Wyrmworks Publishing Can a disabled character survive in a fantasy RPG? What if the whole party is disabled? Welcome to Gaining Advantage. Wyrmworks Publishing Welcome to Gaining Advantage. We're using tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons to help you make lives better. Big, big project that we're getting ready for now is called Limitless Heroics, Including Characters with Disabilities, Mental Illness and Neurodivergence in Fifth Edition, and it's going to launch live on Kickstarter on January 4. Limitless Heroics will include Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition game mechanics for over 450 symptoms, over 90 new assistive magic items, and real world examples — 1000s of them so that each of the players can learn more and better represent those symptoms along with opening articles discussing how and why to implement these options, how to discuss it with your players, common tropes to avoid, all the tools that you need to run an inclusive campaign and you can go to inclusiveRPG.com to get all the details that's inclusiverpg.com The book is going to use a dyslexia and screen reader friendly format, plus an indexed audio version for the visually impaired and free random generators to quickly generate character symptoms and more magic assistive items. We've consulted with dozens of people with disabilities, neurodiversity, and mental illness, and we've hired a 100%, disabled neurodiverse and mentally ill creation team, or those directly involved in treatment and help. Stretch goals include NPCs by Anna Holden of d&d disability and Shauna Spain and more resources by Alicia Marie, Brittany Hay, and Emma Carlson. So make sure that you don't miss it. Go to inclusiveRPG.com and sign up for our newsletter. Just for signing up you get 75 Free 4k Battle maps and a unique wizard arcane tradition plus VIP early access to the Kickstarter for extra bonuses. Now that said, let's get to our interview. Wyrmworks Publishing A lot of people think that disability doesn't belong in the gaming space. Well, clearly we at Wyrmworks Publishing disagree, but today we have someone who has taken the concept a step further to make it central to gameplay. We're happy to welcome Jacob Wood, owner of Accessible Games, to discuss precisely what that looks like and why. Welcome Jacob. Jacob Wood Thank you for having me. Wyrmworks Publishing So what would you like us to know about you personally, specifically speaking to the tabletop role playing game crowd? Jacob Wood I have been a tabletop gamer for most of my life, and I started doing real accessibility work within the tabletop gaming space around 2010 when I launched Accessible Games, the blog to kind of spotlight board game mechanics and how they interact with different accessibility needs. From there, I just kind of launched into my own work, because I noticed that there just wasn't enough of that in the tabletop area as a whole at that time. Nobody was really talking about accessibility, nobody was spotlighting it, and I was running into barriers myself. So I started designing my own games, and I've been doing that since about 2013 is when I published my first book. So this is something that I've been doing a long time. I've been really passionate about gaming and accessibility in gaming. So I really appreciate that there are others like yourself who are coming up and really picking that up and running with it as well. Wyrmworks Publishing Right so what obstacles have you encountered as a disabled player? Jacob Wood How long do you have? There are three kind of main groups of obstacles I would say that I run into the first are at the table just day to day, things that somebody with a disability does to accommodate their surroundings. So my inability to read my own dice, the inability to just pick up a paper book and flip through to find a certain page for ruling. I have a severe visual impairment. I'm legally blind. So doing some of those things at the table, are either very difficult or virtually impossible. So that's one obstacle, but most of those types of at the table obstacles I can overcome by choosing the types of dice that I use or using a digital assistant to roll my dice, using PDFs to look up rules. Those are some of the I feel easiest obstacles to overcome. The second group is more of the access issue, and that's where Accessible Games really started launching because I noticed early on that I was having a difficult time even finding PDFs that were accessible, let alone websites that I get to learn rules, or any sort of real resource like we have nowadays with YouTube you can learn a game without even having to pick up a book. But at the time, and even still, to this day, there are PDFs that a screen reader just can't even pick up and read, so access is a huge issue for not just blind people but for anybody who tries to get into tabletop gaming. Our ability to sit down at a table with somebody or to sit down at a virtual table with somebody has its limits. And those are barriers that I've been trying to overcome and boundaries that I've been trying to shatter. And then the third and probably most insidious group of obstacles is the social issues, the stigma that comes with certain disabilities and the misunderstanding that people often have when talking to people with disabilities or thinking about how somebody with a disability might impact their table. So social issues are probably the hardest obstacle to overcome. And that's one of those other issues that I seek to address with what I do with Accessible Games. