Nerding Day: The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers

Twenty five years ago, tabletop roleplayers didn't have many options when it came to comedy about their favorite hobby. It wasn't like it is today, where you can type "funny D&D sketch" into TikTok and get a cavalcade of mostly-nude women in elf ear prosthetics joking about casting "Snakes to Sticks." Sure, people would pass around things like the old Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies, and Munchkins files on listservs and message boards, and you'd get the occasional Knights of the Dinner Table comic in Dragon magazine.

But mainstream culture was still recovering from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when America thought that Dungeons & Dragons was about awesome shit like summoning demons and running around in the steam tunnels beneath your college instead of hewing to an antiquated and poorly designed gameplay system despite the numerous better alternatives available just because Hasbro happens to have more money than Bahamut.

Ahem. Into this barren, jokeless landscape came The Munchkin's Guide to Powergaming, written by James "Grim" Desborough and published by Steve Jackson Books. It built off the RPG stereotype of the munchkin, an immature player who was less interested in pretending to be an elven wizard than in "winning" the game by combining rules in unexpected ways to produce unbeatable characters. The book was a pretty big deal, winning industry awards and launching the Munchkin card game and associated mini-empire.

As Desborough tells it, he got shafted on the contract. But he wasn't done with the RPG comedy genre. He followed up The Munchkin's Guide in 2002 with The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers, which sounds like an instruction manual for serial killers, but was actually an installment in a series of books put out by Mongoose Publishing and expanding on particular fantasy races or monsters like orcs, dragons, and kobolds.

They got a little ribald with it, publishing a few comedy installments like The Slayer's Guide to Rules Lawyers, which they still sell in eBook form on their site. You know what they don't sell anymore? The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers. Why? I mean, you can probably guess, but no you can't because it's much weirder and more insufferable than whatever you're imagining.

Is The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers contemptuous from a modern perspective? Sure. Was it kind of embarrassing even in 2002? Probably. But its greatest sin is not in its content, which consists of the same three '80s stand-up bits about the differences between men and women repeated over and over throughout its blessedly brief thirty-one pages, but in its presentation. It's like James Desborough realized he couldn't come up with a whole magazine's worth of content for his book, panicked, and tried to pad it out with excruciatingly overwritten copy.

A certain kind of guy thought this kind of over-the-top style was insanely funny in the 2000s. He wore idiotic hats and later got into some really dark subreddits. He was James Desborough.

The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers is written in a tone that suggests the author thinks of himself as a sort of proto-Jack Sparrow, a hat-tipping, swashbuckling, freethinking disregarder of both buttoned-down social norms and tyrannical notions of "good writing." Also, he's extremely British. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but, well, actually yes there is. USA! USA!

Do you get it? "Taking the Mickey" is Britoid slang for "making fun," a Cockneyfied version of "taking the piss." Now that you understand that, you're as well-equipped to laugh uproariously at the phrase "extract the Michael" as British readers were in 2002. Well, go on! Laugh, damn you! We're taking the bloody Mick, you Yanks!

"But you already said that, James." Oh, did he? Did he already say the thing about women being ruddy mysterious?

He did? In nearly those exact words? Shit. He's two pages in and he's already repeating himself.

The first section of the book is a little mini-history of tabletop roleplaying games. It's pretty dry, coming off as yet more padding, but there's one weird quirk here: Desborough refuses to name any actual RPGs. Maybe this was him trying to cover his ass or maybe it was the publisher's decision, but I already hate this book, so I'm going to assume it was another effort at comedy.

D&D becomes "Delvings and Dingos." Vampire: The Masquerade is Bloodsucker: The Pretense. Har har. Michael: The Extracting.

When we get into "Female Gamer Physiology," we start to dig a little deeper into Desborough's more idiosyncratic views. Yeah, there's the expected stuff — female gamers are fat, ugly, etc. — but he's got some of his original stuff too. He jokes about women having "stealth padding" on their feet repeatedly, to the point that it seems based on personal experience with his bird catching him wanking his meat and veg to a comely elven maiden and being rather miffed about it.

Most of this section is about how most female gamers don't look like the pictures of women in roleplaying game manuals. A better writer could have developed this into a full-on joke about men's fantasy depictions of women, but it mostly just comes off as angry. I wouldn't have to wank me bloody Union Jack if you looked like yon elven maiden!

It's not so much offensive as it is just depressing. Female gamers are fat and ugly and wear clothing but nonetheless wield powers over men like "hypnotic boobs" and "the look." It's old school, boring misogyny of the type that makes you think whoever's spouting it would be happier if they just ditched women entirely, moved into a monastery, and started cranking off other dudes in between games of Call of Cthulhu.

We're hitting all the classics: women go to the bathroom in pairs! Women like emotions and talking whereas men are rather cooler on these subjects! Women have periods, what are those all about? There's a fucking quiche joke forty years after Real Men Don't Eat Quiche was published.

