Skeleton of a muse in my closet

Several years ago, Garish and I were working on a rather large HirstArts dungeon layout, and after weeks of casting plaster, gluing and painting, we assembled our wee dungeon in the livingroom floor.

Of course we wanted to try it out and see how it looked with a few miniatures in, and that is when my X chromosome took over. Next thing you know, the dungeon-o-horrors had become Barbie's Dreamhouse. I went and got his iconic wizard character mini and my favourite half-orc and decided to have some fun with the camera and Photoshop.



Oddly enough, it would be another two years before Garish and Janara would actually participate in the same RPG together..and as it often seems to go with half-orc girls, she and Garish ended up "best friends" and nothing more.

Still....it's fun to pretend.

And now...the long-awaited point.

It's no real surprise that there are not that many girls hanging around the game shop. Most games involve math and logic and a high degree of male macho conquest mentality. Girls just generally don't go for that. It's just our nature. We prefer more freeform creative touchy-feely empathic illogical mushy girly things such as Nano-pets, Barbie dolls, scrapbooking and reality television shows.

WHICH IS PRECISELY why roleplaying should have been targeted more toward girls from the start. It's nothing but pretending..making art imitate life, getting into another person's head, and I'll even go so far as to say it's about drama, even at the risk of you, the Reader, throwing a brick at my head. We as a gender are hard-wired for that sort of thing, but most of us cease to indulge it as soon as we think we are too cool to play with dolls or our toy kitchens. It appears that somebody at TSR or WoTC later figured this out and so the later core rules of D&D are filled with examples which involve female characters and their players (which in most but not all cases are also female..but that's another rant altogether).

But of course there is that perception out there that a girl in the game group automatically means that at least one of the guys in the adventuring party will "get some action" or at the very least there will be some soap-opera interaction. Again, it's just one of those human-nature things that has to be either overcame or embraced. I suppose it all really depends on what sort of game group you are in and whether or not your spouse or your friend's spouse is a jealous person with homicidal tendancies.

It would seem, however, that having a half-orcish physique generally stems the tide of unwelcomed advances from males on game-night. Having a character who happens to be half-orcish helps in that regard too.

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The comic strip, by the way, was the genesis of a long series of comics I made about miniatures in general and orcs specifically. The series was called 28mm Theatre. I may be uploading a few of the more relevant ones to Flickr soon, and now that I am gaming again, am feeling compelled to start the comic back up.