Kelly Sue DeConnick's graphic novel "Bitch Planet" serves as a powerful backdrop for this episode's discussion, as the hosts explore its themes of misogyny, conformity, and resistance within a dystopian framework. They delve into a universe where non-compliant women are imprisoned and forced to compete in a brutal death sport, highlighting the narrative's intersection with issues of justice and societal critique. The conversation not only reflects on the story's implications but also challenges gamers to integrate these themes into their tabletop role-playing experiences, prompting a thoughtful examination of how play can mirror and critique real-world injustices. As the group shares their insights and personal connections to the material, they offer a nuanced perspective on how gaming can be a medium for exploring complex social issues while fostering meaningful storytelling. Throughout their banter, they engage in light-hearted exchanges, proving that even in a discussion about such heavy topics, humor and camaraderie remain vital elements of the gaming community.

Takeaways:

1. The podcast discusses how 'Bitch Planet' serves as a critique of societal norms, particularly regarding gender roles and conformity in a dystopian setting.
2. Listeners are invited to reflect on how tabletop role-playing games can mirror real-world issues of oppression and resistance against oppressive systems.
3. Throughout the episode, the speakers explore the importance of incorporating counterculture themes into their gaming sessions, enhancing storytelling and player engagement.
4. The host emphasizes the value of discussing sensitive topics in gaming, advocating for openness and the creation of a safe space for players to explore difficult themes.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Kelly Sue Deconnick
2. Hasbro
3. GWAR
4. Mirkborg
5. Cyborg Borg
6. Vast Grim
7. Pirate Borg
8. Eat the Reich
9. Bitch Planet
10. Chain Gang All Stars
11. Dungeons and Dragons
12. Mothership
13. Dungeon Crawl Classics
14. The Altar of Destiny 2
15. Warhammer 40k
16. Axis and Allies
17. Ice Age
18. Running Man
19. Handmaid's Tale
20. Orange is the New Black
21. Squid Game
22. Lovecraft Country
23. Stingray Sam

Foreign.

Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club.

Where great fiction becomes your next great.

Tabletop role playing experience.

Imagine a science fiction universe where non.

Conforming and non compliant women are imprisoned.

On a separate planet.

Now take those women and make them.

Fight in the Megaton, a death sport.

Match that will profit the very institution that imprisons them.

Mauricio Cordero, Rick Steck and Michael St.

Air are back to talk about this.

Brutal misogynistic world and how we as.

Gamer can reflect on conformity and injustice.

While creating meaningful stories.

Let's get into the conversation.

Hey, there we go.

Welcome again to the Game Masters Book Club.

I'm Eric Jackson and I'm here with three returning game masters.

And today we're going to be talking about Kelly Sue Deconnick's Bitch Planet, a fantastic graphic novel that hopefully is going to make for some fantastic tabletop role playing.

But first I'm going to have our Game Masters introduce themselves again.

And today not only are they going to talk about themselves, but they're also going to talk about counterculture in their games and what that looks like.

So we're going to start off with Rick.

Rick, you want to tell the people who you are a little bit about your game and a little bit about counterculture.

And I think we also said we were going to talk a little bit about who you are as a player.

Yeah, covering a lot of ground right out the gate.

So my name is Rick Deck.

I am known on the Internet as Dr. Lord Emperor and on the console sticks amongst my players as the Warlord.

As a game master man, counterculture and socio political schisms are like the bread and butter of my world building.

So this was, this is a fantastic foundation to build off of.

But as a player I love games.

I fundamentally think that gaming and games is the most human thing we can do, right?

It's tools, it's stories, it's solving problems that nine times out of ten we made ourselves.

There's nothing more akin to the way that humanity functions in that.

Right?

And so cut my teeth as a magic card player in the mid-90s with ice age.

Still play with some of my friends though.

So that's a transition out of me being, you know, behind the scenes gamer into being game master.

That's primarily what I'm playing, though.

I love to dabble in other things.

Mork Borg and Troika and Bastion Land and all of those cool, oh my God, tabletop role playing games that aren't D and D that I also enjoy very much.

Counter culture, which means in essence that there is something to be counter to, right?

And so creating circumstances wherein the obstacle isn't just some monolithic singular figure, but something so much more nefarious than that, like oppression through magical means or sociopolitical means to create this hegemony through which the players are either compelled to rally against or having to work within the bounds of and creating this sort of friction and is huge in my games.

I really enjoy creating these hierarchies where different factions are trying to wrest control.

So, for example, one of the figures that on its surface is pretty easy to present in the 5e environment is the immaculate blades worshiping a sun God.

But that sun God specifically treats humans as being superior.

And so the immaculate blades are seen by your lay person that you're dealing with in villages, etc.

As being these like saviors and heroic figures.

And they do all this good work, yada, the yada, but your Tiefling player innately hates them because they are racists.

Right?

It's sort of like the, the Ku Klux Klan of the south doing outreach at, at a playground or a bake sale or something like that.

And so creating these circumstances wherein the players are within a certain village created this circumstance where interacting with these NPCs and then having these immaculate blade figures show up in that village creates this dichotomy, creates this friction where, like, do we have to like, bite our tongues?

We have to get out of town.

Does it make everybody in this town a bad guy?

Like, what are the circumstances under which are going to create beef or try and pursue these, these storylines which dabbles on the very edges of like, what is kind of some of the contemporary things that we're dealing with today.

Some spaces that are seem innately safe on the surface and then reveal themselves not to be.

And so keeping my game spaces still safe, but being able to negotiate and sometimes get a lot of catharsis being like, yeah, fuck, fuck yeah, those racist Motherfuckers are gonna get curb stomped into the dirt and this village is gonna come to realize that these guys don't stand for everybody, they stand for you.

Those aren't rights, those are.

