Who and What is Voices at play?

Our project, which is organised on a not-for-profit basis, aims to fund, promote and create content around tabletop roleplaying games, designed and produced by Marginalised creators.

Transcript follows:

Hello dear listeners; I’m Ray, one of the many voices behind Voices at play, my pronouns are he/him and I’m here to introduce you to who we are and what we do.

Our project, which is organised on a not-for-profit basis, aims to fund, promote and create content around tabletop roleplaying games, designed and produced by Marginalised creators.

This podcast is produced as part of that content and features the crew behind the project, a group of incredibly diverse people from a variety of marginalised backgrounds. More than half of our revolving cast are People of colour, several are Members of the LGBT2QIA+ community, we also have people with disabilities, both physical and mental, fat people, thin people, you name it and there’s a chance they’re represented here. Many involved come from a number of those groups, all at once.

As you may have realised, representation is at the core, of what we do. If you’d like to learn more about the individuals behind the voices, check out the members page of our website on ttrpg-voices.com.

So what are tabletop roleplaying games? The one you are most likely to be familiar with, is D&D or, Dungeons and dragons, to give it its full title. You won’t hear us playing that one though. Our goal is to make it possible for marginalised creators of less known work, to reach a wider audience and by extension, become more prevelant!

Tabletop roleplaying games are a form of collaborative, narrative fiction, governed by a specific set of rules. Most often, you’ll sit down with some friends, create characters together based on the rules of your chosen game and then start telling a story together. It’s that simple!
This might be in the form of a pre-written adventure or scenario with plot hooks and goals to accomplish. It might simply be something that someone or everyone at the table comes up with on the fly.

As you can imagine, this can lead to a lot of chaos. What do you do when you encounter conflict? When the outcome of someone’s decision isn’t something they can simply decide? That’s where the rules of the game come in, often focused around dice rolls and a player taking the helm as your game facilitator, often referred to as a GM. These introduce aspects of randomness that take your stories places you never could have imagined.

At the heart of them, tabletop roleplaying games are an experience and a very human one at that. The people you play with, their lives and perspectives. All of these things will influence the outcome and flow of your story.

The Voices at play podcast is gameplay and round table discussion focusing on a number of games, created by marginalised people. Each new game system will see the groups reshuffled, with new players taking on the role of GM to demonstrate the ways in which different people and different games influence both play style and story together.

So that’s us! That’s what we’re here to do and I hope that sounds interesting to you. We are Voices at play, making space at the table, for everyone.

This podcast is brought to you by the support and generosity of our Patrons at https://patreon.com/VoicesAt