Role-Playing Queer Assemblages Amidst Capitalist Ruins

Imagine the biology of the Crevice Cucumber: soft, green, expanding to fill cracks of a deep riverbed. Now, consider its relationship with the Psychic Fungaloid, whose fruiting bodies anchor to psychoactive mycelia running below ground. See too the Sprawls, the Moon Melter, the King Glow Jellies, symbiotically flourishing in their strange habitats. And listen for the ocean water crashing across the peninsula of land where the Spiky Cows live. The day the Trickster of the Shallows—a predatory worm-snake native to this seaside region—became extinct, I grieved.

The game that spawned these creatures, Assemblage, is one I designed. It is an outgrowth of my long-term interest in identifying and resisting social hierarchy through narrative play. This project in particular has taken me on a weird (and wonderful) journey toward relating more intentionally with my own power. Increasingly, understanding such dynamics has felt to me like a matter of queer survival—which is why, I think, Assemblage ended up telling stories of strange organisms who contend with world-breaking cataclysmic change.

I first encountered the term “assemblage” in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton University Press, 2015). Amidst careful study of the matsutake mushroom’s economies and sociologies, Tsing sees this rare, highly-valued, and ecologically precarious fungus as a cypher for post-capitalist survival. Tsing says that precarity,

is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive . . . Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.

The condition of “being vulnerable to others” is where the design for Assemblage began. It was early 2023, that transitional moment when pandemic-era art-of-apocalypse and quarantine culture were giving way to charged political discussions surrounding the ethics of “re-opening.” I felt deeply vulnerable to others, my nervous system attuned to markers of respiratory risk. I also craved—desperately—embodiment. I longed to play in-person the games that for the last three years I’d only experienced on Zoom.

Role-Playing Hierarchy

A centerpiece of my quarantine gameplay had been Dream Askew, Avery Alder’s role-playing game of a post-collapse queer enclaves. To characterize this experience, I must clarify that most tabletop roleplaying games are not “GM-less.”

Most readers are familiar with Dungeons & Dragons: part storytelling, part dice-driven combat, the world’s most popular roleplaying game employs hierarchical narrative rules. As players embody individual characters, a single “Game Master,” or GM, brings to life the fantasy setting, managing scenes and arbitrating conflict. This dynamic enables groups of people to improvise tales of legendary heroes by making narrative tension accessible: sparks fly in the power relationship between the “Game Master” and her players.

Still, there are other paths. Alternative, avant-garde, and queer tabletop roleplaying games, or TTRPGs, like Dream Askew reject systems of unequal narrative power by staging their gameplay as “GM-less.”

I’ve often compared traditional role-playing games to film productions. The player-GM relationship is similar to the one between actors and an auteur director. In contrast, GM-less games make play into something more like an anarchists’ meeting.

Role-Playing Anarchy

My 2023 desire for embodied play was fulfilled that spring by a series of GM-less “anarchists’ meetings.”

In collaboration with Pratt Institute’s Center for Teaching and Learning, I created a “Community of Practice” centered on GM-less TTRPGs, pitching play as a means to support pandemic-worn faculty in need of a protected creative space.

Witness us in Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn Campus Library, surrounded by dark wood and Tiffany glass. Cheese, fruit, and chocolate sit on the table amidst paper, books, and dice. Our characters are infiltrating a billionaire’s island inspired by Mar-a-Lago and the movie Glass Onion. We’re laughing, struggling to agree on the shape of the island’s map, and the exact personality of our fantastically rich antagonist.

Most of the faculty in that group (all women, except for myself) were instructors of architecture. While some were new to role-playing, world-building was a deeply familiar activity for these astoundingly creative, non-linear thinkers. Still, sharing narrative responsibility with the group was challenging. In my online Dream Askew game, and others like it, I’d played with talented creative writers and game designers who could receive narrative hand-offs flawlessly. But at Pratt, I encountered brilliant people who didn’t think like me at all.

Amid our disorientation and disagreements, I noticed that I was leaving each session weary and dehydrated. As the founder of the group, I felt responsible for I felt responsible for teaching each game. When my companions struggled to craft story, I intervened. By our final session, I realized I had become the GM.

Nothing in the design of the GM-less games we’d played that semester prevented the reenactment of authority. Ironically, it reminded me of the actual anarchist spaces I’ve visited, where a punk veneer of collaboration obscures the crackling ley lines of power running just beneath the surface.

Collaborative Survival in Weird Ecologies

After the Pratt group concluded, I got to work on Assemblage in earnest. In the game, I decided, players would imagine an ad-hoc science-fiction ecology—an assemblage—by answering questions on prompt cards. Drawn from a deck, these cards would entice descriptions of weird biologies inspired by messy, real-world ecologies.

Returning to The Mushroom at the End of the World, I was enlivened by Tsing’s implication that nature often ignores convenient political definitions. Matsutake mushrooms thrive in logged-out forests, fruiting best in landscapes destroyed by capitalist economies. The story of the matsuke is thus incompatible with tales of leftist heroics that simply invert power roles in the Dungeons & Dragons hero’s journey narrative. (Not that I mind a good tale of punching fascists from time to time.)

Maybe thinking about matsutake as a designer, I concluded, would lead me in a more fungal, alien, and nonbinary direction. Tsing writes: “We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival.”

