Playing Outside the Mainstream: Essays on Indie Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Indie tabletop roleplaying games--games created, developed, produced, published, and played outside of traditional and mainstream publishing practices--have exploded in recent years thanks in part to emergent technologies that afford increased access to publication platforms for a wide array of diverse creators. Existing outside of the mainstream, these independently published games are able to tell new stories, in new ways, with diverse systems and settings and genres and narratives, expanding the concept of tabletop roleplaying beyond the d20 system and fantasy tropes of Dungeons & Dragons. Indie tabletop roleplaying games represent a new avenue for scholarly games studies exploration when considered as a whole: as a genre, or a community, or a scene, or an ecosystem. This edited collection begins that conversation by interrogating indie games holistically, using interdisciplinary approaches that seek connection and commonality. This book begins with an exploration of indie games as a collective, taking a big picture view and defining and historicizing indie games and discussing shared features like digital platforms and core playstyles like safety tools, before pivoting to a close analysis of individual games (like Blades in the Dark and Thirsty Sword Lesbians) to theorize about indie games as a whole.