This is seventh of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Darling Demon Eclipse

In my experience playing erotic play-by-post chatroom tabletop roleplaying games, a particular text was passed around a lot, but never really used – the Book of Erotic Fantasy for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e was an artifact of fascination, occasionally a focus for the masturbation of TTRPG-playing perverts, but never really something we wound up playing. In a number of these play-by-post games, we’d grab bits and pieces and apply them to Dungeons & Dragons 5e, but we never fully used the Book of Erotic Fantasy. We all had the sense that it was too intricate and intrusive in its portrayal of sex and sexuality, that its many stat rolls and pregnancy tables were ultimately going to get in the way of the fantasy-fucking stories we were telling.

We were right that Erotic Fantasy was overelaborate, but for me this concession meant, from about 2017 to 2021, resigning myself to the idea that there are no erotic adventure TTRPGs to be played – I had heard of Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe by Riverhouse Games and other great, erotic games that could be played as oneshots, but I wanted more and longer-lasting erotic games. After studying a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games, I started working on my erotic communist fantasy heartbreaker Sapphicworld (which is still in development as of writing). The process of developing that game ultimately inflicted me with the curse that this essay is about.

After writing and playtesting my own games, I have found that I only want to play erotic tabletop roleplaying games. My priorities and passions continually lie with games about bodies, sex, kink and eroticism; erotic TTRPGs offer thrills and miseries you won’t get from any other sort of play, and there is a part of me that fears that this is my last chance to play these sorts of games.

Praise The Hawkmoth King by Sage The Anagogue is the best place to start in discussing what I love so much about erotic TTRPGs, and what draws me so strongly toward them. It’s a horrific nightmare of a game, and I mean that as a compliment – teens in sexual situations, dogs and bugs and the ruins of childhood in the late 2000s, piss and blood and death. It’s also, thank god, an exceptionally fun game to play. It’s built around a Play system similar to Under Hollow Hills by Lumpley Games, where the moves lack triggers and you call them out when you want to use them – this means you’re often fully aware of the risks you’re taking, and thus aware of just how hot and horrible the worst outcomes of your Play might be. I’ve had many moments in Hawkmoth where things suddenly swung toward disaster in ways that defied my plans and made my stomach turn – I’ve had a character fail to prey on a human being and be forced to explain himself, another character get hypnotized by a demon into fucking an innocent girl, and I’ve seen far worse happen to other player characters, including the most horrific sort of oviposition from a greasy older man. These are situations and themes that are rare to even see in pornography, and they’re driven by the fascinations, perversions and fears of a high-trust table.

I cannot get enough erotic games because they so deeply expand the available thematic space of play, opening doors that previously were previously dismissively shut. I’ve been at many tables where sex and sexual assault were dismissed immediately in the process of safety-making; I’ve had game masters say “of course, there won’t be any sex in this game” at completely closed tables, with exclusively adults. I’ve been that game master before, even! I can’t imagine going back to that world, where daring to mention your character is hard will either elicit a laugh, or get you a talking-to. Erotic games demand a certain level of buy-in, and so everyone is at least a little serious about what they’re doing, but also here to have fun. Having the option to dip into erotic themes, I find, also makes the moments where the play is distinctly un-erotic all the more rich. To play an erotic game with people you trust is to invite the entire palette of human emotion to your table, whether you use every color or not.

I come into play with a lot of trauma, and having the option to explore those traumas through play has been genuinely healing. The aforementioned Praise the Hawkmoth King has allowed me to go explore my experience with child sexual abuse. To Change by Ulysses Duckler, a transformation TTRPG which often veers into the erotic, came to me at a pivotal point of my medical gender transition, where I was starting to experience some new and often traumatic physical and mental changes for the first time. My partner Wendy Ribston Pippin’s in-progress erotic doll heist game Doll.House (a sequel to Doll.Bod) has been an amazing focal point for processing my traumatic experience working as a trans woman. While games that aren’t erotic could explore these themes, the fact that they are erotic means they can speak directly to these feelings.

