for Queer Theatre class, 2023
In Qui Nguyen's She Kills Monsters, "average"[1] Agnes – an English teacher in the original; a cheerleader, that quintessentially ‘normal’ pursuit for ‘normal’ girls, in the Young Adventurers version – unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, is introduced to D&D through playing a D&D module written by her deceased teenage sister Tilly. Tilly’s D&D module doubles as a sort of coded diary, and Agnes learns things about her sister of which she had previously been unaware, including exploration of non-heteronormative sexuality.[2]
A Brief History of Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game, which boils down to a combination of complex tactical board game, collaborative storytelling, and amateur improv theatre performed only for an audience of your fellows playing the game with you[3]. It has tremendous overlap with a myriad of subjects – drama, English Language Arts, teaching (half my repertoire of teaching tricks originates in D&D), very basic arithmetic, and so on. Tuns of ink have been metaphorically spilled arguing the nuances of D&D as relating to game design and ludology, to socializing activity design, to social justice, to queerness, and to other things.
The current edition of D&D is known as 5th Edition, because, just as you might expect, there have been at least eight distinct editions of D&D:
- 1974: Original Dungeons & Dragons – The barebones original version created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, adapted from a game of army warfare.[4]
- 1977: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition[5] – Greatly expanded from the original in terms of gameplay options, this was the first edition to see large-scale publication.
- 1989: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition[6] – As She Kills Monsters is set in 1995, this is most likely the edition Agnes, Tilly, and so on play – as confirmed by the narrator’s line at the beginning of the play, “Forged by the hands of nerds, crafted in the minds of geeks, and so advanced in its advanciness it would take a whole second edition to contain all its mighty geekery.”[7]
- 2000: Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition[8] – The first edition published after the property was acquired by Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, also known as the creators of the collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
- 2003: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5th Edition[9] – 3.5th Edition was a fairly minor yet comprehensive rules update to 3rd Edition, allowing a certain amount of backwards-compatibility, so you could continue to play your 3rd Edition characters in a way you couldn’t have continued to play existing characters in any previous edition change.
- 2008: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition[10] – Most notable because, when D&D shifted from 3.5th Edition to 4th Edition, many fans disliked the new edition and felt disenfranchised, so new company Paizo swept in with Pathfinder 1st Edition in 2009, which was basically another version of 3.5th Edition, to the extent that many nicknamed it ‘D&D 3.75e’ – the similarity was great enough that backwards-compatibility was alleged as a major selling point, but in my experience rarely actually taken advantage of[11]. Pathfinder remains D&D’s biggest competitor, although they have increasingly diverged from their common source over time and new editions.
- 2014: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition[12] – Something of a synthesis and a distillation of all previous D&D editions, and one which has brought in an unprecedented influx of players new to the hobby.
- The 2024 update to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition – They keep changing what they’re calling the 2024 version – most commonly it is called “One D&D”, but its official name appears to be something like “the revision to 5th Edition D&D to be released in 2024”. Despite it being almost exactly analogous to 3.5th Edition’s relationship to 3rd Edition, I have seen neither WotC nor any prominent fan refer to it as “5.5th Edition”.[13]
Personally, I came into the hobby around 2010, and, though I played a few games of 4th Edition, I ultimately preferred 3.5th Edition, then Pathfinder. When Paizo printed a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder and WotC printed a 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I found I preferred D&D 5th Edition, so I switched teams again.
The Queerness of Geekery
D&D is, of course, eminently queer in a variety of ways – never mind what the grognards[14] of the hobby will tell you, and never mind the reputed conservative politics of Gary Gygax himself. It is an ongoing cold war within the hobby that D&D either is, or is not, ‘political’, and every slight move that either Wizards of the Coast or, in some cases, prominent fans make towards ‘wokeness’ is met with an uproar of outrage from a contingent of grognards.
For example: since the inception of D&D, the term “race” has been used in a Tolkien-esque sense, to refer to Elves, Orcs, Humans, etc.[15] Unfortunately for the hobby, “race” is a term that carries a tremendous amount of real-world baggage, so in 2019, Paizo switched from “race” to “ancestry” in its shift from a 1st to a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder, and WotC is catching up by switching from “race” to “species” for the 2024 version of 5th Edition D&D. This ameliorates (but does not solve) the problem that some races – especially orcs and drow/dark elves – are generally presented as antagonists and have, historically, been treated (or even, in earlier editions, outright described by the game) as inherently evil. However, both changes and the reasoning for them remain controversial, contested primarily by grognards who, in general, resist change of any sort[16].
