DIE: A ROLE-PLAYING GAME KIERON GILLEN ©2019 ART BY STEPHANIE HANS COVER DESIGN BY RIAN HUGHES Copyright © 2019 Kieron Gillen Ltd & Stéphanie Hans. All rights reserved. DIE, the Die logos, and the likenesses of all characters herein or hereon are trademarks of Kieron Gillen Ltd & Stéphanie Hans. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (except for short excerpts for journalistic or review purposes) without the express written permission of Kieron Gillen Ltd or Stéphanie Hans. All names, characters, events, and places herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, or places is coincidental. Representation: Law Offices of Harris M. Miller II, P.C. (rights.inquiries@gmail.com)

CONTENTS 1) INTRODUCTION 2) THE WORLD OF DIE 3) PREPARATION 4) THE FIRST SESSION 5) PREPARING THE SECOND SESSION 6) THE SECOND SESSION 7) THE RULES 8) RUNNING THE ARCHETYPES 9) ADVICE FOR GAMESMASTERS 10) OTHER RESOURCES

WELCOME

I have a habit of being a little extra around my comics. I fear this is the most extra thing I’ve ever done. Alongside creating the comic DIE with Stephanie Hans, I developed the role-playing game you hold in your hands. Er… figure of speech. “PDF on your hard drive” doesn’t quite have the same ring. This RPG creates, in a miniaturized form, your own version of the first arc of DIE. As such, there’s some possible structural spoilers for the comic. I say “possible” because it really is your own version of the comic. The comic is available in a handsome trade edition from all good book and comic shops, whether physical or online. It’s $10, so even reasonable. I’ve justified this whole ludicrous endeavour to myself as “marketing” so popping to your retailer of choice and reading it to get the vibe would be an excellent thing. It looks like this…

I suggest that if you’re not planning on running the game, you stop reading now. Going to the Handouts PDF to have a nose is safe, though I’d only read the player character sheets. They’re the first ones. Reading the Rules section is also safe. There is a third PDF that will be released in the future called Arcana. This is basically supplementary weird material. There are many references to it in the following. The most prominent one is (no, really, this is a thing) the “Box of Crap”. For now, consider them teases. I’ve never quite done anything like this. I’ve had amazing support from friends, but it’s still a huge thing. This is a Beta, a public playtest, so do excuse roughness. I hope you’ll find it interesting. There are at least three funny jokes. If you’ve any thoughts, do write to dierpgplaytest@gmail.com. I’d love to hear what you make of it.

Thanks for reading and/or playing and/or existing. This will be an adventure. Kieron Gillen London

VOLUME 1

FANTASYHEARTBREAKER

WHAT IS A ROLE-PLAYING GAME? This is a classical question to answer in an RPG manual. In the modern age, if you don’t know, I’d suggest just googling something like Critical Role and watching for a few minutes. That. That’s a role-playing game. For the majority of the play time, DIE mostly operates like a D&D model game. Players state what they want their characters to do. The GM generally says what happens. For character actions which are uncertain, the mechanics are used to ascertain the success or failure of that action. There are some exceptions to the above, but we'll hold your hand through them. We love you. We will not abandon you. INTRODUCTION TO THE DIE RPG BETA DIE is a role-playing game (not to be confused with “the world of Die” where the game is set). Its standard mode of play involves between one and five players (who each play a single individual) and a Gamesmaster (who controls the rest of the world, and acts as a referee). We may shorten “Gamesmaster” to “GM” if we're feeling lazy. DIE’s main mode is horror-fantasy. How much it leans towards horror and how much it leans towards fantasy will be for you to decide, if only through your perception. One person’s horror is another person’s fantasy. Specifically, DIE is a role-playing game where a group of people find themselves transported from their mundane lives to a fantasy world. In this fantasy world, they have adventures

and try to find their way home – or not. Upon arriving in the world, each comes into possession of one of the six titular dice of the comic and is entirely transformed into a heroic identity. This is the structure of many pieces of pop entertainment, from the 1980s D&D cartoon to Jumanji. Without the transformational aspect, it’s the structure that underlies The Wizard of Oz and The Lion and The Witch and The Wardrobe. It also underlies the famously brutal 1980s fantasy epic The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, so don’t assume those references mean that it’s fun. As such, each player generates two characters. The identity of the person in the mundane world, and the identity of the person in the fantasy world. Clearly, this can be confusing. For clarity, a Persona is the person in the mundane world, and the Character is an individual in the fantasy world. The Player controls the Persona who controls a Character. So for example, Lucy is sitting down to play. She generates Bob the depressed IT guy, who is then transformed into a towering Barbarian Rage Knight in the world of Die. Lucy is the Player. Bob the depressed IT guy is the Persona. The towering Barbarian Rage Knight is the Character. It should also be noted that Character rules apply to all people in the world of Die, whether they are controlled by players or the GM. If there’s ever a case where we need to separate player-controlled characters and GM-controlled characters, we use the phrase Avatar to mean player-controlled characters. There’s none in the Beta at the moment.

Oh – and we use dice to mean both the singular and plural of dice. As the game's called DIE it's going to get confusing otherwise. DIE RPG STRUCTURE A game takes the following structure. I suggest running it across 2-4 sessions, though include some guidelines for running it in a single session or extending it. • Players and Gamesmaster (”GM”)

gather and each generate a persona. This is a social group in the real world, complete with rivalries, passions and bitterness. Unlike many role-playing games, the GM also creates a persona.

• You then roleplay the personas sitting around and about to play a role-playing game. Each persona then generates a fantasy role-playing character.

• The personas are magically transported into the fantasy realm, and (likely) transformed into the characters they generated. They rapidly discover that this has all been part of a scheme by the Gamesmaster’s persona – the Master. The Master has trapped the players there.

• The personas go on an adventure, trying to find their way home. On the way they discover that the only way to go home is for all the personas to agree to go home. And dead personas don’t count. If a decision is not made, everyone will end up dying. Erk.

• The story reaches a conclusion as the personas come to a consensus on whether to go home or not – which includes the Gamemaster's persona. While it is possible that a peaceful consensus will be reached,

it's equally as likely that the players will have to fight the Gamemaster's persona to go home. It's possible that at least some of the players' personas will change their opinions, possibly multiple times. Drama! Climax!

In other words, this is a core scenario... but a very flexible core scenario. It is a dramatic arc rather than a set series of events. After a certain point, your game will go in its own radical direction, before gathering back together in the climax. In playtests, we’ve had games which have just ended in a glorious RPG-typical brawl. In other playtests, we’ve had players sit down in a circle and basically have a therapy session. Seeing what happens is absolutely the fun of the game. BETA? WHAT DO YOU MEAN “BETA”? It means it’s not finished. Here’s a list of some things which you may expect to find in a full DIE RPG which are simply not in this Beta release.

• Extensive details on the world of Die as described in the comic. As in, monsters, areas, locales, etc

• Campaign play • Character advancement • Non-player characters of the

core DIE archetypes • A lot of balancing • An acceptable level of

playtesting • A suitably professional time for

proofreading • A lack of self-indulgence • Lists that stop when it runs out

of content • Really, it’s bad at lists • Oh so bad at lists

At which point you may be understandably wondering why this thing is as long as it is. I swear, it’s not just because we’re bad at lists. There are a few suggestions for how an intrepid player may choose to add these things, if they wish, but fundamentally this is a work in progress by a determined if enthusiastic amateur. If folks respond to it, hopefully we’ll continue to develop it. Either way, it’s something I hope you like. HOW TO READ THIS DOCUMENT Don’t worry. If you’ve reading this sentence, you’re doing it right. There’s three PDFs discussed herein: • The Manual • The Handouts • The Arcana The Manual is what you’re reading, which is the core rules. It takes you step by step through the whole of the game. We describe how to run the game before the specific mechanics of the game, and only interject the rules section when you need it. The back end of the PDF is advice for running the specific character classes, and generalised GM advice. If you’re not interested in role-playing games at all, I suspect you’ll get a giggle out of some of the GM advice. Much of it is just writing about narrative structure. In short: we describe how to run the game before we describe the specific

mechanics of the game. If you ever feel you need to know the actual mechanics, feel free to stop and jump to The Rules which will explain all of that. (For those who are familiar with RPGs and want a brief overview, DIE runs off a dice-pool system, where you compare the number of successes rolled in a dice pool to a target number of successes to determine results. It has a lot of elements from narrative RPGs in there, but it’s got a fairly procedural core. If you’re not familiar with RPGs, don’t worry, none of this paragraph should make any sense whatsoever.) The Handouts are to be printed out. They are the character sheets, the sheets for the GM, and the cheat sheets which boil the key advice from this ludicrous document into a few pages. The Arcana is not released at the time of writing. It’ll follow at a point in the future. If it’s not on the diecomic.com site, it hasn’t been released yet. It’s a PDF of (for want of a better phrase) Weird Shit and the more experimental, less playtested material. If this is all a Beta, the Arcana is all pre-Beta. The stranger or more rules-centric stuff has been put here to avoid overwhelming people, as well as all the alternate play modes – including my thoughts on running it as a one-off or even trying for a campaign. This is the section which is likely to be extended. When its contents may be interesting or relevant it’s referenced in the main document.

