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Magic: The Gathering is probably the most successful, most varied multi-national fantasy worldbuilding project that exists in the world today. The most high-paid fantasy artists are probably united by some intersection with this game, and the people whose day job is ‘make an interesting fantasy world within these constraints’ the most are probably working for Wizards of the Coast in this endeavour.

This isn’t based on any statistics, I don’t have insider knowledge. It’s an educated guess. Chances are good there’s a company within China that’s doing as much or more, but I wouldn’t know about it.

For this purpose, though, they simply are the best there is at what they do, and what they do is cities. Mostly. Most settings have a vibe and a style but they’re mostly about the cultures, and the cultures are mostly the result of cities, and that’s all I need for that transition. Speaking of transition, then, today’s subject:

The Aetherborn, Avishkar’s genderless childless pollution people.

Avishkar, formerly Kaladesh, is an Indian mage-punk fantasy inspired world, defined by widespread and available magical energy that creators use to power a variety of different reliable machines. It’s a world that industrialised without the handicraft of wizards, without drippy candles and pointy hats (though apparently, Magic: The Gathering’s wizards avoid the pointy hat stereotype), and as such, it has its own different cultural vibe.

Mostly, it rules.

To separate it from the conventional settings, Avishkar is a place that doesn’t have some of the typical Magic: The Gathering creature types. Particularly, for small, humanlike enemies, Black (the colour) didn’t get zombies, and Wizards concepted instead a culture of people who were the result of the Aether engines. Thus, the Aetherborn. They’re people who are black-mana aligned, which means thery’re powerfully attuned with the control over life and death, independent, and have no inherent reason to care about community. The relationship to life and death is expressed by Aetherborn being aware of how long they are going to live, and have ways to extend that life through consuming other people’s life force.

They can be vampires.

They don’t have to be vampires, they’re not made vampires, but vampirism is something they can adopt as a cultural practice. Which again, if they know when they’re going to die, is something that’s obviously very tempting. Not all of them do though, but that means if they’re not slurping up the juice from apes, then Aetherborn tend to be hedonistic and fun-focused.

When you have the chance, take it. Laugh, sing, dance. Don’t allow the night to end.

Flavour text from the card ‘Live Fast.’

The Aetherborn are a nongendered community of humanoids that form into ‘families’ with no clear unifying purpose or explanation. I’d assumed that all the Atherborn unified themselves by the machine whose pollution made them. That’s straight up fanon, just something I had in my head that’s not justified anywhere.

As best I can understand it, the Atherborn are a people who are the byproduct of an industrial machining process. It’s a very cool idea but it also is hard to draw parallels to. After all, we don’t have specialised life forms that pay taxes that exist because they’re created by river runoff, no matter what Alex Jones says.

Aetherborn are an example of something interesting as an option for queer representation. See, Aetherborn don’t have genders. They don’t reproduce sexually, either, making them inveterate asexual, agender people. Without a gender assigned at a birth they don’t have, they can’t be cisgender, and they therefore also, can’t be transgender, but a character who has no gender is, in our world, more related to a trans identity than a cis one.

As a fantasy writer, this is a great tool to have access to because it gives you a way to represent the ways that relationships to gender and sex don’t meaningfully interact with any kind of assumed default. For fantasy worldbuilding, when the author introduces elves and dwarves and kobolds and goblins and so on, there’s always going to be repeated patterns of expression and identity that people assert onto them. And that’s reasonable, because people are pretty likely to struggle with inventing whole new gender systems especially when they’ve only kind of examined the one they have in a rear view mirror kind of way.

Having a species in the place that exists and meaningfully and obviously disconnects from these kinds of things is a really important exercise for the writer aspiring to fill out the world. After all, if everyone in the world is the same basic kind of guy, then there’s got to be some reason for that. In the real world, Christians imagine this is because God basically photocopied his own work (and he is a he), which is useful but also, I don’t know if you know this, the Bible’s worldbuilding? Very amateurish. They probably didn’t even have a proper session zero.

Now, it’s not that the Aetherborn are necessarily the ‘answer’ to representation of nonbinary identities across a setting, especially for, again, a multinational company’s artistic output. But they do represent something important in that they break from an assumed heteronormative structure for the whole world. The presence of not-actually-binary, rather than nonbinary identities, the presence of identities that are completely lacking in any reason to have a sexuality, or a gender, those things are characters that make it for every single other character in the setting, the ideas of those things are instantly easier to make sense of.

Look, explaining gender, in the real world, is hard. It’s just hard! I’m a cis guy, but that’s as much a matter of getting handed the default win condition and never once finding a thing about myself that didn’t work with it. That makes it difficult, necessarily, for me to talk about my gender in a way that’s novel or explanatory. If I have to write a character in fantasy setting who wants to be a nonbinary identity, how do I explain that?

