In this TTRPG, I was bought and sold and I loved every minute of it

Jon was my first owner. He was poor and working class. I was meant to provide emotional care and companionship. The first thing he had me do was work at a glory hole. To pass the time, I developed a rating system for cocks that wasn’t just about size, it was also about curvature, hardness, femininity, hair, grime (last time since shower), and TTC (time to cum). I rate each one from 0-10 and keep a ranking in my head of the “best” cocks.

Lemme start this review by saying I probably played this game wrong. Some of the rules confused me, or, in the case of “BATTERY” I simply didn’t realize there was "BATTERY POWER", "CURRENT BATTERY", and "MAXIMUM CHARGE”—of which I didn’t know what to reduce when told to reduce my battery. I wouldn’t say this is a fault of the game nor do I mention it as a way to put the game down.

No, I mention it because my lack of understanding may have increased my play time longer than originally intended. Perhaps I should have died before Jon, my first owner (because you are owned through most of your time in SUZi), during one of his three consecutive depressive episodes where my skin was torn, body beaten down, and skills crossed off one by one? But I didn’t. And more so, the length of the game was part of what gripped me so thank god for my inability to understand basic rules.

Art by Robbi Burns

The itch page for SUZi says it’s a game. And what the game is about. And includes the following content warnings: “sexual violence, trafficking, mindbreak, prostitution, abuse, basically anything awful you can imagine happening to a robot could happen here.” You can go read those things on the itch page. If you want to know what it’s like to play, then stay here and just assume the same content warnings apply~

Jon died after a weekend of strange-but-passionate lovemaking. He did it to himself—suicide. I looked down the barrel of his body and felt brutally alone. Wrong. All I could think about is he stopped calling me by my name. Before he killed himself, he called me Jackie. I didn’t ask why. But he had money issues, so I think he was trying to sell me. Probably to someone who wanted a “Jackie.”

I played Sage’s SUZi over the course of an hour or two in an unconditioned room in my Chicago Apartment on July 15th, the day of the trans picnic in Horner park, on a balmy, 86-degree-morning, while listening to Nujabes and watching the air quality alert blink on the bottom right of my first (left-hand side) monitor. There’s fires around Toronto, as you know.

SUZi is a game of specifics, which is why I feel compelled to be as specific as I can about the environment I played it in. I was sweaty, not wearing pants, thighs sticking to the pleather of my chair. My baggy Junji Ito bedtime shirt acting as a dress, gathering sweat in my pits and where my back meets chair.

a section of the SUZi character sheet.

The longer I played and checked boxes on my character sheet (excellently put together in Google Sheets) the more my head broke apart and reformed into something similar: a cloud of checkboxes measuring the quality of my senses. A damage readout blinking at my left elbow (tennis elbow from years at a computer) and my left shoulder ( muscle injury from nearly a decade ago that won’t go away). I can look at a readout of my emotions (blurry edged but sharp to the touch) and plot the spaces of my brain the game occupies (eye, ear, arm, leg, suzi).

At one point during play, one of my girlfriends walked into the room and put her hands on my shoulders to give me a kiss and I said “no, no, no, no touching please, it’s so hot,” because her hands were a million degrees through the roughness of my shirt. I marked a checkbox labeled “hypersensitive” and created an Affect to represent it. Itchy, uncomfortable heat.

After Jon came Trudy, a tall, older, tattooed woman who put me in front of a computer and had me process numbers for her. I entered a flow state with the work, not needing to think. Or breathe. Just flow. I like the work. Or. I like how numb it makes me. Plus the outfit is hella cute.

SUZi is an act of externalizing disability often found within. Never before have I been more aware of how autistic I am, nor felt so seen and understood when my shoulder aches beneath my skin.

Outside, on the fire escape, my girlfriend is barefoot, grinding the last of our weed. Pinches some between two fingers. Flakes of it drop around her as she packs her piece. I imagine her bare feet stepping on the flakes, the sensation of them clinging to the rough skin like loose dust and cat hair from the carpet, not coming off without being brushed and swatted at. I simply imagine it, and it’s enough to overwhelm my senses (I black out two squares of memory). I have to go back inside.

In SUZi, we all play as SUZi. At least at first. We all get the same character sheet, and we all build from the same rules. Then we get placed with an owner and the fun begins. Owners cover a wide range of personalities and each come with a list of events that can happen between you or to you. You roll on these events, write what you feel like writing, take care of your character sheet the best you can, and repeat until your owner dies, sells you, or kills you. Each of these is equally as possible. You have no say in the matter.

My first owner was meant to be romantic with me but ended up being miserably depressed, losing all of his money, and killing himself. I kept rolling (because of his wealth) “Unexpected Harm,” meaning I kept getting injured. Badly. With each roll, I dredged a throught closer and closer to the surface. That is was my own fault I was being hurt. My own fault that I couldn’t take care of my owner.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I wrote. “I feel like I’m falling apart. He doesn’t know how to take care of me and it makes him so mad. He can’t hide it.”