THE WORLD OF DIE The personas will be transported to a fantasy world. Your fantasy world will be set inside ours, so I’m going to give you a little of its structure. It's likely your players, especially in this Beta, will never know any of this. Die is a planet-sized 20-sided polyhedron consisting of 20 equal-sized triangular planes. It tumbles, though does not move. Despite this, gravity appears to operate as it would on Earth. It is fun to be a physicist in the world of Die. Die is suspended inside a sphere that is half-dark and half-light. As Die tumbles, we get a day and night cycle – though it is far from as predictable as on Earth. Embedded in the dark half of the sphere are what appear to be stars, but are in fact cities of the Fair, about one hundred miles distant. The Fair are “Elves as designed by William Gibson.” On the light side we have an enormous fusion-explosion, looking like a sun. There are occasionally secondary fusion explosions, giving Die multiple suns. The Fallen are beasts that are generally believed to drop from the sky. Cybernetic monsters, primarily, but which can appear in many forms. If the Fair are elves as designed by Gibson, the Fallen are orcs auditioning to play a part in Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The Fallen have an awful secret which the players may or may not discover. There are kingdoms and empires aplenty on Die but, for our purposes, the real rulers are the Masters. Each of the twenty realms has a Master. Sometimes they're the actual ruler. Just as often, they're a weird hermit no one

takes seriously. Some are Saruman. Some are Radagast. Their character defines the character of the region – and its rules. They also get to redefine the rules, assuming they're willing to put in the effort. Above them is the Grandmaster of Die. The Grandmaster gets to meddle with all the regions of Die. If you were playing a long campaign on Die, it's likely the Grandmaster would either be the player's primary antagonist or their ultimate patron. Or perhaps both. That’s the world of Die. However inside Die are countless pocket dimensions. Some are the size of a dungeon. Some are the size of a universe. All are ruled by a single Master. The Master in question is the role the GM’s persona takes when they enter the world. It's also worth noting that a Master's control is considerable, but also imperfect. A Master's subconscious is often at play, in a way which can be instrumental in their self-defeat. In a world where their wishes can create things, it's possible they have created enemies who exist to help the players bring them down. There is also the nature of the world of Die itself and the indirect meddling of the Grandmaster, both of which can be messing with a Master’s desires. Suffice to say: this is in a realm of fantasy and it's fucking with the Master as much as the Master is fucking with the players. Our antagonistic Master has (knowingly or not) made some manner of Faustian pact, and these rarely end well.

At this point you may be wondering where in Die all these pocket dimensions are? This is a good question which I’m not going to answer, which may imply that its reveal may be a big deal in a future part of the comic. To stress the subtext of the above – while there is a solid fictional background this is set in, you have complete freedom to define a sub-reality every time you play DIE. With the exception of our character classes, you don’t need to use any of the elements of DIE. Each one of these dungeons is its own hermetically sealed world. Frankly, that's usually how the Masters prefer it. It's their little dream home, and they may not even notice as their dream home slides into a haunted house.

The word “dungeon” is interesting. Dungeons are prisons. They’re designed to keep people trapped inside them. Not all Masters are aware that this includes them. Wait – is this what’s going on with Sol in the comic? Do you think I’d spoil the comic a handful of pages into a free set of RPG rules? I’m the sort of fool who decides writing a 70,000-word RPG ruleset for free is a good idea, not the sort of fool who’d do that. Or maybe this is all a double-bluff. Hobbits aren’t half as sneaksie as writers.

WHAT YOU WILL REQUIRE

• 1 person willing to be GM (i.e. you). • 1-5 friends or at least people you can

bear being in the same room for a couple of nights.

• A D20, D12, D10, D8 and a D4. • One D6 you are okay with doodling

on with a marker. • A marker for doodling. • A few more D6. At least 6, and the

more the merrier. • Tokens for the Master’s Cheat

Tokens. Coins for the Neo. • Pen and paper for everyone is

useful. • A printout of the Handouts. EXTRA CREDIT

The Box of Old Crap (see Arcana). BEFORE THE SESSION Read these rules, including familiarizing yourself with all the archetypes' character sheets. Invite players and arrange times. Good luck. That’s the hard part. While the urge may be to go for all six players, be aware the game asks a lot of the GM to run all the archetypes. A game with three players and a GM works great. I’ve also run it with just one player. Also be aware that, with a full cast, to give everyone enough spotlight time, you’ll most likely to want to run it for three sessions rather than two.

I’m playing online – can I play the game? Uh-huh. See the Advice for Gamesmasters section for some guides. I want to play with more than five players – can I? Oh, look at the popular one with all the friends. We’re not jealous. Sure! See the section in Advice for Gamesmasters called “The Highlander Variant”. To be honest, I’d suggest not, at least for your first game. More players means less spotlight time for everyone, less chance for each character to be explored, and a lot more work for you, the trusty GM. What’s this Box of Old Crap for extra credit? I don’t want to go to the Arcana – it scares me. It is the sound of your friend’s, the game designer’s, heart breaking as he moves the rules for them to the supplementary section as it’s not actually a core part of the game any more. In short: create a box of random mainly RPG-related stuff which you pretend is the actual game Sol made, and then you use its contents as a glorified tarot deck to influence the game. It’s a fun thing to do, but really is non-core.

PRE-GAME CHAT When people are ready to play, sit everyone down in the play area. I would suggest around a table and perhaps on chairs. Making one player stand is generally a bad idea, unless you are a strong proponent of Player ShamingTM. If you have the Box of Crap, either hide it or have it suspiciously prominent on the table. Discourage anyone from touching it. Try and build up its odd mystery. Firstly, explain the game’s basic setup. DIE involves a group of people gathering together to play a role-playing game. You’ll generate a social group of real-world friends. Stress that the game rewards messy flawed people with real needs. You will then play those personas, sitting down to play an actual role-playing game. And then they’re going to go on an adventure… and, at the end of the session, come to a climax where our personas will grow and change by this experience. Or not. Secondly, you should ask what sort of things they like to do in a role-playing game. As in, what sorts of abilities they want to have. This should be as broad as possible – do they want to fight? Do they want to wield spells? Both? Neither? Is there a character from fiction they find appealing? “I'm up for whatever seems good for the personas we generate or the group needs” is also a perfectly good answer. Encourage them to be honest now, because later, when they're playing their personas, they may end up answering dishonestly. For example, a persona may loathe the idea of being a wizard, but someone who hates magic becoming a spell

caster obviously has a lot of potential drama. Thirdly, you should discuss about the tone of game they’re going for. DIE basically has two natural poles – on one side, adventure and on the other, horror. How much do they want this to be a game about a character’s emotions versus their adventures? If this was a movie, what rating would it have? Discuss how many sessions you plan the game to go for. The rules as written assume at least two sessions, but there are ways to run it in a single session or expanding it to as many sessions as you think interesting. This is to make sure that everyone is on the same page with the same expectations, and also lets you tailor what comes next. Remember: you are also allowed to have opinions and preferences too. Your idea of fun matters as much as anyone else’s in the room. Fourthly, talk about some possible themes the game may involve. This is to make sure people are fine with them and can delineate their boundaries. If people have reservations, you can tweak the game away from them in play. With the setup of this Beta, it’ll likely include issues from childhood – any limits there? The Neo can have themes of addiction. The Dictator has themes of consent. Does anyone have any boundaries there? Respect people’s choices. Say your own. Fifthly, introduce the X-card. Put one card (or more) with an “X” drawn on it in easy reach of all the players.

If any player (including the GM) touches it, it means they are uncomfortable with the current topic or subject and we should take a step back and change direction. It does not mean asking questions about what the element is, or naming it, though some people will say (e.g. “This is too violent for me.”). The X-card can be activated for any reason, even minor ones (character names which might connect to a bad memory for one of the players is a good example – the best low-level example I’ve heard is X-carding a persona whose name is identical to that of an ex.).

The X-card does not mean someone has fucked up. It means someone is uncomfortable, and we should be polite. The X-card was conceived by John Stavropoulos, and the original documentations is here: http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg In the GM’s advice section there are some more safety suggestions to consider, but I consider the X-card a bare minimum. This is a game that can go to some dark places if the group wishes.

PERSONA GENERATION Here we generate the personas – the real-world people whose personalities drive the game. First question: this is a group of people. What is this group of people? What connects them? They are a group of adults who were friends when they were young, who find themselves gathered together years later, and someone suggests they play a role-playing game. Explain it to the players something like this… “You are a group of friends who played a normal role-playing game at school who, years later, have found yourself gathered together to play a game for old times' sake. We're going to now work out who you are, how you know each other, and why you’ve got back together.” This is broad enough to include lots of different sorts of groups (for example, playing 21-year-olds visiting home at Christmas is a very different game than everyone being 55-year-olds back in town for a funeral – and equally different from a game where some characters are old and some are young) while also having characters who've had enough adult experiences (both positively and negatively) to impact the game. It also leads to a wide variety of different sorts of groups – the drama group’s D&D game suggests a different social dynamic to the maths club’s. To stress: the game they played was not a magical game in any way. It was just a normal (probably) teenage game. Next, proceed to ask leading questions to the players to decide upon the key

facts. Encourage players to ask each other questions as they occur to them. Essentially, it's a process of fishing for information. The aim of the questions is threefold: 1. So the players know who their own

personas are. 2. So the other players know who each

persona is. 3. To provide the GM with the raw

material for generating the adventure.

The first allows a player to make meaningful decisions about their persona. The second means that other players are not confused by another player’s persona. Both are important in a story-based game. Encourage players to ask other players questions about their personas. If they don't, you should. The third is for you, and shouldn’t be explicitly mentioned to the players, and it is explained at length shortly. See “Your Purpose For Asking These Questions”. Further details to the personas can (and will) be added during play, but once you've got the basics we’re looking for down (as described below), you should proceed. Generally, a gut feeling that “This seems like a fun, developed, messy and believable social group!” is your tell. Messy is key. Once you get a character to a point of messiness, asking further questions may actually resolve their issues. That’s counter-productive. Facing their issues is what this game is about.

I normally spend around an hour on this stage, if players are enjoying it. If they’re not, cut it short. The following are some areas a group may wish to be prompted to think about. Some of it is less ‘questions’ and more ‘lines of thought for them to explore’. It is likely you will bounce between multiple sections as ideas occur. It's not a checklist. Players should be encouraged to go back and edit earlier ideas if they have better ones, as long as everyone agrees with where it ends up. It's likely players' ideas will develop as they progress. Here’s some examples of types of questions. They’re written assuming the players knew each other as kids and are now getting back together as adults. How did the personas’ old RPG group get together? This is likely the first question you’ll want to know – what is the shared connection? The football team is a different set of inspirations from the chess club. How do the majority of the group know each other? How did you know each other? Was there a shared social activity? Were you all at the same school? What was the school like? Posh? Run-down? Rural? Urban? Did you all go to the same school? This is also a question that can be useful to seed by presenting the players with a list of options for the social activity that connected the personas. For example… School Orchestra Computer Club Family Group

Drama Society Punk Band’s Spare Activity Detention Survivors Football Team’s Guilty Secret Girl Guides/Boy Scouts/Other Teenage Paramilitary Organisation Church Group Hospital Ward Summer Camp Online Group Who Never Met IRL Just a Typical Bunch of Loveable Geeks Actual examples from playtests: a detention group; a close family who played RPGs; guests and attendees of a con; ex-members of a third-rate mathrock band; work colleagues; a Buffy fan forum. What was the RPG like? You don’t need to ask a lot of these at this stage, but there’s two you should consider. The first is essential. What was the name of the world your game was set in? What classes did people play? Who GMed? Don’t ask too many questions on this. For those who don’t know the standard way a DIE game works, being too attentive in this section makes people know it’s related to the plot in a key way. I spend a maximum of 10% of my persona generation time in this area. Maximum. Core Persona Presented with a blank page, a group can be intimidated to get started. One method is to prompt one strong persona, who the others can align themselves around. Once one piece is in place, the rest is easier. Now they've grown up, who's the most successful persona? What do they do?

