About My Work

My name is Avery Alder. I’m a queer woman living on the unceded territories of the Sinixt and Ktunaxa. I want to learn how to build healthy communities, repair relationships, liberate the imagination, and escape the clutches of capitalism.

Our conversations and stories matter, and the ways that we co-create them aren’t accidental. My work blends facilitation, design, and play – bringing keen curiosity and visionary imagination to how we create together.

I’m excited to design and run workshops, facilitate gatherings, offer consulting on game design and educational projects, coach, and speak publicly. Reach out if you’d like to collaborate!

You can contact me at alder.avery@gmail.com

For the past thirteen years I’ve been designing tabletop roleplaying games. These are games about community, relationships, doubt, queerness, and the collapse of civilization. They’re designed for new and seasoned players alike.

I believe a few things pretty seriously:
We are strongly moved and informed by stories.
Stories can bring communities together.
Stories reveal who we are.

The beautiful thing is that we don’t owe stories anything. We are free to create them, explore them, deconstruct them and learn from them as we see fit. We are free to draw from them only what we want and need, and to leave them afterward. There is a certain joy to this freedom, which I summarize as a freedom to “bury without ceremony.”

From short sessions to weekend-long intensives, I’m proud of the work I’ve done putting together workshops that challenge participants to engage critically, imaginatively, and pragmatically.

Most of my workshop design experience to date has focused on game design and community engagement, but I’m excited to be expanding my focus to include relationship-building, creative living, and queer world-making. Anything I should add to the list?

In May, I’ll be running a five-day intensive called Designing Games That Matter, at the beautiful Tatamagouche Centre in Nova Scotia. This will be the second time the program runs, after a beautiful and transformative experience took place in May 2019.

With a background in roleplaying game design and workshop development, I’ve offered design consulting on a number of projects, including Thirsty Sword Lesbians and After the War. I pride myself in my ability to discern unexpressed goals, offer critical reworkings of the material, and communicate with clients in an empowering way.

From 2018-2020, I ran the Emerging Designers Mentorship Program, an individually-tailored and discovery-oriented program that guided seven tabletop roleplaying game designers through new undertakings. It has since entered hibernation.