Those are privileges that the immaculate blades are bringing to the surface.

And so, yeah, that's one of the ways that counterculture sort of exists, specifically in the game world that I'm running.

Michael, do you want to take up the mantle next and talk about your gaming journey and about counterculture in your game?

Sure, absolutely.

I started playing in the early 80s ish.

And have on and off been playing some sort of TTRPG or tabletop game pretty much ever since.

Like many of us, I don't get to do as much in depth role playing as I'd like.

You know, life as an adult in this world tying into.

I can say I've met games I haven't liked, but never a game that I wouldn't play again.

I could not stand Axis and allies, but I'd be down for a weekend if somebody's up for it.

Tying into the talk about countercultures, and I was thinking about this earlier.

Every single character I've ever created has been some kind of a twist between a Robin Hood and a puck.

And wow.

Yeah, I typecast myself really hard.

So there's always been the characters I play fight against the establishment, fight against the oppression of those around, which puts me in a real fun place when I flip the table and become game master.

Because then I have to play the people I fight against and I have to do it without.

I have to do it in a realistic enough way that there's not just snark pouring out of my face.

Yeah, you can't always just be a Disney spinny eyed villain, right?

No.

You have to do it with subterfuge and subtlety.

And I'm about as subtle as a wet mop in the face in January.

All right, Mauricio, do you want to pick up from that evocative image?

Oh, that's a tough one to follow, right?

Yeah.

So I'm Mauricio.

I teach TTRPG and comic production.

Most recently I've been teaching over here at Northwestern like Rick.

You know, I started very, very young add.

I think I invented solo TTRP chain because I couldn't find anyone to play with me.

And I'd try to figure out ways to use the rules and.

And roll dice when I couldn't find anyone.

And so it was just tough.

Northern Virginia.

It was, you know, there weren't a lot of a lot of outlets for that and I discovered girls and punk rock so that stood no chance.

So I've been steeped in the counterculture.

I created a zine where luminaries such as some members of GWAR and Alternatives and other bands submitted to and claim to fame was we got the second and the last a correspondence from Charles Bukowski and his final submission to any publication to or little zine which go, go figure.

Then yeah, punk rock music, poetry, zines, all that fun stuff and.

And then I came back on 5e and I've been mostly running games and running away from 5e ever since the Hasbro debacle and the real bearing of the teeth of that corporate monster and just showing that they are just avaristic and just want money, money, money and the players oh can we say and.

And yeah, damn.

Professor and all.

So now fast forward.

I'm writing games mostly for Mirkborg and Mothership at the moment, but working on a big thing that may be too early to talk about, but basically it is dystopian shopping.

It's a ttrpg.

I hate consumer culture and so I'm experimenting with a system that takes it to most ridiculous extreme where your washing machines are smart and batting you out, where your fitness tracker, everything is coordinated and you it's worse than Orwell.

But in our culture right now we can't hide anywhere.

And I have a few books that just came out.

Clocklysm.

It's part of a four book series from Nagild.

And yeah, check it out.

My name is Eric Jackson and I'm the host and I am the least counterculture person on this podcast.

As far as my gaming experience.

However you'd like to think about it with a father who was very interested in getting his son to use polyhedral dice and graph paper because he was a geometry professor.

Those are the reasons why I ended up getting bunches of game stuff.

But as far as being a player, I probably fall somewhere pretty close to Michael in that I am always looking to be the guy who sticks a wedge in whatever the current power system is and see if I can't flip it or at least reform it in some way.

Which is what I hope all good counterculture is about.

The most recent version of the counterculture that I that I tried and absolutely just failed to deliver to my players was at a group that was working for an empire.

And I had an anti empirical group.

Their job was to basically try and return people back to dismantle large governments and to break people down into like smaller communes.

And I was like, hey, I set it up.

I set up the characters to be like, hey, look at these sympathetic people.

Aren't they great?

And they were like, yeah, yeah, but we work for the Empire.

We're good with that.

And I was like, okay, well, all right.

Those guys just go over to the side.

We'll have them come back later to do the things they need to do.

Kind of hoping they'd all join up.

But I guess in that regard, I'm not the most or the least radical.

So I was, I was like, okay, guys, you want to come join these folks?

And they're like, no, we're good.

Yeah, no, you do.

Yeah, that's always the fun part.

One of my favorite.

One of my favorite things that my wife often, when we talk about various historical things we talk about is we talk about, yeah, Privateer, man, that's the way to go.

Screw pirate.

You get the benefits, you get a letter of mark.

You can, you know, you can always retire later, you know, so there's that, but then there's that ultimate freedom of.

The ultimate freedom and ultimate danger of piracy and what that brings to everybody, which I think funnels us as close as I can from that topic into the actual book that we're talking about today, which is Bitch Planet.

Bitch Planet was written by Kelly sue deconnick and the titular Bitch planet refers to the auxiliary compliance outpost of an off world prison planet that exists in a near future dystopia to punish non conforming CIS and trans women and gender non conforming people.

The primacy of whiteness and maleness is the backdrop on which the mostly brown and female protagonists are made to deal with the imposition of a sport like event called the Megaton, which is a fighting game that is based on a total weight of the players.

In addition to being a brutal and potentially lethal sport, it's also the source of revenue for the prison.

The comic explores many of the tropes of the women in prison films that Kelly Sue DeConnick specifically noted as its inspiration.

Those tropes include voyeuristic guards, sexual exploitation, beating the guards at their own game, death in prison, and finally rebellion.

Bitch Planet delivers on all of these, but provides commentary and criticism aplenty while not stinting on masterfully choreographed violence.

So it is a collection of all of those things, at least from my opinion.

And now I'D like to hear from my contributors here.

We'll start with Michael.

Michael, anything I missed out?

You got it all there, including the mandatory shower scenes.

