ADMISSION:
Admission is free and open to current USC students only. RSVP beginning Monday, January 5, at 10 a.m.

RSVP

DESCRIPTION:
USC students with an interest in home-brewed Dungeons & Dragons campaigns are invited to bring their own adventuring party or join a new table of players to play test Roll for Tricksters: A Powow Heist!

Whether you are brand new to the world of TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) or a perma-DM (dungeon master), an experienced game master will guide you through the world of a small-town powwow with major ambitions. Your mission: Help the festival organizers qualify for a national powwow circuit! Track down missing moccasins, dancing hoops, fry bread ingredients, and a two-liter of Pepsi while engaging trickster spirits and corporate entrepreneurs.

Students will have the opportunity to preview the game at the live play event GM'd by celebrity gamer Brennan Lee Mulligan with an all-Native table on Wednesday, January 14, at Bovard Auditorium.

Bio:

Maddox Pennington is a nonbinary comedian, professor, and playwright. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, originally from Tulsa, OK, they received an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University, and their debut bibliomemoir, A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work was published by Hachette Books in 2017. Previous writing has appeared on Electric Literature, The Toast, and The American Scholar online. Pennington has performed at DC Nerd Nite, FemX Improvised Monologues, the DC Drafthouse, the DC LGBTQ Comedy Festival, and other comedy venues. After teaching college and creative writing in New York and Washington, D.C., they moved to Los Angeles to join the writing faculty at USC, where their teaching interests include Native studies, disability studies, empathy, and monsters. Their work for the stage has been developed with the Native Voices series at the Autry Museum of the American West and the La Jolla Playhouse, NYC’s FRIGID Queerly Festival Off-Off Broadway, the Theatre Viscera Podcast, L.A.’s Moving Arts MADLab, and the 2023 T/GNC Reading Festival. They’ve written, directed, and produced award-winning plays with majority-nonbinary/trans casts, including Love Chicken, Annex, and A Third Space at the Hollywood Fringe. They completed the Native American Media Alliance TV Writer’s Lab in 2023.

Related Event:
Roll for Tricksters: A Powwow Heist 
Live Play GM'd by Brennan Lee Mulligan with an All-Native Table
Wednesday, January 14, 2026, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Bovard Auditorium
For more info, click HERE.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Maddox Pennington (Writing) and Laser Webber.

Art: Paige Pettibon