Thirsty Sword Lesbians - One Shot

You can find the system here. This game ran on February 28, 2025.

So for starters, here is the premise I pitched to my players: You have come to the Grand Duke's ball in search of answers - for your hometown, your scorned love, your estranged fiance, who knows - and you're certain that this night will come to blows. Design a cool sword and a feisty character and get ready to flirt and cross swords.

This was a more open ended plot line inspired by the Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts quest from Dragon Age: Inquisition. We ended up playing with three players instead of four due to a last minute cancellation, but it worked out better that way in the end.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is an interesting system to me because it is both heavily up for interpretation and also provides ideas and ways of interpreting the system that make it very narrow. I think the big one for me is how confusing the Strings system is for me; I understand it in theory but my long-running game also runs in this system and we don't fully understand how the Strings are meant to be used and implemented. Aside from strings, I do like but struggle with referencing the GM moves while I play, which is a challenge I implemented into running this game in particular.

This is definitely something I need to plan better for. The game overall had its ups and down, as all games tend to, but I feel like the game was largely on a down swing. The system gameify's roleplay in a way that can actually leave the playing feeling stilted or even stunted in its capacity to play. The game also wants for a lot more wanton combat that me and my players are used to from a roleplaying game overall.

A large issue my players had was quickly intuiting what the playbooks meant and how to navigate them. For longer games, diving terribly deep into the ruleset isn't that bad, but when people are making characters kind of fast - some players made characters day of - it can be kind of difficult to really figure out what's going on. Now! Some of you might be reading this and saying to yourself, "then don't make characters same day" and you would be correct. However, life happens, ADHD happens, and it can be difficult to follow through on reading through all of the playbooks for a variety of reasons.

art by Koragg1/sunflowerpirateart

On the flip side, the things my players enjoyed were the fighting and the banter. Despite initial reservations of  the combat system in game, they eventually really fell into it and were able to roll with it fairly easily. I think the combat system largely makes sense, and there are many examples for good banter or ideas for bantering across crossed blades, but boy is it difficult to think of good one-liners on the spot. That is probably just a skill issue on my part, but if you're not terribly quippy, I suggest pre-preparing some aspects of character dialogue before running the game.

I think my large takeaways from this game were that I really need to plan better, including the storyline and some character dialogue, as I'm not quick on my feet in the ways that this game kind of necessitates. I'd like some more ease in quickstarting a character, but I think overall the playbooks are pretty easy. If you want a system that gamify's roleplaying and allows for you to be flirty with your friends, this is definitely the system for you. If you're looking for something a little more serious, I think you can twist TSL to your whims, but you may be better off in another system.

If you want a more "liveblog" experience, you can follow me over on Bluesky where I will be posting more often about my TTRPG experiences while on hiatus from actually streaming.

Thank you for reading!