Wyrmworks Publishing What do you do, when evil must be vanquished, but you're just tired? Welcome to Gaining Advantage. Wyrmworks Publishing Welcome to Gaining Advantage. We're using roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons to help you make lives better. It's been quite a month in January, we have this whole open game license hassle, all right, and that led to a lot of thinking, a lot of conversations, a lot of wasted time honestly. But it was exciting to see the community come together and to see what a party of individuals can do against a very powerful, Big Bad Evil Guy. And so it's exciting to be past that. And this has opened up new opportunities for us and you know, we are adapting. And so with that, I want to announce a little bit of a change at Wyrmworks Publishing. Wyrmworks Publishing Well, everything we've created so far has been for Dungeons and Dragons, fifth edition. In the future, we're going to continue to do that, but we will also be developing for other platforms as a couple other platforms that we're going to develop for at the same time that will be the I will be doing or somebody else on the team. But we also are interested in people who have developed or worked on other platforms that are completely distinct from fifth edition to be able to take our content and then create versions of it to be able to use it in other game systems. Alright. And so, in order to do that, we have created a license called the Hybrid Agreement for Gaming or HAG because you know, when you talk about contracts and licenses, working with a hag just seems right, right? Hopefully it's not quite that scary or corrupting. So if you're a developer, or have an RPG system besides fifth edition, or if you are used to working within those systems, contact me and and I'd love to help you out to make our content more widely available. Wyrmworks Publishing So you've been hearing me talk about the Limitless Champions minis Kickstarter, that has been delayed, because the OGL controversy was not the only thing going on in people's lives, and we just ran into some, some stalls with that. And so we're just putting that aside for a few months until we get that everything all taken care of. We want to make sure that as much as possible is ready to go before we even launch that Kickstarter so we can fulfill pretty quickly on that. Meanwhile, we are starting another crowdfunding campaign. This one is on Crowdfundr, and there's a link in the show notes. It's called inclusive artwork, fantasy stock art with disability representation for tabletop role playing games. Alright, now here's the idea behind this: when we were creating Limitless Heroics, I looked around for stock art because commissioning art is expensive and I wanted to commission a bunch of art for it and we did commission a lot of art for it, but I was also looking to save a little bit of money by finding some stock art to add in too. And I found like three pieces total. And while Beth was doing layout, she found a few more. But I can pretty comfortably say that the sum total of all D&D and fantasy-related disability representation stock art is in Limitless Heroics. I mean, there's that little in the world. And so because of that, I want to make more available, because there are all kinds of developers, writers and things that would like to add disability inclusion into the products that they're developing. But they can't afford the artwork. Because most tabletop roleplaying game products run on a shoestring budget. A lot of them never even make back the money that they invest in them. And so because of that, we want to make it as affordable as possible for people to add this kind of inclusion, to illustrate this kind of inclusion. And so a number of our artists are creating artwork with a just a wide variety. We've got service animals and canes and things like that, prosthetic wings, and and then all kinds of different characters. And just all kinds of different, if you want to incorporate disability representation into your game product or also your game world because we'll have more affordable personal use licenses if you just want it for around the table kind of thing. And then we're going to make that available as a crowdfunding campaign so that you can get a nice big collection of artwork to be able to use, and we want to make that available to as many people as possible and so we hope that you will support that even if you're not a publisher, and and you think, "Well how would I use this?" Well, number one, you could use it in your game as you're creating NPCs or other characters, items, things like that in your game. You can use this artwork to show your players or to to find that just that perfect piece to illustrate the character that you'd like to create. We will, speaking of, have also have an option to create a character to work with one of our artists to design some kind of art piece and it can be a character or it can be you know, a service animal or any number of different things, and we have different levels so that you can choose what you'd like and how detailed you'd like it and things like that, so that we can try to match everyone's budget. So we really believe that by making this artwork available, that this could really have a transforming effect on the industry to remove one more obstacle from people that want to include this kind of diversity and make it affordable for them. Wyrmworks Publishing And also, speaking of Limitless Heroics, it is now available if you haven't picked up a copy yet. There's a link in the show notes — you can go to our website, just go to inclusiverpg.com, and you can that will take you right to it. And so we're excited to have that available in a number of different editions. We're still waiting on the premium color version, ran into some obstacles with the cover on that, and we want it to be perfect because especially being print on demand, it's pretty expensive, and we want to make sure people are getting their money's worth out of it. But you can preorder that if you are interested in that one. Otherwise, we have all different versions and bundles with electronic versions to match whatever your budget and needs are. Wyrmworks