Dungeons and Dragons and Drag...Oh My!: Denver Drag Queens Debut D&D Podcast

It's perhaps curious that the art of drag and the game Dungeons & Dragons haven't been more closely linked over the years. After all, both are about inhabiting a character. Both support fantastic fashion choices. Both encourage creativity, conversation, cooperation and communication. And hell — you can't even have a dragon without drag, right? It's right there in the name.

So it's no random encounter that inspired drag queen and Denver public health professional Dr. Zackarina Jenny-hoe —who goes by Zack Jenio (thus the drag name) and makes a point of clarifying that she is a "doctor" in the performance sense only — has become the drag-Dungeonmaster of the bag-of-dice kind. And she leads a game that includes other drag queens: the Queens of the Roundtable, a group of valiant and fabulously made-up heroes who call their party "Sword of Women," pun intended, with a saucy wink.

When Dr. Zackarina found Dungeons & Dragons, she was already in college. "When I was a kid, I didn't know anyone who was into the game, so I just never heard about it," she says. "If young Zack had known it existed, he would have been all over it from the start."

So Dr. Zackarina was already a gamer when, during the pandemic, she ran across a clip from the massively popular gaming web series Critical Role and got hooked. "While we were all in separate isolation, my friends and I started watching different shows and shorts together, gaming one-shots and campaigns both," she recalls. "That when when I really started to get into it. I was like, 'Oh, this is exactly what I love: the fantasy and the gameplay, but also the roleplaying and storytelling aspects.' I've since become a huge Dimension 20 fan. Just watching a group of friends come together and play—that was so inspiring to me. And those shows helped me convince everyone else to play."

As anyone who's ever tried to get and keep a gaming group together has learned, it can be tough. Schedules conflict. But Dr. Zackarina has managed to gather a solid group of ready and willing dice-chuckers, including Petty Patty, who plays a half-elf sorcerer named Sylvera Mintz; Raquelle C. Schelle as triton warrior Coralia Loch; Nini Coco as dragonborn artificer Pyra, and Banana Splits as a half-orc bard named Blisster "Bliss" Snorbag. "All four come into the game with very different backstories, but find themselves embroiled in this ongoing narrative of the mysterious city to which they've all arrived," Dr. Zackarina says.
And like any good adventure, it starts in a tavern. "Because I love a good easter egg," laughs Dr. Zackarina, "the establishment is called Tracks Tavern, named, of course, for Tracks in Denver." She promises that this isn't the only Denver-based surprise that the narrative has to offer for locals. "I wanted to have some bonus fun for the Denver and Colorado folks watching." 

Dr. Zackarina was also committed to making the entire enterprise locally-produced. She's effusive about the skill in production that the studio Dude, IDK has accomplished in just the first season. "Nick Holmby and Jacob Rupp did all the filming, all the producing; it's just phenomenal work. From a technical perspective, the way that they made five cackling drag queens sound good on mics? That's a true feat of excellence."

There are underlying constructive and meaningful reasons for the game and the group, for sure. A sense of shared humanity among different lifestyles, that sort of thing. "Fantasy stories are most commonly based on internal qualities," Dr. Zackarina says. "It's the person with the courage, not the person that belongs to a certain privileged group. They're underdog stories most of the time. And they're stories that parallel the lives of so many people in marginalized communities. That's a core philosophy of fantasy, that anyone can be the hero, that's supported it in being such a welcoming space."

Not that the gaming community in general really needs that specific nudge — tabletop role-players have a history of being pretty welcoming, even decades ago when the world was less accepting of differences. The question as to why a player would choose to inhabit the character of someone of another gender is relatively meaningless when they're also — or at least in the same party with — characters of a completely different race: dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc.

"But really, this is about having fun watching people have fun," says Dr. Zackarina. "When you can see that everyone is really into it, and into the story, and just laughing together. It brings down walls, yes, and drag helps with that. I call it 'wig privilege.' Everybody always listens to the person in the big wig." 

Game on, ladies.

To catch up and keep up with the adventures of the Queens of the Roundtable, keep an eye on their socials: @roundtabledrag on Instagram, TikTok and Youtube — and wherever you get your podcasts.