Were any of you particularly famous as children? Infamous? What for? Actual examples from playtests: an extremely famous author at a con; the one member of the band who got big. The Reason for the Game The personas are about to sit down and play an RPG. It's important to work out why. The game is happening because the personas are all together for a reason. What's the reason? However, by this point it's likely the GM may have ideas of their own for this. In which case, they may wish to suggest things. These are useful if the players need ideas too, of course. Here's a list of examples: Everyone's home for Christmas (or any other holiday). It's the night before one of the group's wedding. Someone close has died, and this is something people agreed to do at the wake. A group holiday and someone thinks it's a good activity for an evening. It's gaming night! They always game! Actual examples from playtests: a game session at a con; the night before a wedding with the groom wanting to finally run a game; an anniversary of the death of a band’s drummer; a corporate orientation briefing; a playtest of a new prototype at a games company. The Persona Then When we've established the rough shape of the group, we add more meat to individual personas.

Has anyone got an idea of what sort of kid their persona was? If so, tell us a bit about them. What was your best subject? Your worst? How smart were you? Were you bullied? Were your parents divorced? What did you think you'd be when you grew up? Did you have any hobbies? Music? What did you hate about yourself? The Inter-Persona Relationships This adds meat to feelings between the group. Especially when you're using a strong Core Persona, a lot of the relationships will end up being defined according to that. Are you related to any of the personas? Who was your best friend? How did you meet? How did they hurt you? Who were you most jealous of? Were you in love with anyone? Lust? The Persona Now This shows what's changed in a persona's life since childhood. The gap between what you thought you were and could achieve, and what you actually did achieve is key to DIE. What do you do now? Do you enjoy it? Are you married? Divorced? Multiple divorces? If so, who to? Do you have kids? Did you want kids? Have you been seriously ill? Has anyone you loved died? How do you think about your teenage years? How do you think about your time playing RPGs? Do you keep in contact with any of the friends? If so, who? If someone makes a movie of this game, which actor plays your persona?

Persona vs Persona If a group seems to lack strong internal conflicts, some Gamesmasters will prefer to try and generate some drama. Some players will respond very badly to these aggressive sorts of questions. Sometimes only one leading question will be enough to encourage other players to start thinking along these lines. The “Core Persona” questions actually work a little like this, except by increasing the profile of one persona. If one persona is famous, that implies other people will have feelings about that, which often are not positive. So, you say you're siblings. What made you hate your brother? Who do you blame for your parents’ divorce? For more on this see “Hardball versus Softball questions” later. Possible Complexities If someone is not really seeming into the group setup, maybe they would be interested in being an outsider. Did any of you meet this lot after they left school? If so – who do you know? When did you meet? A lover of one of them? Perhaps even a child? Were you at the school, but not in the social group back then? If not, why not? Did you want to play and they wouldn't let you? Or did you despise the group? Or both? Random Crap The game runs off detritus as well as big emotional stuff. Don't be afraid to ask trivia. Even if you don't use it, if players are freezing up, this can loosen them up and make it clear that it's actually us having fun.

Who's your favourite author? Band? Film? TV show? What's your favourite colour? What's your dream holiday location? Celebrity crush? Then and now? If you were a character in Friends, who would you be? What about Game of Thrones? The Good Place? Making Sure the Players Understand How to Play Their Personas This is all useful stuff for players to know their motivations and feelings (and for you for the actual game), but it’s worth checking in to see if they know how to role-play in their voice. How do you think you come across to people you meet? Want to try and be your persona for a sentence? What do people notice about the way you speak? SPEEDING UP GENERATION The above methodology gives a lot of flexibility, but also asks a lot of both players and GM. There is nothing as intimidating as a blank sheet of paper. As such, you may consider explicitly seeding some key elements. If you decide the general age of the group, you limit things considerably. If you want to really limit things, also pre-establish the sort of person the core persona is. For example, saying one person is a famous novelist will mean there is a backbone of “Fiction” and “Jealousy/Pride” for both players and GM to hang ideas off. In short, starting with “21-year-olds ex-gaming group just back from university” and “70-year-olds at the funeral of a famous footballer friend from school” gives players and GM much more guidance. For the GM, it also lets you

start to think about what sort of game you want to run earlier. If you really want to shorten generation, narrow it even further. YOUR PURPOSE FOR ASKING THESE QUESTIONS The players will be thinking this is just generating someone they get to play. This is correct. However, for you, you are looking for story elements to use in your adventure. Now, this is going to have to go into some theory of what the game is trying to do, and how to think about what you're trying to do. This stuff is usually buried in the “GM Advice” section of a traditional RPG manual, but we need to foreground this so you actually understand why they're doing all the things I'm asking them to do. What you are doing when they're answering questions? You are writing down all the interesting facts for each character. Put this down in a list beneath each character. Think broadly, including details both large and small. For example, for one player you may have scribbled down... Divorced wife, bitter Disappointed by children (two – one boy, 7; one girl 9) Red Dwarf fan Keeps on asking for white wine, but not Sauvignon Blanc Accountant Aston Villa Season Holder While players are talking stuff up, this is what you're looking for. As you can see,

the above includes details from many different lines of questions and includes both large and small details. I strongly recommend using a large piece of paper for this. A4 is good. Have lots of room to write down anything you think relevant, on a single sheet, so you can see it all together. Flicking between multiple sheets of paper is just going to distract you. If you’re like me, it’s likely your notes will be a mess – see the “Example Sheets” section – and you’ll likely want to compile these notes into a more accessible format between games. Why are you doing this? These are the core details you're going to use to personalise the adventure you're about to generate. To remind you of the basic structure of a game of DIE, it basically goes... • Generate personas. GM writes down

details. • Personas transported to the world of

Die. • A series of encounters in Die which

are generated according to various methods we present which are personalised by the personas’ details.

• A final encounter in Die where they confront the person who kidnapped them, and decide whether to go home or not.

See this structure? Now you get why you're looking for details. As you continue into Preparing the Second Session you'll see how these elements you've noted down now will fuel the adventures. There's more in the Advice for Gamesmasters section on how to integrate persona details into your adventure too.

THE BIG THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR: A PERSONA'S CORE DRIVE This is the key thing you should ideally be looking for in every persona. In short: if there is something they are lacking in the real world, this is likely something they will be tempted with in the fantasy world. The questions are all hiding a real question, the one which we will never mention in generation, but which is implicit in all the answers: what is the thing which the persona would fuck over their peers for? What would they die for? What would they kill for? Some players will present what you recognise as a core drive instantly, while others will require more prompting. Some players will be entirely resistant to it... in which case, don't worry. It's possible that a desire may emerge in play. If at least some of the party clearly have a dark unsatisfied desire, that's sufficient. You may even only need one player to have one. After all, the more well-balanced personas are going to have to deal with the melodrama of their fucked-up friends. It's also possible that the whole group will be entirely resistant to any of the above. As such, the game will end up as a simple adventure with some emotional beats, climaxing in the party facing down the “friend” who dragged them into this nightmare world. That's fine. This is a great story arc. If your players don't want to play a dark game of personal temptation, that's cool. The drama will primarily be how the party interacts with the world rather than how the party interacts with each other. Once again, that's okay, and you

never know. Later we'll see that there are character-based reasons as well as persona-based reasons for a party to butt heads and create drama. The point of the game of DIE is that it moves between modes gracefully. With people who take it incredibly seriously, the game could climax with a huge outpouring of emotions between the personas. With players who are in the mood for something lighter, it becomes a pop adventure where you kill the baddie and go home. Either is fine. There is no failure as long as the players are enjoying themselves. However, you can alter the sort of game you'll be playing by how you approach the questions... HARDBALL vs SOFTBALL QUESTIONS Left to their own devices, and given open questions, it's possible that the players will create a wholesome and well-balanced group. People (especially new players) tend to be sweet. If so, the game is unlikely to involve much inter-party resentment. At this point, you may wish to make the questions harder. Ideally, this builds on players' previous suggestions. For example, if a player says their persona screwed up their exams, you could ask “And who do you blame for this? Maybe one of your siblings?” They can still answer negatively, but this sharper form of questioning may prompt more useful schisms and antagonisms. You may wish to go further and generate complexities. If two personas say they were dating, you may ask “So why did you split up?” They say they didn't? “It must have been hard when you realised that one of your friends was also in love with you though...” If no

player jumps in saying that they're the friend who's in love with them, remember the GM has a persona and can seed this stuff too. It's also possible you will only need to ask a single sharp question to make the group realise that having drama could be fun. If you want a more friendly adventure, angle towards the soft questions. If you're looking for something where internal party emotional strain is key, lean more towards the hard questions. You’ll also want to ask more questions about people’s failings and weaknesses so you can tempt them. THE IN-EMERGENCY-BREAK-GLASS QUESTION Sometimes you can’t be subtle. If you want to get a core drive, you can just ask the question: “Why does your persona hate their life?” If they decline to give an answer, this is their Hard No to having a conflicted character. If not, whatever they say is the core drive. THE GM'S PERSONA While doing all the above, you should be also be developing about your own persona. Your persona is the antagonist to the players, at least initially. Your aim there is to look for a motivation for this persona to drag all their friends into a fantasy world and strand them there. Early on, you are likely to use yourself as an example to set the tone, answering the questions to show how it's done. As the questions proceed, you should step back, especially when

asking questions akin to “What did your persona do when they left school?” Your persona is allowed to be a little more mysterious. It's unlikely players will notice or care, as GM personas are always viewed as less interesting or relevant than player ones. Players are an amazingly self-centred bunch, bless 'em. At some time before the start of the scenario, the GM's persona was contacted by an extra-dimensional intelligence (Most would call it a demon. In any traditional way, it’s not.) and was offered an opportunity. They took it. If they transport a group of people to the realm of Die, they will get a pocket dimension that will fulfil certain fantasies ... as long as they all stay there. It’s likely that the Master doesn’t quite believe it either. If a motivation for your persona does not present itself in persona generation, simply grab one of these robust standards and run with it... A return to their youth. A chance at enacting revenge upon the people who made their childhood a misery. To be united with a dead lover. Just being really sickeningly rich. Essentially almost everything is “a fantasy of what they lack in reality, if they are willing to give up reality to achieve it.” The level of sympathy you wish to have for the antagonist should dictate the choice as well. To choose “To be united with a dead lover” as an example – “It's the only way I can see the person I loved again” is likely to be at least a little sympathetic.

