Catch it. Put it in a pumpkin, in a high tower, in a compound, in a chamber, in a house, in a room. Quick, stick a leash on it, a lock, a chain, some pain, settle it down, so it can never get away from you again (Margaret Atwood, “The Female Body”).

Five boys gather around a table, dice clutched in their hands and glee painted on their faces. A sheet of graph paper stretches across the wooden surface, decorated with drawn houses and a tavern erupting in Crayola flames. Painted figurines the size of sand dollars occupy the squares, looming over the like-sized bandits knocked onto their sides. Dead. The group’s fighter grabs a red marker, surrounding the corpses in blood puddles.

The Dungeon Master grins from the other side of the cardboard screen that separates him from his players—separates the storyteller from the characters playing in his world. He congratulates the party on their victory and asks what they would like to take as their reward.

The paladin frowns, lost in thought. He is the group’s moral compass. The words Lawful Good are written on his character sheet, indicating that every decision he makes must be for the good of society and its laws. If he deviates from that, he could lose the favor of his god, his ability to cast spells stripped away. 

The boy rakes his gaze across the table, noticing the shapely curves of a figurine they had decided to take hostage. He sheds his character for a brief moment, asking the group: 

“Is rape considered a Lawful action?”

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When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in my mid-twenties, men routinely talked over me as they tried to kill off each other’s characters. I was once glared out of a gaming store before I could ask where they kept their dice. After rejecting the Dungeon Master’s romantic advances, my friend was iced out of our gaming group. We both quit soon after. The events inspired me to start my own game where I was at the head of the table, and the game eventually ended up with all-femme players. We’ve been playing together ever since.

It wasn’t until I was a little older and a little more curious that I learned just how much worse the misogyny could get—and how common “worse” was. I even co-created a podcast about it, diving into D&D’s history and trying to figure out where its grudge against women started. The more I researched, the more unsavory patterns I noticed, one of the most disturbing being a prevailing violence against the female body. 

In the 1970s, players really did debate whether sexual violence was a “Lawful” action or a “Chaotic” action. In his book, The Elusive Shift, author and D&D historian Jon Peterson recounts this conversation, and reveals that the group ultimately decided rape was Chaotic—should the paladin decide to walk that path, he would most assuredly fall out of favor with his god and lose access to his magic. 

Gary Allen Fine, author of the roleplaying sociological study Shared Fantasy, observed a player acting as a fifth-level priest as he threatened to rape an entire clergy of war-priestesses. When they were defeated, the player, named Tom, suggested they take their panties as a boon. Tom’s reasoning wasn’t explained, but Fine does say that he was never reprimanded by his fellow players, just as the paladin would likely not have been reprimanded for his question. 

Rape and the degradation of women were so common in these early games that a designer who worked on the first and second edition of D&D put out a warning to male Dungeon Masters running co-ed games in Dragon, an official D&D magazine. He observed that though men didn’t seem to care about rape happening at the table, a female player would likely become “very embarrassed, very upset, and very angry and hostile,” potentially quitting the game altogether. The author, Roger E. Moore, thought Dungeon Masters should “keep that in mind.” 

What Moore didn’t say is that Dungeon Masters (all players, really) should also keep in mind that some players might also be using D&D as an outlet for their own vile fantasies, rape and otherwise. Certain players could use the cover of gameplay, and the perceived lack of real-world consequences, to perform these actions under the guise of being righteous and realistic within the world of their campaign. This behavior should make everyone at the table “very embarrassed, very upset, and very angry and hostile”—not just female players, who are so often the ones blamed for overreacting in these scenarios. 

D&D is a game of violence. You kill monsters, fell kingdoms, and see your comrades die in battle. But the further you dig into D&D’s past, the more you see that bloodthirsty dragons and corrupt villains aren’t always the intended targets. Misogynistic violence wasn’t just happening at the table; it was written into the very source material, laying the groundwork for a toxic gaming culture that discouraged women and other marginalized groups from participating.

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The Dungeon Master considers the paladin player’s question. As he does, the details of the shapely figurine come into focus. In D&D, drawings and miniatures help visualize each encounter, but they are mere tools, instruments that bring life to the dice rolls and wargame math. Most of the game takes place inside the players’ minds. 

The only limit is their imagination.

To them, the shapely figurine isn’t a piece of plastic, but a real woman splayed across their gaming table, prostrated atop grid as they debate her fate. 

