A Woman in the Woods
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🏳️🌈 Why it’s here
What we found
- Queer themes
According to the game’s own description
“Intended as an LGBTI allegory, this game hopes to teach concepts of Otherness, mental health, and environmentalism to a wider audience.” - Tagged queer by its creator
According to the creator’s own tags on itch.io
🤝 Inclusive design ⓘInclusive design is separate from a game’s queer labels. It marks games whose design is deliberately inclusive even when not queer-themed: romance or marriage mechanics with no gender constraint, character creation without a forced gender binary, gender-neutral rules language, or table safety tools. Each marker shows where we found it.
- Character creation free of a gender binary
According to the game’s rulebook
“While A Woman in the Woods is a gendered title, the character needs not be a woman. The title just pulls from a historical trope. Your character should be whoever you would like them to be.”
Description
A Woman in the Woods is a solo role-playing game. It is a narrative based game that is primarily played through journaling. The game uses dice to create story events for the player to react to. The player then imagines and resolves how their character deals with the day’s events. Set in a magical realism world, this game chronicles the daily life of one or more herb women, sometimes known as witches. These people were outcasts of their nearby villages. Often forced to live outside of the village borders, they were treated as oddities or strange at best. All while they plied their trade in exchange for the things they needed to survive. While they provided necessary medical assistance to those who could not afford to travel into towns for apothecaries, and sometimes provided more local, and often “pagan”, spiritual advice, they were also unfortunately easy scapegoats in times of strife. You are a healer. You are a source of knowledge. You are a key part of your village’s life. Yet you are paradoxically ostracized from it. This is the life your character leads. A Woman in the Woods can be played with multiple in game days in a single session. Or, optionally, it can be very interesting and fun to play an in game day every session day. This way it functions as an excellent distraction from the stresses of modern life. Intended as an LGBTI allegory, this game hopes to teach concepts of Otherness, mental health, and environmentalism to a wider audience. Don’t use this as a foraging/wilderness living guide. This is a fantasy role-playing game and nothing more. Now updated in a second edition with more town events and a printer friendly version!If you'd like to get a print-on-demand version in small travel-friendly paperback form they are now available here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/brynn-derwen-and-hazel-derwen/a-woman-in-the-woods/pap...