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright. So tell us about Accessible Games, what kind of products you have available. Jacob Wood So like I mentioned earlier, Accessible Games started as just a blog to review board games and talk about accessibility. But in 2013, I launched my first game called Psipunk, which is a cyberpunk RPG that blends psionics and cyberpunk into just kind of fun mashup. Since then, I have published several other titles, including Monster Kart Mayhem, which is kind of a Mario Kart meets monsters kind of competitive racing RPG. I published several publisher resources so I teach other tabletop publishers about doing Kickstarter campaigns or laying out their books to be more accessible to screen readers and people with disabilities. And most recently, I have begun I've been working on a quarterly zine called Accessible Gaming Quarterly, and I spotlight different disabled creatives. And each quarter, we've feature maybe five or six different voices and we talk about all sorts of different things related to disabilities. That is in its seventh issue starting in January, and I look forward to continuing with that one. And finally, the other big project that I've got going on right now is Survival of the Able, which is a game about people with disabilities in the middle ages who are working together to overcome a zombie plague and that one just funded on Kickstarter in November, and really looking forward to what that one has to do for us in the future. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, there was a lot of talk during your Kickstarter, on various Discords and stuff, saying, "Oh, this, this game needs to happen. We need to make sure to back this just, you know, like, even if you're not going to play it, back it just so that it can happen so that it can be out there and, and available." So Jacob Wood Yeah, thank you and over, whoever the 230 people showed up to make that happen, and I was just completely floored by the outpouring of support, something like that I don't think could have happened in 2010 when I started all this. And I really feel like this community has come a long way. And gaming in general has become not just more mainstream as a whole, but I think people with disabilities are starting to finally have some of that recognition that we've been asking for for so many years. And I think Survival of the Able is a really good example of what can happen when just people with disabilities and our allies can both come together and make something happen. Wyrmworks Publishing So I'm interested in your your experience with this. Do you find that the tabletop gaming space is moving faster in that regard, then shall we say the rest of the world? Jacob Wood Maybe? So I curate my bubble pretty, pretty well. I really make sure that my Twitter feed is loaded with people who are like minded. And not to say that I don't allow voices from outside of my bubble—I absolutely encourage other opinions and viewpoints—but I also don't tolerate toxicity in my feeds. So from my experience, I have involved myself in the world where tolerance and acceptance are absolutely up and coming and have they appear to be accelerating at a very rapid rate. But that could also just be my perception, because I don't hang out with people who want to bring down people with disabilities. I hear terrible stories from others about the gatekeeping and things that go on and I just I won't have any of it. So I refuse to engage with people of that nature. So I don't know. I think it's hard to tell an accurate picture of that from my limited viewpoint there. Wyrmworks Publishing So that's fair. It's something that that I've just been trying to figure out because I think I'm experiencing the same thing as you to some degree just that sort of choice of who you choose to in your bubble. And, and so that could be because yeah, I've heard the stories too. And, and I think, well gee, I'm not running into that. Oh, well. There's a reason for that. Jacob Wood I don't go to Reddit. But I do. I do think that as a whole the gaming culture because we were sidelined for so long, and only within the last five to 10 years, started gaining widespread public acceptance. I think as a bunch of outcasts already. Maybe we do tolerate and…well, not tolerate—it's kind of a loaded word…but maybe we have learned to be more accepting of others because we've all been outcasts. Wyrmworks Publishing Sure, sort of, well, they welcome me here. So I need to welcome others. Jacob Wood Right. I'd like to think that that's the case. I know. That's not the case in every space. And I feel like there have been certain venues that have been slow to adopt certain policies that help keep things nice and friendly and inclusive. So I know that the toxicity still exists, but I'd like to think that overall we're doing a pretty decent job. Wyrmworks Publishing So how have you seen lives change because of your work? Jacob Wood You know, it's I feel almost like I hate to even think that I'm changing people's lives, because I don't feel like I'm one to brag or to…. I don't like to seem like I'm not humble, but I really do feel like my work has had an impact, and I've seen that in many different places. With my Accessible Guide to RPG Layout, I've talked to several publishers who have produced accessible PDFs because of the information that they learned from my book. Todd Crapper who does layout