Patron Spotlight: Cosplanna!

♥ // I'm highlighting a Patron every month! Learn more and sign up here.

If you like dice, dogs, and D&D, you’ll love this month’s patron spotlight! Anna, better known online as Cosplanna, lives on the west coast of Canada with her partner Joshua and their cat and dog. “I format and edit formal letters for a living, which sounds terribly boring,” she says, “except that I absolutely love editing!”

In her spare time, Anna loves both tabletop and video games, as well as hiking with her corgi, Val. “Her full title is Valkyrie Branwen the Lady Thorgi, Chooser of the Slain, Slayer of the Naps,” Anna explains. Val was originally destined for a different home, but her intended owner broke her leg right before they could adopt her. “Big bummer for them, huge win for us!” Val is two and a half and, according to Anna, “has a VERY cute butt.” Anna sent a photo of Val, but unfortunately not of Val’s butt. Please use the comments section to demand proof of her extraordinary claim so we may verify it!

Val’s feline sister is named Pheobe Mu the Purradox, Greek Gem of the Bronze Age. Despite their equivalently elegant titles, Anna reports that Pheobe and Val only get along when they’re causing trouble together. “One time I very foolishly left a half-finished can of tuna on the counter,” Anna says. “I walked into the kitchen to find Pheobe eating her fill and knocking pieces on the floor so Val could get some, too!”

When I saw that Anna was a fellow dice goblin, I had to ask her about shiny click clack math rocks. As it turns out, she hasn’t always been dice-obsessed. “I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was in university,” Anna explains, “and I used the same ONE set of dice for five years!” It was Critical Role and queen dice goblin Laura Bailey who convinced her to branch out and try some more dice. Now she’s all in, even punishing bad rolls with timeouts and praising their replacements to coax higher numbers out of them.

Her favorite set of dice is a simple rainbow set that comes to life in bright light. “It’s my favorite because it was gifted to me by a good friend I play a lot of D&D with,” she explains. The gift wasn’t just a nice present, though. “The dice were a symbol of their willingness to learn and listen after some tough conversations about their homophobia and how it hurt me as a bisexual person and ally,” Anna says.

This is a perfect example of how Anna describes the larger impact of tabletop gaming on our thoughts and actions. “I think one of the most powerful and transcendent things we can do as human beings is tell stories together,” she says. “I love how vulnerable tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) can require participants to be, and how they provide opportunities to develop empathy and question our worldview and assumptions.” She compares roleplaying to walking a mile (“maybe a whole campaign!” she jokes) in someone else’s shoes. As someone for whom religion plays a big role in her life, Anna gives the example of getting to explore and ask questions about the relationships between individuals and the divine in the context of D&D. As another example, she mentions a time when her party encountered law enforcement in their game. “The response of each person at our table was influenced by our real-world experiences with police,” she says. “It opened my eyes to the significantly different experiences our Indigenous and transgender party members had with a structure that I had never doubted because it was designed in many ways for me.”

On the other side of the screen, her experiences as a DM have also invited questions. “Do my creations need to have prisons? Capitalism? Gender inequality? What do class differences look like? What do I want them to look like?” she asks. “Asking these questions leads me not only to think critically about the parts of the real world that benefit me at the expense of other people, but also causes me to think about how I can take steps to make our real world more like a world I want to live in.”

In many ways, tabletop games, like many other forms of media, are escapist in nature. Anna believes that the best escapist media invites us to see things in a different way, and shows us the possibilities for our real world. “Tabletop roleplaying games absolutely have the potential to make us hungry for justice and a better world in our real lives,” she says, “if we let them.”