How to Incorporate More Romance into Your Duet Tabletop Game
(hint: Embrace Romantasy Storylines)
As you may or may not be aware, romantasy is all the rage in fantasy fiction at the moment, and as a couple running a fantasy press who also love incorporating romance into our duet gaming experiences, we are here for it!
In this post, I walk you through how and why romantasy is the answer for incorporating more romance into your one-on-one tabletop game (and why you might want to indulge in more romantasy stories in general!).
This is the first post in a new series where we’ll do a deep-dive into various romantasy-inspired storylines that you might want to try out at your duet gaming table. But first, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about the elephant in the room: What exactly is romantasy?
What is romantasy and how does it differ from “classic” fantasy?
Great question! I think it’s safe to say that there are as many answers to this question as there are romantasy readers, but in most cases, romantasy refers to a combination of romance + fantasy, usually high fantasy, where there are epic quests and high stakes but the stakes for the larger fantasy world generally revolve around the primary couple of the series.
So it’s not Frodo and Sam (and Gollum) taking the ring to Mordor or Aragorn reclaiming his throne in Lord of the Rings—it’s Saeris and Kingfisher dismantling a toxic trifecta of cross-world rulers in Quicksilver.
The centrality of romance and romantic connections in these super-popular stories and series often means, at the story level itself, that we’re leaning more into heroine arcs than traditional hero arcs (maiden, queen, and crone instead of hero, king, and mage—more on this later). In short, the stories are often more about collaboration, even across seeming enemy lines, than they are about going it alone and proving yourself.
Secondly, the prominence of romance in the storylines entails a strong character focus. In order to “win” in a romance as a character, the BBEG that you’re fighting is often yourself. In other words, characters in romances have to first accept their true selves and overcome the identity-based lie they believe about themselves before they can attempt the second half of their story, winning over or allowing themselves to be won over by their match or mate. (In why-choose or polyamorous stories, we are embracing learning to share and the infinite nature of love itself, but the internal arc of self acceptance remains the same.)
It all comes back to love
As a storyteller, I see a shared central storyline in romantasy and “classic” fantasy that “love conquers all.” It makes me think of Bilbo in Lord of the Rings saying that “in his heart, Frodo is still in love with the Shire.” And isn’t it that love that drives him along his adventure?
In romantasy, we’re maintaining the love drive and turning it toward another person who, for a variety of epic reasons, is not only a match for our protagonist but whose mutual attachment to the protagonist will change the future of the world. (As a romantic, I believe this works in real life too—finding the person or people our souls call to is an innate part of the Universe knitting herself back together, just like when we pursue our heart-path, but again, probably subjects for another day.)
Enough preamble, you’re probably thinking, I am ready to hear the romantasy storyline inspirations, curl up with some epic romances on my couch, and then recreate aspects of them at the table for my partner!
Excellent! Let’s dive in!
Why you might want to incorporate Romantasy Storylines into your Duet Game
In case you aren’t familiar with the story of Grove Guardian Press and how we began, allow me quickly to say that the stories you’ll find here all started with my husband Jonathan asking me for a year to play Dungeons & Dragons with him. A few fortunate events conspired to help me say yes to this request, and we fell into the first year of our duet game—just two people at the gaming table, weaving a story together.
While we fell into duet gaming quite naturally, that wasn’t the case for many other people at the time. We kept seeing questions for “how to play D&D with just two people” and too often, the answer was “you can’t. It’s a group game.”
As you’ve likely guessed, it’s our favorite way to play, and we’re hoping that by you being here, it’s a favorite for you or something you’re desperate to try!
Because of our preexisting intimate connection, the characters in our duet campaigns always fall for one another. And that falling in love, over and over again, is soooo much fun!
That’s really the inspiration behind this series—what inspiration can we draw from popular storylines to create stories of our own that will allow us to romance the person across the table from us, whether we’ve only been dating for a few weeks or months or have been together for twenty to thirty years.
(P.S. If you’d like to explore the campaign that “inspired it all,” you’ll find it in the Age of Azuria high fantasy series, available here!)
Romantasy Storyline Basics
In upcoming posts, we’ll dive into specific romantasy novels for inspiration, but before then, let’s get our key tropes and pairings out on the table. In the initial stories that we’ll explore during this series, we’ll be dealing with heterosexual couples where the male protagonist (MMC) would best fit a GM role (GMPC) and the female protagonist (FMC) would best fit the player role (PC). So many acronyms for us to enjoy together!
Of course that setup doesn’t mean that’s how you’ll need to set up your duet game! For simplicity’s sake, in most of the inspiration breakdowns, I’ll be working from a baseline of female PC, male GMPC as that’s the setup of the first three novels we’ll be looking at, but that dichotomy is more for clarity of character roles than anything else. To be clear: I do not think male GMPC, female PC has to be your setup for these stories to work in your game. If we’re talking about a secret heir to the throne being paired with their protector who is the only one who knows about their secret identity, we’re talking about character archetypes of a vulnerable heir who doesn’t know their true identity and the person who sees them for who they truly are, even if they can’t see themselves that way yet.
There is an assumption of knowledge and power dynamic in the scenario I just laid out that does bear greater clarification: To me, it makes more sense for the heir character to be the PC and the one with this secret knowledge to be the GMPC though, of course, the PC will see unique and special things about the GMPC that the GMPC won’t see about themselves. In our duet for example, Marcon sees Iellieth for who she could be and fully embraces who she is while she does the same for him. But from the outside, he’s her protector (GMPC), she’s the chosen one (PC).
And before you feel overcommitted, I do think it’s possible for these two roles to shift over time! We talk on the D&D Duet blog about swapping GM and player roles. Our upcoming Tree of Silver series did exactly that as we played through. Initially, my character, Erela, the PC, was pursuing her destiny. As she did so, one of the two GMPCs, Vekt, fell for her. As they continued their adventuring together, the character whose identity realization would change the shape of the world shifted from Erela to Vekt (which is when we got stuck moving the storyline forward—but we will!). One of our great hopes for this series is that this character setup will make planning your duet game and centering stories around romantic connection easier as well as making it easier for you to keep telling the story over an extended period of time, with possibly a protagonist-GMPC-swap as you go, if desired.
Our first three contenders
Get excited! Here we go!
In the next three parts of this series, we’ll look at The Ever King by LJ Andrews, Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen, and The Wolf King by Lauren Palphreyman. We’ll dive into each of these storylines in-depth, which does mean there will be SPOILERS. In order to delve into how we can bounce off of these storylines into our own duet romantasy storylines, we have to talk about character identities, which means digging pretty far into the plot and story itself because, as we’ve already established, romantic fantasy storylines revolve around the realization of identity and the world-altering results of that realization. (One could argue that this is the case for all fantasy or even the baseline for stories themselves, but that strays a bit from our purpose.)
After our three deep-dives, we’ll take an even deeper dive into romantasy storylines with Buried Heroes, Age of Azuria book one, based off of our duet game, where a runaway noblewoman and an awakened champion are bound together—the perfect setup for an epic fantasy storyline with a slow-burn romance subplot (which is exactly what you’ll find in the novel & series and is exactly what we most like to incorporate into our games!).
Then we’ll take a trip back in time to the foundations of Azuria in the world of Eldura, where a nobleman with a secret identity as an assassin must pair up with his rival’s courtesan (who may or not also have a history as an assassin) to uncover the various kingdom-ending plots unfolding during the queen’s harvest festival.
I am so excited to dive into this new series with you! Are there any romantasies you’d like me to tackle? Storylines or character archetypes that you need help incorporating into your duet? Leave me a comment below and let me know!