The Handbook of Heroes

If I were to write the words, “Imagine a pugilist at a ball,” I doubt your mind’s eye would conjure this scene. Pug certainly seems happy to have garnered an invitation though. And honestly, she couldn’t be slaying any harder if the Vampire Apocalypse was still in progress. There’s more to today’s comic than kobold cuteness though. And it has a little something to do with playing IRL dress-up.

Did I ever tell you guys about the time I tried LARP? Apparently I did. Cool beans. Anyway, turns out that wearing half a moose hide like a shawl and waggling a pool noodle in the woods was not my jam. It was a dry camp you see, and I needed WAY more booze to find these activities entertaining. But on the other hand, I always suspected that it was a case of wrong place, wrong time, wrong costume. Surely, I reasoned, an ubernerd like me would actually enjoy LARP under the right circumstances? Turns out I was right.

This goes beyond the aesthetics we talked about in “Courtly Dress” or the fancy fatale archetype proposed in “Enter the Slayer” (which incidentally was more or less the prequel to today’s comic). What I’m talking about is the chance to embody your character physically. And that’s an opportunity my group just played through. Is it time for another tale from the table? Does striped chainmail clash with plaid pauldrons?

So no shit, there we were at the Temple of Artemis. Yeah, that Temple of Artemis. It was a Girl By Moonlight game, and our troop of magical girls had to find dates for a very special occasion.

In our alternate history Earth, the city state of Ephesus survived into modern day. Its attendant wonder of the ancient world never fell, and was instead rented out for our school’s annual Moon Dance. Imagine Ephesian prom, but with a huge fuckoff ice sculpture in the shape of the moon. Instead of prom queen the Handmaiden to the Goddess would be elected, and it was our job to get one of our own onstage in the Tiara of Victory rather than the local mean girl.

If you’ve ever seen the Princess Prom episode of She-Ra, you might guess how excited we were. You see, this particular game contains the finest crop of transfems and gender queers that the Handbook-World Discord Server has to offer. And as the gaymer in charge of the proceedings, a thought occurred to me.

“Hey magical girls!” I wrote. “A friend of mine is getting married in a few months. We just went dress shopping, and that gave me an idea. What if we wore our finest prom attire for the session? Not LARP exactly, but a chance to get into the spirit of the thing.”

The sound of high-pitched, joyful squealing was audible even through a text channel. You see, part of the premise of our game is that everyone is eggs. Our magical girls are working in the tradition of Sailor Starlights or Kämpfer. The protags only get to be girls after the standard transformation sequence, powering up into magical girl versions of various Greek heroes. Togas and greaves and Wonder Woman skirts are very much in play.

“Actually,” said one of my players, “What if my character used the opportunity to come out as trans in her non-magical girl persona? She doesn’t expect to win prom queen or anything like that. She just wants to exist in a space and be passively accepted for who she is.”

You might imagine how hard my own empathy pinged off of that one! I did everything I could at that point to make the moment special. The slow entrance to the ball. The special song playing as she walked down the stairs. The suitably stuffed ballot box as the mean girl antagonist was handily defeated.

By doing the silly, playful thing and dressing up along with our characters, that moment of empathy and character growth surged up out of the fictional world and into the real. We were courting bleed of course, and that can be emotionally risky. But the cathartic payoff can make it worthwhile. With careful planning, a controlled setting, and plenty of agency, my player got to live the fantasy coming out experience everyone at that table had always imagined for herself in the IRL. Even as the ST wearing an old graduation dress, I got a piece of it secondhand. And that was a dress-up experience I’d recommend to any magical girl.

So for our question of the day, what do you say we talk about the power of embodied characterization? Do you have a piece of jewelry or clothing that you imagine belongs to your PC? Have you ever done the meme and gone to an escape room as your D&D party? And would you ever consider cosplaying your own character? Tell us all about your own experiences with D&D&Dress-up down in the comments!

 

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