You’re dragged into a treacherous fantasy world made from your own fears, doubts and desires. There’s only one way to escape – but with limitless adventure within your grasp, would you even want to? You might very well have heard our first experience with DIE the RPG, based on the comic of the same name, when we featured it on Cannibal Halfling Radio: Now Playing! Jay, Evelyn, Fitz, and Max came back together to play one more roleplaying game and found themselves in the Fields of the Lost, facing down their own troubles. Well, last weekend I grabbed the d20 of the Master myself and ran a marathon session, ten hours long, and it was just as much of an emotional rollercoaster. With the book in hand and experience on both sides of the screen, let’s dive in for a proper review!

The Personas…

DIE is an extremely meta roleplaying game – you start not with the fantasy game character you’ll be playing (a Paragon), but the ‘real person’ character (Persona) that you’ll be playing while they ostensibly play the Paragon.

Whew. 

The basic scenario of DIE is Reunited: the Personas all used to play roleplaying games together back in high school. Now, years down the line, they’re back in town for a high school reunion, and the gamemaster from the high school days has invited everyone to play a game together once again for old time’s sake. This is the start of the Rituals that form the framework for a game of DIE, and it’s mostly in the form of questions. Why did the group come together in the first place, what kind of school was it, and how long has it been since? What were the stereotypes assigned to the characters within the school, and how were they actually different from them? What did each player love and hate about gaming together? Did you have a goal in life, or a significant gift, or something shitty to deal with? Who was your most and least favorite member of the group? After you graduated, how did things not work out the way you wanted them to? What’s your life like now as an adult? Why did you not want to come to the reunion, and why did you come anyways? What did you think when the GM invited you to the game?

Jason was the GM, the jock who lived a double life as a nerd who wanted to turn his passion for creativity and storytelling into a life… and failed. Lionel “Lenny” Spaulding IV was the heir to a janitorial supply empire who was looking forward to continuing the family business, only to find that it was a joyless existence with nothing meaningful to do and kids he didn’t know how to handle. Donny was a gifted, prize-winning writer and social butterfly who coasted through high school and crashed in college, dropping off the grid to work in oil fields but turning his life around now that he’s closer to home. Billy was a king of the nerds with a high school cheerleader sweetheart, but his interests were tossed to the wayside in adulthood for a job that paid the bills but was a drain on his spirit. Antonio, goth vampire who somehow weathered everything high school had to throw at him, broke his own high school sweetheart’s heart and wound up stuck in the same old town as the social pariah due to his own actions, his parents’ madness, and the cutthroat high society he found himself serving drinks to.

In short, if you want a character with plenty of personal problems and a group that’s linked together like only co-creatives can be, this is the ritual for you.

Their Paragons…

The basic mechanics of how-to-do-a-thing are quite simple. Paragons all have the standard dragon game stats (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) with a rating of 2, with two more points to be added to a stat or stats of their choosing. Each point for the stat you’re using adds a d6 to your pool. If you have narrative or mechanical Advantages, you add dice. If you have narrative or mechanical Disadvantages, you remove dice. Then, you roll your pool and any result of 4 or above is a success. Subtract the Difficulty of a task (oftentimes 0 or 1, rarely the challenging 2) from your number of successes. Any successes left over? You completed the task! If one of your leftover successes was a 6 on the die, you can trigger any Special abilities and powers related to your action.

Everyone, Paragons and most NPCs included, have about the same chance of success, really. So it’s probably a good thing that the game punches several polyhedral shaped holes in the side of the good ship Balance.

See, every type of Paragon has a die associated with them that can be added to the pool if the circumstances are right. The Dictator can add their d4 when convincing others. The Fool can add another d6 when acting, well, like a fool, with the added bonus of a Special that adds yet another d6. The Emotion Knight adds a d8 whenever they’ve tapped into their sacred emotion. The Neo adds a d10 whenever using one of their cybernetic gifts. The Godbinder adds a d12 whenever using an ability granted by one of their gods.