“I really wanted to fuck an army of Marilyn Monroe clones” is less so. Think about the specifics of the deal in relation to the group – what is it specifically about this group? Is there someone specific in this group that the demon wants them to bring and the rest are just filling up numbers? Or could it have been anyone? This all filters into the nature of the antagonistic persona. If they could have brought anyone, and they brought these people specifically, it implies a real hatred for them, for example. Do not think too much about why these people specifically at this point. This will be discovered in play later. If it's not (and it's more likely not to be discovered than discovered) that works too. It is a horror game, and the gaps in their knowledge is where their imagination runs wild. Also, do not overly worry if you don’t know everything about your persona at this point. If you have a solid idea, that’s great. If you know nothing, you can conceal it – and you have the time until

the next session to think on it. You’ll likely develop the persona’s motivation significantly in that time as you develop the adventure. Actual examples from playtests: a jealous contemporary of a famous author who never broke through who wants the famous author’s career; a closeted gay groom who wants all his siblings to come to a better fantasy world as he can’t face coming out to his parents; a band’s biggest fan who just wants the other persona’s band to get back together; a corporate AI head who is consuming those who are brought to Die to make an AI that can make a higher form of art; a con runner who kills four con goers ever con to maintain his life; a werewolf fanfic writer who wants to live in her fanfic universe because she can’t risk real emotional intimacy with her friends. PERSONA GENERATION FLOWCHART If you’re wondering whether to wrap up persona generation and move on, have a look at this flowchart…

You will be asking further questions during the game. You don’t need to know everything, just enough. FINISHING PERSONA GENERATION Write each persona's name and pronouns on a piece of paper and put it in front of each player's seat as a reminder of all their persona’s names. It'll make the next bit much easier. Then encourage the players to leave the room, make a tea, go to the toilet, or whatever. Inform them that when they return to the table and sit down, everything they say will (unless expressly stated otherwise) be in-character as their personas.

Yes, they will be role-playing people about to play a role-playing game. EXAMPLE SHEETS

To give a concrete example of note-keeping, here’s the notes I have taken in two games.

Both are written on an A4 sheet. This is my handwriting. Your handwriting will likely be better.

The first game is a group of three players. This game was played in a single session, so we spent less time generating personas. The game was about four siblings gathering to play the night before the Gamesmaster’s persona – Duncan – got married.

The second example is from a two-game session. This game was based around a band who nearly made it, gathering ten years after the original drummer died in a car crash. This is four players plus the

GM. This group highly enjoyed developing the history of their band, so there are considerable notes about their entire history.

Between sessions, these are the notes I drew from there…

Jessica – (MINK) – F Photographer. Then events, now weddings. Hot art girl at school. Still noticeably hot. Dated Hunter from school. Dumped when band split. A little bitter over his success (Sk8r boy villain) in the "I could have been there." Minor Instagram influencer. Love Aesthetics – interested in visuals. One kid, 5, with Kieron – Phillipa or Bonham? (Accidental kid almost immediately after going out, staying together for kids, not happy)

"Hunter" (Gareth) – (ADLAI) – M Singer. Ex-boyfriend of Jessica. Solo material is uninspiring. "Self-indulgent". Afraid has no ideas. Huge Ego – imposter syndrome. Played Jules Holland – annoyed by piano. Other band on way down when split. Bowie is his hero.

Amethyst – (SARAH) – F(?) Bassist + lyricist Grumpy. Negative pessimist. Shy, reserved. Does own material on Soundcloud, anonymous. Python webcoder-HTML. Hero – Brian Eno/Philip Glass. Co-wrote song with Hunter which was one of Hunter's first big hits. Quietly resentful over it. "Coin-operated Boi"

Jem aka Gemma – (ALEX) – F Guitarist (Synth Curious) Wants to be in Hunter's new band. 3 Months from 30. Achieved nothing. Blogs. Oscar Wilde is his hero. Works in chain off-licence. Drinks too much. Enthusiasm – manic, driven. Lloyd from Phonogram-y. Selected Elves as a race as they are "Immortal".

Skirmish – the band. Formed at School in 2007, Hastings. Mathrock noise band. "The Hastings' Battles". In 2012, when driving to Reading from Leeds to play there, were involved in car-crash. Drummer "Animal" Dies. Split shortly afterwards. 2013-2017: Hunter joins rival (but slightly bigger) band as singer, who proceed to go Franz-Ferdinand-ish big. 2018 – Hunter working on his solo material. Everyone gets together on anniversary on Animal's death in local metal/indie pub where they drank.

John – (KIERON) – M Drummer of other local band. Auditioned to replace Animal but just too busy, too metal. P.E. Teacher. Arranged event. Boyfriend of Jessica. "Animal" – dead drummer no details, bar name.

Even for those who can read my handwriting, you may be wondering where some of the other elements came

from – these are things I found written on their character sheets, which hint towards their desires. Having a gap

between sessions can help like this, for when you’re really nosy.

I have highlighted the ones which I consider to be a persona’s core element…

Jessica: Her life is boring. She feels she’s missing out. Hunter: Fears he is a fake. Worse: knows that he is a fake. Amethyst: Wants to be seen as a genius.

Jem: Feels life has been a waste.

And John is secretly the band’s biggest fan and will do anything to hear them play again. He’s got them back together for that.

It’s worth stressing that in practice I was entirely mistaken about Amethyst’s desire, but the three personas were enough to base it around, and Amethyst had plenty of drama anyway.

CHARACTER GENERATION BEFORE PEOPLE RETURN TO THE TABLE As people are getting their cups of tea or whatever, you’re making a decision. Namely, what character class each persona will be playing. This is based on the desires each player expressed in the pre-game chat, what character their persona seems to suggest and a little GM fiat (for example, some classes are more complicated than others). In this playtest, the Master is reserved for the Gamesmaster. The present rules simply don’t work for a player. These are useful guidelines... Dictator/D4 = Lighter warriors. Non-technical rogues. Bards. Diplomats, god bless them. Do not give to anyone you think doesn’t understand the seriousness of a character who messes with people’s emotions. Fool/D6 = Warriors, especially martial arts characters, swashbucklers or other relatively lightly armoured sorts. This is arguably the simplest archetype to play, so useful to give to the least experienced player. Emotion Knight/D8 = Heavy duty warriors, knights, paladins and berserkers. Any persona who seems to have a very strong relationship with a single emotion. Neo/D10 = Thieves, rogues, hackers or cybernetic warriors, especially if they like pets. Anyone whose real-life job is technical. Godbinder/D12 = Cleric archetypes. Demonologists. Magic users. Anyone who really likes role-playing. However, it should be noted that all archetypes can be twisted into most

character classes. Neos tend towards filling rogue-like roles... but they can also be a brutal cybernetic warrior. While the GM does distribute the character sheets, you needn’t keep the players out entirely. The reason for secrecy is to create a magical moment when they get given the dice. It’s no sin to check in on a player and make sure they’re okay with playing a character when you’re all away from the table, or to clarify what bits of an archetype you’ll want to play up or down. “I was thinking of giving you the Dictator – are you up for something like that?” or “I’m considering the Neo – if I do, shall I play down the addiction reading?” There is a lot more about this decision in the Running the Archetypes section later in the PDF. When you’ve made your decision, get back to the table. STARTING THE GAME As players arrive at the table, they should talk in character as their persona. The GM is talking in the voice of the persona they've generated. Let people chat and loosen up, and encourage conversation. For example, ask players about recent life events in their personas’ lives. The GM's persona should feel free to lead the conversation, based upon the shared characters developed above. “What happened to that person you were seeing at university?” would be a good example of a line of conversation, or “How are the kids” or any normal adult chat. Frankly, “What are you binge

watching?” is a perennial dinner party chat fave. Be aware that the setting for the imaginary game you’ve chosen can impact it intensely. Role-playing a scene in a corporate board-room creates different expectations than role-playing things at a quiet dinner party – and even more so, if you’re meant to be in a pub after-hours. This should be extended as long as folks find entertaining. The first session tends to be a shorter session, so you have time to have fun. Let people get used to roleplaying their personas – including you. When the explanation of rules happens, it becomes a little trickier to maintain their personas, so let everyone bed in. When everyone is settled in, if you have one, get out the Box of Crap. Dump it on the table, and say the following – adapted to your characters' voice a little... “Hey – do you remember that thing back in the 1990s? Those kids who were playing an RPG and just disappeared. Mum went up to check on them, and they were gone. For two years. You must remember! Six went. Two years later five of the six turned up. None of them ever talked about what happened... Well you know what? This is the game they were playing. I got it off Ebay. You guys up for it? It's really neat.”

Let the players chat. When all personas have bought in enough to at least sit and play – though, it should be stressed, the personas may clearly grouse about doing it – progress to developing their in-game RPG characters. WHAT IF THEY’RE NOT GAME FOR THE GAME? Some personas will be up for it. Others will show some form of reticence. Others may reject playing outright, for reasons such as taste or superstition. If a persona is threatening to leave the room, ask them – out of character – “Good: but why do you end up staying?” A player can think of any reason they wish, or ask players for ideas. The persona relationships already developed will likely be the source of this, but it's possible a new twist could be added. If the player is stuck, the GM should give suggestions. Here's a few to get you started... You're in love with someone and if you leave you may not see them for another decade. You don't trust another persona to be left alone in case they reveal a secret. You think another persona is rich enough to lend you the money you need to pay your debts. You're an egomaniac and just wanted the attention to threaten to leave. In practice, in all my playtests, I’ve never had to use this. HANDING OUT THE CHARACTER SHEETS When you've made this decision, pull the dice out of the box. Catch the players’ attention. You then distribute the specific dice for each class to the specific player.

