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.