Well, in the world with Aetherborn: “You know the Aetherborn that lives down the street? Yeah. Like that.”

When the time comes, let go. Nothing lasts forever.

The flavour text on the card ‘Die Young.’

One thing that’s a common complaint in a fandom is when there’s an over-representation of men. Well, there’s a solution to that if you’re willing to get involved and also there are some pills. But I jest.

I made this joke a few months ago back when at the time, Force Femme jokes were, amongst my friends, pretty funny. I know where I grungle after all. But then I realised that ah, things have moved on, some people may be mad about it, and some people may really dislike me involving this joke with their beloved space wizard franchise, which has only convinced me I should do it even moreso and harder, because those people can go fuck themselves.

You can get a shirtof this design here on my Redbubble store, and from there all sorts of pins and stickers and what not.

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Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a 2016 game by Sundae Month, and created in the immediate pall of 2014’s Gamergate. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor describes itself as an anti-adventure game. The game advertises itself with about as much story as I’m going to get: You play as the Janitor, an Alaensee girlbeast with a municipally-subsidized trash incineration job, who dreams of leaving Xabran’s Rock far behind her. In case you were wondering about whether or not the Janitor manages this heroic task, and successfully claims the sky and freedom it represents, no, no that doesn’t happen. This game is instead focused on the narrative of not successfully changing one’s life.

Spoilers for a game about being how bad things suck, I suppose.

This is a beautifully stylish game. Aesthetically excellent, brightly coloured, with a wonderfully junky characterisation. What really stands out to me, what I found myself loving in this game which I otherwise didn’t love, was the music. Beautiful music, fun and funky, alien and weird, filling a space with life and vibrancy, like all these weirdo characters of all sorts of different types of people.

The gameplay loop is pretty simple; the Janitor wakes up, looks around for things that the Janitor can turn into currency, and then, things in hand, look for the machines or tools or people that will turn it into currency. The world of Xabran’s Rock in is full of people doing drugs, eating bad food, selling cheap tat, hawking wares in a rotten way and buying garbage they don’t want. The Janitor can burn things for currency (that don’t pay out until tomorrow) but the Janitor can also sell found goods to people who buy them. Of course, because nothing is convenient, those people move around, aren’t around consistently, and don’t have the same return on everything when they sell it. The market is fluid, after all, and that fluid is piss. Even good deals and good information is precarious and temporary.

It’s an economy game (but aren’t they all). Unlike other games in the genre like Stardew Valley or Minecraft or iconic trading game Gazillionaire, the economy of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is prodigiously hostile. It’s easy to assume that a game about trading and scavenging has certain accessibilities, things to give a player a ramp to progress from ‘nothing’ to ‘something’ to then parley into bigger and more interesting somethings. That assumption in this game is simply wrong. Every way the game can limit the Janitor, it does. Storage space is limited, for a start. The Janitor doesn’t get information in a clear or easily processed way, and the prices for the goods being sold aren’t even consistent.Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is at its root a trading game of Dealing With Capitalism, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assert that the design choices in this game are about making sure that interacting with those systems sucks. The Janitor isn’t even protected by the normal conception of laws – where a game might use guards or police to signify why players can’t do some things that are considered ‘crimes,’ in this case, the guards show up to – randomly – shake the Janitor down for whatever meager savings they can claim.

It’s a game full of random bad luck! The Janitor can get sick, which impedes the ability of the Janitor to eat, and that inability to eat impedes any ability to sleep, and an inability to sleep means there’s no access to ‘tomorrow’ when the currency payouts happen. As well as illness, though, the Janitor has a problem of occasionally getting Gender Dysphoria, and needing a treatment for that, forces the Janitor to find one of the facilities that deal with it, and even then, those facilities require nearly-random amounts of money that may just completely vaporise any savings. It’s just another competing need, another unique medical concern, but in this case, the game makes it very clear it’s specifically an internal problem that the player character has to tangle with in a way that’s orthogonal to other medical problems.

Still, it’s this economy the game presents as its main interface with the world, and it contains my favourite bit of worldbuilding in the game. See, there are people who buy dirt and containers, and people obssessing about particular magical components, but there’s also vendors who sell what I think of as ‘adventuring supplies’ – conventional supplies that are clearly designed for the typical adventurer. Magical guns! Superior swords and spells! Cool armour and hoverbikes! Things whose prices are measured in thousands of times more money than I’ve ever seen the Janitor ever have!

