their beloved family dog to some freak charger who is going to use it for something unthinkable, which they described to the Faust in detail, provoking an Unnatural check.

Generate a Major Charge: Sell your soul in fetish form. What exactly this means is likely somewhat subjective to the individual Faust, but it generally requires a proxy ritual or similar. Invariably, upon completing the transaction, they take a Self (10) check. The ensouled fetish is also a very potent symbolic item, and dangerous to the Faust, even in the hands of mundanes who don’t understand what it is.

Taboo: The first taboo for vicariturges is to spend any of the proceeds from their fetish sales. This one is broken strategically pretty often, since adepts are often hard up for rent money, and they are able to stockpile for as long as they want. Spending two bucks on a beer or two grand on a new (used) ride both break taboo equally (assuming you’re not making monthly payments on the beater.)

Second, vicariturges can’t cope normally with their emotional anguish without tabooing. If they lose their Favorite in a tragic accident but eventually find another, they taboo once the bond is strong enough to write it on their character sheet. Similarly, if a commodite wants to heal a failed Helplessness notch in therapy rather than making a fetish about it, or bury Fluffy in the yard without commodification, those would also break taboo.

Blast Style: Vicariturge blasts are cast via cursed fetishes. Specifically, the fetish in question must come from either a violent incident that produced a failed stress check or the violent or sudden death of someone or some (living) thing important to the karma whore. Upon completion of the sale, the cosmos will bend synchronicity to recreate whatever loss happened that spawned the fetish.

As an added benefit to karma whores, a cursed fetish whose blast has been carried out disappears if unobserved, or else decomposes rapidly or simply disintegrates if not perishable.

Random Magick Domain: Desecration, martyrdom, the intersections of commerce and human expression, exhibitionism and misery, spectacle and private pain.

Generally speaking, vicariturgy can only improve the lot of others at the caster’s expense. Karma whores can never make any good come to themselves from their own suffering using their magick.

Ω: +0. Neither taboo is too difficult, essentially boiling down to not doing things that you mostly wouldn’t even have to consider if you didn’t practice vicariturgy. Charging is restrictive in some ways, but there’s nothing stopping a lazy Faust from selling fetishes on Facebook Marketplace all day and never having to leave home in order to stockpile juju.

A Note on Timing: A lot of vicariturgy spells must be cast in the process of selling a fetish. In face-to-face transactions, this is simple enough. However, given the online behaviors that spawned the school, there’s actually an edge to remote sales. In this case (assuming the casting roll is a success), the karma whore gets to choose whether the effect begins upon the receipt of payment, their shipping the fetish, or the fetish’s being delivered to the buyer.

There is one downside to this, which is that if someone buys your freaky matted hair doll and has it shipped to a vacant address in the middle of nowhere, it’s liable to mess up the spell.

Minor Formula Spells

Commercial Commiseration

Cost: 1 or more minor charges

Effect: When you cast this spell, you enchant the money someone paid you for a fetish (normally, it doesn’t matter if they pay in cash, but in this case it has to be.) You can spend any number of minor charges when you cast it; each case adds an additional use of the effect before it runs out and the money becomes mundane again.

While handling the cash and thinking about the buyer, the commodite experiences their current emotional state for up to about fifteen seconds per use of the spell. Note that only the commodite can make use of this effect, since they are the one bonded by commerce to the target.

Keep Your Blood Money

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: As part of casting this spell, the Faust must return the fee they were paid for a fetish created due to failed stress check. This is the one case where giving up fetish money does not break taboo. If they were paid in cash, they need not place it back in the buyer’s hand; it’s fine to Paypal them the same amount or leave it in their mailbox.

Upon the payment’s return, if the spell works, the buyer faces a rank-3 stress check of the same meter as the fetish’s impetus due to hallucinations that set in at a random point within the next 1d10 hours.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Cost: 1 minor charge + up to 1 significant charge

Effect: The vicariturge enchants a fetish made in memory of a dead Relationship upon selling it with a vestige of their talents in life. While the fetish is on their person, the buyer gains a single use of one of that person’s identities at the percentage it held when they died.

This spell can be used to confer magickal identities, but only at the expense of a significant charge on top of the base cost.

I’ll Never Let It Happen Again

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: As they sell a fetish borne from a violent death or an attack that caused a failed Violence stress check, the commodite enchants it with a ward. There is no way for the commodite or the buyer to tell if the spell worked, but if it did, the next time the same thing would happen to the buyer, synchronicity smiles on them and causes the attack to miss.

By “the same thing,” we’re talking a pretty high level of specificity. For example, a warded fetish from a dog that was hit by a car will not prevent any car accident. It would, however, activate on a street in the same city, or in a prospective accident with the same make of car.