Publishing And so as as we get to today's interview, the catalyst for today's interview was during the OGL fiasco. It was exhausting, and we wanted to talk about how to deal with the stress of, on the one hand, wanting to to make a difference to take a stand to unite and you know and fighting back. But on the other hand, it's pretty exhausting. And so how do you deal with that? And now that's pretty much over now. But yet at the same time, it's not like now everything's right in the world. And there's still plenty of things I mean, we are doing a lot with with disabilities and fighting ableism and that's an ongoing thing. And it's it's never gonna go away completely. And so how do you deal with that? How do you keep fighting, but also take care of yourself at the same time and so I'm very excited about that interview. And and just being able to talk about how to do that in a healthy way. And so with that, let's get right to our interview Wyrmworks Publishing It's often said that kindness is a free action. But that's not entirely true. Helping people comes at a cost. It takes time, emotional energy, and often other resources, and it can be overwhelming. Today we welcome Simone Arnold, owner of Hero's Journey Counseling in Vermont to talk about that. Welcome, Simone. Simone Arnold Hi, thank you for having me. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so what would you like us to know about you personally, specifically speaking to the role playing game crowd? Simone Arnold Yes. So I work as a clinical mental health counselor in the state of Vermont and I am also a certified geek therapist. I have been playing tabletop RPGs, video games, and gosh, it's probably easier for me to list the fandoms that I haven't engaged in than it is to list the ones that I have. But I do have a special place in my heart for tabletop RPG games. They are probably the bread and butter, the thing that I look forward to doing the most. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so let's start with an overview of what is outrage fatigue? Simone Arnold Yeah, so outrage fatigue is something that occurs in a lot of social justice movements and various campaigns similar to them, where something happens that is deeply upsetting, is viewed as unjust or unfair. And there is an initial kind of like outcry of outrage. And then what happens is it's really challenging to sustain the outrage over time and can lead to burnout. And additionally, sometimes when we're dealing with systemic issues, you know, thinking of like the Black Lives Matter movement, where there are going to be continued repeated incidents of violence towards those communities, it becomes harder to to escalate as more and more violence occurs. And so you can even sense burnout and sometimes can even have basically, you know, empathy fatigue, it's really hard to continue to stay engaged and to continue working towards change because of how disheartening it can feel sometimes. Wyrmworks Publishing So then, how do we balance the desire to make the world better or fight injustice with our own limitations? Like how do you know when to stop before burning out? How do you avoid that kind of… It almost feels like you… it's not that you don't care. But but at the same time, it feels, like you said, empathy fatigue, that it's just harder to, to engage emotionally with it. Simone Arnold I think this is a great question and a question that has been asked in so many spaces: how do we keep people activated and motivated and like continuing to work towards change? One, a lot of these fights are going to be years, sometimes decades in the making, and it's not going to be over in a couple of months. I think that's the first thing to keep in mind is this is a marathon, not a race. Will there be key moments where we may need to do more? Absolutely. But we want to make sure that we're engaging in things in a way that feels sustainable to us. And that means also prioritizing rest. And rest can look like a lot of things. You know rest could be spending time with people that we care and we love. It could be spending time playing tabletop RPG, in engaging in our hobbies. Sometimes it's actual physical rest. But the whole idea is that we still need to have those things in our life and create balance between them. Now the challenge with that sometimes is that people feel like they're failing the movement if they're taking care of themselves and doing something different. And the reality it's very much like the old adage, you have to put your own oxygen mask before you help someone else. If you have nothing to give if you are on E, you're going to basically stop showing up for these things and stop being as effective. And that in the long run is much less helpful than if you're taking care of yourself and taking the breaks that you need. And so a big part of this is creating balance and sustainability. The other part that often doesn't get talked about a lot is that in a lot of these spaces, sometimes people are acting from a place of trauma because they've experienced things that are really deeply personal and feel like personal attacks. And so it's really important to recognize when that's getting activated in yourself, and how that may be pushing you to feel like you need to do stuff constantly. And that's a great time to actually talk to a mental health professional to help you and like working through those things and balancing and taking care of yourself. Wyrmworks Publishing Okay, so I often say you can't fill from an empty bucket. You need to find ways to fill that, alright? But the worst feeling for me in the world is being unable to help where I see the help is needed. Alright, how do we deal with that experience? Simone Arnold Yeah, so what I find helpful and a lot of the people I work with find helpful is the idea's oftentimes we get caught up in like, the big overarching narrative that's happening, right? So we think like, Oh, we're never going to be able to take down, you know, this big company, this big organization, whatever the big you know, the big bad evil guy is, but just like in any adventure, you don't go straight to the BBEG, right? You actually start with doing smaller things. And oftentimes, a big