While D&D reckons with its racist past, this actual play is way ahead of the curve

polygon.com:

It’s the final boss fight and everyone at the table is crying — but not because anyone has died. It’s because of how performer Sea Thomas is handling a game-changing moment between their character, a half-drow aasimar bloodhunter named Øka Hyen, and the season’s big bad. “Hitsagutan, after all of this is over, my mother is making soup,” they say. “I really think you would love it. Shank and radish stew. I’ll take the meat out of my bowl and put it in yours.” This is their attempt to leverage their personal relationship with the big bad to talk her down, rather than launching an attack or presuming violence to be the only form of resolution. And it’s just one of dozens of moments from Transplanar RPG that set it apart from other actual-play shows.

At the end of 2019, Transplanar RPG game master and creative producer Connie Chang, who uses she/he/they pronouns, made a New Year’s resolution: Start a Dungeons & Dragons podcast. Initially intended to be an in-person campaign based out of Minneapolis, what became the first Transplanar RPG arc, “The Second Stranger,” instead debuted on Twitch in 2021 for the platform’s ease of use and access. Billed as “an all-transgender, people of color-led dark fantasy TTRPG show set in an original noncolonial, antiorientalist multiverse,” Transplanar RPG has grown into an actual-play series with a tight-knit community of fans.

Transplanar RPG is currently airing its second main campaign Saturdays on Twitch, with each live show split into two podcast episodes released the following Tuesday and Thursday. The series started with Dungeons & Dragons and has now moved on to a completed, 16-episode miniseries using Chang’s own Godkiller system. The new campaign, “The Chaos Protocol,” will use a