It all started in my youth with 'Dungeons and Dragons'. The concept of role-playing immediately appealed to me because of the possibilities it offered to escape into imaginary worlds. Without paying attention at the time, I realized that very quickly I only played female characters. Much later, I discovered the 'Live Action' role-playing game with 'Vampire la Mascarade' (a form of improvisational theater where you dress and act like your character).

The 'Vampire LARP' led us to make more and more serious costumes and to keep a record of this, I became interested in photography which quickly turned out to be a real passion.

It quickly became clear to me that I wasn't going to get good pictures by photographing players during a game. So we started organizing photoshoots before the vampire parties, then sessions dedicated exclusively to photography. It wasn't Role Playing anymore because we weren't our characters, we were playing in costumes, it was Cosplay!

Taking the name of the activity literally, "playing with costumes", I got closer to the local "cosplay" scene. Unfortunately, my first contacts with this universe were not very positive. It must be said that I had no knowledge of 'manga' and, I must admit, very little eagerness to comply with rules that were presented to me as 'absolute' (the famous "It's like that and not otherwise! Why? Because!).

When my first vampire LARP character died, I decided to step out of my comfort zone. I was listening to a lot of Visual Kei at the time (a typically Japanese rock style where the musicians have very sophisticated looks) and among others Malice Mizer. The particularity of this group is that its guitarist, Mana, who many agreed to find particularly attractive with her romantic gothic look and her large 18th century dresses, was in fact a boy! Appearing in front of other people dressed as a woman was for me at the time a real challenge, like those English artists who went on stage in drag when women were forbidden to perform there. In English, 'to crossdress' is said 'to crossdress'. When you cosplay by changing gender, you are therefore doing Crossplay...

The universe of Vampire the Masquerade is very rich and it turns out that a clan of vampires, the 'Nosferatus', has the characteristic of having only particularly ugly members. It is, I think, this scripted 'security' that finally convinced me to try the experience. And that's how one fine evening I found myself playing A FEMALE vampire from this clan. It was a success but above all for me the discovery that the female sex has a devilishly more varied range of outfits than ours. After a few months, my character was banned and the almost unanimous reaction of the other players was: "Anyway, your Nosfé was okay at the beginning but after that you weren't ugly enough at all, you have to play a vampire from another clan now, a really sexy one!"

My new vampire will therefore be a Set worshipper, a clan that loves everything that ordinary mortals feel is perverse or decadent, like cross-dressing for example. Playing a man cross-dressing as a woman allowed me once again to maintain a logic between the 'in-game' and the 'out-of-game'. Since Set worshippers worship snakes, I looked for a related name, I found that ophidian sounded good, especially by feminizing it: Ophidia was born.

We had a rather 'radical' approach to roleplaying, which earned us a lot of criticism from 'basic' roleplayers. I never really understood their position, which consisted roughly of wanting to play vampires (creatures that in the game universe are the worst rotten things you can come across, responsible for all the calamities that humanity has known) BUT taking care not to play anything offensive or too politically incorrect, in short, in no case a Nazi or sadomasochistic vampire. Ophidia therefore began to organize 'deviant' parties like the Toreadors organized artistic parties or the Brujahs organized Metal concerts...

The Setites evenings were a great success, but they also highlighted a limitation of the Game... Indeed, some characters who had no reason to appreciate our evenings were played by players who were sensitive to these more BDSM themes. As a result, we started to create small scenarios that were more erotic than vampire-like, and when the vampire activity stopped, we continued this type of evening as our only activity.

I have given our activities the name 'fetish roleplay' but it is important to note that this term will probably not suit many people. As you have understood if you have read the above, the majority of practitioners of live roleplaying keep away from the erotic dimension of the relationships between characters and the majority will consider that we are no longer in roleplaying at all but in the libertine evening or BDSM. Conversely, many BDSM practitioners will not be interested in the playful and theatrical aspect of our evenings and will consider us as roleplaying enthusiasts.