Gygax himself has, as mentioned, a reputation as having been socially conservative – for example, he was “known to carry a weapon” and “known to be a member of the Libertarian Party”, according to the FBI’s file on him and his company[17]. In the earliest editions of the game penned by Gygax, non-human races faced limits (such as level caps) not imposed upon humans, and in 1st Edition, female characters had a lower maximum Strength score than male characters of the same race[18]. Observing these facts is perhaps more unkind to Gygax than necessary – he did, in his later years, seem to recognize the inherent queerness of D&D, and recanted some of his earlier design decisions.
At the beginning of She Kills Monsters, the point is immediately recognized that “geeky”[19] pursuits like D&D are inherently queer, in a way that is generally lost on grognards (or it could be that grognards attempt to suppress nonconformity in their hobby for the same reason any marginalized minority may end up attempting to oppress and marginalize other, more marginalized, minorities) – normal Agnes is initially put off by the demeanor of Chuck, Tilly’s dungeon master, and is reluctant to try D&D at all; once she does, she proceeds repeatedly throughout the play to try to hide the fact that she is playing D&D (even to the point that for a time she allows her boyfriend to believe she’s cheating on him rather than admit to doing something geeky).[20]
“Why Do Gamer Dudes Always Play Girl Characters?”[21]
One of D&D’s queerest aspects is explored in She Kills Monsters: the play recognizes and probes D&D’s capacity to allow for exploration of sexual or romantic orientations and gender.
In the Young Adventurers Edition, the character Tilly plays in D&D before her death, Tillius the paladin, is male, a different gender than Tilly’s own presumed gender, a common phenomenon known in the hobby as ‘crossplaying’. Tillius only appears in the play after Tilly’s death, presented (we presume faithfully, from the module Tilly wrote, described as a coded diary) by Chuck the dungeon master, but the character of Tillius nonetheless represents Tilly – at least until (though maybe also after) he turns out to be an evil five-headed dragon god in disguise. [22]
Similarly, the character of Kaliope is played by an apparently male performer in drag in the BAVPA production, which goes un-commented-upon.[23]
Agnes: "Why would she do that?"Chuck: "I don't know, why do gamer dudes always play girl characters?"[24]
I personally know, at the absolute minimum, at least two people (including myself) who are explicitly confirmed to have changed their self-recognized gender identities or presentations because of having explored gender options in D&D. I know at least a dozen more who have crossplayed without it necessarily having an impact on their genders or reflecting real-world gender exploration – while something like half of them have turned out to be transgender, I haven’t explicitly confirmed with them any direct causal connections between that and crossplaying.
The Belt of Gender-Changing has been a cursed item found in D&D for many editions, which helps to open the scope of gameplay and storytelling to exploration of trans stories. You put it on, it alters your biological sex, and you can’t take it off until you cast remove curse on it. My main problem with this item is its name – it would take powerful mind-altering enchantment to alter a person’s gender, whereas altering their sex is a trivial feat of transmutation in a world with such spells as alter self and polymorph, which can wreak much more substantial bodily changes than mere sex changes. To be sure, many groups play with this item as a sometimes-malicious joke, but in my experience, for every group playing it that way, there’s a group playing with it to actually deeply explore gender.