If the casting roll is a critical fail, synchronicity’s smile is a sadistic one, and the buyer can look forward to suffering the same harm that prompted the creation of the fetish at some point in the next 1d5 days.

No Pain, No Gain

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: The Faust must cast this spell on someone who is already interested in buying a fetish. If it works, the target is overcome with sympathy or pity for the Faust when they tell them the inevitable sob story behind the merchandise, and insist on paying more than the asking price (if they do decide to buy it). The exact amount varies, but you can expect at least as much as the buyer’s Status score in USD. Note that this does nothing to circumvent the taboo of actually spending the money.

Vicarious (Blunt Force) Trauma

Cost: 1 minor charge

Effect: This is the vicariturgy minor blast. Generally, it will be a lesser version of the fetish’s impetus. For example, a fetish made with a bit of grey matter from the karma whore’s dad that died of a stroke used for a minor blast is going to cause a minor aneurysm or even just a burst blood vessel.

Deals damage as fists and feet and provokes an Unnatural (5) check, as is typical.

What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes You Stronger

Cost: 2 minor charges

Effect: This spell must be cast as the karma whore makes the sale of a fetish whose impetus was a failed stress check. The fetish becomes a good luck totem of sorts, warding the owner from shocks to the same meter of the check that was the fetish’s impetus. The next time the buyer would face a stress check of that meter while they have the fetish on them, the stress check’s rating is reduced by two ranks (if it’s below rank-1, it simply doesn’t faze the buyer.)

Significant Formula Spells

Is This Loss?

Cost: 4 significant charges
Effect: The vicariturge must physically touch a fetish at least four hours after selling it as part of casting this spell. Once they spend the charges and pass the roll, the fetish begins to emanate the negative emotions they associate with it like a targeted miasma on the buyer.

So long as the buyer of this fetish is within thirty yards of it, they are overwhelmed by depressive malaise so severe that doing anything more than taking care of their body’s basic needs, including getting rid of the fetish, requires a Self (4) check.

This effect lasts for four days, which is incidentally a typical amount of paid bereavement leave in the US states where that’s required of employers.

Needful Thing

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: As they sell it, the Faust transforms a fetish made in memory of a dead person with whom they had a Relationship into a vessel for their demon. (Naturally, this only works if they have in fact remained around in demonic form.) The demon appears inside the fetish after 1d10 days. It can communicate telepathically with the buyer and cause one minor unnatural phenomena per day, originating from the fetish.

There’s one other requirement here: there has to be a contract involved in the sale of the fetish, signed by both the Faust and the buyer.

No End to My Suffering

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: This bizarre spell requires the karma whore to sell a fetish based on themself. This act does not generate a charge, of course, but it is part of the casting process. If the spell worked, that fetish becomes sort of like a mini-proxy for the karma whore. The next time they would suffer wounds, the first ten are dealt to the fetish instead, so long as the buyer has kept it on hand. This causes the fetish to disintegrate noticeably but harmlessly.

This effect is only active for 1d5 hours. If a karma whore casts it again before this window ends, it replaces the previous casting rather than creating a second instance.

Pity Party

Cost: 3 significant charges

Effect: As they cast this spell, the Faust focuses on the buyer of one of the fetishes they sold to generate the charges for it. If it works, they create a sympathetic link to that buyer. The next time the Faust fails any stress check, if the buyer is within a ten mile radius, they immediately become inexplicably aware that the Faust is in crisis, and feel an unnatural compulsion to help.

If they choose not to immediately rush to the Faust’s aid, they face a Self (10) check, but then the compulsion passes. If they instead give into the compulsion, they risk a Helplessness (4-5) check if anything prevents them from arriving on the scene where the check was failed as fast as they can, or if, by the time they get there, the Faust has left (or died).

Rubbernecking

Cost: 1 significant charge

Effect: This is the significant blast of vicariturgy, so its name is liable to be literal. It works the same as at the minor level, except it deals damage like a gunshot.

See Some Evil, Hear Some Evil

Cost: 1 or more significant charges

Effect: Yet another spell the commodite must cast as they conduct the sale of a fetish. This spell allows the commodite to use any of the buyer’s five senses (only one at a time), regardless of distance, so long as they keep the fetish on their person. This doesn’t prevent the target from sensing things, only allows the commodite to share sensations. There is no obvious sign to the target that any magick is going on while the spell is in use.

This effect lasts for an hour per charge spent during casting. If desired, the commodite can continue to feed sig charges into the spell as long as they want.

Signal Boost

Cost: 2 significant charges

Effect: The vicariturge casts this spell as they sell a fetish. One of the next 1d10 people to see the fetish in the possession of the buyer is oddly compelled by it. They will reflexively feel the buyer out as to where they got it and synchronicity will nudge them into the vicariturge’s path (or that of their online storefront) or vice versa at some point in the next few days, unless one or both parties is actively trying to avoid this. When they encounter each other, the target will face an Unnatural (5) check if they do not try to purchase at least one fetish from the vicariturge for themself.

