This question has a short answer with a long explanation, and as such expect this entry to be largely meta-commentary and a bit light on direct gameplay-related content. No, this series of articles or blog posts or whatever you want to call them isn’t about sex or bondage or other lascivious content.

I know that seems a little dubious. There’s a lot of fetish fuel that ends up in tabletop RPG content, and I’ve seen a lot of the weird “No, no this is perfectly innocent because…” reasoning that makes the horny content come off as creepy and untoward. One of my goals with my writing is to make sure that horny content is unapologetically horny and fanservice is unapologetically fanservicey, because that way consent isn’t being muddled.

Tabletop (or virtual tabletop) RPGs aren’t like TV where ridiculous standards have to be subtly skirted to get past network standards boards—such as network executives not allowing Rick/Richie from Static Shock to be portrayed as gay in the cartoon, forcing them to see what they could get under the radar. The content limits on what goes into a tabletop game are based instead on what the players are comfortable with, and the whole point of playing it is for everybody involved to have fun, not to feel awkward and squicked out the whole time.

As such, if the group wants fanservice, there’s no need to pretend it’s not fanservice, and if the group doesn’t want fanservice, trying to pass it off as innocent will just disrupt the play dynamic and fun of the game. I try to make sure that the horny content I produce is unambiguously so and do my best not to let the non-horny content get soaked in low-key fetish fuel or anything.

So, with that extended caveat complete, this series is meant to not be about sex or bondage or damsel in distress types of things, even if it is left fully compatible with such content. I may even make a very clearly labeled entry for how to incorporate things from this series for that kind of content, but I suspect anyone with an interest in it can probably see how to apply it to a game already.

Initially when I was planning this series, it was just meant as a single clearly-labeled fetish thing for those who wanted to really perv-up their Out of the Abyss campaign, but as I planned out what to write, I realized that there was far more non-horny value in the subject than I had expected, and decided instead to expand upon that, as it’ll be of use to far, far more people.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that this series is really genuinely meant for general purpose roleplaying despite coming from someone who is mainly focused on horny stuff, and that I’m fully aware of how much that sounds like a rationalization. But I am dedicated to making sure the wink-wink-nudge-nudge material is safely behind the velvet rope so it can be included or left out as a conscious choice by the whole group, without trapping things that are valuable for any game in the same category. That’s why I applaud WotC for actively distancing itself from the topless-illustrations-of-Bast history of D&D while I simultaneously feel there is a place for more prurient content (and intend to write a lot of such content myself).

Horny games aren’t skeevy. Horny games pretending to be totally innocent in order to subject people to it who aren’t interested are skeevy. If this series has any horny parts it will be sectioned off and very well labeled. In fact, I think I’ll probably just make a spin-off series to handle those, so the entries with the “Capture, Don’t Kill” title are consistently not about the fanservice element.

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