She has been posed to best fit the players’ desires, but her curves are unnatural. Each detail isn’t quite right. Metal armor digs into her bones, more than skin-tight, her cleavage shoved up to her clavicles. Each breath she takes further cracks her broken spine, contorted to accentuate a waistline missing a rib or three. Her neck snaps a little too far to the right. She is watching them. Inviting them. Waiting for them to kill her or to save her. 

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In D&D, women are subjected to a specific kind of violence before they open any of its sourcebooks: one that relies heavily on unrealistic beauty standards and antiquated stereotypes. On the cover of the 1979 Dungeon Master’s Guide, a woman is trapped in the grip of a gigantic devil. Her golden bikini armor is more effective at showing off her skin than protecting her from its claws. The small blade in her hand is clearly useless, so she must instead rely on two male heroes in the foreground for rescue. The violence enacted against her is the central conflict, posing a question to the onlooker: Do you want to be the hero, or the damsel in distress? Her face is also visible while the two heroes remain faceless, the perfect self-inserts—for male players, at least. A woman, or someone wanting to play a female character, might even find themselves wondering if the damsel is a member of the adventuring party or the reward you get for defeating the devil. Would a female party member even have a place at the table?  

When the cover model is visibly meant to be the hero, not much changes. On the cover of 1988’s Azure Bonds, a novel based within D&D’s “Forgotten Realms” setting, the sellsword Alias’s armor invites violence onto her. It leaves the middle of her chest exposed, the perfect opening for a blade to pierce her heart. Her outer thighs are “protected” by crisscrossed string: one cleave with a great axe, and they would fall off. Not exactly practical, but perhaps that’s the point. 

If a male character was dressed this impractically, there would no doubt be a conversation at the table involving game rules. Should the player reap the benefits of wearing armor if it doesn’t even cover their midsection? Can monsters have tactical advantage if they target the player’s skin? On the other hand, the female character is expected to dress impractically. Mechanically, a player might argue, her sexuality actually works in her favor. Excuses can be made for magically enhanced armor that allows her to show off more skin while also protecting her from unfriendly fire. Perhaps her skin is a distraction for whoever is fighting them, giving her all the benefits of armor without her actually wearing any. 

But what if you don’t want your character to be impractically dressed? What if you want her in full plate armor? What if you found a helm in a dungeon that you really want her to wear? According to much of the early D&D art, you’d be out of luck. These things didn’t exist for femme bodies, and if they did, they magically morphed to favor sex appeal over safety and practicality. This decision—part marketing and part fan service—sends a clear message to anyone who comes into contact with early D&D cover art.

Every image makes an argument. If you see smoke, there is likely a fire. If you see wounds, there is likely a weapon. In the case of D&D, if you see a woman, she is likely a fantasy. She is an object that defies anatomy and physiology and common sense in order to bend to the whims of the straight male imagination. She may be a damsel or a hero, but she is never a threat—at least, not when she’s fighting against evildoers. It certainly makes playing one seem less than ideal. 

While it’s rare to see impractical armor or damsels in distress on modern D&D covers, players using the 2014 Player’s Handbook might still find the occasional elven mage with distorted vertebrae or a red-headed ranger missing the midsection of her leather armor. This is likely due, in part, to the people drawing them. In the three core rulebooks from 2014 (Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual), 90% of the credited artists are men, a pattern echoed throughout D&D’s artistic history. 

To pull a phrase from another fantasy universe, this is not just a flesh wound. These cuts are deep and infected with over fifty years of femme heroes rendered as nothing more than simulacrums of the straight, white, male fantasy. And yet, despite this blatant disrespect, women and other marginalized groups have enjoyed D&D for as long as it’s been around. Some, like the late Jannell Jaquays, even defined how the game is played. These players adapted to their surroundings: they found groups that respected them and wanted them there, they didn’t let the sexist images deter them, and they played the games they wanted to play. 

Despite these efforts, Reddit is still awash with stories of players experiencing sexism at the gaming table. Women have had to soldier through creepy comments, avoid games with strangers, and, yielding to Roger E. Moore’s portent, quit the hobby altogether. In December 2025, a Dungeon Master asked r/DnDcirclejerk why one of his players called him sexist after he announced that her character was on her period and made her roll a dice to see how much pain she was in. No matter how many steps we take forward, there is no erasing the behavior that has been present at D&D tables from the very beginning and pushed (or, in some cases, shoved) women out of the hobby. Behavior that was reinforced in no small part by decades of glorified violence against women both on the books’ covers and within the text itself. 