The encounters this spell creates, if face to face, are fleeting and generally in public places. It is generally hard to do more than exchange contact information or a few bills for a fetish on hand When they happen.

Vicious Cycle

Cost: 4 significant charges

Effect: The Faust must cast this spell as they sell a fetish, but wait, there’s more! The fetish for this spell has to be made from cash (and cash specifically) that was paid to the Faust in exchange for another fetish. Maybe it’s the profit from one they sold to a dearly departed spouse when they first met, or maybe from a sale that went horribly wrong.

If the spell works, the buyer becomes a proxy for the Faust for as long as they retain ownership of the money-turned-fetish (see Book 1: Play, p. 180).

Major Charge Effects

Make a fetish buyer suicidal. Cause a massive riot that escalates from a bidding war over one of your fetishes. Synchronously cause a buyer and all their loved ones to go bankrupt. Make a buyer immune to harm from any source except whatever killed the person the fetish commemorates. Cause a whole city’s worth of people to turn up to your funeral, crying their eyes out.

What You Hear: Vicariturgy is the brainchild of a merchant avatar whose unhappy husband tricked her into entering a Room of Renunciation rather than having to pay alimony.

 

On "Ideology"

The Revolution: that old chestnut
I was really annoying about socialism for a year there and for that I apologize.
I am all better now. I am an anarchist. &
I reject labels & wearing the blinders of a worldview of politics
at the expense of also spirituality, philosophy, humanism, humanity
being its weird and fucked up self. I have left my position as the internal organizer
of the steering committee in the democratic socialists of america’s rochester new york chapter
and now im joining the immortal dyke council & the anarchist hater contingent.
I put down the scribing quill and lit the rag in the cocktail, metaphorically, for now
I joined a “mutual aid” charity to hang out with my fellow trans dykes and, I can be honest,
for no other reason.

obligation is just coercion with a pretty veneer & autonomy is a fucking myth,
aspirational like the revolution, never gonna happen. Key to the “anarchist project”
(derisive quotation marks are a girl’s best friend)
is getting people to grapple with what they believe impossible. Organizations corrupt.
I want to build a local movement against our collective interest
as the beneficiaries of empire & I’m not kidding. I want to abolish cops & prisons & money
& academia & mental health & private property & let everyone do whatever they want forever & never let one person tell another what to do.

I don’t know how I’m gonna cope without coke zero after the revolution &
I don’t need to, any more than I need to untie all those knots I just put in my own logic
ideas can be paradoxes
aspirations can be idealistic
aspirate in with me and let’s breathe
a new and free and impossible world
from the ashes of the one we have yet to burn down

I Am Asking You

Interlocution is power play. Is asking submissive? Answering can be,
if you want it to. You can draw a drop of blood
with your alcohol swab on hand and be told this has to be reported
while nightly cis men drink poison until they can stomach the contents
of their own heads, for a while.
Is that right? How can you defend that kind of world?
Where is the shame? Where should the shame go?
Everything is political and psychosexual and gendered and
if you disagree I want you to make your case. Because

I wanted to try knifeplay but 
I was alone, so
I cut out the middle man.
I cut myself closed. Is it fucked up
I get euphoria out of crying like a girl?
I am a wound, dress me.
I am a woman, subjugate me.
I am alone, don’t let me be.

Read This Shit - Writing That Has Influenced Me

Last updated: 11 April 2026

I've been very interested in and activated (in good ways) by others' writing recently, so I want to start keeping a list of some of the pieces that have affected, radicalized, aroused, or taught me the most.

Read This Shit Right Now On the Internet 

Against Safety/Towards Bleed - The Garden Below- about the dangers of safety in transfemininity and tabletop gaming

The Palette Grid - Jay Dragon - what if safety tools were good?

Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning - Eclipse Dot Gay - incitement to make unapologetically horny games. This follow-up post builds on it; read both. 

Priestess - Gray Levesque - very lyrical and trans short story. There's a lot of good stuff published in The Temz Review (including this) but I think this is my favorite piece from it so far.

Go Buy This Shit in Book Form (or Loan from Your Library) And Read It 

I Hope We Choose Love - Kai Cheng Thom - essay collection covering transfemininity, "mental illness", racism, queer and activist spaces, and more. Her fiction is also very good.

Bad Habit - Alana S. Portero - one of very few novels to make me cry.

Stag Dance - Torrey Peters - short stories & novella, all extremely transfem from wildly different angles, all extremely good. Read all her work.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed - Mariana Enriquez - very Argentine short horror stories. All her collections are great, but this is my favorite.

