EVERETT — If there is one tabletop role-playing game people have heard of, it’s “Dungeons & Dragons.”

In the genre-defining game, people create characters and play through a collaborative, improvised story. One person acts as referee, and dice rolls determine the outcomes.

Some of the games Lara Turner creates are like that, but others are more abstract. Many straddle the line between game, poem and theater scene.

Turner, 36, of Everett, is a part-time writer and full-time stay-at-home mom. In her spare time, she freelances for a handful of game studios, designing characters, settings, game mechanics, scenarios, etc. She also pens her own games and self-publishes under the name Glaive Guisarme Games.

Turner came out as transgender two years ago. She decided to transition, partly out of a fear of dying unhappy from COVID-19, and partly from her experiences with tabletop role-playing games. Around age 11, she started to experience discomfort with her assigned gender and living as a boy. But it took her decades to fully apprehend that discomfort.

“I did not have the vocabulary or the space to explore, to come to understand that,” she said. “There was a very long period of my life where I was either in denial or suppressing that aspect of myself.”

Part of her journey of self-discovery was playing tabletop role-playing games. Turner likes these games because they were a structured, social interaction with rules. In them, she could explore different gender roles and gender identities playing as made-up characters. More impactful were the other trans people she met through the gaming community. In fact, the first time she had a face-to-face conversation with an openly trans person was at a gaming convention.

“It did a lot of useful work in making transness something that existed in my life, which helped give me the lens to think about who I am and what I wanted,” she said.

Turner incorporates this idea of identity exploration in the games she makes, which are mostly brief experiences centered around a single idea. Some games can be finished in 30 minutes or less. A lot of her games made since coming out overtly explore gender identity. But looking back, Turner can see a lot of subtle trans-themes in the games she made pre-transition.

“It is a throughline of a lot of things that I have made, being in a state of marginalization and conflicted identity,” Turner said. “It is a little embarrassing to see just (how) on the nose some of them are, (that) I didn’t realize at the time.”

One example is “To Stand Before the Dragon’s Wrath,” which a year ago Turner sold on Kickstarter as part of her “Trans Rage Trilogy.” The game has a simple premise: Players act as their normal, everyday selves and are tasked with slaying a dragon.

Turner said it’s a game about realizing there is something wrong with the world we’re familiar with and having to confront it. In this scenario, it’s a fire-breathing monster. But for her at the time of writing, it was gender dysphoria.

Another example is “By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan.” It was the first lengthy game Turner self-published and the one she is most proud of. The 2020 game has players improvise their way through a theatrical play based on the writings of Irish poet Oscar Wilde.

“It has not escaped my notice that my first big game that was my own is about pretending to be something that you are not and (about) one of the most famous queer voices of the Victorian age,” she said.

If the gender commentary in Turner’s pre-transition games was a whisper, then it’s a scream in her games post-coming-out. That’s the case with her riff on the 2020 high-budget video game “Cyberpunk 2077.”

Turner was dissatisfied with the game’s character creation tool, so she made her own. “Penis 2.0.77” is a “cyberpunk-themed genital creation system” with “a lot of jokes about junk.” It’s written to look like a part of a game, but is intended to be read like a poem.

“This is a kind of meditation on gender that is shaped like an overly elaborate character creation system for a game that doesn’t actually exist,” Turner said. “I started working on this as an alternative, as a way to mock the game and then also just think about how wacky genitals are.”

Turner’s upcoming game “Abyssal” also delves into themes of gender identity. Players will navigate a world where they’re part human, part monster. Like a person who’s bitten by a vampire and hasn’t quite yet turned or a lone-werewolf banished from their pack.

“The fact that for a lot of these roles that you can play, identity, who you want to be, very much does come down to a choice that you have to make. So it’s super trans.”

To find out more about Turner’s games, visit glaiveguisarme.com.

Eric Schucht: 425-339-3477; eric.schucht@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @EricSchucht.