Each, however, also has a thoroughly game breaking ability that they pretty much start with. The Dictator can simply roll their d4 to use their terrifying!bard Voice to manipulate someone’s emotions – the d6s only get rolled to modify how extremely the target’s emotions are toyed with. The Fool’s d6 is marked with circles that, if they come up, have luck go wildly their way – and they can give the Fool d6 over to the GM to get themselves out of trouble with no questions asked, with the understanding that it’ll all go wrong later. If the Emotion Knight’s sacred emotion is strong enough, they can one-shot pretty much anything up to and including abstract concepts like despair. The Neo, dependent on the Gold of the William Gibson-style cyberpunk elves that are the Fair, can overcharge their gifts to suddenly gain upgrades that would otherwise take many levels to gain – and could wildly change the course of the story with the Fair, the flip of a coin, and a question. The Godbinder, the cleric-as-demonologist, can gain debt with their gods by asking for outright miracles, and trade favors they’ve earned for the same.

Of course, one can hardly dismiss the Master, the Paragon of the GM’s Persona, who first of all adds a d20, second of all can spend tokens to outright cheat and break the rules of the game/ reality (if there’s a difference), third of all can pretty much have any type of spell you can imagine, and fourth of all is, you know, the one who got everyone into this mess in the first place.

You got your issues from your Persona. You get your really problematic coping methods, and a way to grab some time in the spotlight, from your Paragon.

And Their Problems.

Speaking of which, the GM is the one who decides who gets which kind of Paragon.

See, after Persona creation the group takes a break, and the GM uses that break to go off and take a look at all of the notes they should have been taking this whole time. Part of that is deciding which Paragon will pull the most interesting story out of the Persona. Antonio was trapped in a deeply toxic marriage where he had almost no agency, so the Dictator’s d4 went to him. Donny was terrified that things had started to finally go well for him, with plenty of money and a beloved fiancé, and that he’d somehow lose it all: Fear Knight. Lenny had always been chained to his family’s fortune, and the wealth he now possessed had hollowed out his life, so he’d be chasing Fair Gold as the Neo. William had made bargains and compromises, sacrificing professional satisfaction to support the family he genuinely loved, so he would make more bargains as a Godbinder. 

Suffice to say the happily married but creatively failed Jason, encouraged by his own wife to seek closure with his old friends and pick up his old hobbies, had managed to get his hands on a copy of DIE and decided to try and help everyone with their problems. 

TTRPGs can be therapeutic, but you really shouldn’t try to be your group’s unlicensed therapist, Jason.

Aside from that vital decision, the GM also has to identify things from the Personas’ lives that can be brought into the game as Echoes. There’s great advice on how to do this, and most of the bestiary of fantasy creatures include good notes on what they might be an echo of: a giant could be unruly children (Lenny’s) or the shadow of a parent (Antonio), for just one example. Cabinchildren who looked like William’s kids appeared aboard a ship, missing their parents who had to stay in another city for work. Queen Katarina of Beachhead looked eerily like Donny’s fiancé Kate, and was somehow able to silence the voice of his Fearful sword. The AI in Lenny’s head had the voice of his distant wife, cold but considering, and the healing goddess Allura in turn had the mannerisms of William’s wife. 

The absence of anyone resembling Gracie, who had been the one who everyone was scared of back in high school, had everyone getting increasingly agitated and nervous for most of the game.

It’s also vital that the GM identifies what the Persona is lacking in their life, because that is the carrot you’ll be using as a stick to drive them towards a final decision come the end of the story. Antonio wanted to make amends for some past bad behavior and to get some agency in his life. Donny wanted to settle down and be happy, to regain the confidence he’d lost after high school. Lenny wanted meaning in his life, and to be a better partner and father than Lionel III had been. William wanted balance in his life, to not have to hate walking out the door every day and risk bringing that darkness home when he walked back in.

Returning to the table, now in character as their Personas, everyone gets their Paragon and their unique die, and then just as the game within a game starts… the Personas are pulled into the game within a game within a game world of DIE, becoming one with their Paragons. The GM, the Master, vanishes almost immediately, and monsters known as the Fallen (who look oddly like folks from back home) burst in to try and kill the players. Once the Fallen are dealt with, the players leave the room they were in… only to find themselves in the same tavern that they started their first game in, years ago. Posted on the quest board is a note that only they can read:

To go home, all players must gather together and each say:

“The game is over.”

To stay, all players must gather together and each say:

“The game continues.”

Once a decision is made, it is final.

Be aware: as a foreign entity, your presence here has destabilised reality. If a decision is not made, this world will end and all inside will perish.

As long as a unanimous decision is made, the realm will continue.

Those who are dead do not get a vote.

