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eveglass
In Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress, Shelly Mazzanoble sets out to do the seemingly impossible: introduce girly-girls to D&D. I will be the first to admit that I am not Mazzanoble's target audience. The girls she's talking to are the sort who fawn over shoes and purses, grab weekly mani-pedis in the summer, and down margaritas with their girlfriends. And maybe, just maybe, they wonder what the heck their boyfriends are doing when they go out to their "Dungeons and Dragons" nights and what possible fun anyone could see in rolling dice. I'll give this to Mazzanoble: she writes to her audience. It's an extremely basic introduction, and the analogies are all based on things women stereotypically love or can relate to: the rogue "picks a lock with his Amex card and uses charm to avoid paying late fees"; gnomes "are like the lucky cousins who grew up without a curfew and ate organic fruit and were allowed to watch R-rated movies." Not all the analogies are spot-on, but many are close enough, in a weirdly Valley-girl sort of way.
I think Mazzanoble's best point in the entire book is that D&D should be a women's game: it's all about storytelling. Women (or girls) are natural storytellers. Even I will admit to making up long stories and backstories about my dolls when I was a kid. In as much as D&D is all about telling a grand story, it should be right up our alley, and it's a shame the game hasn't pitched itself that way.
I also found the chapter closers highly amusing. For the last two or three pages of each chapter, Mazzanoble provides a diary entry, written from the perspective of her character Astrid. The blend between D&D-world and real-world descriptions are pretty fun. (e.g. When the group's male cleric accidentally brushes up against Astrid, he declares that it's his "spiritual weapon" she was feeling. "Ursula [the dwarf fighter] shoved a gnarled little fist under his chin and told him if he came near me again, she'd take her greatsword to his spiritual weapon. Yeah, that spiritual weapon.")
On the other hand, I was intensely frustrated by a lot of the descriptions of play. For one of their first sessions, the DM placed the characters in a village market square, so that they could equip themselves for the upcoming adventure. Mazzanoble's character Astrid immediately declared she was going to Nordstrom and the Cheesecake Factory. Look, I appreciate that not everyone has the deep historical knowledge that I do, but even girly-girls know (I hope) that there was no such thing as Nordstrom in the middle ages. On Astrid's list of equipment -- I swear I'm not making this up -- there's a Balenciaga clutch and three pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes. One of the more established female players in the group had about the same reaction to that as I did: a barely-controlled need to whack Mazzanoble over the head with a clue stick.
In any event, this book was clearly not written for me. As both an established roleplayer and as far from girly-girl as you can get while still being female, I didn't find much to empathize with in this book. It was cute... in an, "Oh, my God, the pink!" kind of way. I'm just glad I didn't pay any money for it.
