Avery Alder

Last updated

Avery Alder
Born1989 (age 36–37)
OccupationGame designer
Notable work Monsterhearts, The Quiet Year
Awards Indie RPG Awards

Avery Alder (b, 1989) [1] is a Canadian tabletop role-playing game designer. She designs games with themes of LGBTQ self-discovery, community building, and post-apocalyptic survival. [2]

Contents

Background

Adler began playing role playing games at the age of 17. [1]

Game design and writing

Alder designs and writes indie role-playing games and is considered one of the "most prolific" game creators in the TTRPG realm. [3] She designed The Quiet Year , [4] a map-making game [5] about community building. [6] Her game Monsterhearts was one of the first published Powered by the Apocalypse games and an early example of a specifically queer themed tabletop role-playing game. [7] Adler mentions that she wrote the game during the popularity of the Twilight series. [8] Fans generated more than $95,000 to fund the second edition of the game. [9]

For Dream Askew, Dream Apart , Alder and Rosenbaum created the Belonging Outside Belonging system. [10]

Alder wrote a chapter called "Queer Storytelling and the Mechanics of Desire" in The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games by Bonnie Ruberg. [11] Alder's games have been used to teach social responsibility and decision making in secondary school classrooms. [12]

Alder designs games with the philosophy that game mechanics for fictional worlds reveal the designer's beliefs about how similar systems work in the real world. [10] [13]

Alder has been invited to give workshops and present on game design across North America and Europe [14] and her work is a topic of scholarship in the history of game design.[ citation needed ]

Alder also acts Design Consultant on other indie games, and has contributed to Thirsty Sword Lesbians [15] and Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast. [16]

Belonging Outside Belonging system

In collaboration with Benjamin Rosenbaum, Alder invented the Belonging Outside Belonging system, which became a template for future designers' games. [17]

Reception

Reviews and analysis

Ben Bisogno at the Kyoto City University of Art wrote an in-depth analysis of Alder's contributions to the development of role-playing games that don't use a gamemaster. [18] In Transgression in Games and Play, scholars Sihvonen and Stenros draw parallels between how the game mechanics in Monsterhearts broke the norms of roleplaying games in 2012 and Alder's transgressive subject matter of "monstrosity, adolescence, and queerness." [19] Kawitzky's Magic Circles: Tabletop role-playing games as queer utopian method explores Alder's Dream Askew's "intersections between queer theory, dys/utopian theory and the ‘Magic Circle’ in play theory." [20] In No Dice, No Masters, Eric Stein analyses Alder's Belonging Outside Belonging system through the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière. [17]

Awards and nominations

The Quiet Year won the 2013 Indie RPG Awards for "Most Innovative." The prototype for Dream Askew won the 2014 Indie RPG Awards for "Best Free Game." [21]

Monsterhearts was nominated for the 2013 Origins Awards for Best Roleplaying Game. [22] Dream Askew, Dream Apart was nominated for three 2019 ENNIE Awards: "Best Game," "Best Setting," and "Product of the Year." [23]

In 2025, Alder won the Lizzie Magic Award which recognized her entire body of work. [1]

Offshoots

The Belonging Outside Belonging system was later used for other designers' games like Wanderhome [24] and Balikbayan. [25] As of July 2024, Itch.io lists 211 products with the tag "Belonging Outside Belonging." [26]

Critical Role played Monsterhearts on a special Valentines Day episode. [27]

