All Eyes on Me

Now that the show's concluded, I thought I'd share some of the details from the costumes from She Kills Monsters. Photos by John Bogle.



These are the three female adventurer PCs in the party. The human paladin lead and the elf are wearing the armor I made. The lead is also wearing a white tunic of mine under a beaded one-shoulder dress over leggings and boots. I really liked the overall effect of that look. The elf wears my riding britches and a dress I cut to create that high-low hemline. The demon barbarian was specified as a battle-bikini Red-Sonja-type in the script, but I didn't want to put a teenager in an excessively sexualizing costume she'd be uncomfortable with. I think this, made of a found costume breastplate, a leather skirt, and badass boots, is a good compromise. I didn't try to hammer it too hard, but you can also see evidence of my longstanding costuming preference for differentiating characters in a group by color for easy visual identification. The colors don't mean anything, but I like that they're separate that way.



This is Orcus, a demon lord of the underworld who's kind of checked out on the job. We consciously did not go with how this play is typically costumed for most characters, but I just thought the look of the red devil in his jammies to be too funny not to do. The actress playing him (who was extremely funny) wore a red zentai suit, a white tank, boxer shorts, oversized slippers, and a hood with ginormous red horns.



This is Farrah the fairy with Agnes, the other lead and the older sister of Tilly. Agnes just plays herself in the D&D world so she doesn't ever wear anything but her street clothes. Farrah's costume was leftover from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, plus a wings and a flower crown. She had to conceal these knives on herself, so she wore my garter belt under the dress so she could have them tucked away.



Here's Chuck, the DM. I just love his aggressively '90s red plaid jacket. And he's wearing Bernie's "Carpe DM" T-shirt underneath it.



This is Lily, the person on whom the PC Lilith the demon barbarian is based on. Again, the babydoll dress with the tiny florals on a dark background really sells the '90s aesthetic. I was lucky to find that, it was so perfect.



This is Vera, the guidance counselor and Agnes's best friend. She's wearing almost entirely my clothes-- the blazer and skirt are things I still wear, but again. '90s!



Here are the demon cheerleaders, a cliche of angsty teenaged D&D mods. I cut up their tops to reveal slashes of red, spray painted them, and splashed red nail polish all over them. Wings and blood smeared on the mouths finish the effect.



Here is the narrator, serving up Galadriel realness. Another one of the handful of nods we made to how this show is typically costumed. I like the white robe with the gold cloak with the actress's white-blonde hair.

That's not the whole show, but those are the bits I was most pleased and proud of. Not too bad, especially given how many super fast quick changes these costumes had to be able to endure!

I’ve accepted a job doing costuming for private girls’ high school Dana Hall again. I’ve enjoyed it the last two times, and this time I’m especially excited because they’re doing “She Kills Monsters” by Qui Nguyen. It’s about a young woman whose family dies in a car accident, so the only way she can learn about her dead little sister is through the D&D module the sister left behind. The story uses Dungeons and Dragons as a window into the sister’s mind and life, as it was the only honest outlet this lonely, nerdy little girl felt like she had.

I just read the script this morning and I enjoyed it. Honestly it’s not a fabulous piece of writing, and I get the sense that the author just did research into D&D, rather than actually being an enthusiast. There are terms gotten wrong or misused— such as a module being described as “homespun” rather than “homebrew” —and there’s a lot of assumption that what draws people to roleplaying is the need for an escape or wish fulfillment. That last is a bit of a pet peeve of mine— all us RPers are trying to get away from our lives/ourselves? None of us could be interested in creating stories or games-as-art? But it is cute and clever, and I like the idea of roleplaying actually getting some recognition in media.

I think it’ll be a challenge to costume. There are bugbears, kobolds, and a freaking gelatinous cube for God's sake. And got to make the girls look like fantasy medieval warriors on a budget, but I'm a larper, I can figure something out. I think it will be fun. :-)

Maybe I'll run a game for some of the girls...

I have returned to Brandeis, and am quite glad to be back. I had my first and thus far only class today, an English class about self-conflict with my favorite teacher, Professor Quinney. I'm also pleased to discover I have fulfilled pretty much all my requirements for my English and Creative Writing double major, and need only to submit the paperwork to secure it. Additionally, I have enough credits to only have to take three classes this semester. That might be nice, to be a little less busy that way. The way things are looking, I may be able to be finished with all my classes by noon every day of the week. :-) I love having open afternoons and evenings.

I'm currently sitting in the green room in the library with Jared, typing on a public computer while he gets some class reading out of the way. In about a half-hour I'll be going to what I believe will be the final session of Kindness's cleric game.  He says it will be mostly role playing, which I like the sound of, so this should be good. I'm interested to see how he concludes our adventure. I'm certainly craving some RP time, given how I didn't get any over the break.

Also, I need to bid, and consequently buckle down on, Oz. It should be a medium-sized game, fifteen or so players, so it's not nearly the workload that the twenty-seven-character game Alice was. I just hope I have it worked out well enough to come up with a good summary for the bid. Maybe I can do a little work on it tonight.

I am delighted to report that tonight will see the first session of Kindness's all-cleric campaign! I was afraid it wasn't going to be able to happen, but due to the graciousness of jh1230and kamianyaallowing us to just this once take the slot normally occupied by their Star Wars game, things are able to get underway. I'm going to spend the afternoon going over my cleric Lisani's character sheet making sure everything's in order. I used a lot of alternate sourcebooks to make her, so I'm going to have to get my head straight about those rules.

The Zen center yesterday was interesting-- I think I'd like to try meditation on my own in the future. I'm sorry we missed so much of BSCF-- I missed captainecchiand electric_d_monk, who I particularly wanted to see --but we ended up seeing the BORG show. Afterward, Holly and Toby in an act of incredible sweetness and thoughtfulness presented me with a copy of Vampire: The Requiem sourcebook, something I've wanted for a while now. It was just so nice of them. I'll have to write a good thank you note.

Gary Gygax  died today. He was 69 years old.

Goodspeed, sir. You shall be forever remembered for giving socially-maladjusted nerds something to do in the evenings that allowed them to pretend they were elves.

Nerds like me. ;-)