I will interject that we are talking about the first volume here, which is the first six issues, so they're not quite raising revenue yet.

I'm actually been looking very forward to getting this podcast recorded so that I can pick up the rest of them and read them because I want to know where it's going.

Fair enough.

Also, on things that probably should be mentioned and haven't been mentioned yet, we're a bunch of older guys talking about a feminist piece here and written by a white female author talking about brown and black people.

So please take this where you take this from, where it's coming from.

All right, we are.

No one here is an expert on any of these things.

We are all.

The only expertise we claim is we have some serious familiarity with tabletop role playing, and we're looking to see how we can take some of these really interesting concepts and put them into our games in the most thoughtful way possible.

Feminism is a worthy topic to be hammering on anyway.

Just call it what it is like.

It's also like subject worthy of pursuing.

And, you know, if you can get that a dosage of that through epic fist fights and bass opera.

Yeah.

As a former high school teacher who ran D and D groups, I can tell you that I certainly didn't use Planet as a basis.

But we do find a lot of times one of the things that I really liked about running games with younger people is that they really do spend a lot of time exploring some very strange things.

Not that adults don't do it too, but kids seem very free and this is one of the spaces where they can explore it.

And it's actually one of the places where we adults can explore these topics in a way that allows us to.

To have a little bit of separation, but to see the consequences of the choices.

I was going to say something very much along those lines.

Role playing games in general allow you to experiment and explore in a way that is safe from real, lasting repercussion.

Except you might lose a friend if that friend is apparently not able to cope.

I know that I certainly as a bi person, early Bard playing was definitely helpful to me figuring out who I was.

The Bard, the ultimate, the ultimate mouthpiece for.

For the Barnes tagline Bard, I'd hit that.

Let's check back to Bitch Planet as a book, as a piece of literature.

Mauricio, I know you always have something cool to Say.

So I'm going to ask you if you have something cool to say.

Us dudes talking about Bitch Planet.

I think it is highly appropriate in that we're the target audience.

Women and minorities know this.

They live this.

And if there's someone that needs to have this story hammered into their brains, it's dudes.

Older dudes, especially our age, because, you know, we've had it relatively easy in terms of gender.

I'm, of course, not white, so I've had a kind of a different take on this.

But we are the audience that really, really matters, because we're the audience that needs to change.

The audience affected by this has lived this their entire lives.

So just wanted to say that.

And what better way to explore this and through this comic.

It's exciting, it's beautifully drawn, it's intriguing, It's.

It's amorphous.

It just keeps changing each volume.

And I've been teaching this book for about seven years, but at MIT in my comic book course, and now I'm teaching it at Northwestern.

And it's just really amazing to see a group of young men and women talk sincerely and honestly and deeply about this topic.

So, dudes, if there's any, you know, grognoids out there that have not read this book, man, pick it up.

It's.

It's for you.

Calling your name.

You know, I was kind of had a moment of, like, a brain bubble there because I. I was.

Wanted to make sure that Michael had all the time to say what he wanted to say about this and was like, didn't know that we're kind of talking about what we.

You know, I'm picking up what Mauricio is putting down now and would just like to add all that stuff.

Totally accurate.

Yeah.

I feel that also, just as a standalone piece of media, if you just, like, plop that sucker down on a coffee table, I guess we're kind of trying to, like, create a little buffer and boundaries that we haven't, you know, hey, we're not trying to mansplain feminism to anybody, but just straight up, it's a good fucking read.

Like, you could plop it down on the coffee table.

You like Wonder Woman or Captain America or the Boys, or, like, you just, like, images and text smashed together and being able to, like, there are some parts of it, like, I found myself rereading some things.

I was like, man, this feels like something that I should be spending the time to really ingest this dialogue.

And then I also went like, oh, shit.

Oh, she's gonna get it?

Fuck, yeah.

And it just, like, it has some of those, like, really well paced sequences where they're like, you know, building a world that's not unlike Blade Runner, has this very, like, imposing heft to the world, but when the action is happening, it's like a pressure cooker, you know, Just the side note to that.

Yes, it carries all these heavy themes, but also it's just like on a mechanical level, just as a comic book, like, really chugs.

I'm so glad you said that, Rick, because I literally do plop this on my coffee table as a conversation piece.

And people have had that reaction.

The COVID is wonderful.

It looks just like an exploitation film poster.

And people can't help but pick it up.

And then once they do, they're in the web.

Yeah.

And yes, and we've got them.

Rick mentioned the mechanics of the book.

I want to get into the mechanics of how we could turn this into a tabletop role playing experience for folks.

Mauricio, would it be okay if you took the first crack at this and if you wanted to take Planet and bring it to your table as closely as possible or something like it, what system would you use?

And why would be Cyborg, which.

And Eric, I think your players would love rule number 00 in corkboard, which states players cannot be loyal to or have sympathy for the corpse, the cops, or the capitalist system.

Yeah, I love this.

There you go.

And I agree that I tried to slip my thing in without having a discussion with my player characters about, like, what I thought the game was going to be about, like.

And so I suffered from a bad session zero at the.

@ least in that regard.

But yes, that is.

That is a great session zero point.

When we're like, okay, everybody, we all agree the corpse are bad.

Are we good with that?

All right.

Because that's how this game is.

Going.

Last night I was thinking, or the Dumila or the Megaton portion, the athletic portion.

Man, that'd be fun to run with.

Basically a kind of a sports based.

Think a rollerball.

Think Running man version of Engine Crawl Classics in the funnel system could just see a.

One.

Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying.

Because, yeah, the DCC funnel system, where you start off with multiple characters and whatever you get left with ends up being your character.

I've experienced that a couple of times.

And yeah, that really does work for that.

Particularly that first scene where everybody's coming in, which is again, another trope that sort of welcome to the prison scene that happens in all prison films.