It’s a fascinating component of this game’s design; it speaks to the world as a place that the Janitor works in, but it’s not a world made for the Janitor. Nor is it a world that shaped the Janitor – such a place would have made someone more capable of engaging with its ways of being more naturally, more intuitively. It’s a world made for other people; this place is colourful and bright because whoever is coming into this town on the way from point A to point B, on their quests which are clearly extremely lucrative is spending enough money to sustain an economy for just themselves and that economy has enough spillover to feed traders and hawkers and those traders and hawkers attract the artists and the musicians and those artists and musicians attract audiences and buyers and the audiences and buyers give rise to the drug dealers and the litterers and all of this waterfalling bucket pouring into bucket design, finally spatters onto the ground as a wet stain for the Janitor to clean up.

When we talk about things in spaces in games, we tend to think in terms of instruments – in terms of the things we can interact with, and what that means for how we interact. Doom, for example, makes its instrument clear, front and centre when it starts, a big ole honking gun just sitting in the middle of the screen. Narrative Adventure games are often built around the challenge of working out what in the game is an instrument and what’s not. Diaries of A Spaceport Janitor works from the ground up; the instrument of the game, the things the player use to make the Janitor interact with, the things that to drive this game for is garbage. It is the garbage of a culture of transition. Everything is something someone threw away because they were done with it. Everyone else is dealing in trash because it’s all they have.

Hell, the Janitor is dealing with the trash other people can’t be bothered to deal with! The transitional trash of transitional trash! The game then sets up destitution for the player such that the trans trash is thrilled to find trans trash!

I’ve talked in the past about an idea from Foucault, where he talked about places that exist to be passed through but never lived in; places that are inherently alienating, places that are made to be incredibly comfortable and have the conveniences of living, but not the conveniences of living long. It creates a space that is accommodating for a moment and hostile for a month.

They are decked about with signals to people that they should not remain; they say, move on; that you don’t belong; that this place is made not for you, and if you are here, you are not here to stay. These spaces are exhausting to spend too much time in, and incredibly hard to work in. Even those jobs that have the least interaction, the least need to talk to people, still have the demands of the place put on them. The workers in airports aren’t supposed to hang around in the social space on their breaks, just as janitors need to be inconspicuous while they clean. The people who work in these places aren’t meant to enjoy the benefits of this space, the comfy seats and the power point and the conveniences. They are for the people who will not stay. They are for the people who will use them the least.

There’s a term for these places. Foucault called them Heterotopias.

It’s a game made about a time in which the people who wanted Games To Be Fun was the cause and rallying cry to abuse the world around them. In a point in history where the people who demanded games be more limited, be more like that single ‘proper’ way, Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor was a game that seemed to resist that definition. And it’s not like it’s not compelling!

There can come points in this game, where between being shaken down for my money, an emergency gender dysphoria attack, and the closing of night, without even battery for my incinerator, that I staggered around the spaceport checking what was on the ground in the hopes of finding something I could eat,because if I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and if I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t advance to the next day, so I couldn’t get my next influx of cash. When I found some rotten food that made me ill, I was so god damned relieved because even if this was going to create a problem for tomorrow, I could get to tomorrow, and maybe deal with it then. So I ate trash off the ground.

This is a pretty rough experience for a game to get me into, and while I’m absolutely impressed, it’s still grim as hell, pastel colours and chunky pixel art with singing aliens notwithstanding. This game gave me the experience of subsistence living, just on the far side of rough sleeping, and like, there’s no reason for me to have kept playing. When I was starving in a raining night staggering around looking for food to, I need to repeat, eat off the ground, recovering from having been robbed and having an attack of the genders, there was literally no reason for me to keep playing this game.

I did it, though.

The game had me engaged, but it wasn’t until after I hit the pillow with the mess of whatever the hell I’d chugged down rumbling in my guts to make me sick that I stopped to go: wow this is fucked up.

The next day was a festival day.

And that was nice.

I sat and I listened to the music. And I smiled. I picked up trash after the night came and the festival ended, and got back into the grind for another while.

It makes sense, though.

Not to pretend otherwise about my preferences, I’m not wild about games that approach the world-building from this footing. The kind of queer videogames that diarise painful experiences and or culminate in player death or failure or just ‘defy’ the conventions of games being interesting and fun to enjoy, as if the space of queer art is defined by its relationship to just being miserable. It seems to speak to the idea that power fantasies are the things the nonmarginalised make for themselves, and therefore, those who are marginalised should instead make the games that defy power fantasies, as if fun is the tool of the oppressor.

I don’t want to be seen as saying games like this shouldn’t exist! Even if there were too many games like this that existed, any single specific game shouldn’t bear the burden of the trend on its shoulders. As much as we can point to a trend where women are presented in mainstream movies a particular way, we can still point to a way that queer media tends to be about spaces that other media leaves alone.

