Femme Noir

Femme Noir is a pair of thematically-linked roleplaying games - Desperate and Becoming. These games were inspired by media about womanhood through a noir (or neo-noir) framework: not stories where a cipher-like femme fatale arrives on the scene to confuse and beguile a male lead, but ones about how women relate to each other.

How women define our identities is a fraught subject - a complex based on the women we wish we were, the selves we wish we weren’t, who we’re told to be or not be by a patriarchal society, and how we absorb pieces of each other as we cling to each other for something like understanding.

Desperate is a game for 3-5 players, who will take on the role of strangers investigating the disappearance of a missing woman. In the course of their search, they will find that they did not know her as well as they thought they did - and that her disappearance is not as it first seems. Desperate is inspired by the movie Desperately Seeking Susan and the book Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Becoming is a game for 2 players, who will take on the role of two dissimilar women who find themselves becoming the same as their lives intertwine. They are brought together at first by a simple coincidence, but will soon find themselves inseparable, for all that they might wish otherwise. Becoming is inspired by the movies Mulholland Drive and Single White Female.

These are NOT games for TERF bullshit. How trans women define and relate to their womanhood is just as rich a thematic landscape as how cis women do, likely even moreso. If you picked up this zine hoping for themes about “real women” or “natural women”, I suggest you put this back down and get your head on straight. The works of David Lynch are a particular inspiration here, and he would rightly tell you to fix your hearts or die.