FAQs

Rainbow Roll Fest is a 3-day online festival celebrating LBGTQIA+-led Actual Play shows. Rainbow Roll Fest is brought to you by Rainbow Roll Network. 2025 will be our fourth year of the Fest, and we are so excited for what is in store!

Rainbow Roll Fest will take place in June 2025.

We are able to admit a maximum of 24 shows to the festival, and we hope to have all 24 spots filled. 

We are defining "Actual Play" as any show where the hosts or cast members roleplay a story together using any system, including just improvising. Shows that contain non-AP segments, such as reviews or discussion, are eligible as well.

Our initial screening crew, made up of Rainbow Roll Network members, will review your submissions. Our first priority is to ensure the information from your application (for example, the content rating for your show) is accurate. Next, we will forward your screeners to our panel of judges,  who will help us determine which shows are accepted to the fest.

Applications will open in early 2025. More details will be provided then. 

You can start the application process at our Ko-fi page. After you pay the entrance fee, you'll be directed to our submissions form. If the entrance fee presents financial hardship for you and you'd like to inquire about reduced fees or a scholarship, please email us at rainbowrollfest@gmail.com. 

The Ko-fi link is: https://ko-fi.com/s/bac8de6f59

Our entry fee helps cover the cost of staff labor and hosting for the Fest. We try to keep it lower than most web fest fees, which typically range from $30-$80. If our fee presents financial hardship for you, please reach out to us at rainbowrollfest@gmail.com for reduced fee and scholarship information.

We strongly encourage you to submit a festival cut of your show.  More specifically, we have the following minimum expectations: 

1. Your screener must be Actual Play. (See our definition above.) 

2. Your screeners, web presence, and social media presence (show, cast, and crew) must align with our values of respect, inclusion, and care for marginalized communities.  

3. Screeners are between 30-45 minutes long. We have a minimum length requirement of 30 minutes. Material that exceeds 45 minutes will not be screened at the fest or reviewed by our judges.

4. Audio or visual material must be accompanied by an accurate English-language transcript for our accessibility requirements. Captions are strongly encouraged, but not required. If your show is primarily played in a language other than English, we welcome transcripts in that language as well! Because we broadcast to an audience composed mainly of English speakers, we do require an English-language transcript. 

5. Audio-only files must be accompanied by cover art or a still image while audio plays. 

6. Screeners must include content warnings. (For your convenience, here is a database of common content warnings.)

7. Screeners must include credits detailing featured cast and crew, artists, musicians, etc. 

8. Your submission must have been released after January 1, 2024. 

9. Your show does not use generative AI for art, performances, scripted performed content, or music. 

We aim to feature a wide range of art that showcases many styles, themes, and perspectives. However, there are a few things that we don't showcase:

1. Screeners that do not uphold our values of respect, inclusion, and care for marginalized communities.

2. Screeners that feature performers known to behave in ways that do not uphold our values of respect, inclusion, and care for marginalized communities.

3. We do not accept screeners edited so that the audience primarily experiences a sequence of very short clips in rapid succession for a significant duration of the screener (clips under a minute in length generally fall into this category; clips that last only a few seconds each definitely do). 

4. Screeners that use generative AI for art, performances, scripted performed content, or music. 

We regret that we are unable to offer ANY extensions past our application deadline. Not for screeners, not for transcripts, not for a late application. We know that life happens and sometimes an extension would be really really helpful, and we're not doing this because we want to be unfeeling or inflexible. We've instituted this policy because when we've offered extensions in the past, it has always resulted in a lot more work and stress for us on the back end of things. 

Rainbow Roll Fest is planned by a team of volunteers. (We do have paid staff during the fest, but the planning team is all volunteer!) Most of us have full-time jobs and also make art or have other creative endeavors in addition to our jobs and this festival. Many of us are also disabled and/or neurodivergent. After three years of trying out various ways of offering extensions that felt fair to everyone applying to the Fest and fair to us, we've realized that there just isn't a way to do it that doesn't result in a lot more stress for us behind the scenes. That's why we've decided that this year, our deadlines are going to be very firm. We encourage you to start your application process early and leave plenty of time to spare in case life happens and you need some wiggle room. And if you don't make it in this year, we hope to see you next year! 

Festival cuts can be a selection of clips which tell a story, and/or which you feel highlight the best parts of your show, or one long segment of an episode. Festival cuts should demonstrate the qualities of your show that make it unique, enjoyable, and innovative.  