Tillius, moreover, is in a relationship with fellow D&D character Lilith – one appeal of D&D for Tilly, we are told, is that Tillius "gets to save the princess"[25]. Lilith is based on Lily, a fellow player with whom Tilly shares her first kiss, although neither Tilly nor Lily is out of their closets in any official capacity – being 15, Tilly is still exploring her sexual identity, at least in the Young Adventurers Edition:
Agnes: "Are you [lesbian]?"Tillius: "I… don't really know?"[26]
That doesn’t stop a group of cheerleader demons from bullying and making fun of Tilly for being a lesbian, implied to be based on an actual event from Tilly's life – Chuck: “I think this is actually your sister’s diary. She just wrote it in geek.”[27]
In the original version, everyone in the game’s setting is homosexual (including Tillius, who in this version is female, not crossplayed):
Agnes: “Wait, the big slacker demon is gay?”Kaliope: “As is everyone in New Landia.”[28]
This is a reflection of Tilly’s own homosexuality:
Agnes: “Tilly, why’d you make everyone gay?”Tillius: “Um, I don’t know. If I were to take an educated guess, I’d venture to guess that maybe the author of this world was into wearing tanktops and The Indigo Girls.”[29]
The concept of a D&D setting where homosexuality is welcomed, and in some senses even universal, is not unheard-of in actual D&D play. It is commonly thought that Paizo’s position is all non-player characters (NPCs) in Pathfinder Adventure Paths[30], and by extension in the setting, are bisexual unless the text specifically says otherwise – the official position is somewhat more nuanced, as clarified by James Jacobs, creative director for Pathfinder’s Adventure Paths:
Milo v3: “Is it true that NPC's in the Adventure Paths are bisexual unless otherwise stated?”James Jacobs: “Sort of. More accurately, unless their sexuality plays into something significant of their character (such as them being in an established relationship), it's not something we decide for NPCs. They can be whatever the GM wants them to be, which isn't EXACTLY the same as ‘always bisexual.’ The ‘Always bisexual’ is a simplification.”[31]
In my home D&D setting, after long struggles with what policy would be best, I have made it canon that 90% of NPCs are panromantic – ‘romantic’ because I prefer sex not to be a very big deal in my D&D games, ‘pan’ because it’s a little more intuitively inclusive than ‘bi’ – and the remaining 10% are evenly divided between some flavors of heteroromantic, homoromantic, or aromantic. Moreover, polyamory is well-accepted in society and by most deities. It would be nice for me to say that this is all for the purpose of representation and social justice, but in all honesty it’s just so the romance options for player characters are maximized, for the purpose of gameplay fun[32] – if you want to pursue an NPC romantically, it is almost certainly an option, even if they, or your own character, are already in a romantic relationship.
“This is a D&D adventure, not therapy.”[33]
The characters of the party that Tilly puts together, the characters played by her friends, are a queer crew in the tradition of Dorothy’s Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. They include Orcus the retired demon Overlord of the Underworld (a name drawn from the canon of D&D, where he is the demon king of the undead); Lilith, a demon queen whose father is “the Devil”[34] (a name drawn from real-world mythology, most famously the alleged first wife of Adam in certain apocrypha of Judaism/Christianity, banished from the Garden of Eden for insisting on being on top when making love to Adam); and Kaliope, a dark elf, a race shunned and considered evil by others.
A digression on race: the script calls for Kaliope to be a dark elf, or drow, but that comes with its own heap of issues, rooted in the issues with the drow species itself. Evil spider-worshipping matriarchal dominatrices with literal black skin (sometimes dark indigo in illustrations, never brown) are not a concept that would pass muster with a cultural sensitivity consultant today[35]. Two obvious options present themselves for casting Kaliope in this play as written: either put a white person in blackface, which has obvious problems; or cast a Black person as Kaliope, which has different, equally serious problems.
Casting a non-Black person as a drow and painting them with blackface runs into the issue that blackface has historically been used in minstrel shows to make fun of and oppress actual Black people, and is therefore utterly verboten. In the second season episode of the television sitcom Community, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”, the Asian actor Ken Jeong, playing Asian character Ben Chang, who was in turn playing drow character Brutalitops the Magician by coming to a D&D game in blackface. Ultimately, this was poking fun at the Chang character’s cluelessness and at the issues inherent with the drow in D&D, but the episode was nonetheless pulled from Netflix and Hulu in 2020.[36] No production of She Kills Monsters could possibly get away with casting Kaliope as a person in blackface makeup.
Casting a Black person as Kaliope presents problems which reflect the core issue with the drow species in D&D. Drow are usually depicted as literally black of skin, or sometimes some shade of dark indigo, no hue ever found on any real-world human – but the point remains that a species of usually-evil[37] antagonists use a visual shorthand that describes an actual marginalized group of humans.
Why did the 2023 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feature no drow, despite an excursion to the Underdark, their traditional stomping grounds?[38] After the movie came out, I saw a solid half dozen articles wondering why the drow Drizz’t Do’Urden, possibly the most famous D&D character, did not make an appearance in this movie. The obvious answer: good luck casting a drow in anything without radically updating their appearance!
Maybe you could get away with casting a Black person and painting them with black- or indigo-face makeup – but probably best not to risk it.