The Collected Schizophrenias - Esme Weijun Wang - nonfiction about living with our culture's most stigmatized "mental illness."

How to be an Antiracist - Ibram X Kendi - I feel like this is mainstream enough I probably don't need to platform it, and it looks like low-hanging fruit to say "look how woke I am!" but it did really leave a mark on my worldview; the emphasis on judging systems and beliefs over individuals. And if you're white and haven't examined your white fragility at all, it's a very (too?) gentle first step toward fixing that.

Before Gender - Eli Erlick - nonfiction about trans people alive between 1850-1950, pretty much all of whom were fully erased by history for reasons that I'm sure aren't evil at all. It also covers MULTIPLE trans-led riots pre-stonewall. Effie Smith is my favorite, and my new role model.

Subject to Change (Anthology) - poetry by trans authors, mostly of color, along with interviews of them. Not all of them are my cup of tea but several are now among my favorite poets.

Read This Shit in Book Form, But It's Okay if You Pirate It Because It Was Written by a Cishet White Man (It's Still Good I Promise)

Crazy Like Us - Ethan Watters - Journalistic nonfiction about the irreparable harm the white supremacy and imperialism inherent to psychiatry and big pharma has done worldwide.

Saving Normal - Allen Frances - nonfiction; the author was the lead writer of the DSM-4 so he's awful and has many awful takes through the book (for example, "the DSM-4 was totally fine"), BUT it documents the ways things got even worse with the DSM-5 very thoroughly.

The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber & David Wengrow -  big long list of prehistoric and ancient cultures that were way less evil than what we've gotten stuck with today; a counter to the dominant narrative in archaelogy/anthropology/history etc.  

Shardik - Richard Adams - the guy who wrote Watership Down wrote a fantasy epic for grownups. No speculative elements, big fuckoff bear, child slavery, what more could you want?

Jerry Cornelius series - Michael Moorcock - My favorite Moorcock books, even above Elric (where this blog's namesake comes from). It's like if James Bond was severely fucked in the head and extremely queer, plus pornographic illustrations.

The Prisoner - Patrick McGoohan - yes it's a TV show; it's important to me, shut up. Aggressively 60s, weird allegorical sci-fi, way ahead of its time and our time. Watch it, then watch the documentary so you can understand why I'm crediting this show to one guy, and worry for me that I relate to him so much.

Collected Works of Otto Gross - Gross was one of the founders of psychoanalysis, as influential as Jung from what I can tell, but he's been erased for being a communist about it. He's far from blameless, but fascinating, and he does have some good takes (my favorite is his essay that calls gender norms a "humanity-encompassing etiology"). I will say I find understanding academic writing from the 1910s almost impossibly hard, even as someone who loves long, pretentious words.

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges - Borges was Argentine and thus not white, but he's dead so you don't need to worry about pirating him. I dunno what to say other than that his work is deeply weird in wonderful and influential way, and he conveys a love of books that is very specific and relatable.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino - fiction without narrative; just sheer weird imagination. 

Announcement: No More Laughter Left on Earth is back!

Quick announcement: I have decided to un-unlist my first, and so far only, original roleplaying game, No More Laughter Left On Earth, which was originally a game jam entry about two years ago (ahhhh time is scary!) 
 

It's still PWYW, and I still feel it's very much a product of the beginning of my RPG design journey. I am still proud of the layout and most of the writing, and I still LOVE the cover art I commissioned (which is good, because there's no way I'll ever recoup the cost through sales), but file it under "early work". 

That said, I do think it would be fun to make a second edition that fleshes out all the stuff that never moved from my brain onto the page, tighten up the design intent and specific mechanics, etc. If nothing else, the random tables at the back are still rad.

Download links:    Itch     DTRPG

Update 18 March 2026: fixed the DTRPG link  

Open

Consensus between the liars and the lies for all to see
fake news implies the existence of real news
yellow journalism gave way to Watergate
and we got Bedtime for Bonzo and we got Home Alone 2

A commitment to honesty is dangerous
in an empire whose hottest commodity is truth
as defined by the empire 
                     whose hottest commodity is truth

I hate the way my brain makes me feel
I hate my brain from inside my brain
                         from inside my body connected to    
                                            my brain
Is science our religion
Is god our witness
Is the demiurge really so cruel
Man is machine
Are we in The Matrix
Are we our thoughts or our actions or our politics or meat

This is not subjective. This is not active
This is not an argument. There are no sides. 
(though my higher hemisphere hurts me)
no object                                                         no objection
This is not a fact. This is a mandate. This is a call to arms.

