Defy the Gods: Smoldering Queer Sword & Sorcery Kickstarts March 25

The world is against you.

A single sword stroke or kiss can change everything.

Your glorious destiny beckons—but beware the monster you may become.

The gods dare you to write your own epic.

Defy the Gods is an RPG of romance and adventure that takes the sword & sorcery genre and queers it. It’s launching on Kickstarter on March 25th. The game invites you to explore messy relationships under the thumb of oppressive gods and tyrants—and risk becoming powerful enough to overthrow them.

Defy the Gods cuts out sword & sorcery’s misogyny, homophobia, and Orientalism, keeps the action and adventure, and adds dollops of romance.

The System

Defy the Gods is Powered by the Apocalypse. It takes the roll-too-high mechanic and doom spiral popularized in Rae Nedjadi’s Apocalypse Keys and marries them with the flirty seduction mechanic from April Kit Walsh’s Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

• 2 to 5 players plus the GM. Designed for long play.
• Your roll may miss, succeed, or succeed too much and give you more than you bargained for.
• As you continue to get burning successes, you gain Dooms that grant enormous power but eventually destroy you.
• Win people’s Hearts to tempt them, aid them, or thwart them—and give your Heart too. 
• Burning successes eventually lead to a defiant showdown with the world’s gods and tyrants. In this crucial moment, only the Hearts you gave others can help you.

The Adventurers

The game takes classic sword & sorcery archetypes and sees them through a queer lens. You can play:

• the Revenant, who escaped their old life and their death to discover their new self.
• the Sailor, who makes plans, starts relationships, and burns both to the ground.
• the Sorcerer, whose chaotic spells peel back the world’s simple façade.
• the Sword, whose big heart and strong blade submit to no one.
• the Vessel, whose power comes from self-sacrificing devotion to a minor god.
• the Wolfling, who was raised by animals, is learning about the human world, and belongs in neither.

The Setting

Defy the Gods is inspired by fantasy ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia—the realm of Gilgamesh. Leave medieval Western Europe behind and journey to a sun-drenched land at the dawn of writing. 

The world is new—a land of city-states, chariots, and clay tablets. Humans are carving out small pockets from the unbowed wilderness.

But it is also old—the ruins of Atlantis, a sparkling civilization of beauty and wonder that came before humans, lie scattered across the wilderness. The gods destroyed them utterly for inventing sorcery, but their legacy lingers.

Build Your Pantheon and City, Play Them, and Destroy Them

• Players build a vivid world of gods and tyrants in a fast-moving Session Zero, using the magic of pick lists.
• Between adventures, players play the antagonists in a brief World Scene, signaling to the GM where they want the story to go.
• Ultimately, adventurers risk ascending to power, displacing their oppressors as the new forces in the world, and perhaps defying even Death itself.

The Publisher

Hectic Electron Games is the imprint of Chris Sellers, who lives and works in Columbus, Ohio. 

Sellers’s first game was the raucous, goofy Raccoon Sky Pirates, a GM-less game about raccoons in a flying ship made of trash who raid a suburban house. It was a consistent top-3 seller on Indie Press Revolution throughout its print run. As of March, it has sold out.

Sign up to be notified when Defy the Gods launches at https://prelaunch.hecticelectron.com.