Works

TitlePublisherCreditsDateRef.
Ribbon DriveBuried Without CeremonyDesigner2009, 2011 [28]
Monsterhearts Buried Without CeremonyDesigner2012 [19]
Dream Askew, Dream Apart Buried Without CeremonyDesigner (with Ben Rosenbaum)2013, 2018 [21]
The Quiet Year Buried Without CeremonyDesigner2013 [4]
Variations on Your BodyBuried Without CeremonyDesigner2014 [29]
Monsterhearts 2Buried Without CeremonyDesigner2017 [7]
Going For BrokeBuried Without CeremonyDesigner2025 [30]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Avery Alder wins award and goes for broke with new pocket-sized RPG". Rascal News. 17 February 2025. Retrieved 20 January 2026.
  2. ↑ Duffy, Owen (8 February 2017). "Monsterhearts: 'A lot of queer youth are made to feel monstrous by people around them'". The Guardian.
  3. ↑ Yue, Sebastian. "Meet the homegrown game designers making the tabletop games we can't wait to play". CBC.
  4. 1 2 Jackson, Gita (14 August 2016). "How the Quiet Year Brings People Together". Kotaku.
  5. ↑ "RPG Review: The Quiet Year - Shut Up & Sit Down" . Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  6. ↑ Dixon, Adam (19 February 2015). "Playing the Quiet Year, a tabletop game about building communities". Kill Screen.
  7. 1 2 "Pride Week: Dicebreaker recommends Monsterhearts 2 - an RPG about being queer and loving demons". Eurogamer.net. July 2021.
  8. ↑ Duffy, Owen (8 February 2017). "Monsterhearts: 'A lot of queer youth are made to feel monstrous by people around them'". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 20 January 2026.
  9. ↑ Duffy, Owen (8 February 2017). "Monsterhearts: 'A lot of queer youth are made to feel monstrous by people around them'". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 20 January 2026.
  10. 1 2 "Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans: Ep. 27 "Game Design with Avery Alder"". mrahpodcast.libsyn.com. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  11. ↑ Ruberg, Bonnie. The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Duke University Press, 2020.
  12. ↑ Cassie, Jonathan, "Don't Split the Party: Using Games to Enhance Social-Emotional Learning Strategies", Teaching in the Game-Based Classroom, doi:10.4324/9781003042693-12 (inactive 1 July 2025), retrieved 21 March 2023{{citation}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)
  13. ↑ "Worldbuild With Us: Episode 78: Interview With Game Designer Avery Alder on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  14. ↑ "Talks & Workshops". Buried Without Ceremony. Retrieved 3 February 2025.
  15. ↑ Walsh, April Kit (2021). Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Evil Hat Productions. p. 2. ISBN   978-1-61317-197-4.
  16. ↑ Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast. Possum Creek Games Inc. 2023. ISBN   978-1-954097-19-3.
  17. 1 2 Stein, Eric. "No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart". GENeration Analog: The Tabletop Games and Education Virtual Conference, with Game in Lab, Analog Game Studies, and GenCon. 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  18. ↑ Bisogno, Ben. 2022. “No Gods, No Masters: An Overview of Unfacilitated 'GMless' Design Frameworks.” Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, 3: 70e-81e.
  19. 1 2 Transgression in Games and Play. Edited by Kristine Jorgensen, Faltin Karlsen. Chapter 7: Queering Games, Play, and Culture Through Transgressive Role-Playing Games. Tanja Sihvonen and Jaakko Stenros. MIT Press, 2019.
  20. ↑ Kawitzky, Felix Rose (16 November 2020). "Magic Circles". Performance Research. 25 (8): 129–136. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2020.1930786 . ISSN   1352-8165.
  21. 1 2 "Belonging Outside of Belonging: Avery Alder's Dream Askew | Unwinnable". 7 June 2018.
  22. ↑ "2013 Origins Awards". Archived from the original on 27 December 2013.
  23. ↑ "2019 Nominees and Winners – ENNIE Awards" . Retrieved 11 July 2024.
  24. ↑ "Wanderhome is a Redwall-inspired RPG that arms players with dialogue, not daggers". Polygon . 16 April 2021.
  25. ↑ Carter, Chase (9 December 2020). "Cyberpunk by Asian Creators game jam spotlights neon-and-chrome tabletop RPGS without the racism". Dicebreaker.
  26. ↑ "Top physical games tagged belonging-outside-belonging". itch.io. Retrieved 11 July 2024.
  27. ↑ "Cinderbrush: A Monsterhearts Story (A Critical Role One-Shot) | Critical Role" . Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  28. ↑ "Ribbon Drive". Buried Without Ceremony. Retrieved 3 February 2025.
  29. ↑ "Variations on Your Body". Buried Without Ceremony. Retrieved 3 February 2025.
  30. ↑ "Going For Broke". Buried Without Ceremony. Retrieved 3 February 2025.
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