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Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress

October 2007 Issue

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By Robyn Fleming

Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl’s Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, by Shelly Mazzanoble, published by Wizards of the Coast, 2007

I’ve been wanting to get my hands on a copy of Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress for months, ever since someone first mentioned it on the Iris forums back in March. A player since the 80’s, I’m not actually in need of a guide to D&D - for girls or otherwise – but as a feminist gamer, I was (predictably!) interested in what a book published by Wizards of the Coast and aimed specifically at female readers would be like. Fortunately, I was able to score a review copy last month, and assuage my burning curiosity!

First Impressions

I’ve always thought the old “don’t judge a book by its cover” adage uses a pretty weird metaphor. The cover – and other design details – of a book is an important part of the overall presentation, and is usually designed to tell prospective readers something useful about the contents. The cover of Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress is particularly interesting, especially as compared to the bulk of the other Dungeons & Dragons books on the market.

Whereas most D&D books are pretty hefty (a little bigger than a spiral notebook and rather heavier), hardcover and sporting busy-looking wraparound art in saturated hues, Confessions is a much smaller paperback with a comparatively spare cover design. A blonde, fashionably-dressed woman smiles enigmatically, holding a few dice aloft over a background of fantasy characters and dice rendered in shades of pink, all on a field of bright white. There’s more pink inside, highlighting some boxes of text and more illustrations in a style similar to that on the cover.

In short, Confessions looks a lot more like a “chick lit” novel than a gaming sourcebook – which was probably the goal.

And while I’m not sure how enthusiastic I am about the first – and only – official D&D product marketed directly towards women being so very different-looking from the rest, I do find the design appealing. Craig Phillips’s illustrations are charming, expressive and fun, and the smaller format of the book makes it easy to carry around and comfortable to hold up for long stretches of perusal (have you ever tried to read through a sourcebook while tucked up in bed? Ouch). The only thing I’d really want to tweak, design-wise, is the pink. I’m not the color’s biggest fan, but I do like pink, most of the time. I’m less enthusiastic when it’s so bright and sharp against a white page that I feel like it’s stabbing me in the eye, though. A soft salmon would’ve worked a little better for me. Or, best yet, more than one color in interior illustrations.

Confessions

The content of the book can more-or-less be broken down into three categories, each of which is present to some degree in each chapter, and in the text boxes highlighted in pink (and sometimes different fonts) throughout. The most successful of these is the personal-narrative “confession” aspect.

Shelly Mazzanoble uses an informal, friendly style to relate to the reader a free-form story about how she got into playing Dungeons & Dragons, and some of the adventures she – and her character, Astrid – had while doing it. Though Mazzanoble and I have very different interests and personalities (I think I probably have more in common with her almost-nemesis, Helena, really), I found it easy to relate to the version of herself that she presents in the narrative, and was eager to keep turning pages to see what would happen next right up to the end of the book.

I found Mazzanoble’s renditions of the chatter at the table during a game session – both in and out of character – particularly engrossing, and also very true to my own experiences. The constant examples – and accusations! – of metagaming made me laugh so hard that I had to start reading them out loud to my fiancé so he’d stop asking me what was so funny.

Guide to

I’m less enthusiastic about the “guide to” content of Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress. Mazzanoble’s brief overviews of game rules and mechanics lack enough substance to be of much use to a newbie gamer, and also, unfortunately, tend to lack the vitality of the more narrative portions of the text. The guide material works best when it’s embedded within the stronger frame story – for example, in a dialogue-heavy scene where the newbie players are fumbling their way through spot checks – and is at its weakest when placed in highlighted text boxes.

Significantly less focus on the how-to aspects of D&D might have made for a better book, overall, though it would have necessitated a change in the subtitle. Though, even as the text stands, I’m not sure that the word “guide” is justified by the contents.

Girl’s

The third aspect of the text – one which pervades the other two, and is well-represented in the highlighted text boxes – is the “girl” factor. The book is stuffed with references to fashion and shopping, sentences that start with phrases like “women love…” abound and the section headers have a tendency towards puns and pop-culture references that play somehow on gender and gendered expectations.

Though I am in fact a person who could be called a “girl” (at twenty-four, I prefer “woman”), I found the almost aggressive feminization of the text to be a bit of a turn-off. I’m not too interested in fashion (I fall right over in high heels) or most of the other girlier things in life (with a few exceptions – ask me about my knitting yarn stash sometime…), myself. But I know that many other women are, and it makes some sense to include aspects that might appeal to the “average” woman in a book targeted at her. I have no issue with that.

What I do find concerning is the way the text is constructed – from the title on down – so that people who aren’t interested in those things suddenly don’t count as “girls” at all. When (all?) “women love…” something, and I don’t, what does that make me?

Final Thoughts

I’m almost certainly not a member of the target audience for Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress. I’m a girl, yes, but I’m already a D&D player, and I’m clearly not the kind of girl – the kind more interested in shoes than in swords to begin with, I’m guessing – that Wizards of the Coast is hoping to reach with this book. Still, I found large chunks of it quite enjoyable, thanks to Shelly Mazzanoble’s upbeat, accessible writing style. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of her writing, and would be thrilled if she – and maybe Astrid? – started up something like a regularly-updating gaming blog.

While I was put off by the perpetuation of some kinds of gendered stereotypes that I noticed in the text, overall I’m encouraged that Confessions exists. It’s good to see a big-name gaming company like Wizards of the Coast trying to appeal specifically to potential female gamers. I’m hopeful that Confessions will be just the beginning. Because it’s the only thing like it out right now, it bears a heavy weight of expectations, and can’t possibly be the right book for every female reader – there are just too many of us!

I’m looking forward to the day when there will be so many books about gaming written with women in mind that there’ll be a little something for everyone. And I’m really looking forward to the day when there are so many women visibly gaming that the stereotypes about gender that are so prevalent in gaming culture will disappear.

And in the meantime, I’ve loaned my copy of Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress to a female friend of mine who’s just started playing in her first D&D game.

Article © October 2007 by Robyn Fleming.

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