Hold out each dice towards each player, lock their eyes and intensely recite... This is your die. There is no other die like this in this whole game. This is special. This is yours. And put it in their hand. The Fool should be given their dice last, with the slightest tweaked line... This is your die. This is exactly the same as every other die in the game. There's nothing special about this die at all. It's likely this will get a laugh, and it will take a while for the Fool to realise what they get to do with their dice (as described on their sheets). Hold up the D20 with a flourish, and say… And this one is mine. From this point, encourage people not to roll their own dice. Be deliberately twitchy over it, almost as if you expect them to explode. “They're kind of antiques” is a good example of the sort of excuse you may use. Imagine how you may act if you thought the dice were made of plastic explosive. Distribute the character sheet to each player. The sheets explain the archetypes, but feel free to give them more information – the section Running the Archetypes includes more on this, including how best to explain them in a simple, iconic nugget form. Work your way through the sheet. To start with, ask each player to read the flavour text at the start of the first column, ending with the Fool.

Each player goes through their sheet, selecting their abilities, statistics and customisations from each section in the sheet. The trickiest part is “Stats”. Here, you distribute six scores (4, 4, 3, 3, 2 and 2) into the six abilities. Explain to the players what statistics are used for what sort of challenges. For example, that Strength is normally used for melee combat, and Dexterity for ranged combat. Some players are likely to ask for a more detailed rules explanation, and you can give them the basics – as in, you roll the number of dice equal to whatever the relevant stat is and each 4+ is a success. If the number of successes rolled equals or exceeds a difficulty number the GM sets, they succeed. If they don't, they fail. In other words, bigger numbers in abilities are good. It's not worth going in too deep yet, and tell them they'll pick up a bunch as they play. The basics are also explained on the sheets. At this point you should be filling in the Master sheet too. A player may be surprised the GM gets a character. Explain that this is just one of the cool things about this game. If you want, you can decide your Master's abilities before the game starts, but you filling in the sheet along with the players gives you a way to demonstrate each step along with them. When all characters are generated, ask the players to pick up their class dice and then close their eyes. Next, tell all the players to lower their dice to the table, and then – simultaneously – release them.

Wait a little while. Tell them to open their eyes. Tell them they are somewhere completely different. Welcome to DIE. The proper adventure starts, and you should read the next section, “Into The Dungeon”, which explains what

happens when the adventure is running in terms of events for the rest of the first session. There’s some mechanics referenced loosely, but you likely will be fine without them. If at any point you want to know how the actual rules work, skip on into a main section we have called – after some careful consideration – The Rules and then come back here.

INTO THE DUNGEON Up to this point, things have basically been on rails. Flexible rails, often created by all the players, including the GM. However, after this point, things can go in many directions. What holds it together is the underlying structure. Printing out the DIE GM Cheat Sheet to see this structure may be helpful, but here’s a breakdown of the core events… PERSONA GENERATION Keep a list of each persona’s major motivations and minor details. CHARACTER GENERATION The personas generate their characters using the character sheets. FIRST ENCOUNTER • The Master brings them to the world

of DIE. • The Master grabs the D20 and

teleports away. • Encourage each persona to pick up

their magical dice and so transform into their character.

• A brief combat to introduce mood and tone.

• A reveal that they are in a fantasy world…

–- END OF SESSION ONE -- BETWEEN SESSIONS Further encounters are generated. Encounters are ideally grown from personas’ interests and motivations, as presented later. SESSION TWO (AND MORE) The players move through the prepared (or improvised) encounters.

FINAL ENCOUNTER • The players confront the Master. • The players either go home or don't. We’ll break them down as we continue. “WAIT – WHO AM I PLAYING NOW?” In the previous section where you all sat around the table generating characters, you are playing the Master character. The second we arrive in Die, you segue to a traditional GM’s role of describing the environment, the results of the players’ action, and role-playing anyone they meet. The Master is then a character you play, like any other character in the world. In the GM advice section there’s quite a bit more about how “who players/GM are playing?” can work. In short: some people play as their persona for the whole game. Some people don’t. There’s no right answer. Whatever folks feel comfortable with is great. THE FIRST ENCOUNTER The personas will find themselves, dressed exactly like their personas were, carrying whatever they possess, in a different world. The personas are in a room almost identical to the room the personas were sitting in to play the game. It's the same room, but awfully wrong, just a little off. Perhaps the windows are sealed over. Perhaps the colour palettes are off, as if a gothic Instagram filter is making reality terrible. Perhaps their breath freezes in the air. Perhaps blood creeps like a snake across the floor. Nightmare imagery. This is not a good place to be.

The only brightly coloured objects in the room are the dice. They lie where the players left them. They are still their personas. They are just humans in a weird place. Stress this. Before anyone has a chance to react, say that the GM's persona grabs their own dice. Hey, it's almost as if they knew this was going to happen. Instantly, they transform into their character. Describe what they look like now – extrapolate from whatever you’ve put on your sheet, with the volume up. Use your imagination. This is likely your main antagonist. I stress: make sure the players realise that your persona grabbed their dice and then transformed. This is the main detail they need to realise. You may need to hint at it later if the players haven’t realised. The Master perhaps says a few words. This is the first time you get to show what kind of antagonist they'll be. If it's someone who the players will have at least some sympathy with, you may lean it soft (“I'm sorry, I wish it didn't have to be like this”). If it's someone with a grudge against the players, you may show that (“This serves you selfish bastards right”). If your game is going to be campy as balls, this is where you will just do an evil cackle (“Muhahahhaha.”) Honestly, saying absolutely nothing is a strong choice, especially if you’ve yet to decide your Master’s motivation. They then disappear. Take a Cheat Token (as explained on the Master’s sheet) and toss it over the board. If anyone asks what it is, say it's him spending some of his resources to do what he did. Cheating is explained on

your Master’s character sheet. Any time the Master breaks the rules in an extreme way, they spend a token. Now, leave the players for a few seconds looking at the environment. If they're having fun role-playing the confusion of panic, do feel free to let it linger. If you want to get a move on, the Fallen arrive. I think of the Fallen as undead cybernetic orcs, as if they’re the offspring of old 1980s TV had sex with a vat of meat. You can twist them any way you wish. You’ll find statistics for some basic Fallen later. Have one lesser Fallen for each of the players, and one more powerful sort. So if there's three players, one major fallen and three normal ones. The Fallen seem hungry. The Fallen want to kill and eat the players. AGAINST THE FALLEN How the Fallen enter depends on the nature of the room the personas were role-playing in in the real world. Perhaps they slide in via the wall, or a sink, or the lights or… If the players have not yet grabbed their dice, this will likely encourage them to do so. Ask everyone what they want to do. This is their one chance to grab their dice before the combat starts. At this point, combat starts, as described in The Rules. If the players have not grabbed their dice see “Ways Players May Be Shits At This Point”. WHEN A PLAYER GRABS THEIR DICE They are instantly transformed into the character they designed earlier. Their class dice fuses with their body.

Ask the player if they want to describe what they look like. Some players will leap at this, and others will much prefer you to give them a fancy description. If a player’s description is a little lowkey, build upon it. These are not normal people. For example, a player described herself as someone with regality and charm and charisma. I added “she looks like Meryl Streep’s Meryl Streep.” Describe how physically amazing they feel. Anyone with a Strength or Dexterity of 3 basically feels like an Olympic athlete does. A stat of 4 feels like living CGI. If the combat with the Fallen has started, it's likely you'll want to have the descriptions be shorter to keep things pacy, but lets the players have fun. They can now use the abilities as set out on their character sheet. WAYS PLAYERS MAY BE SHITS AT THIS POINT By which I mean “express their agency as players.” Geesh, you people. Basically, there's two main ways a player may choose to be awkward here. First is by trying to grab another person's dice. The second is by simply refusing to pick up the dice at all. The first is easy: they simply can't pick up any dice other than their own. Their hands just change direction, as if they're a magnet entering a field with an opposite charge. Just not picking up the dice is trickier for them – but also, in a real way, not a problem at all. The personas are in a dangerous situation. They may not believe that you will hurt them, or they may try and run off, or fight the Fallen

with their bare hands or many other solutions that have crawled from the players' brains. If players are simply being a bit slow, it may be worth reminding them about the weird magical glowing dice that are here – you know, the ones that changed the GM's persona into a fucking wizard. If they’re also the brave and noble players who want to play a character who panics, runs from magic and generally is a mess? More power to ’em. However, if they haven’t grabbed their dice, they’ve missed their chance to get the dice for free, so now all untransformed players have to survive a combat round in the melee... with the abilities of a real-world human being. Personas, before they are transformed, have 2 for all their six statistics and a defence of 1. If a player is a professional athlete or a world-class professor, you may give them a 3 in a stat... but this is unlikely. All humans are kind of average compared to fantasy heroes. Aragorn could beat up everyone's dad. Combat starts and they are stuck in their natural form until they manage to get hold of their dice. While the Fallen will not prioritise the untransformed personas to begin with, they also won't spare them. If the transformed characters manage to protect the untransformed and look like they're defeating the Fallen, you can decide how to progress. If you want to force the issue, you can always have more Fallen arrive. However, if the player really doesn’t want to transform, see how it goes. They will have a hard time, but it’s an interesting role-playing situation. If it’s possible to return to the room later, the player may always transform then. Alternatively, you can have their dice appear at some dramatically meaningful point during the second session to give

them a second chance to grasp their powers. Really though? Untransformed, they'll be lucky if the first hit does not kill them. If they are not lucky, kill them. Tell the player their persona is dead, and move onto the next player's action. The player will likely be surprised, so offer a “wait to see what happens” nod. Expect a scramble to pick up the glowing dice if they haven't already. At the end of the combat, something awful happens to the dead persona. They re-animate as a new Fallen, aware that their sentience is starting to leak away (See the section called “Running the Fallen” later for details). To become Fallen before a persona transforms is a particularly bad state for them to be in. They can pick up their dice when they return as Fallen, but it does absolutely nothing to them bar attaching to their body. If the characters somehow all manage to get killed, the Fallen eat their bodies a little then wander off. After a short period of time, everyone becomes Player Fallen. Er... an interesting adventure awaits. ROOM PROBLEMS It's possible your room may not be suitable, in which case, you can cheat. Expand the room in scale, so it's a much larger space. Alternatively, make the players tiny, so they're the size of figures on the table before them. Or anything between. Board up the windows and doors so they can't see what's outside, giving you room to make the rest of the game anything you want.