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After much debate and discussion, the party decides to keep the body on the table unsullied. For now. She might have information that could help them on their quest. 

The body writhes and curses, miniature figurines stabbing into her as she tries to escape the chains attached to her wrists and ankles. She is not a willing informant. Each player has their turn with her, flicking their twenty-sided dice across her exposed abdomen, adding fresh cuts as they ask their questions. 

It’s all part of the game, they reassure themselves. A necessary technique to reach the next phase of their adventure. When the body on the table bleeds, red staining their character sheets, none of the players notice. 

The only blood they notice is that which they purposefully draw. 

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Every D&D player must choose a class for their character. They range from wizards shooting fireballs from their fingertips to rogues sneaking through city streets. As the game evolved, so did the classes. By D&D 3.5, published in 2000, some of the classes were segregated by gender (or sex—older roleplaying games often did not distinguish between the two). The Thrall of Kostchtchie, one of the male-only classes, relies on the torture and murder of women in order to join their ranks. After prolonged torment, the women (clad in revealing robes, of course) are either killed or given to a belligerent monster.

While choosing this class is optional, its existence gives insight into the game’s culture and what themes D&D’s game designers were comfortable exploring. Torture and sacrifices are not exclusive to this class, and do exist elsewhere in the game, but nowhere does there exist a female-exclusive class that requires the explicit torture of men. When men are explicitly targeted for torture in the sourcebooks, such as in the evil matriarchal society of drow, there is an undercurrent of sexual deviance involved. The male victim’s clothing is neither revealing nor part of the torture, but the female torturer’s always is, often including leather and a whip. It’s therefore not difficult to imagine any drow character immediately becoming sexualized—not because the player necessarily wanted to depict a sexual character, but because the material forces that archetype onto them, along with the reputation of being a man-hating tyrant.

When a femme character is the one being tortured, the body and revealing clothing are painstakingly described, giving the impression that players are meant to glean erotic pleasure from the character’s torment. We see this pattern repeated even in smaller details throughout D&D’s publication history, such as the description of Baalphegor’s Grace: an enchanted vial players can interact with. A powerful archdevil originally created the vial “to capture the blood and tears of his consort” (the article does not specify if these components were collected willingly). An adventurer who survives drinking from the vial is then linked to a group of powerful female devils who must obey them. If they don’t, or if the devils attack their new master, they risk unbearable pain at the drinker’s hands. 

Players are not meant to empathize with these evil creatures, but after reading how the female devils are punished for trying to escape enslavement, after learning how said enslavement was caused by the blood and tears of another woman… how could we not? It’s a familiar story cloaked in deceptively harmless gameplay: a cycle of abuse known by women and people of color and members of the queer community who may have escaped similar circumstances or carry the generational trauma of those who didn’t. While there can be power and catharsis in overcoming these themes within the game, at the same time, there can also be valid exhaustion when facing them so explicitly.

Players’ battles in these fantasy games can often reflect our own personal battles. The fantasy worlds players interact with are often inspired by real-life history and myth. Many of the monsters featured in the game’s bestiaries come from the same bestiaries in our world that were used to depict real people and cultures as “monstrous.” D&D’s stories of friendship, love, and good conquering evil can also be as familiar as they are comforting, acting as an incredible outlet for players’ imaginations. Players latch onto and rely upon this storytelling—yet these same stories can also be unnerving. Themes of sexism and violence against women are not exclusive to D&D, and should players wish to find empowerment in them, they might need to emancipate themselves from much of the original text. 

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The body on the table is no longer of use. She was not persuaded by the players’ attempts at diplomacy. In fact, she was more resistant than any mortal ought to be. 

The players declare her a succubus, an evil seductress capable of controlling men with a single kiss. They wonder how they didn’t notice before. Her exposed skin and lurid defiance are clear indicators of her evil, and in this imaginary world, the wicked will always remain wicked. If the paladin chooses to slay her, the Dungeon Master decides, he will still remain Lawful and stay in his god’s good graces. So, he rolls his twenty-sided die, plunging a blade through her unprotected chest.

Critical hit.

One final scream, and the body stills, impaled atop the table. 

Cheers erupt. High-fives crack-crack-crack above the still corpse. The monster has been defeated.

🩸

During a game of D&D, if you run into a woman wrapped in tight leather, you should either run or kill her before she kills you.