I haven't included many illustrations yet, mainly because they're just sort of thrown in with no real relation to the content. But there are a number in the book. Here's my favorite:

Verily, yon wench wields a bloody flail! Prepare a quiche post-haste, and make ready with the flicks of the chick, for the moon waxes full and a scarlet tide washes across the land!

God, I'm sorry about that. As a palate cleanser, can I offer you a detour into Desborough's ballbusting fetish?

That leads nicely into the section on female warfare, where we get the predictable discussions of catfights and gossip. But there's something pretty weird, here, too; something that reveals one of Desborough's preoccupations. He brings up that thing in anime where sometimes a girl will pull a hammer out of nowhere and bonk someone with it.

If you're wondering if he's mentioned hentai elsewhere in the book: of course he has. And this was 2002, so it wasn't like he could just open up Twitter and drown in a sea of cartoon titties. He had to go hunting for that shit on VHS. He was something of a pioneer in this respect, because two years later he made a card game about tentacle rape hentai. But incredibly, he didn't even make the one actually semi-successful card game about animated tentacle porn. His has mostly disappeared from the internet, but from the limited pictures available it looks like the art came out of a "How to Draw Japanese Manga-nimation" book.

Next up is a section on actually playing an RPG with female gamers, with the various tricks women employ to fit/sneak into a group of men. This includes everything from trying to act like one of the guys to actually trying to disguise themselves as men. What does Desborough call the latter — the Joan of Arc? The Mulan? The Twelfth Night? No, he makes a timely reference to Tootsie.

And then we get a weird nod to this ostensibly still being a guide to a fictional race of monsters for D&D, and Desborough gives us stats and spells for the Female Gamer race. It's this sort of meta thing where you're supposed to be playing a Female Gamer alongside other people's dwarven paladins and half-elf sorcerers. Oh, and I can't believe it took us this long, but we finally get a "does this dress make me look fat?" gag here.

And, of course, another reference to the padded feet thing. It's fucking comedy gold, innit?

I've got to give Desborough credit here: he tosses in a few miscellaneous puns that are at least attempts to make jokes beyond "women are fat and I hate them and hate that I want them." They're not good, but they are, at least, present. "Hot Pants" is an abysmal bit, being short shorts that burn men who touch the wearer, but "Stocking Ladder" is genuinely a decent effort.

There it is, the first and only nice thing I will say about this book. Of course, Desborough immediately goes and burns his good will with this:

Homie, I do not think you can say that.

The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers is an overworked, hackneyed crime against the English language and women on several levels, but it could perhaps be forgiven as a product of its time and place. We thought some really fucking stupid shit was hilarious in the early 2000s: All Your Base, Hampster Dance, that game where thinking about it makes you lose the game. Maybe the book was a juvenile blip in James Desborough's life, and he went on to have a successful career as a designer and— sorry, I'm hearing that he's actually gotten worse at all of this.

First things first: he edits his own Wikipedia article.

Caring what the petty virgin editors tireless volunteer defenders of humanity's communal knowledge think is in itself a red flag, but that's only the start of Mr. Grim's Wild Ride.

In 2017, Desborough self-published a book titled Inside Gamergate: A Social History of the Gamer Revolt, describing it as a "left-libertarian movement against censorship and corruption." Like all of Gamergate's most prominent figures — which, to be clear, he isn't even one of — he is a middle-aged, mostly-forgotten character who made a desperate gamble that aligning himself with angry young men would restore him to his former cultural relevance.

Only, what would that even look like in his case? A cut of the Munchkin franchise? Gamers flocking to play his tabletop RPG based on John Norman's Gor setting, or his choose-your-own adventure book, SteamSpunk Chronicle?

Wait, is that… is that an AI-generated anime lady? It is! Grim's getting with the future, like all good artists with no faith in their skill or the indomitable spirit of humanity.

He's a small businessman, you see. He's gotta compete in the marketplace! If he doesn't use AI, he will literally starve to death! But you've got to agree that he's using it pretty tastefully.

Speaking of the qualities of a good artist, Desborough has that condition where he can't understand how competing creators could possibly be more successful than him. He wrote a 2,000 word blog post on how he doesn't get the appeal of Apocalypse World, one of the biggest indie tabletop games of the last twenty years. Nobody says you have to like something just because it's popular or critically-acclaimed, but it's pretty clear that Desborough was just infuriated that somebody else made a successful tabletop game that was edgy, sexy, and weird while he's still languishing in bitter obscurity.

Like, it's true that Apocalypse World is written in a pretty distinctive tone, but that's one of the reasons people like it. The book isn't a dry old instruction manual; it's trying to bring you into its world through its prose. Also, remember that the guy calling a massively-popular game "pretentious" dresses like this:

So that's The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers and its legacy. I don't really know how to end this, so in lieu of any kind of wrap-up, here's James Desborough in various hats.

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