Kinds of relationships I have been in

Strangers, brief exposure
Strangers, prolonged exposure
Strangers who will become acquaintances
Strangers who will become friends
Strangers who will become lovers
Strangers who will become enemies
Acquaintances
Friends
Lovers
Enemies
Family
Strangers, famous
Strangers, internet famous
Lovers who will become friends
Friends who will become enemies
Enemies who will become famous
Family who will become strangers
Selves who have become strangers
Selves, former enemies, now friends
Selves, former enemies, now family
Selves, former enemies, now lovers
Selves who are lovers
Selves, brief exposure
(this is a complete list.)
Selves, prolonged exposure

Tall Girl Shadow Self

I have never had access to poetry about the moon. I said
I was performing feminine because I wanted access
to oppression, my own corner of the margin, to use this
to explain why I am always in conflict with the world.

Then I came up to the edge and beat myself backwards
but you can only see a lie in the mirror so many times, 
           I can only see a lie in the mirror so many times,
before I get too angry to repeat it.

I am the kind of bitch Shirley Jackson would have called “dark”
pale, a six foot five princess, a heterodox paradox, Girl Atlas
holding up the world for the littles underneath me,
an asinine androgyne anodyne shooting for femme
sometimes I’m a pissbaby
sometimes I’m a bastion of wisdom

How to destroy a girl’s confidence in one innocent question:
“Do you know any dance moves?”
After I danced for hours.
After I looked and waited and checked my phone for them
for hours and hours. Before a reverse Socrates
(“I only know that you know nothing”)
welcomed me to womanhood after six months of me injecting it

walking woman, trying to talk woman, hair woman, hairless woman
soft skin, coquette gestures, sounding woman most on my way
to orgasm, clutching sheets, pulling hair
the clothes made the woman
push my tits together and make a line
look in the mirror and see square jaw, stubble chin
look in and see nocturnal lashes, lips, forest of locks

I will move well, like a secret hero, like a secret
British big cat, smooth, exact, deploy precision stride

so atomize me, persecute me, sentence me, force me out
look askance, look outraged, look
but don’t you fucking touch

I am fat, I am a pervert, I am perverse, I am weird, mad, I love me for it
I will not go back for cisgenderism, respectability, a manhood
things I could never quite hold, never quite want. I love me radically
and you can choke.

Pedophilia is NOT the Cardinal Sin

I know I’m endangering myself with the titles of my two latest essays back to back, but what can I say, I’m a provocateur. And this one is too topical to delay.

The Epstein Files have made their mark on politics by now, I would say. It’s an impressive bruise: livid and visible, but only skin deep.

No one in power has, to my knowledge, suffered for their involvement since their publication, and barely any had at any point previously, when Epstein was incarcerated and all signs pointed to what we now have in writing for all the world to see.

But people are angry. Disenfranchisement with our rulers and the disempowerment they have inculcated in us is growing more and more. But the public narrative is, unsurprisingly, weak to the point of derailing what could be a huge push toward a mass revolutionary movement.

Before I go further: child rape is indefensible. Human trafficking and sex slavery are indefensible. I haven’t said anything in this essay yet to indicate I don’t believe that, including the title, but trans women are never given the benefit of the doubt, even when we’re talking about banal things not connected to our dominant stereotyping as degenerate, deceitful rapists.

I would like now to lay some groundwork for the crux of the argument that my titillating title suggests.

First, I am a firm believer (even if I fail in practice in times) in the notion that people are not good or bad, but actions and systems can be. This is a principle I derived from Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent book, How to Be an Antiracist. In it, he makes a thorough and compelling case that, whether or not people are Racists, as a noun describing their moral character as an individual, it is more productive to addressing racism that beliefs, policies, and institutions are Racist or Antiracist (and anything “neutral” typically tends to be Racist because it is passive in the face of a Racist status quo). This is a framework that really aligns with my overall theory of change and ideal view of humanity; it can be applied outside of racism.

I also don’t think morality is the best benchmark to inform praxis. Morality in our current American culture is derived from Christianity; the good and virtuous go to heaven, the evil and sinful go to hell. Even when morality is a lens applied by people who explicitly disagree with and reject that judgmental paradigm, who have been personally harmed by it, I see a lineage underneath that goes, even if unconsciously, back to a need for a hierarchical religious institution to tell us right from wrong, rather than to do the messy and difficult work of deciding that for ourselves.

I do look at things through a moral lens, all the time. But I think effective critical decisions about where to spend our money, time, and labor, who and what to platform or criticize, should come from other values more than morality.

Who benefits from a policy or narrative, and at a cost to who else? What are the underlying motives? What could be done or said instead, and why have those not happened while this has?

These questions can be answered with morality: for example, two statements I broadly agree with: “Police are evil because they get off on killing and terrorizing minorities.” Or, more topically, “the ruling class are evil because they all frequented an island full of child sex slaves, or participated in covering that up.”

