Dream Askew is a game by Avery Alder about a queer enclave in a post-apocalypse, or—as the official website puts it—"belonging outside belonging." It is part of a book that also contains the game Dream Apart by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
Friends at the Table first played Dream Askew during the live game "Live at the Table: Dream Askew". Five years later, they returned to the game, made a few changes to their setting and characters, and continued their Dream Askew play-through in the final arc of Bluff City season two: Give Way to Open Sky.
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Dream Askew gives us ruined buildings and wet tarps, nervous faces in the campire glow, strange new psychic powers, fierce queer love, and turbulent skies above a fledgling community, asking “What do you do next?”
Imagine that the collapse of civilization didn't happen everywhere at the same time. Instead, it’s happening in waves. Every day, more people fall out of the society intact. We queers were always living in the margins of that society, finding solidarity, love, and meaning in the strangest of places. Apocalypse didn’t come for us first, but it did come for us.
Gangs roam the apocalyptic wasteland, and scarcity is becoming the norm. The world is getting scarier, and just beyond our everyday perception, howling and hungry, there exists a psychic maelstrom.
We banded together to form a queer enclave — a place to live, sleep, and hopefully heal. More than ever before, each of us is responsible for the survival and fate of our community. What lies in the rubble? For this close-knit group of queers, could it be utopia?”