James Mendez Hodes

On the cover of the Thousand Arrows ttRPG, a samurai in armor and a wide-brimmed hat smirks and brandishes her musket while a multi-tiered tower burs behind her.

Sometimes, when people learn I’m a cultural consultant, they ask me why queer people, or people of color, or religious minorities, or disabled people, or any other subaltern population seem so sensitive about trivial things.

Would you care for a slightly more organized and precise way to discuss representation in media?

It is 4 June 2020.

Seeing my friends and acquaintances struggle to explain why we feel so strongly about orcs to people who vehemently disagree, I thought I'd try rephrasing my orcticles’ most important point in language which both sides—since evidently now there are sides—…

This article discusses cultural appropriation.

“I cast a spell to trip up the ninja,” says the white man playing the tabletop role-playing game I’m running, “but because we’re in Korea right now, I do it with an Asian flavor.”

content warnings religious intolerance, racism, sexism, anti-gay and anti-immigrant bigotry, war, slavery Religion suffuses role-playing’s most basic structure: the adventuring party with a fighter, thief, wizard, and cleric.

This is the complement to my previous article, “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror.”

If you attend panels or presentations, ever, I need you to read this article because, best case scenario, I need you to help protect me from “less of a question, more of a comment” guy.

This is a story about a racist role-playing game I encountered at Dreamation 2019.

I’m back from Dreamation.

Now also available in Italian!

content warnings: racism, colonialism/imperialism, cultural conflation, sexism, sexual violence, anger Now available in German!

I just did a Reddit AMA and now I’m kinda exhausted.

I hope you enjoyed Part I of my series on Thousand Arrows, sensitivity, and respect.

I’d like to share some principles I follow when I work with historical and real-world settings, either in play or in design.

So, Thousand Arrows is on Kickstarter!

The Giant Robot of Offense is a framework for creating content which won’t harm people.

The blog on this site is going to cover some pretty divergent topics, but gaming, race, religion, martial arts, and hip hop are the first things to come to mind.