And so it goes. The players will have to track down the Master in order to even try to complete the ritual, as the world falls apart around them, facing echoes of their lives and being presented with reasons why they might want the game to continue. Hopefully nobody dies, because dying for real in the game world is so much worse than you might think…

Frankly, everything I’ve covered here so far essentially makes up the Session Zero/first session of a traditional game of DIE, and it’s a master class in character and group building, roleplaying-game-as-conversation, collaborative storytelling, and making sure that your players are going to take some emotional hits.

A Hundred Pages Too Many?

From the perspective of trying to critique the game’s design, however, I do have some issues.

DIE is really meant, on the actual paper, to run for a few sessions, with the first session including the Persona creation all the way through making it to the starting tavern. However, starting on Pg. 253 there are rules for playing a long form campaign version of DIE. In short, the ritual to go home fails, and instead of a single self-contained region the players find themselves on the full icosahedron-shaped world of Die, with twenty potential levels of gaining new abilities and twenty regions to explore, learn from, and maybe even control as they try to figure out what went wrong and how (and if) to get home. The problem is… I don’t think DIE at its heart is any way in favor of an indefinite, long-running campaign, even with changes like removing the time pressure of the world ending if they don’t perform the ritual fast enough.

This is not a bad thing! It’s a feature, not a bug, and pretty common among emotionally heavy games anyways. I can’t see a game of Masks lasting more than twenty or so sessions, even if it would typically be much less intense than DIE, and the horror of Bluebeard’s Bride would collapse if you tried to run it for more than one.

Both of my times playing DIE, first as a player and then as the Master, were so emotionally intense that they couldn’t possibly have sustained themselves for much longer. If anything this is even more impressive with our Now Playing outing with the game, which for recording purposes was maybe 1/3rd the length of this past weekend’s session. Yes, we didn’t dive as deeply into the world and the possibilities then as we now have, but a player delivered the emotional damage version of an orbital strike that blasted the game’s conflict into a memory and was responsible for several seconds of dead air as we just tried to come to grips with it. 

As for last weekend, everyone was completely wired by the end of the game, having fun but stressing out as their Personas saw more and more traces of their lives in Die, began questioning whether the familiar faces were real or not, began scheming against one another in secret in case the ritual didn’t go the way they wanted, were subjected to and took more risks. They were gaining debt with the gods to save multiple characters at once, determining the fate of their Persona’s marriage with a flip of the Fair’s coin, planting mental compulsions, and sending emotions off the scale of normal human endurance. We were supposed to play two games the day we played DIE – by the time we were done, we didn’t have it in us to play even something significantly more lighthearted, nevermind more DIE, and it had nothing to do with the time of day.

I think the total runtime sweet spot across however many sessions you do play is somewhere within the 8-12 hour range. While there’s nothing mechanically wrong with the campaign rules so far as I can see, and there are some very interesting things, you’re not really playing the game as intended. It’s by no means impossible, it’s just that you’ll be walking a tightrope between burning the playgroup out and failing to maintain the experiential impact DIE is going for. If you succeed, I think it’ll come down more to you and your group rather than anything else.

Then, starting on Pg. 291, there are various different Scenarios & Social Groups to run DIE with. There is some advice on DIE-as-a-one-shot, which is pretty much what you heard in Now Playing. There are some alternate social groups that, to an extent, plug in the same Rituals as Reunited: a driven group that was united in a doomed effort (band, political activism, start-up), teenagers right before graduation instead of at the reunion years later, and far-flung friends and fans meeting in person for the first time at a con. Then there are some straight-up pre-generated scenarios. 

Total Party Kill is optimized for one-shot play because it’s optimized for things going very badly very fast, as the last time the group was together the GM slaughtered the player characters. Video Nasty is based on a low-budget horror film crew that fell apart before the movie could be finished, with the Paragons taking on the roles of the film’s antagonists to try and finish what they started. Con Quest is about the team behind a successful indie comic that was optioned for a movie that never got made, who get brought together one more time by the Editor. Do You Remember The First Time (We Killed A Kobold And Took Its Stuff) is an extra deeply meta scenario where the Paragons are playing through their first adventure all over again… except things aren’t quite right, are they? Development Hell consists of the dev team for an indie game, deep in crunch, who try a roleplaying game as a team exercise that might just end up rewriting actual reality. 

The problem with most of these (and this is probably the biggest reason for the ‘opinion’ tag on the article) is they just don’t have the same amount of punch as Reunited. Pretty much everyone who gets their hands on this game will be or will have already been a teenager, and even if said player lacks personal familiarity with the high school tropes at play during Persona creation they’re quite likely to be familiar with them through other media. That’s a lot to work with. The Personas moving from troubled teenagers to troubled adults also creates a lot of energy, a kind of roleplaying emotional water wheel, that the actual playing of the game can feed off of. These social groups and scenarios just don’t have that, and/or are more obscure or specialized in their experiences. I can’t say I’ve ever worked on an indie horror film.

