Many Hands is a game my friend Tobias and I wrote for a game jam. We were only allowed 20 pages for the thing, so some parts had to be cut, and I wasn’t allowed to include hyperlinks, so I’m adding the content I wanted to include in the module here.

Table of Contents

1. What is Personal Care?

2. Inspiration Porn

3. Tools of the Tabletop

4. Screenrant article on Tabletop Principles

5. Toxic Masculinity Rejects Kindness as Weak

6. Two Extra Campers

7. Violence is necessary? Really?

8. Some Music

What is Personal Care?

From this page

Personal care may include:

• Assistance with getting up and going to bed

• Support with washing, oral care, bathing and dressing

• Haircare and shaving

• Skincare and care of toenails/fingernails

• Assisting with visits to the toilet or changing incontinence aids

• Help with housework, including washing up, cleaning and laundry

• Cooking meals and helping with feeding if necessary

• Prompting and administering medication

Inspiration Porn

Inspiration Porn is a whole thing, but Speechless gave a good summary:

The Social Model of Disability

From this site:
The social model of disability is a way of viewing the world, developed by disabled people. Scope's Everyday Equality strategy is based on this model of disability.

The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets. Or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can't do certain things.

The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice and control.

Tools of the Tabletop

Check them out here.

Screenrant Article

When Tabletop GMs Should (& Shouldn’t) Ask Players To Roll Dice

Toxic Masculinity Rejects Kindness as Weak

Thought Slime did an excellent video about this.

Two Extra Campers

I had two cut two campers for space, which was a shame. Here they are. They’re both loosely based on people I’ve worked with in the past. Cutting Colin particularly hurt, because… it’s really important to remember that disabled people, as with everyone else, are perfectly capable of being pricks. I include myself in that - I’ve said and done a lot of really terrible things. I had an edgelord phase, and I’m very grateful for my friends helping me work through that whole… thing. Anyway. Two more campers:

Agatha Temple (she/her - diagnosed with acquired brain injury - 40) A prickly woman who loves lute music. Her short term memory is significantly reduced, and she gets easily frustrated as a result.

Needs: entertainment, sanitary products & meals. Agatha can take care of herself well enough if she doesn’t need to rely on her memory. She does get easily bored, however – her main needs are social.

Fallout: if Agatha is left too long without care she will forget to feed herself, and possibly begin to start fights with the other campers.

Possible subplot: Agatha’s care plan says that she loves murder mysteries, although she struggles to keep them in her head for long. The players may enjoy making up a shaggy dog murder mystery to tell her whilst caring for her.

Colin (he/they - lives with missing left arm - 22) Colin was born with only one arm, just as his mother was. He resents her for this, and struggled to find a place for himself under the Tyranny, where society seemed determined to patronise him or make him into some sort of saint. Colin is not a saint. If anything, Colin is a bit of an edgelord prick. He hasn’t grown out of telling dead baby jokes yet. He only went to Skylark because his mum wouldn’t shut up about how much it helped her.

Needs: To grow up, or to find some community – any community – which will help him see past the end of his own nose. Colin has internalised a lot of the worst aspects of life under Tyranny and this can emerge in unfortunate ways.

Fallout: Colin tries to leave the camp by himself with no preparation or plan, which leads to him lost, hungry and at risk of bear attack in Blean Woods.

Possible subplot: A PC caring for Colin can casually mention something – a piece of music or a book or a play and it turns out that Colin is extremely passionate about that one thing, even if he’s embarrassed to be so uncool as to be seen to care about something. He can grow closer to the players by chatting about this shared point of connection (this will require improvisation but standard techniques (‘yes and…’ ‘yes, but…’ will make it easy)

Violence is essential? Really?

I spent a decent chunk of time researching how effective protest works for my novel Not in My Name. As part of this, I learned that almost every time a populace managed to successfully revolt against those oppressing them, violence was a key component. I mention a few of these in the module, but it would be nice to expand on my point there a little.

There was one example I could find where regime change was achieved almost entirely without violence – Solidarnosc (‘Solidarity’ in English) was a Polish trade union instrumental in the liberation of Poland from Soviet dictatorship in the 1980s – the history of which is fascinating and is well worth a read.

If you spend any time watching the news, you’ll definitely have seen a lot of old white people complaining about violence at protests. ‘Why are these protestors damaging property?’ they ask. ‘Why can’t they protest peacefully, like good old Martin Luther King Jr?’

This is very frustrating. Let’s look at activism to combat global warming, as global warming might well wipe out the human race. The first calculations of the ‘greenhouse effect’ took place in the 1890s, and we’ve known global warming was real and man made literally the entire time I’ve been alive. Global warming activism began in earnest in the late 1980s. So, people have been asking for change very politely for most of my life. We’ve held marches, signed petitions, and explained what’s happening again and again and again.

Despite the evidence and the urgency of action, change was blocked by… well, a number of groups– too many to get into here. It’s a whole thing – essentially the Owner Class looked at global warming, thought ‘it’s okay, we’ll be dead by the time that starts to bite, whereas if we act now we’ll lose money’. So the 1% sponsor right wing political parties (both main parties in the UK and US, for example), they tell the newspapers they own to sneer at the very idea of global warning and so on, and on and on.

In such circumstances, shutting down climate change denying newspapers isn’t merely justified, it’s vital. In my opinion. When environmental protestors shut down global warming denying newspapers for one day, the UK media went berserk.

We’re making slow progress towards mitigating global warming, but it’s far too slow and it’s being fought every step at the way by the right. The liberal doctrine of ‘incremental change’ (you can’t change the world too fast!) means that when a centre-right government gets into power and implements some mildly useful policy, the hard-right government which gets in next simply rolls back that policy. Under such circumstances, I hope you can understand why I consider violence against institutions and people who intentionally stall attempts to halt climate change is justified when every other option has failed.

I also think that about a range of other topics, including combating white supremacy, combatting homelessness, working for LGBTQ+ rights, disabled rights, religious minority rights etc. etc. etc. but let’s not get off topic. So, that’s my rationale for saying ‘violence is essential’.

However, our universe is infinite and complex. A phrase such as ‘violence is essential’ leaves a lot of important things out. One of my sensitivity readers for the Many Hands project said ‘I have mixed feelings on it. I think it’s [violence] sometimes used more than it should be.’ Mexie has a great video about Revolution – a seizure of power – and how the left can become overly focussed on Uprising rather than building true innovative communities.

Some Music

Usually for projects I come up with a full playlist, partly as a mood board and partly to get me in the zone when I’m writing. This was a shorter one but I had two songs which I felt captured the mood of the project for me, both by a band named Icon for Hire: