It is my pleasure to bring you an interview with Wesley from the fantastic Forge Ahead: A Party To Access, an accessible guide to tabletop gaming that I am a huge fan of. While I don’t play Table Top Role Playing Games (TTRPGs), I have a background in text based online RPGs and my fiancé Chris and many of my friends do. I reached out to Forge Ahead because I wanted to highlight this wonderful resource and the great work they’re doing to help represent disabled people in TTRPGs.
Please welcome Wesley one of the co-founders of Forge Ahead to tell us all about it!
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The Interview
Hi Wesley, thank you for joining me today for GeekDis 2023! Could you tell us a little about yourself and Forge Ahead: A Party to Access?
Of course! My name is Wesley, I am a 23-year-old non-binary person with cerebral palsy. I am an artist and a storyteller! I’m currently working a collection of jobs in adaptive fashion, acting, and solution focused coaching! In my spare time, I’m a bit of a lore fiend. I absolutely love researching all the nooks and crannies of my interests in fiction and finding the most obscure information possible. Forge Ahead: A Party To Access is an organization Rachel Voss and I founded in 2021. We saw a lack of representation within the tabletop gaming space, and we wanted to create a platform to be the guide to accessible tabletop gaming. We want to create a space that not only showcases our own lived experience and design ideas in the context of TTRPG’s, but also highlights the work and experiences of other disabled people in the community!
How did Forge Ahead: A Party to Access get started?
Rachel and I met through a random encounter on a D&D Facebook group in early 2021. Rachel posted a toolset she created around the practice of chair smithing. This toolset was meant to transpose the reality that wheelchair users often have to figure out DIY solutions for chair maintenance onto a fantasy background and give player characters in wheelchairs the ability to upgrade and maintain their mobility devices in game. I saw this and thought it was one of the coolest things that I had ever seen. I commented on it and asked to collaborate, and the rest is history!
What is disability representation like in tabletop role playing at the moment?
It is definitely an uphill battle, but it is slowly improving. We founded our organization because we saw the need for more advocacy in the space. Especially after Sarah Thompson released her combat wheelchair rules, there were some awful reactions on the Internet, and we wanted to help. Our organization has had the chance to meet with different folks attempting to learn and create their own content around disability in gaming, and we would love to continue that trend!
What sort of content can people find at Forge Ahead?
You can find a little bit of everything as it pertains to disability and tabletop gaming/advocacy. We have articles about our experience as people with disabilities, interviews with friends and colleagues on their experience, showcases of assistive equipment and how we might put it into a fantasy context, spotlights on mechanics that we and friends have designed together to help people make their games and systems more accessible and much more! We’ve been active since the beginning of 2021. I highly encourage folks to check out our content, both recent and older!
How have people responded to the opportunity to learn more about creating content around disability in gaming?
We have had some truly wonderful experiences and found amazing people who share our vision to make tabletop gaming more accessible. We have had some very fulfilling opportunities to work with companies even as large as Wizards of the Coast to share our expertise and experience. On the flip side of that, there will always be people that are comfortable and committed to maintaining the status quo while being exclusionary. There will always be folks that don’t want to learn, and we can’t always change that. It is our goal to slowly make the environments that we all love more accessible for more people!
What has been your favourite experience interacting with other people as a part of your work for Forge Ahead?
My favorite experience has been the ability to work with some very close friends in the disability community and bring fantastical tabletop versions of them to life in some of our character showcases. Designing these characters together with friends, some of whom have never even played tabletop games before, and seeing their joy when witnessing the final product is one of the most fulfilling experiences I’ve ever had.
What advice do you have for people who want to learn more about creating content around disability in gaming?
Follow as many disabled online creators as you can, from as many different intersections as possible. It is very hard to create accurate content when only drawing wisdom from one part of the community. Also, always hire sensitivity readers. And if you’re asking for work that requires people from the disabled community to perform labor for you, compensation is very important.
Who are some of your favourite online disabled content creators?
This is by no means an exhaustive list but here are a few of our favorites:
What’s next for Forge Ahead?
Currently, we have many irons in the fire. Right now, we are hard at work drafting potential submissions for presentations at a few different game development conventions, and we will have more announcements if any are accepted. We are also always hard at work to highlight other amazing creators in this community! We also have major projects that have yet to be announced, but if you stay tuned to our socials you might be able to sneak a peek!
Thank you, Wesley, for taking the time to talk to us!
Over to you
Thank you for reading my interview with Wesley from Forge Ahead! Please do take the time to visit the Forge Ahead: A Party to Access website to see the full range of content they have available. You can also follow Forge Ahead on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram!
This interview was part of the GeekDis event which you can follow on social media using the #GeekDis. You can also view all this year’s content at GeekDis 2023 content hub!
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