So the BAVPA performance of She Kills Monsters, among others, went with the somewhat less contentious casting choice making Kaliope a regular – i.e., with a beigey skin tone – elf, not a dark elf.[39]
At the end of the play, Tillius turns out to be, by some strange turn of events, the evil five-headed dragon god Tiamat (another name and concept drawn from D&D’s canon: Tiamat is the goddess of evil dragons[40]) that the party has been questing to defeat for the duration of the play – and to have been Tiamat since at least the earliest part of the quest, because Tillius casting magic missile, a spell not traditionally castable by paladins, is cited as evidence for Tillius being Tiamat[41]. This could potentially add a new twist, a new facet, to the exploration of Tilly’s psyche. Did Tilly see herself as a multi-headed dragon?
The five heads of Tiamat are played by doubling the actors of Agnes’s party – Tillius/Tilly, Lilith/Lily, Orcus/Ronnie, Kaliope/Kelly, and Chuck the DM. Might this represent Tilly’s struggles with friendship – or Agnes’s struggles with D&D?
Post-Script: Disability Is Queer, Too!
Disability is baked into She Kills Monsters. The script casts Kelly, the beautiful human player corresponding to the beautiful dark elf game character Kaliope, as a girl in a wheelchair (Kaliope does not need or use a wheelchair). BAVPA instead cast Kelly as walking with crutches[42].
Georgia State University transferred the wheelchair use to Tilly and Tillius[43] – although it was not well-supported in 1995, playing a character with a wheelchair is perfectly possible in this day and age, thanks to a well-known fan-made unofficial “Combat Wheelchair” supplement for D&D 5th Edition[44], which naturally has been the subject of many angry tirades from grognards who somehow contrive to find wheelchairs less realistic than orcs, magic missile, liches, dragons, meddlesome gods, hungry gelatinous cubes, demons, and polymorphing people into chickens.
Works Cited
Beuth, K. (Director). (2023, May 31). She Kills Monsters. (BAVPA 11th/12th Grade Theater Department, Performer) BAVPA Black Box Theater, Buffalo, NY, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmQxs99zWGU
Bulmahn, J. (2009). Pathfinder: Core Rulebook. Paizo Publishing.
City Springs Theatre Company . (2022). She Kills Monsters. Georgia, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7deLsNgb9Q
Cook, D. (1989). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monstrous Compendium. TSR, Inc.
Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2000). Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.
Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2003). Dungeons & Dragons v3.5: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1995, April 28). 149A-SF-106204. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3866268-TSR-Pt-4.html
Goldstein, J., & Daley, J. F. (Directors). (2023). Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [Motion Picture].
Gygax, G. (1977-1979). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide. TSR, Inc.
Gygax, G., & Arneson, D. (1974). Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set. TSR, Inc.
Heinsoo, R., Collins, A., & Wyatt, J. (2008). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.
Jacobs, J. (2015, April 5). Ask *James Jacobs* ALL your Questions Here! Retrieved from Paizo Discussion Forums: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page=1082?Ask-James-Jacobs-ALL-your-Questions-Here#54090
Maas, J. (2020, June 26). Netflix Pulls ‘Community’ Episode ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Due to Blackface Scenes. The Wrap. Retrieved from https://www.thewrap.com/community-advanced-dungeons-and-dragons-episode-removed-netflix-blackface/
Mearls, M. C. (2024). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.
Mearls, M., Crawford, J., Perkins, C., & Wyatt, J. (2014). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.
Nguyen, Q. (2011, November 4). She Kills Monsters. Samuel French, Inc.
Nguyen, Q. (2012, November 14). She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition. Samuel French, Inc.
Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ysDrH2vqKz6NSGkf3_0WX5tV-Ch_t_N_
Wiktionary. (2023, May 5). grognard. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grognard
[1] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters, 2011)
[2] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters, 2011) (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[3] However, over the past decade or so, a genre of podcast known as “Actual Play” has come into existence, first popularized by Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, wherein professional players play the game for an audio recording of their gameplay to be distributed to an audience, so it turns out the audience is not necessarily so limited as all that.