That's a great moment for that DCC funnel.

I agree.

You figure out what that is.

Come back to us, Mauricio.

Michael, do you want to hit us up with your choice for how.

To run a bitch planet?

Far too much time actually thinking about this and I can't think of a single system that would really work really well.

I have this idea that for the social interactions you need to have something that is somehow completely weighted towards the old white men in suits.

So like you're doing a contested challenge and the prisoner has a single D20 to hit a skill check.

Whereas the.

The fathers as they are called, which as a father insults me greatly.

They're rolling five D20Is to hit the same target number.

And it's cumulative fighting.

There are a lot of fight things.

I think the fighting should be quick and dirty.

I mean my favorite fighting thing was in a silly game called Hole Human Occupied Landfill.

It is very quick and I forget who.

It may have been you, Rick, that suggested the Metatron.

Metatron.

Metatron.

Metatron.

The Megaton.

The.

The game that's Bloodbath.

You're putting that on a Blood bowl pitch using a lot of the same rules.

You lose the racial stuff and the magic stuff.

But that is going to be, I think a super fun way to.

There's a streamlined version of it that just came out that I've heard about that I haven't actually looked into that would be, you know, cool to wrap in.

But I couldn't think of a single, A single system that would cover all of the things you needed to do and have fun.

With.

It is challenging.

Why I've gathered this, this team of superheroes, as it were, to solve this problem.

This council of Reed Richards, Doom Patrol.

Oh, who's the.

Oh, darn it.

I can't remember who the professor is from that one.

The guy who's the professor, who's the in charge of.

That?

The.

The pseudo down.

Below.

Rick, you are next to pop.

In wagon to figure out is there something that you were gonna.

Add?

Just X Crawl Classics is the one I'm thinking of where it's basically Dungeon Crawler Carl where the dungeon crawl is live streamed and it's sort of a sporting event.

And I think that would be a great one for the funnel.

But anyhow, over to you.

Rick.

Just before you go, Rick, let me just say thank you Mauricio for stealing one of my book choices.

There we.

Go.

Perfect.

Oh, and by the way, Dungeon crawler car.

There's a previous episode of the Game Masters Book Club.

So feel free to check.

Us.

Check that.

Out.

Okay.

I think we were chatting about this previously.

I had mentioned blood bowl as being a good option, but specifically for the combat end of things.

And so to really kind of drill down on some of what Michael was saying is like, yeah, it would be really hard to make that work without it being pretty uneven.

Then why not go to the source?

Why not go to the fucking fount of white guys rolling dice and let's go right back to promised land of Gygax and all of those, you know, founders in their war dungeons back in the day.

And I think the white book D and D, first edition as a heartbreaker is a brutal, lethal, grinding, grudging combat system that I could see having your, like, legions of inmates and henchmen and all of these sorts of, like, where you're just rolling to have faceless contacts and connections in the background who don't even have stat blocks being ground up on the grist mill.

That is the horror of this prison industrial complex.

And I. I think that not looking at it from the contemporary lens of TTRPGs, which are very, very power fantasy focused, I think you need to flip the script on it and be looking at it from the other end, which is war gaming.

War gaming was meant where there's a guy wearing a goddamn crown at the end of that table and he was gonna you up, he was gonna smash your character.

Like, the idea before, like 99 or something, that you would get emotionally invested in a character was anathema.

You were expecting to get your gut spilled at some point in time in a couple of sessions.

And so using some of those old OSR formats, I think are a good headspace, I think to approach a place that is as brutal and.

And imposing as this re education system.

And so using that as the overarching background, but using the blood bowl sort of team building, like wargaming is how you're approaching it from a GM standpoint, but your players are playing this mechanical.

You're trading people, you're trading alignments and alliances.

And here in Lowell, we do a thing called the kinetic sculpture race.

It's every year, September.

Love it.

It's full of whimsy.

It's, you know, it's the exact opposite of Bitch planet and the horror that that brings to bear.

It's very inclusive and awesome.

Sailing for mill, that stuff.

And having done work with those guys in their rule set, there's something that I absolutely adore, which is cheating is encouraged.

You should bribe judges and try and like Find ways to like, grease palms and, and kind of get the rules bent and people looking, you know, away.

And I would love to see that mechanic built into a system where you're trying to like squeeze the NPCs that the D, you know, trying to really curry favor with your warden, the gm, to maybe get some leniency or politic to.

To screw some other player so that you can get away with whatever you're trying, like little schema you're trying to get.

So blood bowl, white book, chainmail, white book with a fair amount of backhanded dirty dealing to kind of get yourself ahead at the table.

That.

Oh my goodness, where did my brain go?

Card game.

Kick down the.

Door.

Munchkin.

Yes, munchkin.

Where cheating is allowed as long as nobody catches you.

That feeling of like, yeah, as long as you don't mention it and.

Nobody picks up on it.

We're all cool sort of element to it.

We've like, here are these mechanics that you can absolutely do.

But if you can get the wink nudge, you know, to be able to.

Instead of discarding this card into your graveyard, you're slipping it back into your hand, that kind of element.

But, you know, now you owe them.

So might come back to bite you.

Might.

Ha, come back and bite you.

Later.

Yeah.

Again, as the guy who I feel is the least radical, at least to do what I can, when I was looking for this, I was looking for more rules to tell me how to be subversive, which is always a good thing.

And I haven't played this game, but there is a GMless RPG called Duance, where you have characters divided between authority and convicts, which is exactly what we're looking for here.

The players generate the planet so that there's this opportunity to put in place all of the systems that you want there.

You can start by saying it's a desolate planet, or you can say it's a.

It's a beautiful planet so you can build any world you want.

But here we could put in place the patriarchal authority backdrop there.

And then that culminates all that world design that you do with your fellow players in this GM system culminates in what's called a drive for the planet, which serves as the third leg of a three pronged system called the Uncertainty Triangle, which is used to resolve conflict.

The other two sides are servility and savagery.

So you have to balance between servility, savagery, and whatever that drive is that you decide is your third drive.

And that's where all of your dice get rolled and is it, do I get servility dice?

Do I get savagery dice?

Do I get this drive die?

The characters took flat to what Rick is saying.

The characters play notables.

So there's this whole population of people and you're a notable prisoner, and that makes you like a special leader type.

But each of these characters have.

Have an oath.

And if they break that oath, they cease to be a player character.

They go from being a PC back to being an npc.

So if you are the kind of person, you're like, I stand for justice and I'm going to save everybody.

And then you betray your friends.

That's the only way characters die.

They only die if you break your oath.

And then you.

Then you then.

And then you just pull someone else from the background and they become the new notable person.

So there's that sort of disposable feeling that both I know Rick mentioned and also that Marisa mentioned when he was talking about the DCC stuff.

So that's all in there.

And so all of that made me feel like, yeah, yeah.

If I were going to run a Bitch Planet game that it's the.

I'll try to run it in.

I have no idea how well it'll work.

Totally excited to try it.

Yeah.

Do want question.

To.

Looks really.

Good.

When are you going to run that for.

Us?

When are we going to run that for.

You?

Oh, that's.

Great.

I don't know.

I'll definitely have to pick a day where we can get you guys all in here and we'll.

We'll do it on zoom and we'll just have fun because that'd be.

Great.

Here's a real thing, and I'm just going to say this aloud and you can leave it in or not, but I have a number of my players, like, listen to the last episode and be like, that's pretty cool.

So when is this.

Happening?

That is the rat hole we run.

Down.

I like this thing that Maurice could have sent with Brad.

And like, Michael had this really good.

Like, I thought these two things are really meshed.

And like, I've kind of been painting the.

Yeah.

Pretty busy with work and the hive and all that stuff.

Like, you know, it's just.

This is all theoretical and like, the eyes glaze over and there's a lot of nodding and like, okay, so later.

I'm just saying, you know, if there is a, you know, we're talking all this, you know, we're talking the talk, what is the chance of there being A, you know, stranger fiction test.

Kitchen.

That could be really.

Fun.

Great.

We've got our systems in place, but let's be honest, as we just talked about, whether it's still in the podcast or not, the idea that you're gonna pick a brand new system and design it all and put it all together, maybe they're.

That's a bit daunting.

Right, so what are the bits and pieces?

The stuff that's portable from the story that you'd like to throw into your game that you would take just right off the bat?

Rick, do you want to give that a shot?

Is there a particular thing from this story that you're like, oh yeah, stealing that, putting that in my.

Game.

It'd be hard because like I said, you know, the current meta for DMs is, you know, the system is pretty power fantasy heavy.

I think it would be big culture shock to try and bring some of the things that would fit for this to a lot of my tables.

But when I was thinking about running this and it being such a fraught environment, some of the potency in the character interaction is that it's not this perfect binary of us versus them.

There is tension without and there is tension within.

Right.

There's not universal agreement.

There are some figures the.

I can't, I can't even say it out loud because I read the other books and Michael hasn't yet, so no spoilers.

But there is a.

There is a figure around which there is great agreement and sort of creates a certain title ship.

You can put your muffs back on Michael, but for the most part, especially in the first couple of novels, it is like tension in the microcosm and then there's tension out towards.

And so having a better system for dealing with PvP.

There are some times we're vying for supremacy, whether it is in verbally.

Like think about how you treat it in like, you know, at your table, okay, you're gonna, your PCs are going to talk to each other, but they're human beings who live in the environment.

They know what everyone else knows at the table.

You roll some deception dice, you roll some performance or insight dice and then they kind of land.

But everyone knows what they know.

Like a better system for being able to stronghand each other or fight each other, I think would be an integral element.

It would be something that created for this environment that I might port over to my other game.

Players have more stakes when they're trying to deal with one another in particularly difficult.

Moments.

An interesting and serious topic of player agency and all that.

Stuff.

Yeah, there's a Andean tradition called takanakwi.

It's basically like a weekend of getting absolutely tanked and calling out your rivals and fist fighting them in front of the whole village.

It's called Takanaki.

It's super, super metal.

So, like, if your boss screwed you over or, you know, someone sold you a bad bale of wool or something, or was I in your man?

Like, it's just like this kind of agreed upon weekend of airing grievances and shooting the ones.

And I think that if you had a better mechanical system for it, I think you'd see more players really vying to confront one another at tables that I think could really create interesting.

Dynamics.

I'm totally stealing that and putting it into a game at some point.

And having my players show up at a village when that's happening, that would totally be amazing.

Mauricio, to jump back to the book, though, do you have anything that you would want to port.

Over?

Yeah, plenty.

Some of it flavor and some of it.

Let's dive into the book.

That first.

First thing you see is a woman just desperately running through the streets apologizing, she's got to get to work.

But it's all apologies.

Oh, excuse me, excuse me.

And it's kind of how culture treats and trains women is to have them apologize for what is normal behavior for.

Men.

Right.

A guy's gonna push through a crowd, not apologize one bit, Just kind of.

Strut.

Not.

Not us.

We're nice.

Guys.

Right.

But some men will just strut through a crowd, you know, and when I hear my wife and her friends talking about this sort of apology culture in higher ed, you know, it's just so poignant.

And that person in the comic turns out to be the voice of the most evil character in the book.

The.

The nun, the mother superior, the pink Barbie God, and I love that she is so far away.

She's on another planet.

She's in a recording studio.

And that boss is untouchable, unassailable.

So I would do something like that.