She sometimes appears as a femme fatal, whispering sweet nothings into a player’s ear as a succubus or an erinyes or a lilitu or, even more on-the-nose, a pleasure devil. She can occasionally appear as a goddess of pain who finds ecstasy in suffering. There is also a chance she appears as a drow matriarch oppressing men, and in some cases, sexually assaulting them as part of her coming-of-age ceremony (when it happens to a man, rape is something players are supposed to be angry about).

If a sexually dominant woman appears, she is most definitely a great evil that must be dealt with. Her body—explicitly described, of course—is a dog whistle for her bad intentions. Her power and control are unnatural. Her sexuality can be enjoyed by the players, but only with the promise of death or corruption. 

In her essay “Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality,” cultural anthropologist Carole S. Vance writes that women “must weigh the pleasures of sexuality against its cost in their daily calculations, choices, and acts.” There is always a risk of brutality or coercion. Exploitation or humiliation. Trauma or death. 

In D&D, the opposite is true. The female body, especially when she is in control, is the danger. Is the humiliation. Is the death.

When viewed through that lens, it’s clear what kind of player these creatures were created for. Not for a strong, confident woman who might sit at that table and see herself reflected in their image—see herself called evil and be marked for death—but for men and boys who blur the lines between fantasy and sexual fantasy. The same men and boys who may view Lillith as only a she-demon and not the complex biblical figure she truly is.

Some player groups choose to lean into these promiscuous archetypes, while others move away from them. The beautiful thing about a game that relies entirely on your imagination is that it relies entirely on your imagination. Marginalized groups have been fighting against these archetypes for decades. Content creators, journalists, and game designers play a critical role in building a safer and more inclusive gaming experience, but the fact that they need to fight at all is a problem. Players shouldn’t need to rework the source material in order to disinfect it—ideally, they should rework the source material because they are inspired to create new worlds, characters, and rules, just like the original creators of D&D encouraged their players to do. 

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“Can we loot the body?”

One nod from the Dungeon Master and the players tear into the corpse they labeled succubus, removing her armor plate by plate, only giving her space to breathe when she no longer has need for air. She has no weapons and little in the way of other valuable items, earning a chorus of groans from the players—until one suggests harvesting the corpse itself. After all, a succubus’s blood and organs could fetch a hefty price from the right buyer.

Her blood is drained into vials. They cut out her lungs, deflated from screaming; her stomach, pinched corset-tight; and her bones, cracked from her armor’s vice grip. Finally, the paladin saws through her skull, pulling out a pastel brain. 

🩸

D&D’s assault on the female body did not begin at the gaming table. It didn’t even begin in the sourcebooks. It began with the game’s very creators and the people who reinforced their prejudices.

In July of 2005, D&D’s co-creator Gary Gygax announced he was a biological determinist on a public forum. He didn’t believe women were capable of enjoying roleplaying games because they had “a difference in brain function”; a female brain could not enjoy his games, so it was a waste of time and effort to change that. Instead, he decided to use his daughter as a pinup model to sell them. When addressing accusations of chauvinism, he self-identified as sexist and made jokes in interviews about including women in the “Raping and Pillaging” section of his books. Gygax had seemingly no interest in including women in his game. He had no issues making rape jokes or using the female body for marketing purposes, either.

Three years after Gygax’s post, Jonathan Tweet—the lead designer for D&D 3.5—said that roleplaying appealed disproportionately to men and that women tended to enjoy games that were more about personalities, relationships, clothing, and make-up. A year after that, Len Lakofka, a contributor for early D&D, stated in an interview that he did not write mechanics for female characters with women in mind. He wrote them for men wanting to play female characters. 

Of course, these three men do not represent every person who made D&D what it is today. But by examining their words and recognizing the influence of their positions, we can directly pinpoint the origins of at least some of the feminine body horror present in the books. As per their own statements, not one of these men wanted to include women in their games, beyond making use of their bodies. They included women in their art for the purposes of exploitation, sexualization, and objectification. They described torturing these bodies as if they were nothing more than an in-game tool for initiation rituals or item enchantment. They labeled any dominance femme characters or monsters might have as evil and trained their players to attack—or even assault—first, and ask questions later. 

It’s no wonder players debated if rape was Lawful or Chaotic, why my friend was immediately ostracized for rebuffing our Dungeon Master, why there are so many stories of women and other marginalized groups being mistreated while trying to embark on what is meant to be a fun, make-believe adventure. Lead creative minds, their insular source material, and like-minded players have fed into each other like a venomous ouroboros for the game’s entire lifespan. D&D doesn’t just reflect real life, it reflects their real life, and all of the prejudices that came along with it.