for me nowadays learned a lot from the work that I've done and from some of his other acquaintances, and he has put together a new sort of style PDF that he calls vision layers. That's PDF layers that can be toggled on and off to change the font to be more or less accessible depending on what your preferences or to turn on and off certain types of colors that are difficult for people with colorblindness. So I know that things like that have had an impact and just the overall ability to access documents like I had mentioned earlier. And then I've talked to several people who have played Survival of the Able and have said, Wow, this has really changed how I view not necessarily having a disability as a whole but how I interact with disability within the context of an RPG. And just having that inclusion and that representation in gaming. That wasn't there before. And that non disabled people can now look at the disabled character and say, hey, that's still a viable playing option. I really think that I have found some I've struck a chord with at least a few people there. And I know that that's impacting game designs for some of the folks that I've played with who're also game designers. So it's having a ripple and I do see that and on the other hand, I see that there are people like you and like Elsa Henry, or Elsa Sjunneson, who have been doing this for a long time as well, who have also been having a big impact. And I think we're starting to see those ripples converge and make something really big, and I'm really excited about what the future holds. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, yeah, it's I think one thing that we can learn from just from from playing role playing games is that the party depends on everybody. Yeah, and it's not you know, just one person on their own is going to have a pretty rough time. But when the rest of the party is all there each contributing in different ways that that each one is able to contribute, it comes together to make something pretty amazing. Jacob Wood Yeah, absolutely. That's funny that you that you say that because with Survival of the Able, I ran the Kickstarter for that originally in 2019. And I ran it on my own, and it failed pretty hard. I raised a quarter of my funding goal. And when Todd had come to me after that campaign and said, "Hey, I want to make this thing happen. Let's work together to do it," we put our heads together. We started working together and the whole context of what that game was became not just people with disabilities overcoming a zombie plague. It was people with disabilities working together to overcome a zombie plague. It was that whole concept of not going at it alone of working together and not splitting the party that really grabbed it for him and made it successful when we ran it this last time. And not only was it successful, but we blew for funding goal and hit like 130%. So I went from a quarter of what I wanted to more than a quarter in addition to what I'd asked for, because of working together and that is something that I think this community I think we know better than anybody else. People who are disabled have worked together for ages to make things happen. And it's it's not going it alone that can get you what you want. It's not one single voice that can change legislation. It's not one voice that prompted the Americans with Disabilities Act to get signed into law. It was everybody working together climbing the steps of the what was the Congress building whether they could claim or not. We showed up in droves. I wasn't there personally, I shouldn't say we myself but disabled people in the disabled community came out together to make something happen and it happened. And that's that really is huge. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so you just rescued a djinn from the hands of an efreet, and it offers you three wishes to achieve Accessible Games's goals. What do you wish for? Jacob Wood This was perhaps the hardest question to mull over. The first thing that I would wish for would be the ability to do Accessible Games as my full time job. So to have it earn me enough income that I can quit my day job and focus 40 hours a week on what I do because I am a very busy person after I am off the day job clock and I would love to be able to put more and more time into this. I know I could do a lot more for the community if I just had all that time, but the second wish that I would ask for would be to have some way to really amplify my voice far beyond what it is now. Because as I talked about earlier, the ripple effects. It gets things going but having a bullhorn to shout at people from the rooftops would be quite handy as well. Being able to get the attention of some of those bigger publishers that are not thinking about accessibility the way that they ought to be with the size and resources that they have, getting them onboard with accessibility would be my next wish, and the third wish would be to let the genie the djinn be free and the hope secretly that he's going to continue to be my buddy because it really worked out for Aladdin. So it would be very helpful to have a magical being on my side. Wyrmworks Publishing All right. So what one message would you like to give to gamers who are disabled? Jacob Wood I think the one thing that I would really want to say to other disabled gamers is to don't stop. I was listening to an interview from one of my favorite YouTubers, the charismatic voice he was talking to music vocalist from a band called Lorna Shore and he was talking about how he had received the best piece of advice he ever had was to Don't stop. Don't stop doing what you love. Don't stop doing what you're doing. Don't stop letting those… Don't stop when you hit these obstacles that seem insurmountable. Just keep going. You're not going to make a change in the world, or even just for yourself if you give up at the first sign of failure. Survival of Able had failed once and I didn't stop. I kept going with it and working together with other people we finally made it happen. So don't stop pursuing your dreams and don't stop doing what you love. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, and what one message would you like to give gamers who are not disabled? Jacob Wood I think the biggest piece of advice that I have for non disabled people is to just ask. If you have a question about somebody's disability, ask them first if it's okay to ask them because it's not okay to just assume that somebody wants to talk to you about their disability, but somebody like myself might be completely open to it. And if you want to know something, I'm an open book. So ask me if it's okay to ask and I'm happy to respond. But not everybody is, and if they say no, then listen to them and respect their wishes. And if they look like they need help, and this goes for anybody, if somebody looks like they could possibly need some help, ask them if they need it, but don't assume. I used to live in Portland, Oregon, and I would travel around downtown Portland with just myself and my white cane and I'd be stopped at a stoplight and inevitably, somebody would come up to me and try to grab my arm and help me cross the street. And you know, I wouldn't be standing there in the street corner in the middle of downtown if I needed their help to cross this one intersection. So I don't appreciate somebody butting in and just taking hold and trying to move me the way that they think I need to be moved. So ask if you see somebody who looks like they need help ask. Maybe they do and maybe they don't but it's not okay to assume and it is okay to be told no. Wyrmworks Publishing Right so What projects are you planning for the future? Jacob Wood I mentioned Accessible Gaming Quarterly earlier. Issue seven is due in January. Issue eight is due in April, and I anticipate running another Kickstarter for that next year to fund the third year of the zine. Survival of the Able is due out in May. And beyond those two things, my next big project that I'd really like to focus on is a game called Super Able, which is designed to empower children with disabilities in particular, to really take what they have as take what they see as a disability in their own body and learn to be heroes regardless and sometimes use your disability as your own superpower. So it's about disabled people kind of working together to overcome modern day challenges and kind of supernatural beings that are attacking the city kind of pulp action monster of the week kind of storylines, but really designed to empower again children in particular and I'm super excited about that one. Wyrmworks Publishing Cool. As someone with disabled children let's let's make that happen. Jacob Wood Yeah, absolutely. Knowing that there are other people out there who would like something like that gives me all the more reason to keep doing that. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so we will have your contact information in our show notes, but where is the one best place that you would like people to start to learn more about you or to contact you? Jacob Wood You can do it all from my blog at www.accessablegames.biz. That's where I have all of the information about all the different games that I have produced. It's a resource for all the videos that I've appeared in, all my podcast appearances, my background, there's a Twitter feed that's attached to the blog so you can see everything that I'm doing and everything that I'm working on and everything that I have worked on all from that one place. And I am most active on Twitter in terms of social media. So that's the next place I would point people to. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright. So we will have all those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for for coming on, on the show. Jacob Wood Thank you again so much for having me. It was my pleasure. Wyrmworks Publishing So just a reminder, if you haven't signed up for our newsletter yet, go and do that right now. You get 69 No 75 Free 4k battle maps. The subclass also free. You get discounts other specials latest news blog posts, we just added two more maps that makes it 75 Total just as of this week, just go to go to WyrmworksPublishing.com or to find out more about our upcoming Kickstarter, inclusiveRPG.com, and you'll find all the details there. If you see this show as being helpful, hit that like button. If you'd like to see more, subscribe, and if you know people that need to hear this, please pass it on to them. And if you, like me, think that everyone needs to hear this, then pass it on to your social media friends. And don't forget those podcasts ratings. It's so important to get the word out to people to see those ratings to see those reviews that messes with the algorithm or not mess with it — makes it work so that to get the word out some more people see it. Now we'll close with this question. What benefits have you seen in diversifying the game space?