A reverse wizard of Oz where wizard cannot be touched.

But it's going to goad you.

It's going to haunt every move you make.

And I'd into that something I did for the recent book.

I put out Cat Clocklism.

I did a assorted crimes table where you can be accused of many different crimes that kind of sets the action in motion for the game.

For example, you might be accused of defenestrating explosive fermented milk with A.

Priest.

Okay.

Table of transgressions of things that are just so normal.

And I'm thinking of Penny when she gets in the food fight with her mom and how transgressive that is in context of the comic and how innocent it is in real life.

People waste food that they don't go to jail for, and Bitch Planet they do.

And just having a list of these crimes coupled with this narrator that you're never going to get to this narrator is kind of a potent storytelling combination that I would love to.

Explore.

Michael, There is a whole subsection of things from this that I would like to actually build an RPG around.

But taking that world, shifting the point of view from the people that are on the Bitch planet and the fathers, there has got to be a bunch of people, maybe small cells, maybe larger cells, that are trying to fight to break this.

And so far, at least, like I said, we're dealing with the first volume of the graphic novel, the first six issues.

That is not shown.

But that is the part that I would want to run.

So much as a game master, as a world, depends on your players and their willingness to pick up the role that you've sort of shoehorned them in a little bit, you know, to get them.

This is the where the story wants to go, so I need you to go that way.

But someone like Penelope, who is this very large presence, but tries to pull herself in to do the right thing until she just fucking can't anymore.

That is a life thing.

That is a life thing.

Especially in my watching, witnessing and perceiving women, they suck up a lot until they just can't how to pull that out of a player, you know.

Dude, Michael, I was just kind of thinking about how what an imposition to some degree it would be just to run a game like this, right?

Because like, when Mauricio was saying, I forget the premise that you were saying from the cyber cyborg, cyborg, that like this, don't let the cat out, don't let the cops in sort of thing.

Fuck the bastards that you create, rubrics to play this world, you have to say, you are going to be playing disenfranchised, dehumanized, and degraded women.

And if your table is mixed, yes, you are saying, hey, you know, if you're CIS or heteronormative or any of These sort of things that are more.

More heteronormative.

You're going to have to stretch and maybe think of things differently.

But then you're going to have people at your table that might be like, this is hard because this is my life.

This is my, you know, play games to subvert these things or push through these things or avoid these things, or do explore other elements of myself.

And maybe that is a bridge too far.

I think this would be something you really have to discuss in your.

In your sess0 and how you'd even tackle this for some folks.

I don't have a great answer to that.

It's just something that kind of bubbles to the surface when I think about what you're saying that, like, why would I get this, you know, crammed down my throat?

Okay, I'm gonna go outside and.

And get cat called on my way to.

The.

Yeah.

And that's what session zeros are.

For.

Right.

Like, there's a lot of things in here that just may not be viable for your table.

Right.

Because it may not be something that folks are ready for on a completely different subject, but from a stylistic sort of thing.

I was working with my regular D D group that I see every Tuesday, and they wanted to play a.

A game with morally gray characters.

And our games last, like, four.

Years.

Right.

Like, this is a campaign I'm going to be in, and I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna play this morally gray character for four years.

And I was like, I wasn't in the headspace to do that.

And so I was like, guys, I can't.

Like, I can't.

I'm not gonna play this game.

You can call me back later.

I'll see you guys in three years.

We're okay.

And we had to talk about it, and we worked it out.

We figured out how to run the game in a way that was gonna be okay for me and get what I need out of it, but also allowed people to explore the things that they wanted out of it as well.

And I think that's really what this difficult Bitch planet stuff is about, particularly from a role playing standpoint.

Point that if we present players with very stark realities, one, we need to prep them beforehand and say, this is something that's going to happen, and you have to be cool with it.

And then the second thing we have to agree to Mauricio's Rule 0 points out.

How are you going to respond?

Because we talked about Tabletops being a safe place if we know that everyone is going to respond X way, then maybe that's the best way to handle something like this, that we can say, this is what this table is going to explore and we're going to go from this angle.

I don't know if that's the best way to do.

It.

You know, I. I'd argue that subversion by definition is not safe.

And I've struggled with this because I learn more about someone when they speak frankly.

And I learn more what I don't like when I'm confronted with things that I don't like.

The roads and soft plush carpet in an effort to try to protect everyone.

That's all fine and good, but tension is what grows, what helps us grow.

The way we make muscles is by ripping those fibers apart and they heal by stitching together getting bigger and stronger.

And so I think there is a place.

And maybe I'm in the minority.

Well, I'm always in the minority, but maybe I'm the minority.

But you know, I think safe spaces in practice for me are a bit different from what I see whenever I pick up a 5e or some big publications like how to Role Play.

Make sure everything's safe for your players.

Have this session 0 oh if I know what's going to happen, why the am I going to play the game?

I'm there to be shocked.

I'm there to be challenged.

And, and I know there are limits to this, but I think we're all grown up enough to be able to talk frankly and say the reason this is difficult, the reason this is going to be painful, the reason you might cry is because this is powerful art.

This is storytelling.

This is subversive.

If we want to make art as a tabletop experience, it's going to hurt.

And let's just try not try to hurt respectfully and compassionately, but a good story's got to hurt or I'm not watching.

It.

Try not to hurt needlessly because.

That'S the difference between it's where the line of.

Cruelty.

We're talking about art and we're talking about experiencing art.

So if we wanted to look at media or art that is similar to Bitch Planet and we wanted to use that to help inspire us to write these kinds of games, what is it that we want to show people?

What do we think is going to be the best for that?

Rick, do you want to start off and tell us about what sort of media you think resonates with the Bitch Planet and would be good fodder for GMs who are looking to do Something like.

This.

Yeah.

He said, let me just.