The game was rigged from the start.

🩸

I am the body on the table. 

So are thousands of others, many with deeper wounds and bigger bruises than me. Throughout much of D&D history, it was made clear that we were not worth creating games for, but our bodies were worth exploiting to sell those games. To fictionally assault without any “real” consequences. To gawk at before they were ultimately slaughtered and discarded. Adding insult to these deep and gruesome injuries, there are still far too many D&D players who don’t think these instances of violence are a problem, preventing the wounds from properly cauterizing.

Some players have chosen to move away from D&D because of this mistreatment—along with other instances of bigotry and corporate malpractice—and rightfully so. There has never been a better time to try other tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). You can find one for just about any genre, experience level, or player count—even if you want to play by yourself. But the truth is, no matter how far you move across the tabletop space, even a game like Thirsty Sword Lesbians can’t escape D&D’s influence. 

D&D is the original TTRPG—each game in the genre that comes after will be influenced by its mistakes, as well as its successes. From Thirsty Sword Lesbians to Pathfinder to MÖRK BORG, every TTRPG system exists because of the path D&D forged for them. A path paved in blood and scraps of too-tight leather. Trying to escape that truth is like trying to escape the effects of heteronormativity, white nationalism, and the other real-life villains that created all of these problems to begin with. 

So, how do we move forward?

Can we keep playing this game?

Is it even possible to play a feminist, inclusive version of D&D?

As a society, we’re constantly negotiating what it means to consume certain products and what it means to participate in certain hobbies. Nothing in this world is perfect, and ethical consumption under capitalism is nigh on impossible. So, for some, choosing not to play D&D can be one of the easier decisions: a surefire way to protest the game’s atrocities and the companies who produced it. For others, those who view the game’s structure as an invaluable and irreplaceable imaginative outlet, the decision is a little more complicated. 

While the path D&D forged may be sullied and bloodstained, it is still walkable. Still malleable. That’s due in no small part to the progress that’s already been made. As of 2023, 39% of D&D players identify as women with 1% identifying outside of the gender binary. Queer stories of exploring identity through D&D, such as those detailed in Thom James Carter’s They Came to Slay, are growing in number. Digital copies of old D&D modules have content warnings and a promise by the game’s current designers to do better. 

On top of being the first ever TTRPG, D&D is also still the most popular, and that likely isn’t going to change anytime soon. It’s almost always people’s first foray into the genre, the first game of its kind they see with a big display at Barnes & Noble. So why not push for change? Why not pressure the game at the top of the food chain to keep making progress? Why not try to define what a feminist, inclusive game looks like?

Feminist D&D is more than possible. In fact, it’s objectively necessary in order to play. Interacting with D&D in 2026 means accepting that every character, no matter their sex or gender or species, starts at Level 1 with the same potential for growth. It wasn’t always this way. In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, some species and sexes had restrictions on certain attributes, including female characters having a lower Strength score than male characters. 

We can’t, and shouldn’t, forget D&D’s long history of assaulting the female body. It seeps into crevasses of the game you might never expect, reflecting society’s desensitized view of misogynistic violence. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. In a strange way, that’s the beauty of playing modern D&D: if you educate yourself on its past, you can reflect and see how far the game—and also society—has come. Like one big case study into the imperfect model of human progress. 

For every Gamergate, there is an answering #MeToo. For every Gary Gygax, there is an answering Jennell Jaquays. And for every Big Bad Evil Guy, there is a group of intrepid heroes armed with dice primed to take him down. 

Further Reading

• “Dungeons & Dragons Is Shedding ‘Race’ in Gaming. Here’s Why It Matters” by Dr. Steven Dashiell
• “Queer Dungeons & Transgender Dragons: Exploring Gender Through Imagined Worlds” By Rowan Zeoli
• “WHEN WORLDS COLLABORATE: RACE, GENDER, AND THE STYLE OF EARLY TABLETOP ROLE-PLAYING GAMES” by Stefan Huddleston
• “Misogyny and the Female Body in Dungeons & Dragons” by Dr. Aaron Trammell
• “The Ludic Bestiary: Misogynistic Tropes of Female Monstrosity in Dungeons & Dragons” by Dr. Sarah Stang and Dr. Aaron Trammell