Ophelia

she/her

5.0

(5)

Timezone

Asia/bangkok

Language

English

Identity

LGBTQ+

Queer

Disabled

Neurodivergent

Published Writer

Women/Femme Identifying

No Gen AI

About Ophelia

Hi! I'm Ophelia Frankenberry-Saas (but if a review ever refers to me by my legal name, Dawn, that's why there's a difference). I've been playing/running tabletop roleplaying games off and on for almost my entire life, but I've been GM-ing multiple years long tables concurrently and campaigns sequentially for the last 5 years. I am also a former professional games journalist! I have been a contracted associate editor at GameSpot, and I was a core member of the early freelance team at Waypoint (Vice's gaming vertical). I've also written about music full-time in New York City. My tabletop tastes run towards the independent and old school (Powered by the Apocalypse games and Microscope are my all-time favorites), but my first long-term campaign was a two and a heal year long 5e Ravenloft/Planescape fusion game (that also included brief detours into other systems as palette cleansing micro-shots. That same table (minus some people that had to leave for personal reasons and with the addition of others) is now nearing two and a half years in a longer-term 20th anniversary multi-splat World of Darkness Chronicle. That said, my priorities as a GM are about crafting player-centric tables and empowering my players to be as invested in the fiction of which they are, ultimately, the stars and to incorporate smart/critical world-building and NPC characterizations on my end. I am an autistic nonbinary transwoman and leftist and sapphic so if words like "lesbian" or "transgender" or "class struggle" make you uncomfortable, you probably won't be a good fit for my table. For everyone else, I hope to make a safe space for queer, trans, and neurodivergent folks as well as cishet and neurotypicals that are themselves already invested allies. I do not have the time or patience to teach someone not to engage in micro-aggressions or any other form of racist, queerphobic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, lesbophobic, misogynoirist, Zionist or anti-indigenous behavior or table talk. I do not run genocide simulators.

At a glance

4 years on StartPlaying

Highly rated for: Inclusive, Creativity, Storytelling

$20 per session

Featured Prompts

My favorite books are

I'm a sucker for modernist queer fiction and genre-bending speculative fiction period. My favorite authors are Octavia Butler, Thomas Pynchon, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Samuel R. Delany, Alyson Greaves, and Talia Bhatt.

My favorite shows/movies are

The thing I miss most about NYC are repository theaters where I could watch old, foreign, and/or independent cinema. My favorite filmmakers and showrunners include David Lynch, Akira Kurosawa, Werner Herzog, John Singleton, Shonda Rimes, Gregg Araki, and Kate Purdy.

My favorite system of all Time is

Microscope. Microscope is a GM-less and diceless storytelling game in which you construct a history from the outside in and the inside out, while zooming in and out of broad swaths of time and character. It is a masterclass in a story structure and very easy to teach to beginners.

How Ophelia runs games

See above for part of my answer, but I will re-affirm that I run tables where my players are empowered to make interesting choices and not be punished for them by only engaging with the parts of the game they didn't build their character around. When my players make choices with their characters, those choices shape so much of the game to follow, and this is true for my prep after character creation and as the campaign continues. My players are the engines that make this game run; I am simply a storytelling and worldbuilding substrate to enhance, mirror, and challenge your choices. My stories are always interrogative of setting and systems. It is no great secret that much of the early days of this hobby were the blood of the volk and testosterone induced racist and genocidal fantasies of active Christofascists. I run games that are sensitive to trauma: personal and inter-generational. My games are safe spaces because I do not tolerate what I've already said I do not tolerate. There is a difference between a mistake that can be gently corrected and an intentional and knowing act of violence. Gentle corrections can be given. So can immediate expulsions at my judgment if racists or misogynists or misogynoirists or homophobes or transphobes or xenophobes attempt to infiltrate my games. My bullshit sniffer is strong. You will not get away with what you think you'll get away with. I respectfully decline to GM for cops unless you're the literal Thai Royal police, in which case I will consider myself a gracious guest in your home. That bit about the Thai Royal Police is not a bit or a non-sequitur. I am a trans woman who had to flee Amerikka because of the transphobic policies of Donald J. Trump, his administration and his enablers, and the general complicity of not only the federal government but the state government of West Virginia which was threatening every year to make it illegal for me to live where I lived (because I as a trans woman wouldn't have been allowed near a school and I lived down the block from one) and to make it illegal for me to do the sort of work I had been doing before I left the country (I was a medicaid case manager for adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities). I have fun with combat, and my encounters tend towards the cinematic, but, I also love players and tables that look for non-violent conflict resolution. That was how I often played computer and console RPGs as a teenager and young adult, and as a pacifist (to a point anyways... my politics tend towards the radical, the revolutionary, the decolonial, the liberation of Black people from Amerikka, and the anarchotransfeminist... which is to say that my stories understand the primacy of struggle but also the primacy of community and care). If clients are interested in booking a game that I don't have offered, please reach out and we can discuss terms.

Featured Prompts

If my games were Movies they'd be directed by...

If I could cast a director for my long-running D&D game, it would most likely be Panos Cosmatos (Mandy). It was a psychedelic, surrealist cosmic horror nightmare redeemed as fantasy by the love the players had for the setting, their characters, and the sprawling cast.

I prep by

asking questions about the fiction. I run Fiction First campaigns as a hard, non-negotiable rule. Telling a satisfying story that is crafted in the moment and in response to my players decisions and the context we have established is why I love this hobby.

Rules are...

Mechanical choices are narrative choices and one of the fundamental units of narrative storytelling in this form. They aren't simply opportunities to add to the fiction. They are always moments where you are adding and building on the fiction.

Ophelia's ideal table

I already have an ideal table. It's my current World of Darkness game. The #1 rule of my games is that Real Life Always Comes First. Tables will have to run on a quorum structure because of how a paid game service works, but players should never feel bad about having to miss sessions. We are playing a game. You are living your life. Real life will always come first. My players tend to become tight-knit by the end of a campaign. We respect each other and play off of each other's strengths and respect how we all have different ways and practices of contributing to the experience of the table and the game. I tend towards sandbox style experiences, system permitting, but, when I run investigative mystery games (or any game of sufficiently necessary worldbuilding/character building), I understand the important of structure. I prep, but my prep informs my GM-ing style. It does not dictate it. My GM style is always in conversation with the choices the players are making.

Featured Prompts

If you're into ___, you're going to love my table

To quote Austin Walker and Friends at the table, if you're into "critical world-building and smart characterization" and good fun with new internet adventuring companions, you're going to love my games. I am prone to auto-critique and systemic critiques of systems I'm a part of.

I love it when a player

I love it when players "Catch the Big Fish." David Lynch wrote a book on transcendental meditation with a similar title, and it refers to reaching down past the surface and into the inky depths of your imagination to find truth and/or beauty that you wouldn't have found without such considerations.

I think metagaming...

I hate the term metagaming because players should make mechanical choices that support their play style and system knowledge is just shared table knowledge that allows players and GMs to mutually support each other. Mechanical choices are representative of fictive choices is how I feel.