I’m still doing my best to practice optimism, though the world is going out of its way to make optimism difficult these days. Progress on Chancers proceeds apace, however, and I thought I’d hang out the chapter on player safety for folks to take a look at. I’ve got a monstrous amount of prose drafted, so this post will serve as a prose sample and do double duty for me, allowing prospective players to see where I’m headed. I can also mix in links here, so folks can find their way to some digital resources and to the launch page itself.

Here be the working draft of Chapter Two, any which way:

On Safety in Chancers

Before you tuck into your first session of Chancers, it’s a good idea to have a discussion about safety for both players and the GM in your gaming group. Happily, there many highly-regarded safety tools out there in the world of gaming these days, and if your group has already found a set that works well for you, don’t hesitate to apply it to Chancers. (Bloggery note–a goodly set can be found over here.)

I’ll speak candidly as Bill Wandless, longtime gamer, for a few paragraphs to lay some cards on the table. I’m not as conversant with the modern safety tools in circulation as I could be, largely because I’ve had the great good fortune to play with the same group of friends since about 2017. One of the group’s regular GMs was kind enough to invite me to take part in his RuneQuest campaign back in the day, and that invitation was seconded by players already in the group. Over time we’ve had the chance to try on many games and iron out many of the wrinkles in our interpersonal gaming dynamics, and those adjustments have all been made amicably, given our collective intent to do right by our friends.

Three other things are worth knowing about me, at least in terms of player safety. The first is that my day job involves teaching. As a result, I’m steeped in the idea of best practices, even if the notion often feels elusive at an academic institution. If there are strategies for doing better—for making people feel more welcome and more willing to engage with an experience—I’m on board. Most classes I teach involve diverse groups of 20-35 writers, so establishing a preserve for creativity and self-expression is vital. It’s tough to take risks of any kind if you don’t feel safe doing so. No one wants to be teased or laughed at for verbalizing aspects of their identities, convictions, thoughts, or values, and gaming deals with such acts of self-articulation regularly.

The second thing, oddly enough, is that I’m a hypnotist, a sidelong extension of my work with language. There are two vivid takeaways at the place where hypnosis and gaming meet. The big one is that imaginative experience is profound. The same capacities that allow us to get lost for hours in role-playing escapades also leave us vulnerable to tensions that can arise when our in-game personae encounter forms of victimization or harassment we might know from lived experience. (And I take for granted that experience is wildly various, that my own frames of reference can’t fully equip me to conceive of what anyone else has been or could be going through.) The second is that these effects register on the body, bearing on heart rate, blood pressure, the release of neurochemicals, and several other autonomic processes. I’ve seen a great deal of online chatter dismissive of the need for safety tools in role-playing games, hinting that they speak to some failure to distinguish between real life and the realm of imaginative play. When I conceive of safety at the gaming table, however, I think about actual hurt and harm, about how what happens in the mind can work on the body in unwelcome ways.

The third and final thing is the integrity of the fiction, an idea that appears in the section on “GM Best Practices” in John Harper’s excellent Blades in the Dark and which I dwell on often when I work on worldbuilding. You and your players have a vast array of games to choose from, so there must be something about Chancers that appeals to you in prospect. Given how I’ve promoted the project, I’ve got some suspicions about what that something must be. When we play Blades, for instance, we plug into the history, culture, and vibe of Doskvol; we adapt to the locale and abide by the operant conditions within those lightning barriers. When I write on the Rainy City game setting for Superhero Necromancer Press, I go in knowing the rain is a feature, not a glitch, that what’s wondrous and fun about that world arises from embracing the rain as a constant. In Chancers I proceeded in a similar way, keeping broadmindedness, inclusivity, and humanity in focus from the very beginning—both to help players determine how they might inhabit the Drifting Kingdoms and to help GMs craft exciting adventures arising from a coordinated set of fictional commitments.