The players should not be able to escape this area until the end of the session. FIRST ENCOUNTER IN THE ROOM THE PLAYERS ARE IN The above suggests that it's all modelled after the room the personas were in before entering Die, which is the literary thing to do. I would suggest going another way, at least on your first play. Instead, make the room they arrive in appear in to be a dark mirror of the room the players are sitting in. As in, the actual real-life room you are presently sitting in. This approach is accessible to the players. If the players are in the space it makes it easy to visualise, and easy to understand what’s happening (e.g. “Monsters burst in through there...” GM points at the door to the room.). The fundamental meta nature of the game also becomes clear, in terms of messing around with reality, and there's something creepy about personas playing characters who are now trapped in a dark mirror of the players' reality. Plus, while being meta, it's also a way to simplify. As you're already roleplaying a person playing a roleplaying game, having something simple to hold onto is not a bad idea in any way whatsoever. END OF THE FIRST SESSION The encounter lasts until the Fallen are defeated. If you're bored of the fight, or you are running out of time, the Fallen can all turn as if hearing something uncanny and run. Or crumble to dust. This is an appetizer, and an excuse for

the players to experiment with their abilities in a relatively safe environment. When it’s over, allow the players to try and exit to the outer world. Have them pull back the curtain or open the door and tell them what they see. It’s the fantasy realm from the game their personas played when they were young, all those years ago. This is why you asked the players its name. “Out there… it’s the Land of

Uther” is a stronger ending than a generalised “It’s your fantasy realm.” If you know roughly the sort of area they will be appearing in, you can be more specific. In practice, the name is enough. Cut to black, theme tune and post-game decompression chat. Come back next time!

You will pick up the second session from where you left off last time. The players are in the same space they were, likely surrounded by the corpses of the Fallen, having just opened a door to see their teenage fantasy world out there. You will ask them what they want to do, and lead them through further encounters which lead to the conclusion. HOW DO WE GENERATE FURTHER ENCOUNTERS? We make them up. MAKING UP FURTHER ENCOUNTERS I'll put this up front: what follows tries hard, but is not a pure cooking recipe. It is more a cupboard of ingredients with some guidelines of how to throw them together. This is designed as a bunch of ways to make it easier to make stuff up. But, really, the answer is "make stuff up". Do not let any of the methodology below distract you from the purpose of it. Like cooking, the point is to make awesome food. Equally, if you’re an experienced games-master, do not let this distract you from what I’m saying. I’m saying “prepare the adventure”. You’ve done this already, in other games. These are tactics which are useful when preparing a DIE adventure, but are in addition to everything you already know. Do it your way. This is doubly true if you use any of the weird stuff from the Arcana. (I’m really building up the Arcana as a source of horror. It was originally “the appendix” but I renamed it to “The Arcana”. Beware the Lovecraftian Arcana. WoooOOoooOOooo.)

You have a gap between sessions. You can sit down and work out the encounters you would like the players to experience. Some GMs may want to make up everything in advance. Others will have rough ideas which they will develop in play. Others will not even read this section and wing it. These are all valid methods. Love to everyone. Suffice to say, we're in the difficult middle-section of the game. The opening of the scenario is a set point – “people sit down and play a game and get dragged into a fantasy world”. The ending is a set point – “people decide whether to go home or not”. The middle is where you game most becomes uniquely yours. It’s the hard bit – but it’s also the exciting bit. This is much easier than it looks. That DIE actually has this conclusion built into it makes everything easier – you will reach a climax. It’s just a question of filling some time interestingly between the two. Honestly, you’re amazing. You’re going to nail this. At the end of this section, you’ll find a hypothetical example to show how this could work in practice. There are other actual play examples in the Arcana for you to browse and see how your fellow players have done it. See – the Arcana, not just home of Lovecraftian horror. What follows is a framework to try and make encounters. It's a framework to guide your creativity, and to reduce the feeling of working from a blank page. CREATING YOUR FRAMEWORK Reread your notes on the first session. What are the flaws of each persona? What are the personas interested in?

What has the Master character sold people out for? Just chew it over. Then you’re going to work down this list. And sometimes up, but this is a logical way to progress. 1) THE LOCALE – where the adventure

will be set. 2) THE PERSONAS’ TEMPTATIONS – how

the adventure will test the personas 3) THE ACTUAL ENCOUNTERS 1) THE LOCALE Why is this important? The players have to go somewhere to have an adventure. Knowing where it is makes all the other steps easier. If you have a space where the game take places it suggests the sort of things the players will end up doing, so lets you think of what may happen. Equally, it sets the boundaries of the world and so defines the amount of encounters you will have to make. This is what happens in “The Personas’ Temptations” and “The Actual Encounters” sections. This is you defining a place to inspire it. I’ve decided to Dismiss Your Wisdom and Not Send Them to The Fantasy RPG they Played in As Kids Go to the Arcana, you fool of a Took. Making Their Teenage Fantasy World This is why at least most of the personas are all connected by that teenage experience – it allows you to create a setting which has meaning for them. Equally, as fantasy RPGs tend to work on a fairly robust set of tropes and conventions, it means you have a

backbone of a setting which you can fill in the gaps of as you play. The players have opened the door, and step into the world. The room is sitting there, in the middle of the landscape (The Dorothy’s House gambit) or that the door is a magical portal into the world (the Wardrobe to Narnia gambit). Either way, you can’t go back. So – a fantasy world. Think about a generalised fantasy world, and the sorts of situations you can drop them into. Archetypes are good. There is no need to even try to be clever. The cleverness is what we do with the structure. As this is designed for a short number of sessions, here’s a selection of useful basic situations to drop people into… * The world is about to be conquered by the Not Sauron, unless they can creep into Not Mount Doom and destroy Not The One Ring. * The greatest city of the empire is under siege by its greatest enemy. * The Alliance of Lords are about to elect an evil person to the highest throne. * The land will be destroyed if the Not Holy Grail is not found. * You’re in a dungeon. How can you get out? At this point, be thinking about the sorts of antagonists and characters they will meet. For example, the evil dark lord, the henchpeople, lords, dragons and whatever. Think broadly. You don’t need to nail down specifics yet. If you make a map, leave spaces to fill in. I regularly just draw a rough shape, and then place things as I go along, either in preparation or during play. For example,

I have drawn a rough circle and said, “This is the city under siege”, had a list of ideas for encounters but only placed them on the map during actually running the game. Making a map as you go along can be a lot of fun. You don’t need to actually generate a whole working world – in fact, that’s likely to get in the way of what we’re doing in the second session, when you’re going to be asking questions to the players about what their teenage fantasy world was like and using those details in the game. A blank map you fill with the players’ answers during play is a very strong tactic. Of course, you’ve already asked the players a bunch of questions in the first session, right? So… 2) THE PERSONA’S TEMPTATIONS (aka FUCKING WITH THEM) At this point you will have a locale to explore – you now need to make it work with the thematic elements you’ve drawn from your personas. It's likely you'll be thinking of this already, but I want to state it explicitly, one last time. The dilemma at the end of the game is whether the players go home or not. As such, at least for some characters, you want to create possible temptations for them to stay. 1) Look at what they lack, based on

that emotional need. 2) Offer it to them. It doesn't have to be much, of course. In The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, Edward fucked over the rest of his friends for Turkish Delight. It's also

worth noting that he changed sides again. This axis is one of the more rewarding ones the game can provoke – someone turning on their friends and then realising it's just not worth it is a real emotional arc. The “offering it to them” in an encounter can be either immediate or postponed until later in the adventure. The more likely it is to derail the encounter, the better it is to postpone the choice until the end. If someone’s long-lost love appears halfway through the adventure and begs a character to stay with them, there are two choices – either they stay, or they leave. If they stay, the game breaks. If the choice appears at the end, it means that it's part of the climax. The “your love is captured by the baddy” is always an option, and Nintendo has managed to stretch decades of Mario games out of that setup. But remember DIE's theme. Emotionally speaking, the princess is always in another castle. Temptations can be crass or subtle. They can be designed to be awful heartbreakers or easy to reject. Ideally, conceive them with no idea how the player will respond. They can happen either at an individual moment in the encounter, or be a running theme throughout it. If a character is estranged from their parent, it's likely that encounter will involve something which is related to their parental issues. If a character is really upset that they could never win at Donkey Kong, it's likely that the encounter is related to that – either literally (as in, a monkey at the top of the hill throwing stuff at you) or less literally (the encounter is giving the player a chance to have their ability

hailed above all others, as "Being best at Donkey Kong" isn't really about “Being best at Donkey Kong”, is it?) It is equally likely that these character points will play out on the largest level. As in, they’ll form the inspiration for the adventure. At the least, the Master’s desires will do that. If the Master’s urges are somewhat darker, it’s likely they’ll take the place of a villain in the world. For example, if the Master wants to rule a world as absolute Master, the Master will likely be in the place of your story’s arch-villain. Sometimes players’ own desires can suggest alternatives too. If a character has no strong desires, do include something which comes from the information they gave you. For example, if all you got from a player was that they quite like the books of Agatha Christie, you should definitely consider having Poirot turn up as a character they meet. Possibly a warped version of Poirot, of course. Or set the whole thing as a weird murder mystery and… you see the point. Building upon what people have given you is very much what the game is. Do not doubt how effective this can be. When I had David Bowie turn up towards the conclusion of a game, the players almost exploded. In short: use the obsessions of all personas, including your own, to both inspire and personalise the encounters. Remember: the Major Needs you’ve highlighted are what the players will be disappointed about if they don’t come into the game. They’ve thrown you the ball. Don’t drop it. Either using the personas’ major obsessions as a backbone for their adventures or as the key inspiration for an encounter is a good way to do this. If