Yep, there he is.

There we.

Go.

Good.

There are a few layups.

Right.

Sorry guys.

I'm just going to kind of snatch them off the table.

There's Running man.

Right.

Just from the perspective of dystopian top down oligarchs sort of pitting people against people and gamifying it.

I think that's a central theme.

Margaret Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale.

I mean Jesus, like that couldn't, you couldn't hit the nail more firmly on the head with that.

Or Orange is the New Black.

Like you just kind of take a, an amalgam of those three and smash them together, condensate it down into a storyboard of beautifully wrought images and essentially you get some semblance of Planet.

I would say Planet is a little bit more.

Is a little guess, for lack of coming up with a better word, is cooler.

It's more like.

It's pretty slick.

Like it's stylistically kind of cool.

It's the kind of thing, I don't know.

I. I think about what reading comic books was like when I was like in high school, before everyone had phones and all that stuff.

I know I'm dating myself, whatever, but like we had talked about this last time.

We talked about how important Love and Rockets as a series was to me and how I've re sort of looked at it as this reflection of myself as I've sort of grown from a.

A boy to a young man to a man over time.

What it means to have a relationship with my own emotions and the emotions of other and heartbreak and like all those sorts of things.

But like having that book hang out of the back of your backpack so that someone could be like, oh, you're reading that like bitch.

Planet is kind of one of those like, you know, Mauricio putting it on his coffee table.

It's one of those ones that you just kind of want to be like reading on the train because it's, it's a signal.

It's, you know, it's pretty fucking cool.

It takes all those other things but it packages them this way that is just like.

Yeah, it has this sort of resonant hum.

The BPM is at like that pretty like punk rock head bobbing.

Like it really paces along.

And so like Handmaiden's Tale, Orange is a New Black Running Man.

Mash them all together, but also have them to the soundtrack Segue.

I would say Sonic Youth's Dirty is a great record that has that vibe, has that trash but has that kind of groove to it.

Alien isolation, the video game.

I thought like just how claustrophobic it is.

Not exactly analogous but like how the claustrophobia element of it.

Lovecraft country, the book, not the TV show.

Just because like the real horror of planet it's not the beatings and the.

And the assaults and all these things.

It's like just being a woman who's alive in that time period in that world.

Same thing with Lovecraft Country.

Thematically it isn't about just the.

The cosmic horrors of unknowable mind breaking enormity.

It's being black in the south in America at the time period that takes place in.

And lastly you can't get it any other place except for YouTube now is the Corey Maccabee and Billy Nair show masterpiece, which is Stingray Sam, which is a black and white musical about the denizens of a prison planet and their mission to get basically their collars taken off so that they can be free again.

A lot of stuff.

But this comic book series is a lot of things, so got a lot of.

Facets.

Michael, you want to.

Continue?

I would start off by saying go back to the roots.

Go back to the 70s early 80s exploitation films and look at them beyond the tits and ass, beyond the oh, we're here for titillation.

Because many of them had subtext.

That was exactly the stuff that's in here, highlighted by in Bitch Planet.

Oh yes.

Here's the obligatory shower scene and it's laid out as we have to do this because this is exploitation.

A specific one that comes to mind.

I mentioned this in the pre thing and it's only because there's a connection.

But reform Skullgirls starring Wendy O. Williams.

It's on the surface, it's oh hey, let's look at all of these women fighting and naked and being naked and there's boobs everywhere and there's a little bit more underneath that music.

And this popped into my head like a sledgehammer when you were talking.

Produced by Trent Reznor, Saul Williams and the rise and fall of Nikki Tardust.

It's.

I never thought of it like that until Rick brought up music and I went, wait a minute, music.

I didn't even think of that.

And that just jumped into my head because it is a story of being oppressed and screwed around by these councils of others that say you do not comply, you do not conform, you may not succeed.

And him.

Succeeding.

Anyways, I'm going to drop mine in next just because I think Mauricio is going to be the big finish.

And I'm going to say when we're looking at some of this deeply ingrained issues that women suffer, particularly in this book.

There's a great piece of science fiction fantasy called When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill that was really great at literally women with their skin splitting because of all of the things they put up with and literally exploding and becoming dragons and eating the people who were brought them to that who tortured them.

It's just that's a great book to go back to the classic parable of the sewer.

But the one that is again hit nail on the head the most is Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Aji brenya.

That is 100% a televised group of people who are in a running man sort of situation.

And it's all about race and gender and all of that great stuff.

So if those are things that people want to look into, that's my, that's my number one pick is Chain.

Gang also Mauricio picking up let's go from Light to Dark Squid Game, especially the last season that deals with motherhood, transgender and a few other non conformist ideas within weird voluntary sort of incarceration where people are in it for the money and get much more.

And then I'd say that 10 or 15 seconds every night that the Broadcast News devotes to covering the horrific ICE detention that is happening throughout this country from coast to coast where migrants are being separated from their families for basically non conforming crimes.

The crime of coming into this country, it's not a crime.

It's not illegal to seek refuge, it's not illegal to seek asylum.

So we see it every fucking night on the news.

And so just take a look at that and that should fire you up.

That should make you angry enough to run a Bitch Planet based game.

And yeah, some of the games I run are from that pit of anger.

Another one that's a little off the beaten path would be Nadia Tolonikova.

She's been touring the country with a show that recreates her cell and she's part of the show.

She's present for the piece and she's here in Chicago.

Hopefully I'll get to get in at the end of the month.

But she was imprisoned for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.

That's what Russia charged her with and she's making art.

And try to see this if it comes to your town.

It looks absolutely amazing if you're here in Chicago.

Well, this, it'll be long gone by by the time this comes out, but it's over here at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

And lastly, you know, maybe the lightest thing actually is andor which damn, I can't believe Disney greenlit it is such poignant story.

