Hollis beckwith weighed the pewter miniature in the palm of her sweaty hand. It didn’t look like high elf sorceress Alvena Ravenwood at all.

Beyond the lack of resemblance, Hollis wasn’t sure what a character like this could really do in a high-fantasy setting like the Eight Realms, where adventurers wielded swords and sorcery on epic quests against evil. Her bikini top and thigh-high-split skirt weren’t going to provide much protection on the battlefield, and her high heels weren’t practical for traversing the continent’s kingdoms. They didn’t even allow her to stand up properly. The miniature leaned heavily forward, like the weight of every bad Secrets & Sorcery stereotype rested on her shoulders.

“She’ll do, right?” the Secret Keeper asked.

“Uh,” said Hollis.

She hadn’t brought a miniature of her own, so she didn’t have much choice. And if this was the first option the Secret Keeper—the game’s head storyteller—had offered, Hollis was pretty sure there were no other girl miniatures in his bag.

She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “I mean, sure. Uh, thanks.”

Leaning forward, the sides of her rickety folding chair protesting against her thighs, Hollis placed Bikini Alvena on the blank battle map.

All around the folding table, the other players did the same with their characters. A nervous college-aged boy across from Hollis had borrowed a miniature as well—a knightly, paint-chipped paladin wearing considerably more clothes than Bikini Alvena—which he slid beside hers. A woman in her early twenties had brought her own miniature, a hulking troll barbarian in a loincloth, which she pushed to the front of their haphazard line. A man with a weak chin and a silky wolf shirt had a figure in the same model as Alvena, but his had been painted with much more care, all the way down to her tiny, intricately shaded cleavage.

Both the miniatures and the players who placed them seemed much more at home in the cramped, dimly lit back room of Games-A-Lot—Hollis’s local game store—than Hollis felt. For the past hour, she’d been trying to settle in among the sea of tables and the chatter of players gathered for tonight’s open role-playing session. But it was no use. The room felt too small—or maybe Hollis just felt too big and too young. Most of the other players seemed to be at least college-aged. And they all seemed more prepared, too, with their own dice sets and game books and neatly filled-out character sheets (unlike Hollis’s, which she’d scribbled in a rush earlier that same day). Moving as little as possible, Hollis cast a glance around her table for anyone else her age.

The only possibility was the boy sitting beside her, who was probably around her age—seventeen—or maybe a year younger. His bard miniature wielded an electric guitar that didn’t match his doublet, tights, and foppish feathered hat. He placed the bard directly beside Alvena, its base crossing over the graph paper line and bumping up against hers.

“Hey,” said the boy, leaning uncomfortably close to Hollis. “Maxx the Bard wants to know if your character is thicc like you.”

What Hollis wanted to say was Ew and then I don’t know, is your character a creep like you? but before she could find her voice, the Secret Keeper cleared his throat. He’d arranged a horde of goblin miniatures on the opposite side of the map, and now he began reading from the official Realmsdelver Adventure Guide.

“The party comes upon a group of goblins.” His narration had the flat quality of someone put on the spot without time to prepare. “They stand with their crude short bows drawn but do not attack.”

Finally, the moment they’d all been waiting for: combat. Since this was the first session of an open-to-the-public game, the group’s role-playing had so far been stiff at best. Hollis had been silent the whole time, furtively flipping through her borrowed copy of the player’s handbook as she tried to keep up. Maybe the framework of a battle would be just what the group needed to get them all on the same page.

Leaning in, Hollis opened her mouth to speak at last. She took a deep breath, and—

“‘Newbs,’” the older girl cut in, pitching her voice down to a gravelly rumble to mimic her character’s speech. “Axtar the Terrible’s gonna run forward, his battle-axe raised high.”

“Wait,” said the boy playing the paladin. “We don’t have to attack them. They haven’t done anything yet.”

“Oh, God.” Maxx the Bard’s player leaned in closer still. He dropped his voice, waggling an eyebrow at Hollis conspiratorially. “Gay!”

Hollis’s folding chair creaked as she leaned away, but the table was so small that this meant leaning closer to the girl on the other side of her, and that wasn’t an appealing idea either. Her muscles tensed, holding her uncomfortably in place.

“I know you’re new,” said Axtar’s player in her regular voice, “but those are goblins. Goblins are always bad.”

“I’m just saying,” said the paladin boy, “could we at least try something other than hacking them up first? Maybe they’ll let us pass through their village if we ask.”

The man with the other Alvena miniature scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

“While they’re doing that,” said the boy playing Maxx the Bard, somehow managing to loom even closer to Hollis, “can I roll to seduce Alvira? My persuasion modifier is plus 10.”

Hollis froze. If she leaned any farther in her folding chair, she feared it would tip. The bland gray walls felt too close, pressing uncomfortably near to her skin.

“Come on, man,” said the paladin boy. “You know S&S isn’t just dice rolls and numbers! It’s collaborative storytelling. We’re supposed to be creating something together! Really exploring the world and playing our characters, and—”

“Ugh,” said the other man. “Leave that soft-boy crap at the door.”

“Okay, enough’s enough,” said Axtar’s player. “Axtar is going to let out a guttural roar”—to demonstrate, she made a noise startling enough that several players at the more experienced tables turned their heads to look—“and then he’ll chuck his axe at whatever goblin looks the meanest.”

“All right.” The Secret Keeper seemed thankful to finally have something concrete to do. “Make an attack roll against the goblin.”

And with that, the game whirred back into motion. Players went back and forth rolling dice that Hollis wasn’t sure she even had in the set her boyfriend had loaned her. It was as if every bit of last-minute knowledge he’d crammed into her brain was dribbling out her ears now that the time had come to use it. What Hollis wouldn’t give now for it to be him seated next to her, instead of Maxx or Axtar, so that she could lean in and ask what she was supposed to be doing and where all this math was coming from. She wished, not for the first time, that she was playing her first S&S game with him instead.

But his group had a rule that came before any in the player’s handbook: the No-Girlfriend Rule. It barred Hollis specifically—and any other future girlfriend hypothetically—from playing in the boys’ weekly S&S game.

The No-Girlfriend Rule was the only thing that had kept Hollis desperate enough to stay seated at a table full of strangers in a windowless dungeon of a room for two hours (and counting). Her eyes wandered toward the store’s front door.

“Hello, earth to Elvira,” came the voice of Axtar’s player from beside her.

Hollis’s attention swam back to the table. For an instant, she wanted to protest that her character’s name was Alvena, but she only said, “Huh?”

“It’s your turn! What did you roll?”

Hollis picked up one of her dice—the largest, with twenty sides, which her boyfriend had said was the one used for most rolls. Unsure what she was even rolling for, she shook it clumsily in her palm and let it drop to the table in front of her.

The die landed with a 1 face up—the lowest number she could have possibly rolled. Alvena would be last in the battle order. Hollis settled into her folding chair, leaning as far away from Maxx the Bard’s player as possible, and waited.

As soon as the table...