Who is Glaive Guisarme Games?

I am! I’m Lara Paige Turner, professional game-making-lady-what-makes-the-games. I’ve been designing RPGs and board games for most of my life, and have been getting paid to do so since 2014. I’ve got an absurdly supportive wife and a merely absurd kid, and we all live in the Pacific Northwest of the US unless we’ve moved and I forgot to update this.

I’m also a queer, trans woman! I use she/her pronouns exclusively, and I have since August of 2020. A note about deadnames: I used to be called Edward Turner, and that’s still the name that’s on a lot of my older work, especially stuff that was published before 2020. Where that was convenient to change, I changed it to Lara, but it wasn’t always possible and I may have missed some stuff. That’s alright. If you see something oldish that says Edward Turner or EddlyT, that’s probably mine!

My favorite games are the ones that tell small, specific stories. Now there’s nothing wrong with a grand adventure across space and time with a system that will let you do, like, anything. But for me, the most fun is when there’s a single little mechanism tightly tied to a narrative, making a game that does exactly one thing but does it in an extremely interesting way.

Can I hire you for something?

Probably! If you have a writing job that you think would be up my alley, by all means, send it my way. 

If you have a game design that you want to get looked at, I'm also available as a developmental editor. That means I'll read what you have and provide detailed feedback, complete with some back-and-forth discussion as needed. Generally this is intended for something that is in a nearly-done state, and focuses broadly on how clear and coherent the rules are, how consistent the tone is, and how effectively the mechanics accomplish what they are trying to accomplish.

Either way, email me at GlaiveGuisarme at gmail dot com to get the ball rolling. My availability varies based on what's currently on my plate, but I'm always willing to consider new projects.

What if I just want to hear you talk more?

That's a little odd, but sure. I have a Twitter, for which my handle is, you guessed it, GlaiveGuisarme.

What’s a Glaive Guisarme? Why Glaive Guisarme?

A glaive-guisarme is a piece of Medieval European weaponry. A glaive is a curved blade affixed to a polearm, which is a fancy way of saying “knife tied to stick.” A guisarme is a polearm with a hook at the end, sometimes accompanied by a stabbing point, which is a fancy way of saying “stick with a dongle.” A glaive-guisarme, then, is a polearm with both blade and hook. You may recognize it as being one of the twenty-five different kinds of polearms in the overstuffed Advanced D&D weapons list. I believe that in addition to providing reach, it imposed a penalty on mounted combatants.

The glaive-guisarme is a peasant weapon, which is to say it’s one of a massive family of “tape a farming implement to a stick and now it’s a weapon” weapons. Giving it a name at all, especially one as fancy as “glaive-guisarme” is hilarious to me, let alone attempting to stat it up, as if there weren’t a world of variation from one glaive-guisarme to the next.