SUZi put me in places where I could only think about my disability. It put me in a new body and asked me to relive things. Things with past partners. Past living situations. Moments where I couldn’t do what I needed or wanted to do. Moments where I felt like I was failing someone I loved. I fear a less disabled life would create a far less cruel experience, and that’s not something I’ve been confronted with by a tabletop game before.

Trudy came on to me today. She called me into her office and complimented me and called me cute. She bought me a dress. Then we…made love. Idk, she was very sweet. She kissed me. Put herself inside me. Put me inside her. It felt…right. She said that I’m hers now. Im sad to lose the job, but happy with Trudy.

SUZi is the kind of game that is supposed to end badly. I had a string of good luck with my second owner, I was moved from the employment track to the entertaiment track, and her wealth kept increasing allowing me to reach events otherwise blocked off by poverty, but there was always the risk of rolling poorly. Like a string of good days ruined by a meltdown. Or an ache so deep and ever-present. Even with 9 wealth, I rolled things that led to my owner being put in the hospital, that led me to changing careers, and moved me over to other, less envious owner tracks.

The goal of the game is to become independent. To regain control. As a SUZi, you are a construct, and are thus constructed to be owned. To follow orders and do as you’re told. But doing this can cause you to become overwhelmed, resulting in parts of your character sheet, your physical and mechanical parts, being blacked out. Cause just the right amount of issues at just the right frequency and you can black out what controls you and connects you to this ouroborus of owners. Welcome to becoming a “Player Character” in whatever future SUZi (the game) holds.

But that’s a lie, really. That may be the stated goal of the game, or at least one possible outcome (fluke) of the game’s programming. But the actual goal of the game is to be in pain. And then die. That is what will happen the most as you play. Each run of SUZi will be a uniquely devilish and erotic series of terrible events happening specfically to you, dotted with the occassional glimpse of a better life. Then death. Too bad, try again.

Trudy is angry a lot. About money. But she took me in for maintenance today. Said it was her treat, but she never gives me money anyways. They fixed up my skin. I look better than i ever have, even if they didn’t repair the damage underneath. Even if i still feel like im falling apart.

I didn’t have another owner after Trudy. I got scrapped. I stopped playing and instead read about a better life with the other owner possibilities. Turns out? Not many options to reach a better life. I got lucky (or possibly unlucky if you’re doing a masochist speedrun of SUZi) that I never got an owner obsessed with torturing me for their own pleasure. That could have been my life. I could have done that for thirty minutes, got killed, and been dumped in the nearest dumpster.

Put the game away, never play it again.

But hidden within the game is one speck of hope. One possibility that I wish I never read, because now that I know it’s possible it’s all I can think about. What order of circumstances would I need, what dice rolls must I get to be able to reach it? The google sheet flashes red in my head.

If you get abandoned, you make all rolls without wealth, because, duh, you have nothing. You are nothing than what others put on you. You could live a life on the streets, hiding from danger, suffering disasters, slowly being mauled by beasts while you starve. Well, not “could.” That is what will happen to you. Every option picks at your flesh and strips you down to your skeletal frame.

a section of the SUZi character sheet.

Or, and this is a Big Or, you could roll a 10. With a 10, another Suzi finds you and cares for you. You get to adjust your character sheet and choose one amazing benefit from a list of amazing benefits. The highest rolls for every other event table allows for some darkness to slip in. Some horror to make you wish you hadn’t actually rolled that high. But the highest for being abandoned is a moment of love that doesn’t push you into a new list or give you a new owner, or ask you to abandon some part of you. It doesn’t ask you to continue in any way. It simply is.

If I were to roll this, I would put the game aside and choose to stop there. I don’t care if it’s not part of the rules. It’s as much of an ending as being scrapped for parts for the last time, or having the last of your battery siphoned off as you become nothing but a husk.

This is all just character creation, by the way. The game itself is not finished. This assembly section, while functioning as a complete solo game, is merely a fucked up Life Path system to see if you die or break free. Sage promises that, those SUZi’s who do break free can become Player Characters and “will come together under the guide of their Administrator and collectively operate their group of SUZi models through an unkind and unfamiliar world.”

But even if this remains “unfinished,” it’s an excellently twisted piece of game. The writing is sadistically horny and painful, the layout is exacting and brain-altering, and the results, I think, speak for themselves. SUZi has taken its place within my skull and I may never black it out.

a section of SUZi’s rules.

You can find SUZi on itch.io and you can find Sage on Bluesky.

To support writing like this, there’s my patreon ormy substack (where you’re reading this). I’m onbluesky as well, for less-words and more-posts.