The Designer Who Made the Table Equal

Before Avery Alder, most tabletop RPGs had a game master. One person held the world. Everyone else inhabited it. Alder looked at that arrangement and asked: what if no one was in charge? What if the authority to shape the story belonged to everyone equally? What if the game worked not by distributing power from a single source but by refusing to concentrate it in the first place?

The answer was a body of work that has reshaped indie RPG design over the past fourteen years. Monsterhearts (2012) made queerness a mechanical reality, not optional content. The Quiet Year (2013) turned a blank sheet of paper into a collaborative map that told a community’s story through what people chose to draw. Dream Askew (2018) formalised the framework — no dice, no masters — and gave it a name: Belonging Outside Belonging. As of 2024, over 211 games on itch.io carry that tag. The mechanic propagated because the idea was transferable: any community, any setting, any story could be told with distributed authority and a token economy.

Alder designs from Nelson, British Columbia, through Buried Without Ceremony, the publishing imprint she founded. She has been designing games since she was twenty-two. She has mentored the next generation of indie designers. She has won awards for innovation and lifetime achievement. And she has done it all in a corner of the industry that most people never see — the indie RPG scene, where games are published on itch.io and funded through Kickstarter and played in living rooms by people who believe that how you share a story matters as much as the story you tell.

Monsterhearts and the Mechanics of Desire

Monsterhearts arrived in 2012, funded through Indiegogo, built on the Powered by the Apocalypse engine that Meguey Baker and Vincent Baker had created for Apocalypse World. It was one of the first published PbtA games, alongside Dungeon World. But where Dungeon World used the engine to revisit fantasy adventure, Monsterhearts used it to do something no RPG had done before: make queerness structural.

Each player chooses a “skin” — a character type that is simultaneously a monster and a metaphor for teenage experience. The Vampire is hunger and control. The Werewolf is rage and transformation. The Fae is manipulation and beauty. The mechanics do not treat sexuality as a character trait you select during creation. They treat it as something that happens to you during play — contingent, surprising, sometimes unwanted. The game’s tagline could be its thesis: your body and your social world start changing without your permission.

This was not a game about queer characters in a straight framework. It was a game whose framework was queer — where the mechanics themselves expressed the instability and confusion of desire. No RPG had been organised around that principle before. The Origins Awards nominated it for Best Roleplaying Game in 2013. Scholars at Duke University Press analysed it as a case study in queer game design. A second edition, Monsterhearts 2, funded on Kickstarter in 2016 at 534% of its goal — CA$95,130 from 2,416 backers — and refined the system further.

The Quiet Year and the Map on the Table

The Quiet Year (2013) asked a different question: what if the game was a drawing?

Players represent a post-apocalyptic community rebuilding after collapse. A deck of cards drives the seasons — each card drawn represents a week, and each suit represents a season, spring through winter. On your turn, you draw a card, read its prompt, and respond by adding something to a shared map in the centre of the table. A river. A building. A threat on the horizon. A path between two settlements. Small drawings, done quickly — less than an inch, finished in under thirty seconds — that accumulate into a living record of a community’s struggles and choices.

The map is not an illustration. It is the game. Every decision manifests physically. Conflicts become visible as competing marks on paper. Alliances emerge as connected lines. Disasters leave scars. By the time winter arrives and the game ends, the table holds a document — part cartography, part diary, part collaborative art — that tells a story no single player authored.

The 2013 Indie RPG Awards gave it Most Innovative Game. The map-drawing mechanic established a new way to do collaborative worldbuilding — not through spoken narration alone but through the physical act of making marks together on a shared surface. Other designers adopted the approach. The mechanic propagated because it was visceral: you could see your story taking shape under your hands.

Dream Askew and the Framework That Spread

Dream Askew began as a free release in 2014 — a game about queer community surviving amid civilisational collapse. Its innovation was mechanical: no dice and no game master. Instead, a token economy. When you make a “weak move” — something that puts your character in danger or creates complications — you earn a token. When you spend a token, you can make a “strong move” — something decisive and powerful. The GM’s traditional duties are distributed: each player controls not only their character but also a “setting element” — a facet of the world that they introduce, develop, and complicate.