I know I was biased against the type of game Diaries of A Spaceport Janitor chooses to be. It calls itself an anti-adventure game. The game starts with a call to adventure then punished me for trying to answer that call, and the optimal outcome is not to change anything. My goal became to just return to the point in the cycle I was at before I was foolish enough to try and want to change my poor little Janitor’s life.

The 3e module Return To the Temple of Elemental Evil has a gay couple in it. Kind of. Sort of. Not really. But definitely.

The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is such a weird book, to me. I mean almost all modules are weird to me, I don’t tend to find myself particularly interested in reading someone else’s suggestions for a site-based adventure. I mean those are good things to have, it’s really handy, but apparently some part of my brain has never needed someone else to stitch all those things together for me.

That aside though, the Temple of Elemental Evil is a ‘big deal,’ a sort of historical artifact whose importance isn’t really something I get. I understand that it was a big dungeon that Gary Gygax was fond of and ran people through, and one of the real high-value campaign books back in the day. It had enough cachet that in 3e, there was a book as a throwback to that original campaign, with all sorts of references.

In the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, the players head to the site of the original adventure, with a town around it. This town apparently is developed from the original campaign, and is full of references to it. Particularly, the town has two ‘elders’ that aren’t quite governors, aren’t quite mayors, but are to some extent in charge. These two guys, named Burne and Rufus, are apparently, adventurers from the first campaign, refernces to Gygax’s own table.

Burne and Rufus are a pretty standard seeming pair of characters from the rulebook. One’s a wizard, one’s a fighter. They’re both pretty high level by the standards of a starting adventurer – in a world of 20 levels, a 10th level wizard is pretty significant, and capable of infrastructural power. These are the homage characters, characters that were good friends to one another back in the days of Gary’s table.

Now, this is where things get a little fuzzy. See, the best records I was able to find on this indicate that these two characters were not, in fact, gay boyfriends in the original adventures. They were just characters played by friends, who were nice to each other. And the thing with that is, as best I can tell, this led to the rest of the table joking that they were boyfriends, which, given the time and context and the fact that Gary Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness, probably indicated that these characters were being, rather than ‘gay’, being ‘gayyyyyyy.’

Now, this detail was then homaged in the campaign Return to the Temple Of Elemental Evil, where these characters who weren’t gay are seemingly represented as husbands. They share their tower, they share their quarters, and they share their apartment. When asked about it, the module author, Monte Cook, said that while the original characters were not intended to be gay, according to their players, when he wrote the campaign, he did intend them to be, but chose ot do it in a way that didn’t involve explicating it. It’s got an odd little effect of being a sort of sneakiness, like he was trying to make sure he hasn’t actually done anything an editor might notice.

What’s more, it’s an especially interesting example because it feels like something that started as a meanspirited joke between pretty sophomoric guys, that then decades later another author hit upon it as something that’s actually interesting about the characters and weaves it into things, resulting in a footnote in an edition that is otherwise, honestly, quite lacking in any material.

Pride month is rough on me when I want to write about 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. One part of the problem is that the kind of thing I was interested in, and bought during that time, was much more about character options and Dungeon Master advice. Complete Warrior, Complete Arcane, those books are ones where there’s a lot of talk about what goes into a character, and not about what that character expresses.

That means that I honestly don’t know much about the place I’d expect to see Pride material show up in the game, because with a few exceptions it’s largely not something character-construction rulebooks have anything to talk about. What I’d expect to see for representation of queerness in the world of these games is either explicitly intentional worldbuilding advice (where the books wouldn’t mention queerness, because they weren’t comfortable with the topic), or in any given text that represented characters and their relationships to one another.

Basically, the books I was getting weren’t the ones with scenarios and modules and non-player characters in them. The Dungeon side of the publication, rather than the Dragon side of it. I haven’t the means to look at every published guide to find anything ambiguous in them, and I have strong memories of owning an issue of Dungeon magaine that included a reference to a gay thieves’ guild leader, and the ensuing issue where a letter to the editor complained about it.

This is something that was present – after all, I was a bisexual guy reading these magazines and books so I knew there had to be queer people playing Dungeons & Dragons! But it was something that apppeared in such minor ways.

Back when the game was much newer, I understand there was a lot more proactive gender play, as framed by dudes who didn’t want to talk about things and weren’t particularly endowed with the deeper language required to talk about gender. Supposedly, Gygax’s table had people who had spent years in differently gendered bodies – always deniably in the background rather than in the actual events – like they were going on a vacation. These particular ideas, while being a bit on the weird side for their context, were all about playing with gender through a system that let them do.

It’s kinda interesting that when things went corporate with Wizards of the Coast, in 3rd edition, a lot of these signifiers kinda … just went away.