My Pratt group, in its own way, had been oriented toward collaborative survival. The unspoken ley line in our assemblage had contended with the embodied experience of enduring academia. I think part of what led to my de facto GM-ing was the desire to make vulnerability—and maybe even transgression—possible within the hallowed halls of an elite private University. Could a GM-less story game respond to this desire, which I value in myself and in others, without nominating its harbinger as a niche king?

Creation in Conversation

My design for Assemblage responded to this question by exploring a unique character creation process. In traditional role-playing games, this process is a first entry point for players, offering foundation for narrative-building in the crafting of an alternate identity. This is often done separately. The game session, when it happens, contends with organizing story around a group of divergent protagonists. GM-less games can offer more collaborative approaches.

Beginning with archetypes, Dream Askew invites players to develop the game’s narrative foundation through emergent conversations on character relationships. Assemblage, I decided, would be similar: in conversation, my players would define not just single characters, but entire species—a collection of simultaneous, overlapping “we” voices.

This was weird, and good, and different. New narrative tropes emerged. Often, a player would describe a squishy, co-dependent creature who lived parasitically inside of another. Common, also, was the doomed and dangerous predator, precarious in its dumb, relentless violence. In one game, queer players built an ecosystem of immobile psychic slime molds and resilient fungi, upon whom the seasons enacted much weathering.

These nested, alien psychedelia were born from the rules I’d crafted for turn-taking amidst otherwise unstructured collaboration. Rigid, even didactic, design choices, I realized, provide players with an alternative to the limiting hierarchies we carry with us into unstructured creative landscapes. 

I decided, didactically, to center Assemblage’s core conflict on a decision that must be made by the players themselves: Who will die?

This is not without precedent. In Ben Robbins’ Microscope, another GM-less TTRPG from which I took much design inspiration, players act as disembodied gods as they enact expansive, planet-sized lore that unfolds across generations and even millennia. Zooming out this far is one way to avoid a common design problem in GM-less role-playing games: How do we generate meaningful narrative tension when everyone has an equal stake in positive outcomes?

In Assemblage, players must reach a consensus on an irreversible mass-extinction event in which exactly one species is forever lost. I realized that Assemblage was, at heart, a game about collective grief in this era of mass extinction.

Forced by the game rules to make this challenging decision, I sensed my players seeking out data and histories from beyond their imaginary world. They stepped outside of the story, facing instead the people who had been writing it. They asked themselves, “Who among us can take responsibility for this moment of narrative annihilation?” The consensus was abundantly clear: the person who would have been the game’s leader, its GM, under a different ruleset.

I have witnessed many games of Assemblage in which a de facto GM gently leads their ad-hoc community of play through the surprising heartbreak of their own disappearance. I have been that person myself.

Connective Tissue

Years later, I found myself simultaneously transforming Assemblage from game idea to market object and discovering within myself the need to step away from professorship as the primary container for my intellectual and spiritual work. On this threshold, I read a stunning epistolary essay originally published in Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun (MIT Press, 2014) by experimental writer Jackie Wang. In it, Wang writes:

For me, art is always what happens during an encounter, for writing is first and foremost ENERGY and CONNECTIVE TISSUE—a relation. It’s not the textual objects but the bonds that matter. So long as we think of artistic production in terms of the individual rather than collective body, then the isolated product will be prioritized over the relation.

Here was the biological metaphor I was seeking. Wang’s essay could have been a statement of purpose for why I believe in game design as such a uniquely powerful form of art-making writ large. TTRPGs can’t help but establish relations: They offer up play as connective tissue.

With Assemblage, I’d fomented a particular set of creative bonds, ones invested in transgressing the fractal reiteration of hierarchical power. Occasionally, this dynamic has allowed me, as the game’s author, to step outside the game industry’s contemporary drift toward “auteur” game-making. Prioritizing the “relation” over Wang’s “isolated product” has been my objective as Assemblage becomes something I am also trying to sell.

The game of Assemblage where I created the Trickster of the Shallows had only two players. It was an edge case playtest, exploring the adaptations associated with playing as a duo. In the end, I was again the architect of our extinction scene.

Early summer, seated in a green-glowing public park in Baltimore, Maryland, I imagined how the Trickster met its end. Half-snake, half-eel, the creature had a dangling protuberance to lure prey like an angler fish, but instead of a light, it offered a phony white flower.

Witness me in the park, mosquito-bitten, skin grimy with humidity as I described to my companion, an appreciative poet, how the last Trickster slithered to the top of an enormous tree as night fell. In its last moments, the being’s nose-flower lifted toward the moon, flesh-petals glowing. It quivered in vain and wonderful effort, straining toward something it would never quite reach.

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Featured image: Cover art for Assemblages, designed by Jill Colbert. Image courtesy of Scryptid Games, 2025.

Nat Mesnard is a game designer and writer based in NYC, and a co-founder of Scryptid Games and Unquiet Games. They have published fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Autostraddle, Blackbird, Cartridge Lit, Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, The Journal, and elsewhere. Nat’s digital story game Banned Together was a recipient of funding from the NYU Game Center Incubator in 2024-25. They teach classes in interactive fiction for the literary magazine One Story. Their last contribution to Edge Effects was “Finding Connection and Resisting Extraction in Quarantine Gaming” (April, 2021). Contact.