In 2018, Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum published the refined version as a paired set: Dream Askew (queer community in collapse) and Dream Apart (a Jewish shtetl in 19th-century Eastern Europe). Both used the same engine. They called the framework Belonging Outside Belonging — BOB — and released the system for others to use.

The adoption was immediate and sustained. Wanderhome used BOB for gentle pastoral fantasy. Sleepaway used it for summer camp horror. BALIKBAYAN used it for Filipino diaspora narrative. By mid-2024, 211 games on itch.io carried the Belonging Outside Belonging tag. The framework had become what Powered by the Apocalypse was a decade earlier: a design chassis that other creators could build on, adapt, and make their own.

The Kickstarter for Dream Askew // Dream Apart raised CA$62,355 and funded on its first day. The 2019 ENNIE Awards nominated it for Best Game, Best Setting, and Product of the Year. The 2014 Indie RPG Awards had already given the free version Best Free Game. The system had earned its recognition twice — once as a gift and once as a product.

The Workshop and the Next Generation

Alder’s influence extends beyond her own games. From 2018 to 2020, she ran the Emerging Designers Mentorship Program, guiding seven indie RPG designers through the process of developing and publishing their work. She has served as a design consultant on other creators’ projects — notably Thirsty Sword Lesbians and Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast — and is known for her ability to identify a designer’s unexpressed goals and help them realise those goals mechanically.

She runs workshops across North America and Europe on topics ranging from game design through permaculture to narrative therapy and the Theatre of the Oppressed. Her games have been used in secondary school classrooms to teach social responsibility and decision-making. Her 2019 collection Variations on Your Body — four solo pervasive games meant to be played in the margins of daily life — pushed the form further, straddling the line between poetry, roleplay, and self-help.

In 2025, the Rennes en Jeux festival awarded her the Lizzie Magie Award for her complete body of work. The award is named for Lizzie Magie, creator of The Landlord’s Game, the precursor to Monopoly. The jury cited Alder’s creativity in challenging conventions and her emphasis on games as cultural objects. It was a lifetime achievement award given to a designer who is thirty-six years old, which says something about both the depth of the work and the speed at which it has accumulated.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Alder’s games are about communities that exist outside dominant structures. Dream Askew: queer survivors building something in the ruins. Dream Apart: a Jewish village on the margins of empire. The Quiet Year: a settlement rebuilding after collapse. Monsterhearts: teenagers becoming monstrous because the structures meant to contain them — school, family, sexuality — cannot hold. Even Going for Broke: a collective house scrambling to pay rent, which is to say, a community negotiating survival within a system designed to extract from them.

The mechanics mirror the content. Every Alder game distributes authority because authority, in her design philosophy, is not a resource to be hoarded. It is something that happens between people. The token economy in Belonging Outside Belonging does not track power. It tracks vulnerability. You earn tokens by making yourself weaker. You spend them by making yourself stronger. The exchange rate is: you must give before you can take. This is not a metaphor layered onto mechanics. It is the mechanic itself, expressing a belief about how communities function.

The deeper pattern is the refusal to separate form from content. In most RPGs, the mechanics are a delivery system for the fiction. In Alder’s work, the mechanics ARE the fiction. The way the game distributes authority IS the political statement. The way the map grows IS the story. The way desire operates in Monsterhearts — unpredictable, uncontrollable, not yours to define — IS the queer experience the game is about. She does not design games about these ideas. She designs games that are these ideas.

What Remains

Monsterhearts (2012) — queerness as structural mechanic. Thirteen years of play. Origins-nominated. Scholarly analysis at Duke University Press. The game that proved PbtA could hold intimacy.

The Quiet Year (2013) — collaborative map-drawing as primary game mechanic. Most Innovative Game, Indie RPG Awards. A blank sheet of paper that becomes a community’s history.

Dream Askew / Dream Apart (2018) — no dice, no masters. The Belonging Outside Belonging framework adopted by 211-plus games and counting. A design chassis for stories about communities on the margins.

Seven mentored designers. Workshops across two continents. A lifetime achievement award at thirty-six.

A body of work built on one principle: the most interesting stories emerge when no one is in charge.

Total: 24 points. Year: 2011.

24 points. 2011. The designer who made the table equal.

A body of work built on one principle: the most interesting stories emerge when no one is in charge.