What draws me again and again to erotic TTRPGs is not just about feelings, though – there’s a physical element here, too. I’ve played a number of erotic TTRPGs where there was an explicit permission structure for masturbation or sex, and it’s ruled every time.

When I played TINTOY by Geostatonary, for example, my friend and I agreed that masturbation was allowed and even encouraged. TINTOY is a memory-alteration game, and we decided to play it as rival pilots in a soft sci-fi setting, a rough Star Wars riff. I played the victim of the memory alteration, a male imperial pilot, while my friend played the perpetrator, a transfemme rebel pilot. We played the game across multiple days, spread out across a month or so. What I found was that, because we were telling this story while masturbating, the whole thing took on the form of a few sessions of kinky e-sex with the game as a toy, even though our attention was rapt on the game the whole time and we played it as intended. We would, per the rules of TINTOY, often start a session with the imperial pilot living his (and later, her) ordinary life, then introduce the memory change offered by the rebel pilot through another scene, then resolve everything and wrap up. Sometimes we’d do one of these cycles, sometimes two, but we were always both satisfied by the end of play.

Physically stimulating erotic TTRPGs, like my friend and I’s game of TINTOY, have the beautiful ability to create matching arcs of narrative and sexual excitement. Players build up a narrative as they become worked up, then reach a physical and narrative peak, and then wind back down. My own recent goblin handjob game, HANDGOB, does this explicitly by having the players give each other handjobs while speaking in silly goblin voices, all toward the goal of getting the other to look away. In my playtest of HANDGOB, my partner punched me in the stomach repeatedly to try and turn my eyes from hers, but I won because when I said “hey, look over there”, she couldn’t help but laugh. I get a lot of playful pleasure, joy and intimacy from these games. These things are often unavailable from non-erotic games, and games that take place entirely in the voice and the imagination.

Erotic TTRPGs are, to me, precious. Not only because of the unique experiences they offer, but because of the threats they face from payment processors and governments. From 2025 to 2026, sweeping steps have been taken across many gaming platforms, including indie marketplace Itch.io. On Itch, as of late last year, items that are tagged with adult tags or include adult content warnings on their page are removed from search listings, and occasionally made entirely unavailable to new purchases. This happened to Praise The Hawkmoth King, and it happened to my own game, Don’t Test My Love.

I was heartbroken when Don’t Test My Love was taken down, which Itch publicly stated was due to its content warning for incest. It’s a game that reflects my own trauma, my manic, dissociative and suicidal tendencies and the experiences of others around me, all through a transfeminine lens. To lose that piece was, on many levels, a statement that my grief and exhaustion was invalid, disgusting and not worth being seen.

The game has since gone back up for free, and it was signaled to me by Itch that I shouldn’t put it back up with a price tag. I’ve realized recently that this system of moderation and censorship is arbitrary and should be snuck around, subverted and underestimated at every possible opportunity. I’m loathe to offer specific advice for subverting the scrutiny of censors like those that Itch uses, for fear of weakening the very techniques that I use, but I will say this – the only way to censor as many projects as Itch intends to censor is through the use of machines, and there are certain things that machines cannot see. The freak artist will always outwit the censorer, as afraid as I am of the future of making and enjoying this sort of work.

I believe that erotic TTRPGs will persevere in some form, and I’ll keep playing them, to the detriment of my enjoyment of non-erotic TTRPGs, even! There’s no other medium and genre that thrills me, stimulates me and arouses me as much, and I hope to be involved in this sort of work for the rest of my life. If you’ve designed a non-erotic TTRPG recently and I didn’t give it a fair shake, sorry! I’m too busy getting high with my girlfriend and pretending we’re sexy elven sisters.

Darling Demon Eclipse is a journalist, social worker and erotic tabletop roleplaying game designer from Long Island, New York. Her work mixes the playful, the horny and the mythological in vibrant prose. You can find her blogs at eclipse.gay, and her games at darlingdemoneclipse.itch.io.

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