Most web fests and film festivals have a hard 30-minute cutoff for screeners. Rainbow Roll Fest is the only web fest (that we know of) to focus exclusively on Actual Play, and we know that this medium can be very challenging to pare down. Due to our schedule, we can provide slightly larger time blocks for screeners than most web fests, maxing out at 45 minutes of runtime.

We're also the first web fest that a lot of shows apply to, and we like to think of ourselves as a good practicing ground for editing screeners. If you start by paring it down to 45 minutes (or shorter) for us, hopefully a 30-minute edit becomes more feasible to achieve! 

At Rainbow Roll Network and Rainbow Roll Fest, we have a strong commitment to accessibility. Captions are a fantastic access tool, and we strongly encourage you to use them whenever possible!

Captions make shows more accessible to many folks, but they do have some limitations: for example, they aren't automatically picked up by screen readers. Transcripts provide access to folks using screen readers and folks who process best by reading and need to spend more time with the text than captions allow, to name only a couple of examples. For this reason, we require applicants to provide transcripts.

We welcome shows with sensitive topics/shows that aim to be transgressive art that are made with player and audience safety and consent in mind. We require all shows to submit descriptions, ratings, and content warnings as part of the application process. We reserve the right to deny admission if your show's values do not align with our values of respect, inclusion, and care for marginalized communities. 

We are defining "LGBTQIA+ led" as any show with hosts, cast members, or production team members who identify as any part of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

If your cast isn't LGBTQIA+ led, you are still welcome to apply! However, we will be prioritizing LGBTQIA+ led shows.

Streams, prerecorded video APs, and podcasts are all welcome to apply!

We will announce the accepted shows by June 1st, 2025.

Our awards are intended to celebrate and honor AP artists, especially LGBTQIA+ AP artists, for outstanding achievements and innovation in the art form of Actual Play.

Each show self-nominates for every award you would like to be considered for. You may do so in the nominations section of our submissions form. You are encouraged to nominate your show for multiple awards, but you are not required to nominate it for awards if you don't want to!  

At Rainbow Roll Fest, we have two awards tracks for shows: audio and video. Most awards categories are given to one audio-based show and one video-based show, with a couple of awards geared only toward video and a few awards where one award is presented to all formats. 

Your show is a good fit for our audio track if: 

• The show is based primarily around voice performance

• If hosted on a video-based platform like YouTube or Twitch, the show may have static or dynamic overlays as a complement to voice performance

• The show is available on at least one major podcast player 

Your show is a good fit for our video track if: 

• The show is based primarily around video capture of performer’s faces and/or bodies (including v-tubers) 

• The show features actors filmed in-studio or captured remotely via online recording (Zoom, OBS, etc.)

• The show features detailed animation sequences 

We do require that your show choose one track to compete in, and we reserve the right to decline your choice if it does not fall within the above guidelines. 

Rainbow Roll Fest offers self-nominations for a couple of reasons: we believe it makes the awards process more accessible to actual play artists and demystifies some of the awards process, and it helps our judges know which performances to focus in on for the purposes of awarding the Outstanding Player awards.

We accept around 24 shows each year, and most (though usually not all) of our accepted shows average around four players each. Accepting a maximum of two nominations per show for Outstanding Player helps keep labor expectations reasonable for our judges. Instead of having to consider 80-96 individual performances spread across 24 shows, they are able to focus their attention on a maximum of 48 individual performances while considering who will be recognized as Outstanding Players. Trying to keep track of 80 or more individual performances is a lot of work -- we've tried! -- and this is our way of balancing labor with opportunity for recognition. 

And, our judges do pay attention to what the whole cast of your show is doing! We recognize overall cast achievements through the Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble Cast awards. 

Nope, our $20 submission fee covers that!

Our judges are individuals who are active in the field of Actual Play as creators, performers, producers, thinkers, writers, and fans. 

The judges will review each screener and judge entries according to a rubric provided by Rainbow Roll Network. We provide brief summaries of what we ask judges to look for in each category on the nominations form. 

No. Rainbow Roll Network members are automatically accepted to Rainbow Roll Fest but are nominated and judged for awards using the same process as non-network shows.

Award winners will be announced in the closing ceremony of the Fest on Twitch in June 2025.

It's fine if you know or guess the identity of one or more of our judges! Please do not contact them about the judging process. If we learn that any member of a show's team has contacted a judge about the judging process, or has tried to influence judging outcomes, that show will be automatically disqualified from this year's Rainbow Roll Fest and may be banned from future Fests and/or membership in Rainbow Roll Network.