you can throw in some minor obsessions as well, all the better. Make sure that you draw equally from each persona, so each player feels equally listened to. For example, you’ve decided that this DIE will be set in a fairly typical fantasy realm. The Master is actually just a simple villain, who is selling out his friends so he can live his fantasy of being basically Sauron. Looking at the personas, Reginald the GM works out elements to use. Theresa is a divorcee who is hugely bitter towards her ex for making her miss her mum’s death. Adam feels he has never been appreciated for his endless work as a teacher. Maria’s only hobby is being an ornithologist. The GM thinks Theresa’s ex may inspire a useful lieutenant for the Master, and gives Theresa a chance to confront and get closure with him, one way or another – he could be a recurring villain, or a one-off. A chance to speak to something akin to her dead mum is also a possibility – this could be something the Master offers her, or a place she finds, or anything else. There’s definitely lots of emotional meat there. Adam wants to be hailed for the work? Adam is a folk hero ala Robin Hood in this world – all the people they meet are huge fans of Adam, and hope he’ll save them. This could lead to an encounter where he’s hailed by everyone as this grand hero, especially AFTER the Master is defeated… but it’s also a theme that works across the whole scenario. Maria doesn’t seem to be the sort of obsessed ornithologist who would sell out her friends for a look at a fancy bird… but you never know. Having birds which only speak to Maria could be an interesting motif though, so Reginald

makes some notes to make birds be important throughout. These elements immediately will suggest things in the locale. You will likely muse it over, before stepping on to three. 3) THE ACTUAL ENCOUNTERS You now have a place for all this action to happen and a vague idea of the sort of things you want. Now it’s a case of just arranging the pieces into ENCOUNTERS. The ENCOUNTERS populate the locale with interesting people to meet, punch and have existential crises with. You do not need to initially plan everything. What you’re trying to do is create a spine of a structure, which allows you to know how the adventure could be solved, at least in one way. The players will do their own thing, but you’ve thought about the space and what could be there. First, look at the locale you’ve set the game in. Work out the objective – as in, where the players will be trying to get to in order to confront the Master. Work out where you will start the players. Look between the two. What’s to stop the players from just marching from one to the other? Each place where the players could be stopped is a place where you need an encounter. It will also likely suggest something of the nature of the encounter. For example, we’ve decided to set this game around a thinly-veiled version of Mordor in Middle-earth. The players have to get to Barad-dur to confront the Master. They start outside. Looking at the map, there’s the big old gate that stops you getting in. That would be one

encounter. There’s the back route through Cirith Ungol, past Shelob the spider. That could be another encounter. There’s Mount Doom – like, maybe you can’t break into Barad-dur until the ring has been destroyed? And then there’s the confrontation with the Master at Barad-dur itself. This mean the basic spine would be… 1) THE GATES. Either get in or get

shown another way. 2) CIRITH UNGOL – getting past Shelob

or the maze or something similar. 3) MOUNT DOOM – destroying the ring. 4) CONFRONTATION AT BARAD-DUR. Clearly the “travel between these places” could be another encounter. That you know personal details about the personas may give you some idea of how these encounters may be. For example, following from Reginald’s party, immediately a lot of Tolkien links are suggested. The orcs, rather than being villains, could be hailing Adam as their saviour. If we need a place for Theresa’s evil ex, Shelob would make a wonderful thing to play with. Equally the fires of Mount Doom could be a good place to try and talk to the dead mother (or perhaps that’s offered during the final confrontation in Barad-dur). Finally, as Tolkien loves his eagles, the party’s advisors throughout could be Maria’s birds. You can see that juxtaposing the map and the personal details leads to a core idea of fun encounters. How many encounters do you need to prepare? Generally speaking, in a 2-3 hour session you’ll need 3-4. This includes

the climactic faceoff against the Master. A large combat encounter will normally count as more than one smaller one. If you’re planning on running the scenario indefinitely, clearly, make as many as you like. Or as few. You can always add more later, often in response to players’ decisions. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – every single piece of RPG scenario design works here. This is 100% “design or improvise an adventure” stuff. Any GM advice column in the world is useful for this. THE FINAL ENCOUNTER To stress, working out an interesting possible place for the final confrontation with the Master is worth doing. It’s the climax of the adventure, and should feel like it. KEY THINGS THE PLAYERS SHOULD DISCOVER ALONG THE WAY There’re facts which the adventure should impart to the players, as necessary. You’ll want to let the players know these – and the first one, as soon as possible. 1) If everyone agrees to go home,

including the Master, they go home. That’s it.

2) As far as everyone in the world knows, this is the real world.

3) The world is unstable. If they don’t all either leave or stay, eventually the world will end.

4) The world will continue once they’re gone (or all decide to stay).

Point 2 is the trickiest one, of course – the only character who definitely knows all of this is the Master character.

Information coming directly from him is one way to do it. Alternatively, more liminal, strange magical creatures are useful – I’ve a habit of using high magical creatures who are aware of the dual realities of Die and the “real world”. A dragon rolls its eternal eyes at you and telling you this stuff has a way of playing to tropes. It also works with Kate Bush. Or a Kate Bush dragon. SPECIFICS DETAIL OF THE ENCOUNTER You now only need to fill in the details of what the challenges are in each of these encounters. How much detail do you actually need? As much (or little) detail as required to be able to play them out. Do this for every encounter, including the climactic encounter. Be aware that this is a spine – it’s entirely possible your climax will be elsewhere. This is your preparation, remember – it’s not definitely going to happen. Things not going to plan is the plan. For any given encounter, it’s possible you will already have an idea for an encounter based on the personas’ temptations or the locale, or both. You may consider tweaking them in some way, by combining them with part of a players’ background. This can be a minor detail or a major one. Meeting Grima Wormtongue or Bart Simpson may be a minor detail. Meeting your dead lover is likely a major one. Think about what emotional journey each persona is on. Be aware, you want to include enough material that it resonates with all the players. If the whole game is just about one persona, it’s unlikely to be satisfying for most players. The exception may be a one-off or a game

with drama-averse players, where the game ends up being about the antagonist’s obsessions and the personas’ attempts to survive them. For an encounter, it’s possible you will need some statistics for the players to interact with. It’s worth noting this is not always necessary. It is also possible you will need to pull a character out of your posterior during a game. Either way, the following is a useful methodology for making other people… FRIENDS, ENEMIES, MONSTERS, THE GENERAL CREATURE OF DIE This edition of DIE doesn't exactly go into masses of rules and lists of monsters or creatures. We’ll probably do more down the line, and there’s some examples at the end of the section, but this is the sort of thinking I go about when preparing a game and the characters. 1) Choose what they are! Here’s some ways to generate someone… a) Choosing something logically from

the locale. If you’ve got ideas, use them.

b) If a player's Minor Detail is a movie or piece of fiction, grabbing characters from that is amazing. It's your RPG played in the privacy of the house. You don't need to pay Games Workshop money if you want to fight Space Marines. Or make out with Space Marines.

c) For Arcana users, consider something random from The Box of Crap.

d) Go with something you've just thought of which seems appropriate.

Like a liche. Liches are always good. Everyone loves liches.

If you don’t know what a liche is… a) Welcome to this hell of role-playing.

I’m impressed you’ve got this far into the manual without running away screaming.

b) A liche is basically “What if Gandalf from Lord of the Rings was also an undead monster.” If you’re wondering who Gandalf is, he’s a bit like Dumbledore from Harry Potter. If you’re wondering who Dumbledore is, he’s a bit like Alan Moore.

If you wonder why liche has an “e” at the end, it’s because I was exposed to Warhammer to a toxic degree as a teenager. 2) Consider weirding it up You may not want to run it straight. Colour it with an element either from the personas’ histories or an element of the environment they find themselves in. If a persona is a big Harry Potter fan, perhaps the liche is Undead Dumbledore. Perhaps the liche reminds them of their dad. Perhaps the liche is their dad. Warning: do NOT make your liche Alan Moore. He will use his powers on you. At the least, consider making them Fallen – especially if you want to be able to fight them with no moral questions. Or rather, relatively few moral questions. Fallen are a visual motif in DIE, so will be familiar to anyone who’s read the comic. Equally, they are important to the latter game. If a player meets Fallen regularly before anyone dies, it’ll mean more.

3) If you need stats, choose stats. If you don’t need stats, don’t bother choosing stats DIE is deliberately simple in its use of profiles. Standard monster profiles and example creatures are included at the end of The Rules. What follows explains the basic process of adding some rules to your ideas. It's also worth stressing that while this is in the preparation system, you don't need to generate this profile until the players have to actually use the rules to interact with the monsters. Are the players going to attack that dragon with the face of their old headmaster? Probably not. If that’s so, you don't need to generate it. If a battle actually happens, it's a case of choosing the Epic Monster profile and letting it do anything that would be sensible for a dragon with the face of their old headmaster to do, like set homework, or incinerate them. DIE is a generous system. We all have busy lives. We don’t need to know the random orc’s general knowledge skill. Most orcs don’t know anything about generals. 4) Personalities If it's just a monster, or brainless, this can be skipped. Or maybe not. Maybe this is a Gelatinous Cube that sings the songs of Huey Lewis And The News as it's devouring you. I'm not even joking. It's likely, especially if you're using a detail from a persona’s history to create it, that you know what their personality is like. If the persona hasn’t actually defined any details other than a vague “I miss my dead parent” when the dead parent appears as a liche, just make a

note to ask the player for more details in play. We talk about asking players question to tweak the world in The Second Session in a few pages. In short: ask what the parent was like in terms of personality, and then then play the liche as your interpretation of what they say. Er... you don't need to have them be a liche. I'm kind of committed to the liche as the standard example now. It’s likely we will include personality quirk generators in later editions, but for this one, it seems extraneous. Almost every RPG system has one, and if you have one in your Box of Crap you can turn to them. If not, there are many personality generators online, which can easily be googled. Here’s one I just have: https://springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/character-quirk.htm. Generally speaking, don’t be afraid to play characters to the fucking hilt. If you want a really weird character, select multiple options, but be aware you're always risking things turning into Monty Python if you go too zany. Of course, for true horror players, choose entirely emotionless, to the max. Entirely non-responsive. Silent staring. Monotone voices. This is also horrific. Especially if you do it for more than one creature the player meets, as it speaks to the nature of the horror world in which they find themselves. Oh, there is one particular kind of character which is likely to be of use with this core setting – an encounter with the personas’ previous characters (i.e. the characters the personas played in their original teenage RPG). While having the world think the players are

actually their old heroes is a logical route, you can get more drama from showing where their old characters ended up. Heroic master thieves begging in an alleyway, bards running a simple pub and so on. It’s a useful way

to dovetail with the personas’ real lives – as in, showing them the road they’re on. If you meet your teenage hero stuck in a loveless marriage, it can give you perspective.

