Defy the Gods’ creator wants a game "intensely full of life”

There’s a lot to like about Defy the Gods. It promises a game of queer sword and sorcery, and its design seems to back that up. There’s an elegance to the mechanics — every one of the individual elements of the design seem to be doing double-duty. They’re rooted in the love of sword & sorcery as a genre — the brooding, the savagery, the wonder. But at the same time, they’re also playing with identity, relationships, and community in an explicitly queer way. It isn’t obvious that these two elements can be melded together, but this game wants to sink the shot and make it look easy and obvious. 

But elegance never comes easy — it’s usually the result of a lot of time and a lot of effort. Chrys Sellers, the designer of the game, initially launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game at the end of April 2025 but prematurely cancelled it. They’ve relaunched it in June with a more modest funding goal.

Rascal reached out to Sellers to discuss their journey with Defy the Gods, how it reflects who they are, and how it makes kicking divine ass extremely satisfying. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Thomas Manuel: So I know that Defy the Gods has been in the works for a long time. What's that journey been like? How has it changed?

Chrys Sellers: It's been wild. It's been about four years, and it started really unformed, inchoate. I knew I wanted something that just felt like a wild ride, something intensely full of life. And that need only became stronger after a couple deaths in my family. From there it was really a lot of subconscious ideas slowly coming out, and I'm glad I had time to explore those. 

I wanted a new setting that was not fantasy, medieval Western Europe, and not influenced by the ideas that inevitably come along with a medieval setting. I wanted something pre-Christian, and I wanted sword & sorcery just because those stories always feel so full of possibility and so full of wonder and horror. As far as mechanics, I had no idea. Early on, it was a bag builder where you add tokens of different colors to a bag and draw them at random, but the probability difficulties stopped that. As well as just the idea of how am I going to make and ship like 2,000 of these bags full of tokens. It'd be great to explore if I had the resources of a corporation, you know, but I decided not to go down that route.

I resisted having a GM at first. I resisted it being Powered by the Apocalypse at first, but I ended up being fascinated with it for how it marries mechanics to the story and reinforces the story in a loop. I decided I have to make at least one PbtA game. Then, I was very fortunate that Rae Nedajdi’s Apocalypse Keys came along at pretty much exactly the right time for me and introduced to me to the idea of rolling too high and the further idea that it's not a failure, but it's more than you bargain for. It feeds into a doom spiral where the more it happens, the more likely it is to happen, and it turns into something different, something monstrous. Transformations are all throughout this game — metamorphoses and an arc of glory.

At first, glory and doom were two different ideas, and they kind of collapsed in the same one where you do become more glorious but that's also, you know, not representing your heart very well. It's sort of taking away from your heart. So there's this tension there between the romance and the ascendancy to power.