I was expecting gatekeeper outcry for the launch of Dale Critchley’s Limitless Heroics: Better worlds via Dice & Disabilities for 5e. That’s not happened yet, and I hope it doesn’t.
The comments on the Kickstarter project are from people worried and hoping that the project has done well at representing a range of disabilities, mental illnesses and Neurodivergence in the fifth edition well. It looks like it has been, based on the responses. The campaign has already doubled its $10,000 goal and has three weeks left to run on the crowdfunding platform.
Geek Native previously published a free preview of Limitless Heroics.
Why was I expecting a backlash? Frankly, it happens. Even though these are worlds of two-headed giants, magic and economies impervious to inflation, people think wheelchairs or spectacles wouldn’t exist because they wouldn’t be realistic. In settings where people can fight by throwing fireballs from their chairs, some unimaginative people can’t see any value in chair warriors. Some people can’t imagine wizards making artificial arms in lands where wizards can create sentient mechanical golems.
One of the first questions to the campaign about how wisely the sensitive topic of representation was approached got a thoughtful response. Here’s most of it;
I started out looking at literally every condition in existence and compiling a list of all possible symptoms. Looking at that list (and categorizing to make it manageable), the next step was thinking about what fantasy analogs would also exist in a magical world and added those to the lists.
Then, we started reaching out all over the place. I asked people about their experiences and then wrote mechanics based on those descriptions & said, “Like this?” And they’d say, “Yeah, except…,” and I’d make their suggested tweaks & show it again, back & forth, until they said, “Perfect.” Where I couldn’t find someone with a specific symptom (a relatively small percentage, since most people have multiple symptoms, although some are so rare that only people in certain corners of the world have it, or nobody alive does at the moment), I read medical journals, blogs by people with those experiences, and anything else I could find on each one with a specific eye for possible stereotypes and misunderstandings, and the mechanics are specifically described to clarify the experiences and debunk the myths. Everything also runs past our 2 sensitivity consultants, who are highly trained but from different perspectives, but both work full time in fields that specifically address the harmful stereotypes you’re talking about, so they’re immersed in precisely all these issues and work full-time with those populations, and where they need to, they can consult with colleagues for clarification.
Limitless Heroics has more than 450+ symptoms for game mechanics, 4 degrees of severity, 6 frequencies and giving 1 to 6 symptoms per character that amounts to more than 64,800 combinations.
In addition, there are new magic items and an online random generator to create more. There are new monsters, spells and random tables.
The book will also contain real-world examples so you can better represent symptoms and tutorials.
In terms of book accessibility, there will be a dyslexia-friendly layout, a fully screen reader accessible and an indexed audio version with every purchase.
We believe that this resource will help you normalize disabilities in your life and the lives of other players. Non-disabled people can sometimes feel uncomfortable around disabled people or don’t know how to talk or act. This resource allows you to practice in an imaginary world to equip you with empathy and skills to feel increasingly comfortable doing that in the real world.
A pledge of $25 is enough for that Dyslexia-friendly PDF and indexed audio version.
Stepping up to $30 adds in a discounted print-on-demand voucher, but you still need to pay the shipping and printing costs.
Other perks are added in at $70 with your name on assistive magic item, at $200 where you create a character for the book and again at $500.
The expected delivery is July for the PDF and September for the print-on-demand.
Check out the comments below to see what other Geek Natives think.