Finally, starting on Pg. 351 there are rules for a player, not just the GM, to be playing a Master. There are a few tweaks that make them work differently from a GM Master, rules for advancing the character just as with the Campaign, and so on. Math wise and power wise it all checks out, but darn it the Master is the GM PC, and it’s just weird to try and drop it into a player’s hands, something that the book itself admits. Unless I had myself six players, which I haven’t managed so far, I wouldn’t even consider it. I’m more likely to just cap the game at five players, to be honest.

Is this to say that these 100+ pages, about a quarter of the book, are outright bad or shouldn’t exist? Absolutely not! The book itself says of the campaign rules that many of them could be useful for any kind of DIE game, and I think that’s broadly true of all of these to some degree. A vampire had the Voice of a Dictator and a d4 necklace to match because of some of the advice as to why a Campaign ritual went wrong, the different scenarios are at a minimum interesting reads and may very well fit your own group exactly right, and I personally found the PC Master’s section a useful source of ideas on what I could use Jason’s cheat tokens for. 

It’s just that, altogether, putting these pages next to the rest of the book gives one the feeling of having managed to catch lightning with Reunited, and turning the bottle this way and that to try and catch some more bolts. Might it not work? Quite possibly. Pretty cool looking? Yeah, fair. Worth doing? That’s up to you. For my druthers I think the whole lot could have made quite a nice supplement, which I would gladly have thrown money at, to make the core book more concise and easy to digest. For example, they are in fact planning to release four soft cover supplements to introduce different ways to play DIE. Pgs. 253 to 369 of the DIE core book could easily have been the first of five supplements, instead.

That’s okay, though. I now have some thoughts on how you could run a Campaign of DIE by more closely emulating the comic’s there and back again story, and the working title of the first supplement is BIZARRE LOVE TRIANGLES which… yes, please, take my money. Did I mention that Jason was married to Antonio’s ex Bella, who Antonio had cheated on as an adult with former Student Council President Gracie, who had also been Donny’s… something complicated? We called it the love pentagram.

Anyway, there are way worse things than trying to catch some extra lightning, and even the attempts can net some interesting data.

The Game Continues?

When we finished our Now Playing session of DIE we concluded that we recommend it without reservation. So, now that I’ve been a player, been a GM, and have chewed on some problems I found within its pages, do I still feel that way?

Absolutely.

The players returned home. William resolved to strike a better balance between his work and his life and, still compelled by godly debt, helped his rivals do the same. Lenny immediately grounded his spoiled kids and began to actually try to make things work with his wife – after all, getting divorced is not among the things that will happen. Donny set aside his Fear, the sword shattering in his hands before the final ritual, and faced the future. Seeing a vampire with Gracie’s face perish helped Antonio come to terms with how he really felt about her – and a Voice-implanted compulsion made sure that Jason could never interfere in their lives again without great loss. Jason, holding a record of what had happened written mostly in his own handwriting and, eerily, sometimes in the handwriting of his players even though they’d never touched it, put the book on a shelf and the dice in a box. He walked away, content.

There’s a bit of ‘you had to be there for it’ because it’s such a personally-influenced game (which hopefully our Now Playing can help with), and I can only salute those who would play DIE with strangers, but I genuinely don’t think I’ve played or ran a game that had more of an emotional impact on myself or my fellow players. Heck, I hit Aaron so hard with the feels that a Table Fiction fell out. When scheduling our annual get together for 2023 I made sure DIE was the first game we played, and I think I was right to – three days later, and it was still the game people were talking about the most as we parted ways, and it’s still the one most discussed since. I don’t think I can muster higher praise. 

Even if you never play it, I think there’s a fair bit of good reading to be found in how DIE approaches basing a game off of the characters’ fears, dreams, and conflicts. And, yes, I might think there are more pages in this book than they needed… but just because they didn’t have to be there doesn’t mean you won’t find some value in them.

DIE: The Roleplaying Game can be purchased in PDF form on DriveThruRPG and from Rowan, Rook, and Decard in forms ranging from PDF to deluxe hardcover with slipcase.

Pick up your DIE, fall into the game world, and remember…

It was all for you.