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When you start up a Chancers campaign, consider beginning with a Session Zero, an open session in which the players can introduce themselves to one another while trying on the roles they intend to play and the GM can set the scene in Euphyria. Session Zero thinking is cooked into “The First Chance,” the introductory adventure presented in Chapter XX, which can be expanded to help everyone at the table feel at ease. Such sessions can serve as vital opportunities to lay down ground rules concerning thorny subjects, especially those areas that people at the table personally find disquieting. Also be sure to let players know they can draw attention to any in-game distress they experience without fear of judgment. That is a critical premise to get out on the table openly and early.

Chancers is flexible enough to accommodate just about any content exclusions, boundaries, and tonal choices your group settles on. Most games wisely set aside child abuse, animal cruelty, and sexualized violence altogether, and many games acknowledge problematic social practices indirectly or subtly, reminding players that they exist in the game cultures without dwelling on them. Conversational consent—talking things through and agreeing on the right terms of engagement—will help your group dial in the details.

As a broad content warning, however, it’s well worth acknowledging that Chancers deals with cultural bias. The word “Chancer” itself echoes with this prejudice. At bottom the word refers only to someone who takes chances and assumes things will work out. In modern British English, however, it’s taken on a few negative connotations and associations. In the Drifting Kingdoms, usage of the word partly captures the fact that early uses of Chancing magic were alarmingly unpredictable, which led observers to associate good results with dumb luck. Players will begin their adventures in a far more enlightened time, but some hints of those outdated attitudes might occasionally surface.

Those attitudes, however, have little traction in the societies of the Kingdom. They have been challenged and scuttled in most every dimension of culture. In terms of player safety and solace, GMs might find it beneficial to highlight the constructive dimensions of culture on the islands rather than emphasizing those glimpses of intolerance. “The First Chance” adventure captures the typical tenor of the game setting, which emphasizes mutual regard, community, and the belief that good things might be made even better. In the two days prior to the Muster, when the PCs will be formally installed in the social structures of Euphyria, they are sure to see folks of every human race and ethnicity and a host of the ogres, orcs, goblins, gnomes, elves, and more exotic humanoids one would hope to find in a fantastical setting. They’ll encounter citizens of many different body types and capabilities. They’ll also see a wide variety of gender expressions and relationships of all kinds, as well as the prevailing attitude that this state of affairs is what the Kingdoms themselves want—a notion that extends to the emergence and reception of Chancers, too. Beyond simple tolerance, the PCs will find wholehearted acceptance of all kinds of lifeways.

At the end of a session, especially if it coincides with the end of an expedition or similar foray, some safety guides recommend taking time for a debriefing.  That’s solid advice, especially if the group grappled with sensitive subject matter. In most cases, however, I think it can be more beneficial to affirm what everyone at the table thinks went well in the latest stretch of the game. If time permits, the session can profitably segue into an Interlude, which assumes life goes on in the Kingdoms even though gaming at the table has paused. The plans the Chancers have in mind—intelligence they would like to gather, for example, or the things they would like to build, or the connections they would like to forge—can often be set in motion in brief exchanges that give the GM help with their game preparation and the players encounters to look forward to. Experience and Reputation awards can be handled during these junctures as well, and Reputation will be an excellent guide for GMs, allowing them to sow adventure seeds for the future.

Whether the group decides to formalize regular debriefings or not, it’s wise to keep lines of communication open between sessions. GMs can also make themselves accessible in the event issues arose, especially if the issues concerned matters of tone or problematic content. Most players will recognize when they’ve made interactive missteps, but the GM might from time to time opt to help players appreciate moments when they unwittingly gave offense. The GM should not be expected to serve as the arbiter of disputes, nor should they be asked to police behavior personally; their primary responsibility is to support the integrity of the fiction, which will account for what the PCs altered in the Kingdoms and set the stage for the next batch of happenings.

Player safety will typically involve the regular revision and refreshment of conversational consent, as the dynamic of the group evolves and as new considerations make their way onto the table. Latching on to the ethos of Chancers, however, should help everyone get a feel for the best approaches to engaging with the fiction before long.