[4] (Gygax & Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set, 1974)
[5] (Gygax, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, 1977-1979)
[6] (Cook D. , 1989)
[7] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[8] (Cook, Tweet, & Williams, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual, 2000)
[9] (Cook, Tweet, & Williams, Dungeons & Dragons v3.5: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual, 2003)
[10] (Heinsoo, Collins, & Wyatt, 2008)
[11] (Bulmahn, 2009)
[12] (Mearls, Crawford, Perkins, & Wyatt, 2014)
[13] (Mearls M. C., 2024)
[14] Wiktionary: “(games, slang) Someone who enjoys playing older war games or roleplaying games, or older versions of such games, when newer ones are available.” (Wiktionary, 2023) Throughout this paper I will use this term to imply an older white straight cis male geek with relatively conservative politics – a minority in the hobby, but a vocal one.
[15] (Gygax & Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set, 1974)
[16] The most common objection I’ve seen to “species” is presented as coming from the standpoint that “species” has a scientific meaning which differs from its usage in D&D – scientifically, two members of different species are too distantly related to interbreed, whereas half-elf/half-humans and half-orc/half-humans have been part of D&D since its inception. This objection, of course, falls into the same trap that the claim ‘tomatoes are actually a fruit!’ does – tomatoes are scientifically a fruit, culinarily a vegetable, not actually anything at all, because categories and categorization are inherently an arbitrary thing imposed by humans on the world. Humans and elves, therefore, are different species in D&D terms, different ancestries in Pathfinder terms, and in science “species” is ultimately a taxonomic description, and not all D&D settings use an evolutionary tree of life like we have in real life – in my home setting, for example, humans and elves and orcs were created in three separate acts of creation by the gods, and are not descended from any common ancestors, so they’re not even the same domain, let alone the same species. (It may seem like I’m spending a lot of words on a specific hobby-horse issue here, and to an extent I recognize that I am – hence why I’ve relegated this apparent digression to a footnote and not the main text – but it is a microcosm of the grognard-vs-woke debate in the hobby, and, moreover, character race will become a queer issue for discussion later in this paper.)
[17] (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1995)
[18] (Gygax, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, 1977-1979)
[19] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters, 2011)
[20] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters, 2011) (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[21] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[22] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters, 2011) (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[23] (Beuth, 2023)
[24] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters, 2011)
[29] Ibid.
[30] Which is to say, published modules: the equivalent of what Tilly wrote and what Agnes is playing in She Kills Monsters.
[31] (Jacobs, 2015)
[32] Perhaps it’s also a little like Tilly’s reasoning: wouldn’t it just be nice to live in a world where 5% of people are straight, where they’re the queer ones?
[33] (Nguyen, She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition, 2012)
[34] Ibid.
[35] I have heard it argued that racism should not be a feature in D&D games at all, and to an extent I can agree, except for one experience I had playing a drow character that was actually deeply informative to me vis-à-vis racism. I played a do-gooder drow paladin in a setting where drow are looked down upon and the victim of frequent racism. Maybe it sounds trivial and absurd, but non-player characters calling me ‘spidersilk’ (a reference to the traditionally white hair of the drow), among other things, several times a session taught me more about what it’s actually like to be the victim of racism than have any of the dozens of books about or touching on critical race theory I have read over the course of my education to become an English teacher. Nobody ever mentions how tedious it is to be the victim of frequent racism. And I only stepped into that role for a few hours a week, and I could at any time have asked my DM to tone it down a little!
[36] (Maas, 2020)
[37] The problem of a mortal race – as opposed to one that needs to commit evil to survive, such as vampires, or one that is literally formed out of raw elemental evil, like demons or devils – being predisposed to evil is itself a serious one, and WotC and Paizo are increasingly moving away from it. My opinion is that yes, it’s racist for all orcs to be evil, even though you aren’t necessarily being racist against anyone, because it’s perfectly possible for racism to be an intransitive verb. If you commit racism intransitively, it is not the case that nobody is hurt: your own soul is tainted (whatever that turns out to mean) by this unvirtuousness.
[38] (Goldstein & Daley, 2023)
[39] (Beuth, 2023)
[40] Though in the play she is repeatedly referred to as “the Tiamat”, which mystifies me.
[41] I noticed this discrepancy when Tillius cast magic missile in the first place, but I ascribed it to either the playwright not knowing the game very well or myself not knowing 2nd Edition very well. Turned out the playwright and I both know the game just fine!
[42] (Beuth, 2023)
[43] (City Springs Theatre Company, 2022)
[44] (Thompson, 2020)
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