But the moral lens, while it feels good to look through (regardless of your political alignment), paints things in the colors of a crusade. “We are the good guys because we aren’t billionaires or cops” is a slippery slope toward “We can do no wrong because we aren’t the ones who hold most of societal power.”

Intersectionality and power dynamics can save us from falling prey to this black-and-white thinking. Yes, I think that choosing to hoard a significant portion of the wealth and power in the world just because you think you deserve it more, while people starve and die, is wrong. And it’s a choice billionaires are making every second of every day, which makes them (and those who are constantly choosing to enforce their rule) the only group that I can support framing in an “us vs. them” mentality. But if you start letting yourself applying that logic any further, you are doing a disservice to any kind of leftist or humanistic agenda.

I do understand and strongly empathize with marginalized people viewing those who uncritically support or enact their oppression as universally evil. It’s nearly impossible for me not to think cis people are evil when they gleefully insist on deadnaming me or using slurs, or leverage systemic power against me in ways most likely motivated by hate, or disbelieve me when I say these things are happening. But if I cave into the depression brain and start thinking of all cis people as evil for being cis, I am supporting the same logic they use to fear and hate me for being trans.

It’s actually very easy to bring this back to pedophilia and the Epstein Files. Pedophilia is generally defined as a sexual attraction to children. If you are queer, and do not feel that you can just choose to stop being lesbian or bisexual or asexual or gay, because you can’t, then how can you hate pedophiles as a blanket statement?

It is VITAL to distinguish between an internal attraction one cannot control and the ways one does or does not act on it.

Please read the above sentence again and pause to think on it before you read on, especially if you are still rankled by any of what I’m saying.

Pedophiles cannot choose to stop being pedophiles. But they can choose not to rape children.

Now, in considering the above arguments in relation to the Epstein Files, I would like to explain why I don’t think pedophilia is the cardinal sin of the ruling class, as stated in the title.

Their cardinal sin is choosing to have unrestrained, unaccountable, absolute power over the entire rest of humanity. The vehicle for this power is the hoarding of almost all extant wealth and the deployment of it to safeguard their dominance and suppress any effort to challenge it, even potential ones.

If they lacked this power, then even if they wanted to rape children all day long, and own them as property whose purpose is their own sexual gratification, they simply would not be able to have been doing it for so long, on such a massive scale. They couldn’t have kept it a secret for so long, or controlled the media’s expression of the truth to dull and distract from public outrage about it, or prevented themselves from facing any kind of material consequences for their actions.

There is also an attitude among the ultrarich which is genuinely terrifying, despite its existence being logical if you stop to think. There is a reason they don’t think twice about buying up kids to sexually abuse to their heart’s content in the way that anyone else would, even if they had a desire to do so.

They believe they are straight-up better than the rest of us. That they are the most intelligent, beautiful, and good people there are, because they are voluntarily surrounded at all times by sycophants and only sycophants, whose motivation for ass-kissing ranges from delusion to opportunism. And because their purity and greatness is a prerequisite for the fact that they are all-powerful. If they saw themselves as any closer to the squalor and sin of the rest of us, they would have to question their status, and then the whole thing would come tumbling down.

So I say, when we talk about the Epstein Files, we should be talking about choices and the systems that support them. We should be calling attention to power dynamics on a global scale.

We should condemn billionaires and their supporters, not because they are intrinsically evil, or because they are pedophilic monsters, but because they wake up every day and decide to do nothing less than indulge their most destructive and harmful impulses, and reinforce their “God-given right” to do so, for no other reason than that they can.

Why I Don't Trust People Who Won't Roleplay Sex Scenes: On Attitudes Toward Safety Tools, Consent, and Predation in the RPG Hobby

Alright, first of all, let’s get this out of the way: the title is glib and exaggerated. This is intentional though, because I want to weed out people who will be scandalized by a line like that that. It’s not literally true as a blanket statement, but the sentiment has validity buried within, and that will be the subject of this essay.

Being a kinky, fat trans woman who does not think or experience sensation how “neurotypical”/”normal” society wants me to, I have a lot of thoughts on content/trigger warnings, safe spaces, and related conversations. I have never felt at home in kink spaces or most queer spaces. The more informed my opinions become, the less this surprises me. It shocks me in hindsight that I could ever let my guard down in game stores full of nerd bros, even when I thought I was one of them.

I’ve heard it said that RPG players’ conversations on consent and safety are light years behind those in kink. That is true, from what I’ve seen, but I also think kink communities’ conversations are light years away from anything I find relatable or safe to engage with. This is also true of queer and leftist spaces I have been a part of or observed from without. 