part of that is building up who your adventuring party is. And so if you're not sure where to start, start first with building connection figuring out who are the people who are interested in this. I guarantee there's probably already people who have started those organizations, and if you've done a thorough search and there aren't, then that's a great time to start reaching out to people who share in your concern and starting to build an idea together of what you guys want to do. Grassroots change and like working together and creating that small local change inevitably translates to us taking out whoever the big bad evil guy is. Wyrmworks Publishing So what are some warning signs that you're getting close to burnout? Simone Arnold I would say warning signs of getting close to burnout, for all my peeps who have like chronic health conditions, if you start seeing your chronic health conditions like really flaring up, so a lot of increased pain, maybe your stomach is more upset than usual. You're getting more migraines and headaches. That is a you know a sign that your stress response is just getting overwhelmed. Otherwise, maybe you're avoiding. Maybe you're avoiding things related to this topic and stuff. So for example, if we're talking specifically about the 5e controversy with the OGL, maybe you notice like you don't even want to engage in anything related to D&D anymore. And you find yourself not even looking forward to going to your gaming sessions with your friends. And so the idea of kind of like pulling away or if you notice yourself feeling kind of numb in response to news that would normally have provoked a pretty strong reaction. Those tend to be like really great signs that you're starting to feel burned out. And maybe you're not taking care of yourself in the way that you need to or your community is not taking care of yourself in the way that you need to be taken care of. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, that's so valuable just thinking about and how D&D principles apply to this, you know that don't be afraid to take a short rest. You need that. Don't be afraid to take a long rest, and and unlike D&D, you can't always just get eight hours and then you're good to go, you know, back up to full hit points, you know, you might need more time than that. So… Simone Arnold absolutely. Wyrmworks Publishing And and we need healers and things to to help us in the short term too. Simone Arnold Mm Hmm. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so what other tips do you have for making the world better while maintaining your own health? Simone Arnold I think the first tip is listening to your body. You know, really checking in with you and making sure that you're taking care of your basic needs. Are you getting sleep? You know, are you hydrating? Are you getting the food that your body needs? Are you making sure all of your other like physical body needs are being taken care of, too. Do you have a community or a friend network or a family network, however you choose to identify them, that you can lean on when you're struggling? Some of them may be directly involved with what you're going through and what you're trying to support. Some of them may not be, and everyone has a different role that they can play. Not everyone can be a cleric, right? Some people are going to be that sorcerer or that warlock, and they're just as valuable in that care network. Those are some of like the really big ones. The other one is allowing yourself to still have fun, right? It doesn't have to be everything and allowing yourself to take a break from those other things. Big ones where I see people kind of get like sucked in is the news. Kind of like going back to the news and reading a bunch and getting oversaturated. It is okay if you need to take a media break. Sometimes we just need to do that. I do that even when I notice myself getting overwhelmed. Maybe it's time for me to take a day or two away from TikTok. Or maybe to not check the Discord directly related to this project. And just take some time to decompress and be with myself and to be surrounded by things and to fuel back up, regain my spell slots and everything and get rid of some of the conditions that I have that are lingering from when I was immersed in it before. Wyrmworks Publishing Especially talking about social media. When you consider the algorithm-based ones like Twitter and Facebook, they are specifically geared toward anger and rage. And, and so yeah, if you're already kind of feeling a bit overwhelmed by all that, that's just it's going to amplify it. It's going to keep, you know, kind of digging in and trying to give that more and more because that's how it gains engagement. Simone Arnold Absolutely. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah. You talk about self -eflection. My daughter has autism, and the way that she navigates social situations, on the one hand, she's very empathetic, but she doesn't always know how to express that. And so her kind of key phrase that she uses it to engage with people is, "How are you feeling?" And and it always just strikes me that, you know, she'll she'll say that to me, and I'll just stop because I don't you know. It's not just, "Hey, what's up?" kind of thing, like she's, she's like, "How are you feeling? What's going on with you?" you know, and, and, and so often I don't know how to answer that question. "Um…I'll have to get back to you on that, because I'm not sure I can assign a word to what I'm feeling right now." Simone Arnold Yeah, emotions are hard for a lot of folks. So you may not know how you're feeling, and sometimes it also makes it hard to ask for help, because you don't know what you're feeling or what you need. So if you're someone who struggles with that, a suggestion around that is talking to the people who are going to be your support people ahead of time and coming up with like a brainstorm of, "What what are things that have worked well historically to support me when I'm feeling overwhelmed? What's felt helpful, what's not felt helpful?" Like for some people hearing the phrase like, "how are you feeling," might be like super unhelpful to them, but no one will know and they may just not be in the headspace when that's asked to advocate around it. So and then for other people, they may love that because they just need a place to like be like, "Yeah, I'm feeling kind of crappy, because this thing happened." So I think just having that open dialogue is really great and like advocating for what your needs are to feel supported. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so what one message would you like to give to people who want to make a difference, but don't know where to start? Simone Arnold I would definitely say look around. Look in your community. Look at the people in your life. Again, it's so easy to get caught up in the big overarching narrative. And then we lose out on moments of connection that are directly available to us. Maybe your way of starting advocacy is educating other people in your life who may not know about this thing. And like slowly making them more aware. And again, even though that's not as big as like knocking down the doors again of the BBEG like castle and like taking them out with like a mighty swipe of your sword, it's still really important that that awareness step is important. A lot of times when it comes to advocacy work, it's a three prong approach. And one of the prongs is just educating people. Another prong is you know, legislative change. And then another prong is like a lot of like direct action and stuff. But not all of those are going to be available to everyone. Some people just, like some disabled folks, they're not gonna be able to go to a protest. That's just not accessible to them. But they can educate people, or maybe they're the people who know where all the resources are. And they're amazing at like disseminating that information to everyone who needs it. Some people are going to have the patience for dealing with people who are creating the laws or changing the rules or doing all of like that nitty gritty kind of like money based stuff, and other people have zero interest in and that's not where they're at. And so I think it's really about allowing yourself to explore and not belittle what you can contribute, because that happens so often. Every little bit helps. And then the other part is just listening to the people who are already there. I'm sure that they have a lot of ideas of how you can help and they may have ideas for skills that you don't even realize would be helpful. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, yeah, and talking about the kind of big versus little changes. I heard this great quote, and I can't remember who, where it came from. But it really resonated with me. It said, you know, lots of people want to change the world, but if you can change one person's world that's the whole world to them. And that's no small thing. Simone Arnold Absolutely. Wyrmworks Publishing All right. So what what message would you like to give people who want to make a difference but don't know where to stop? Simone Arnold My one message would be it is okay to rest. As you said, you need to take short rests. You need to take long rests, because eventually you will run out of spell slots. And when you have no spell slots, and you're caught in the middle of an encounter, you become more of a liability to your party than an asset. That's how people and parties end up dying or getting like really hurt or leaving a group. And so it's really important for you to take care of yourself. Stopping doesn't mean stopping forever. It just may mean taking a pause. I think that's really important. pauses are moments of reflection, moments of growth, maybe you realizing what you need and what isn't working for you and what's going on instead of barreling through ahead and causing more emotional harm to yourself. And so stopping is not weakness. It actually takes a lot of insight and strength to choose to stop and reflect. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah that Yeah, wow, that's such a great point. Yeah, I think about oh, you know, with where you have elves that live for 1000s of years or whatever, and, and they're kind of changing some of this lore now, but you know, orcs used to be very short lived and stuff and, and some of that would kind of reflect on you know, society that you're not as patient, you know, and, and I often feel the sort of, you know, I look at how old I am, and I go, "Okay, well, I'm past halfway, you know, I've only got so much time left in my life, and you know, I want to make the most of that and stuff." And so, yeah, there can be that, that urge to just, "I gotta keep going, gotta keep going. There's only so much time left," but then you actually become less efficient and accomplish less overall. If, if you're running on if you're on a spell slots, if you're, you know, if I really want to make a difference, I gotta slow down. Simone Arnold Absolutely. And sometimes when we are trying to move ahead at breakneck speeds, we miss out on people who would be wonderful assets to a movement. Alright, for a lot of disabled folks, that's a common thing. We just need to move slower; we need more time to recover between things. And when movements just like rush ahead, you know, really important insightful voices get left behind. So again, slowing down also allows more people to join in your movement and also allows you to think more critically about the steps. Sometimes we think any change is good change. And I don't know if you've ever noticed this that sometimes in history, change happens, and the unintended consequences, and the reason they ended up happening is a lot of people who were left behind were like, "We could have told you that was happening. That was gonna happen if you did this." But people got so caught up in the idea that any change is good change and that as long as we can change something, it's better than nothing. Now, there is a little bit of merit to that, right, if we get caught in like a decision paralysis, but a lot of the times that isn't what we're getting caught up in, and instead we're getting caught up in the idea that we have to move towards change because we want to see a change happen in our lifetime, and a couple of years and a couple of months, days or weeks, and through that sometimes, like a barbarian, we attack recklessly, right, but that also means sometimes our enemy can attack recklessly back and like have advantage on us. So again, moving slowly, moving with purpose, taking breaks also allows you to assess the situation and come up with a plan and invite in different voices who have different perspectives. Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah. All right. So what projects are you working on now that you can talk about? Simone Arnold Yeah, so I'm working on a couple of things. Probably the ones that I am most excited about are a little bit of like to be determined when they're exactly gonna start. So I have, going to be working with a group of people on a podcast where we're going to be talking about different theories and counseling. Our hope is that it's not just accessible to other mental health professionals, but so that people who want to go to counseling or who just have an interest in psychology can kind of hear what's going on in the field and hear from other people who are therapists, our perspectives and experiences on like, is CBT really that great? Or is x therapy that awesome? Or what about Freud? through kind of a critical lens, which we hope will be really helpful in people when they pursue counseling and understanding what they're getting into, and other professionals coming into the field hearing from people with experience. Other projects that I'm hoping to be working on soon is creating a book that's basically the, "Everything that we wish we knew before we got into the counseling field." Again, I think it's just going to be a really great resource. Because we want more people to enter and we want to make it more accessible for various voices to enter the field. And then lastly, if you like listening to me, and you would like to see some of the some of the shenanigans I get up to in when I'm roleplaying, I am actually part of a live play D&D campaign that happens every other Friday at 8pm. Eastern Standard time, I believe you're going to be including like a link or the handle for the Twitch channel. Feel free to join us there. Three of the players are all geek therapists themselves. So it's a blast. And one of them happens to also be my partner who is also quite an entertaining human being. And all of us are neurodiverse folks. So prepare for tangential narrative! Wyrmworks Publishing That's alright, I feel that so much. All right. So we will have all your contact information in our show notes and those links you're talking about. But where is the one best place you'd like people to start to learn more about you or to contact you? Simone Arnold Yeah, I would say best place to reach out to me is herosjourneycounseling.net. That is my webpage. You are welcome to reach out to me. I only provide counseling currently in the state of Vermont. But if you ever want a consultation around neurodiversity with a special focus case of working with autistic folk, or around geek therapy stuff, I'm very happy to talk to people about that. That is a service I provide, or if you just want to chat about stuff, please feel free to reach out. Wyrmworks Publishing Right and we haven't mentioned this yet, but I have to: Simone was also on the Limitless Heroics project, both as a sensitivity reader and helped create several of the NPCs and worked with our backers to create those and made some of their own and phenomenal and so I really appreciate all your work on that and being on the team. All right. So thanks for coming on the show and everyone check out those links. In the show notes. Simone Arnold All right. Thank you. Wyrmworks Publishing That was awesome. I'm so excited that Simone was able to come on and help us out with that. And so I hope that that was beneficial to you as well. I'd like to thank everybody that makes this show possible. A big shout out to all of our patrons especially to our new ones, Ronald, LaunchyCat, Teresa, and Bill. Thank you so much for your support. If you are interested in supporting the show, and all of the work that we are doing to make lives better, you can go to the link in the show notes to our Patreon and when you sign up for that not only do you get the joy of knowing that you're making a difference in helping us transform an entire industry. But also we have all of our content in a modular format like a wiki. Everything's all interlinked and we're constantly adding new content to that, and everything that we have published is available that way. This is actually the most affordable, at $3 a month, this is the most affordable way to access all of our content. And so our adventures, Limitless Heroics, even upcoming things that aren't on Kickstarter yet are going to be available. Much of it is available there first. And so, we encourage you to check that out. And we're we're just constantly adding stuff to do that all the time. And so if and so a huge thank you to everyone who supports us in that way. Wyrmworks Publishing If you see this show being helpful. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit the like button. Alright, if you'd like to see more, wherever you're consuming this, subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. We have lots of exciting things coming. If you know people that need to hear this that are struggling, that are burned out, pass it on to them. And if you, like me, think, "Wow, everyone needs to hear this. This can really helped lots of people," pass it on to your social media friends, and I can't emphasize enough the value of rating the podcast, whatever if you're watching this, apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're consuming the show. Alright? Click on those ratings, even if you don't have time to, to write up a review. Even just going in there hitting that five star rating or whatever you think it's worth makes a huge difference because it tells those podcast systems that yeah, people are interested in this and this is worth checking out and they will show it to more people that way. So thank you so much for joining us to help us help you. Wyrmworks Publishing Thank you so much for joining us to make lives better with role playing games. And we close with this question: How do you do a long rest?