And it is particularly relevant in that prisoners are creating the instrument of their own oppression.

Much like in Bitch Planet where they are creating a spectacle that would only given the logical state side outcome would create more incentive for prisons to treat the women they do in Bitch Planet.

So this sort of formative aspect of incarceration I think is really fascinating in which planet and related to the self defeating process of being a prisoner that's building this gigantic weapon in.

Andor.

Does anybody have anything else they want to add in for media that we've missed they want to throw back out that popped up during.

Discussion.

I would say that one of the things that also is I'm just realizing it now, one of the things that's really striking about this book because I'm going to not go back on something I said, but I'm going to mirror something that I said earlier which that just take this on at face value.

It's a kick ass rollicking romp that is just, you know, lots of fist fights and great dialogue and all that stuff.

And that is true.

But having just spent the time that I've spent with all of y' all folks is that I think it's a collection of themes and ideas and a presentation that can't help but want to talk about.

Right.

We only had however much time we've had.

And Eric, thank you for let's run a little over and it's going to get condensed and compressed down and stuff.

But one of the things that I think just like really speaks to Chuck Palahnuk, right.

He's a fight club.

He's sort of queer author who's wrote a whole bunch of things.

But one of the things that he spoke about on like a podcast was how hates Hollywood.

But he loves the fact that people want to kibitz and gossip and all that stuff.

And he would say knowing that you've got a good story is when you tell it at a party and then you hear somebody retelling your story, you know that you're onto something, something you know, you've got a hook.

Right.

And not everything I read or consume I feel like I want to or enjoy sharing the concepts that were contained therein.

And this is a testament to the quality of this media.

I feel like I went to it with a certain headspace and then left it feeling like I've, you know, leveled up a little bit.

It gave me some XP points having read it and then even more so now having talked about it and worked through it and heard how other people have interpreted it and worked through it, I got even more out of it.

Yeah, it's a cool book, but it's also this kind of interesting theoretical.

Prism.

Here we are at the end.

Is there any final things that you want to direct people to of your work or things that you're working on or things that other people are working on that you want to have them go take a look at?

I know we talked about this in the pre game, Mauricio.

You definitely had something.

So we'll start with.

You.

Yeah, I got a bunch of stuff going on.

Like I said, recent Kickstarter is done, so now we can release release the files and books.

So check out NAU Guild Publishing for a fabulous foursome of books that take aim at chick tracts, which are such an evil of proselytizing and recruitment, we turn them into satanic instruments of recruitment.

Just bring people over to the dark side of Mirkborg, Cyborg Borg, Vast Grim and Pirate Borg.

Coming up will be a trilogy of pamphlets for Mothership that's going to happen most likely during Zine Quest, and then got something big coming up for Mothership Month next year that ties into that.

Yeah, we're working really hard on two standalone complete systems.

One is based on Merck Borg and one is based on Eat the Reich, a hack of Eat the Reich.

And lastly, it's my own game that I'm developing kind of on my own called Atwell, which is an amalgamation of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell.

And again, it's all about the evils of consumerism and deformity in a very repressive state.

Lots of fun.

Or.

Or if not lots of fun, at least great art.

Rick, anything you got coming up, folks need to know.

About.

Well, high public market has gone public or open.

Has taken months of toil, but we finally kicked the doors open.

Foundation has been laid.

And in downtown Lowell, hemmed between Merrimack street and 101 Page street, two corridors of commerce and community and good times.

And we're open 11 to 6 Wednesday through Saturday, 11 to 5 on Sundays.

We got a evolving art market on Saturdays.

It'll Be different vendors and different people, different themes.

Every Saturday and then every Sunday, like clockwork, the downtown Lowell Farmers Market bringing green groceries and eggs and meat and bread and all sorts of good sundries from local producers right into downtown.

Which still, yes it.

Is.

You know, it's a, it's a food desert down there.

So having have fresh food doesn't answer all the problems, but it pushes that pushes that issue forward a little bit more.

Of took over your life gets in the way sometimes.

Yeah, yeah, I could see.

That.

Went on, went on to the back, went on to the back burner.

So come down, visit us in downtown lol.

Come see me at Red Antler Apothecary where I'll be holding cord on the, on the weekends.

And it's a vessel so that people can do kind of what they like.

We want to be creating a third place for people down in downtown.

Lowell.

Michael, by the time this comes out, hopefully there will be stuff to find@stair.com that's s t a y r e.com the biggest focus is going to be based on stuff I'm doing with.

You.

Yep.

Absolutely.

I can come in and provide live and recorded podcasts.

I've got a rack and will travel.

I'll come in, I'll do your live sound and you're recording and editing.

And hopefully Michael and I will have some shows both from Total Con which is happening in February in Massachusetts and then definitely happening doing a couple at Rising Phoenix Con in.

April.

That was Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue Dacani.

It's always a tour de force.

When Michael Saner, Mauricio Cordero and Rick Steck get.

Together.

And given the range and depth of this episode, they did not.

Disappoint.

Check out their earlier episode Episode.

Episode 15 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the classic by Hunter S. Thompson for more of their gaming philosophizing.

Join us next episode with Jason Keeley, Rob Trimarco and Karen form to take us to SA Chakraborty's City of Brass, the first book in the David Bod trilogy.

You can find a complete complete transcript of today's discussion, as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-square productions.com GMBC.

You can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media on bluesky@gmbookclub, bluesky social, on Facebook at Gamemasters Book Club, on Mastodon at Gamemasters Book Club, and on Instagram @GamemastersBookClub.

If you've enjoyed this show, please like subscribe and comment on our episodes in your chosen podcasting space and be sure to share those episodes with your gaming community.

You've been listening to the Game Masters Book Club brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions.

Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music.

Later, gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising.

King.