Pretty much the only cases I see my inner concerns and experiences reflected accurately come from the most marginalized people who might want to be allowed into these groups. Almost always these are BIPOC people, trans or genderqueer people, disabled people, and people with lived experience full of poverty and trauma and systemic discrimination. The people whose voices go unheard, if not actively silenced, in the places ostensibly most welcoming to them.

This is all background information, and what I’m getting at so far has been abstract. Let me start being more concrete.

I think that it is certainly good that things like session zero, the X card, and lines and veils have begun to be socially acceptable to discuss in the RPG hobby, and indeed included in the text of many games. But, like reformist derailing of workers’ movements, this being the extent of the progress for at least a decade and a half is a problem. It’s not enough. Not even close. And in the mobbish cesspool that social media discourse and echo chambers are, it’s a problem that the narrative is not continuing to progress.

As a side note, I assume that readers of this essay have already familiarized themselves with those safety tools. If not, google still works just barely well enough that you can find them and then read on.

In my personal experiences playing RPGs with various people, from my own queer friends and fellow leftist organizers to “apolitical” white male nerds, to uninvested teens at game stores, I have seen general acceptance of the specific safety tools mentioned above. There’s also a consent checklist of common lines and veils that uses a “red/yellow/green light” system familiar from kink (albeit much less useful, as I will get into), and a couple other things in the same vein. These all appear to be understood the same way across players, excepting those who simply haven’t come across them yet. This is also true in what I have seen in actual play fandoms, discord servers, Bluesky, Tumblr, and other online spaces.

What’s wrong with this? 

First of all, there is commonly an assumption that if you get through explaining all these things in session zero, assemble a list of lines and veils and share it with the whole group, that you’ve done your job and triggering or hurt feelings should be easily avoided unless there is a Bad Actor (TM) in the group. 

This strikes me as extremely shortsighted and also built on insidious assumptions that will cause harm to the most vulnerable people present. 

One assumption is that this conversation happens in its entirety at the formation of a group or the start of a new campaign. There’s a maxim from either kink or LARP (I forget which) that, if examined critically, debunks this assumption: “I need to hear your No before I trust your Yes.” Basically, people will say they are or aren’t comfortable with certain subject matter or triggering content when considering it in the abstract and act as though that’s going to usefully reflect how they feel and act when it actually happens. 

The only commonly used safety tool in RPGs that is explicitly intended to address this issue is the X card (or occasionally, the “red light/yellow light/green light” from kink), but there are a lot of questions left unanswered when this is your sole recourse. 

What happens when someone X cards the death of their character when death is the only meaningful consequence offered for failure by the game system being used, and the other players are interested in their characters’ actions having consequences?

What happens when someone X cards something that triggers them, but that they didn’t think to add to the list of lines and veils three months ago, but the triggering content is the main thematic motif of the adventure the GM has prepped, or the key clue that the mystery hinges on?

I think most of the time, either someone has to pretend they’re comfortable with something they’re not, or the game falls apart entirely. And there are ways to play that don’t make either of those necessary. They just require people to actually think and talk honestly about their feelings, rather than grab something that looks helpful off the internet that purports to make their game safe.

These kinds of problem commonly come up in session zero, too, and it’s rare that it’s addressed well. I’ve seen groups fall apart because someone stayed quiet when a line or veil was made, or not made, that they weren’t okay with. I’ve been that person. Who wants to jeopardize this social activity that requires several people’s committed attention and compatible schedules, before they even get to start playing the game?

What happens when someone says a line for them is any kind of sexual content (one I’ve seen very often), but another player at the table is trans, and wants to play a trans character that draws on their lived experience, and we exist in a society in which trans people are sexualized whether we like it or not?

What happens when someone says a line for them is racism or discrimination of any kind, and the group is playing a Western-themed game or campaign, or a 1920s U.S. Call of Cthulhu game, and one player is queer or a woman or Jewish or Latino or any other identity that was defined first and foremost in those times and places by the ways they were systemically oppressed?

In my experience, people get bitter or feel alienated from the rest of the group, and they try to swallow it until they can’t, and then they leave or blow up with all their restrained hurt. Often this is a deathknell for the game, the group, or even long-term friendships.

Another reason this status quo for such content and conversations is harmful is the way it propagates and reflects a common and dire problem in “woke” spaces: that when these heavily flawed safeguards fail, individuals are blamed for it, and there is no pause to reflect on the safeguards or the norms that led to them being agreed upon.

This is exacerbated by the widely accepted idea that the worst thing one can be is an abuser, a predator, a transgressor, a Bad Actor in whatever way it can be explained to justify a mob mentality. Kai Cheng Thom has written a very compelling case against this accepted “wisdom.” 

Abusers and bullies are usually abused and bullied themselves. Addressing harmful behavior with punishment and judgment cements “Bad Actor” as an identity and self-fulfilling prophecy. The types of people that are most often vilified for transgressing are typically more marginalized. The types of people that are given sympathy or a more nuanced response are typically less marginalized. 

