It was awesome fun, even if I'm now infected with filth fever (got bitten by a dire rat. Along with our bard, who is a shardmind* and thus none of us can understand how the hell he's infected.)
But I want to talk about the gender distribution of our group and our characters, which is something I find really cool.
There's 6 of us playing (or will be, once our cleric recovers from surgery), plus our DM (who is S, for regular readers of this blog). So, we've got fairly large group, most of whom have either never played or have played little.
The gender distribution of our group is 4 guys to 2 girls, plus our DM is also male. Considering the stereotypical group set up (mostly all male, maybe one female at the best of times), we're doing pretty well. I'm the only girl actually able to play at the moment (again. cleric's in the hospital), but once the cleric's joined us it'll be a little less unevenly gendered. (Not that this is actually a problem. The guys are all really awesome people, ones whom I'd be comfortable being the only girl in the group with.)
Anyway, the group's gender division is not the thing which I find really, really, really cool about it. What I find cool is the character’s gender divisions.
We've got a male shardmind bard, played by a guy (F), a male human fighter, played by a guy(T), a male halfling rouge, played by a guy (M), a female halfling wizard, played by a girl (me), and our cleric has neither a race nor a gender yet (or even a name. She just knows she's going to be a cleric).
We also have an undecided/gender neutral dragonborn sorcerer, played by a guy (W).
The fact that we can have a non-binary character, that no-one raised the "but that's not possible" argument , is fucking awesome. Yeah, we've had a few "too afraid to look" jokes. But none of them were serious. Not once was it actually doubted that someone (or in this case, some dragonborn) could not know their gender or not be either male or female. It wasn't even an issue. It was just "This is my character. They don't have a gender." "Alright, mine is male."
And for a group of people who, as far as I'm aware, have mostly little to no knowledge of queer issues and/or gender issues (our DM has some, as does W), that's fucking awesome. The fact that they could accept someone, albeit a fictional someone, not having a standard gender, gives me hope that someday the whole world will be just as accepting as they are.
*basically a swarm of living crystal, who takes humanoid form. He's jokingly called the group's pet rock.
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