People and communities nominally committed to social justice and acceptance, or even abolitionism or anti-racism, regularly overlook these facts when it would shake the status quo to take a closer look.

One last reason I feel this essay is necessary is that it’s far from the first time in the hobby this argument has been made. We’ve had games for and by marginalized people for a long time, that explicitly ask us to talk about this issue, often through the vehicle of game mechanics designed to facilitate conversation and critical thought. But these games are either erased or appropriated and derailed. 

I cannot tell you how many times I see Monsterhearts recommended to queer players because it’s a game by a queer and about queer characters. It happens on social media, it happens in books (plural) by therapists on how to run RPGs for therapy groups. I have to assume a lot of the time, this recommendation comes from people who know of maybe five to ten RPGs that aren’t 5th edition D&D, and who have played maybe one or two of them. There are shitloads of queer RPGs out there.

Now, to be clear, I fucking love Monsterhearts. I think it’s probably the best game about queerness I’ve ever read. Many have read or played it (or vaguely heard of it) and tried and failed to cash in on its excellence. I think the reason we get games like Thirsty Sword Lesbians, that want to be part of the lineage borne from Monsterhearts, but that ring so hollow to me and people like me they almost feel like they weren’t written by actual queers, is that the imitators fail to understand what’s great about the OG. And if they did understand, I think many would no longer like it.

The real genius of Monsterhearts, as much as I love the way the themes are deployed and cute details like the seating chart, is the way the mechanics put you in the shoes of your problematic queer teen character, who is also a literal monster. You cannot control who or what Turns Them On (which is the name of the move that is the centerpiece of the game). 

If you try to play Monsterhearts to tell stories of untraumatized, well-adjusted queers, the game will fight you every step of the way. If you try to play it and retain full authorial control of any aspect of the game, including your own PC, it will fight you. This applies to the GM as much as anyone else. This is beautiful, and what makes it a great game, but also something that is hardly ever mentioned when it’s recommended. Usually, I just see it touted as a “queer game” or “queer romance game.” 

Admittedly, I think at this point the majority of the RPG “community” is adept at fighting and ignoring the explicit rules and intent of the game they play, if they even play at all themselves. We can thank actual plays and their fandom cultures for that. 

Whose ideal "UWU queer found family" system DOESN'T have extremely 

detailed mechanics for when you can and can't move in five foot increments?

Incidentally, my critical read of Monsterhearts is heavily informed by the RTFM podcast episode on it, although I am not unequivocally positive on that show as a whole. It’s also very interesting to me how Monsterhearts became, years ago, a “queer game” with a “queer author,” not a game with a “transfeminine author.” Both are true, but it bears consideration which term is more popular, and why.

The only other thing to talk about here is solutions. The obvious and least helpful thing I can say is, don’t engage in an activity like RPGs with the potential for extreme emotional vulnerability with people you don’t trust. This does no good for people who don’t have anyone they trust a lot (who also wants to play tabletop games with them), and it also creates the potential to damage that trust by not giving any more concrete support frameworks – the thing I’m criticizing in the first place.

I do have a bit more to add, but it’s still not super concrete. That’s partly because these kind of meaningful human interactions don’t have a quick fix. You have to engage with them thoughtfully and honestly, as best as you’re able.

So, here’s my advice: do not assume safety tools and session zero are all you need. Do not expect this conversation to happen once and be finished. Keep having it. It’s going to be part of the game as long as the group continues to exist. And accept that there will be times when you fail to use the safety tools when you should, or you misuse them, or you cause each other harm despite them. 

People aren’t perfect. We all fuck up and hurt each other. It’s vital to accept that will happen to you and that you will do it, too. This does not erase the harm itself, and it does not excuse a refusal to apologize, reflect, and do better. 

I often see people try to avoid “heavy” or taboo subjects in their RPGs to try and avoid this. It’s certainly understandable, and defensible to a degree, to want a gaming table to be a safe place where you can let your guard down. That’s perfectly fine to want and strive for. But this is the motivation that leads to people banning racism or sex or sexual assault wholecloth as subject matter that can be addressed in any way. And that will alienate and possibly even harm people who experience, or have experienced, those things. It’s erasure, even if well-intentioned. And it doesn’t actually prevent players from triggering each other. 

So yeah. I guess it boils down to saying you can’t control everything, and loosening your chokehold on life is necessary, even though risk is scary, and that’s something that applies in every context, not just RPGs. I have an extremely hard time living that truth myself. But we need to have grace for ourselves, not judgment. Respect, not hatred, and informed by acknowledgment of power dynamics and systemic oppression. It’s necessarily a work in progress, but one we should be honest about, rather than afraid to admit.­