SECOND SESSION GENERATION WORKED EXAMPLES Here’s a hypothetical walkthrough of preparing for an actual scenario, to show all of the above in practice. If you want to see how some groups actually did it in the playtests, go look in the Arcana. THE HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE I’m going to use the same locale, and show two completely different ways you could take the material generated by the personas. Here’s a set of personas in a stripped-down form. It’s likely that yours will have more complicated links. To stress, the GM’s character – Rupert – likely has several bits of this information hidden from the other players. The players were a D&D group – with the exception of Rupert, who is Valentine’s cooler older brother. Or at least he was then. They’re now all in their late 30s. Bob, a Rage Knight Bitter divorcee, who has spent ten years in an increasingly loveless marriage only to discover his wife has been cheating on him, and has left him. Has always had a lingering crush on Valentine. Used to play a Fighter. Core Drive: resentment at having wasted 20 years of his life. Secondary Elements: amateur historian. Always wanted to move to the big city. Football supporter (Arsenal). Catholic. Trudy, a Godbinder Was the GM of their group as teenagers. Small-town wife. Two kids, mid-teens. Dropped out of her literature degree while pregnant. Now kids are about to

leave home, and aware that she’s not sure what to do with her life. Long-standing crush on Rupert, but more how Rupert was then than now. She’s been sad and disappointed in him forever. Used to play a Cleric. Core Drive: stymied creative urge. Secondary Elements: volunteers at the library. Avid reader of literally any trash fantasy novel. Secretly smokes. Idealises Sylvia Plath. Valentine, a Neo She’s a nervous, closeted small-town IT specialist consultant. She’s gay, still afraid of coming out, afraid of her religious mother, afraid of everything. Younger sister of Rupert. Used to play a Rogue. Core Drive: to stop being scared. Secondary Elements: huge gamer. Long-term Blizzard fan, especially Hearthstone. Rupert, a Master He was the nerdy king of the school. He was even generous then – he was friendly with all his sister’s geek friends, even if he teased the game. He was a literary nerd not a gaming nerd, loving Tolkien. His life didn’t really go anywhere. He works at a bar and has never left the town, with a string of relationships with women he decides “weren’t good enough for him”. Core Drive: his life peaked at high school – he wants a chance to be the king he should always have been. His expectations are simply too high. Secondary Elements: protective of sister, and all too aware she’s gay. Football supporter (Tottenham).

These are British people, btw. To translate to American, replace “Arsenal” and “Tottenham” with “Yankees” and “Red Sox”. THE LOCALE It’s their teenage D&D game. It’s a land with a high fantasy feel, which is all I need as an aesthetic – high fantasy, all the time. I’m also aware that the fact they’re traveling to a teenage fantasy world gives an excuse for the stuff around the edges being not exactly perfectly thought out. It’s a teenage D&D world! The simple setting: the land is about to be crushed by the forces of Evil, ruled by some kind of Dark Lord. The last free folk have gathered in the last stronghold. They can transport a group of heroes deep within the Dark Lord’s lair, in a last attempt to stop him. When they step out of the room at the start of the second session, they’ll find themselves in the stronghold of the remaining good folk of the land. Here’s two separate ways someone may use the above information to develop two adventures. They’re written to show ways your thought processes may go, including going back and editing. The first is a pure good and evil structure, the other considerably more complicated. EXAMPLE ONE: RUPERT AS A TOTAL SHIT/BASIC VERSION This is the simple way to do it.

Rupert’s life peaked as a teenager, and he thinks he deserves better from life than he ever got. His core drive is simple – he wants to rule a fantasy world of his own. To come here, he had to bring some people – the other personas. He hopes his sister will join him but, really, they’re all just sacrifices for his power. He is in the Evil Lair, and he is the Dark Lord of the world. He has acquired the Magic Item of Evildom, which means he drives all the forces of evil, evilly. The players get there, and we have the classic epic confrontation at the top of his lair. In other words, the encounters are primarily aggressive obstacles trying to slow them down. This is mainly playing the Dark Lord situation straight. They have to travel through the dungeon beneath the evil castle. Let’s call it the Undercity. The players arrive in the last stronghold of the forces of good, get briefed, and then transported to the Undercity. I could draw a map to link things together, or have my list of places they are likely to discover and as the players defeat them they get closer. I realise I want it to be more than just “Go to the bad guy and kill them”. As we’re riffing on a basic fantasy story, having the one weapon that means the Dark Lord Can Be Defeated in the castle seems a good thing. So – this basically creates a list of core encounters for the second session… 1) The briefing in the last stronghold. 2) The arrival in the Undercity. 3) Some manner of pursuit when

they’re down there??? 4) Finding the magical artefact. 5) Using it to confront the Master. The briefing? As this is a pop fantasy take, Trudy’s love of trashy fantasy

seems a useful thing to mine for content – as is Valentine’s love of Blizzard games. I’d like to include some elements from Trudy’s favourite fantasy books, but I haven’t actually asked her what her favourites are yet. I don’t need to. I’ll just ask her in play, and then just drop the wisest person from that book into the role of advisor… and can also provide the actual nature of the artefact to defeat the Dark Lord. Alternatively, the details can be filled in by asking players questions about their RPG world during the session – “What was the legendary artefact in your game?” is always an easy one. Whatever it is, it either allows Rupert to be killed or gives access to Rupert’s secret lair. So – why is the artefact in the dungeon? Easy option – the personas’ original teenage RPG characters went in there with it. The good guys cowering in the last stronghold haven’t heard any contact. This sets for an agreeable tragic encounter when the players catch up with them. That actually changes the necessary encounters… 1) The briefing in the last stronghold. 2) The arrival in the Undercity. 3) Finding the party who went first. 4) Finding the artefact 5) Using it to confront the Master,

Rupert. Now – how about Rupert having some lieutenants? That gives us some antagonists who players can also interact with, who aren’t Rupert. There’s someone who’s killed the previous party, and is leading the resistance against the players – a lieutenant figure. Scanning the background – Valentine and Bob both have domineering figures they’re resentful of. The ex-wife and the

religious mother could easily be twisted into encounters. That Bob’s ex-wife “took” something from him means that she’s an influence on the lieutenant who’s hunted down the party and has taken the magical artefact she needs. Taking a Nazgul archetype as a monster and giving her followers gives a fairly creepy visual. There’s also the idea that maybe they don’t need to fight her – There’s room for Bob making peace with his past here. Valentine’s mum as a religious mother, as a necromantic cult leader, leading an awful dark mass? That’ll be a good thing to arrive in, as a huge visual, and gives the players a choice to intervene or not in whatever is going on. As it’s Valentines’ mum, this seems to be her encounter. Her mum’s victims could be some beautiful elves, taken prisoner, with a suggestion that it’s because of they’re not straight. Can Valentine stand up to her mum? Make peace with her? Defeat her? Who knows? As Powered By Apocalypse World games like to say in their manuals, we play to find out. Next – they find their way to as far as the previous party got. All dead – which we’ll ask the players some questions about in play to work out why it’s particularly sad. I check if I’ve given all the characters an encounter which revolves around their obsessions. Well, Valentine and Bob already have big scenes, but Trudy hasn’t. She needs one. If the party is already dead, how do they work out where the artefact has gone? Well, Trudy’s a Godbinder – she could bring them back to commune with, via a deal with one of the gods. Which is fun. But… it’s a bit mechanics-based? How to make it personal? The Sylvia Plath mention sticks out – having a bard based on Sylvia Plath as part of the

original party? Whatever challenge they do to get the clue, they get her dying words, which is a chance for Trudy to talk hero to hero and get inspiration from it (perhaps linking to that stymied creative urge?). Some manner of combat situation, fighting ghosts for a chance to speak with her literary hero certainly works. From that, one way or another, we get to the confrontation with Bob’s Nazgul ex-wife (Yes, now’s there a sentence.). One way or another, we get emotional closure and the artefact. And then onto a final confrontation, at the most dramatic part of the lair. That, according to the scenario, the world will be falling apart means it’s going to be a deeply dramatic visual background to whatever happens. Any ways to spice it up with the background? Hmm. Bob had a lingering crush on Valentine? With the rules for the Fallen, the opportunity to kill her and then have her as Bob’s eternal bride is certainly something evil Rupert could suggest if Valentine rejects his demand to stay. It’s certainly a loaded decision, but the fact this is meant to be a more fun and games adventure means this feels far too ugly (especially with Valentine’s sexuality). I keep it as an idea, but find it unlikely I’ll go there unless the group is leaning that dark. Wait. This adventure is designed to be high adventure – we’re overthinking it. Let’s work out a bunch of lieutenants in this final encounter. Rupert liked Tolkien? Having the key LOTR cast as his petrified servants, and winning the fight sets them free would be a big cool geek thrill moment – and, if they’re suitably grateful, perhaps giving Bob some closure on his resentment. Obviously,

Rupert is married to Galadriel and Arwen, to highlight the shallowness of his “No woman is good enough for me” bullshit. A quick final scan through for minor details – I’ll use one of the online Hearthstone card banks to randomly generate cards to influence encounters, include a few historians in the opening council of the wise and have the banners of Arsenal on the good guys and the Tottenham flag on the bad guys. That sounds fun, and signals that it’s a playful game. Work out a few stats for the key monsters – Hero Wizard for the mum and Monster for the ex, perhaps – and then we’re good to go. EXAMPLE TWO: RUPERT AS MORE SYMPATHETIC/COMPLICATED VERSION So, Rupert is an over-achiever who thinks he deserves better than he got? Let’s not throw out the affection for his sister too easily. He actually believes this fantasy world is better for everyone – their lives are all shit. He’s hoping that being here will make them want to stay. The backbone of “Get to the Evil Lair” seems solid – do we have to throw it out? A simple option – in fact, the Council of the Stronghold think Rupert’s character is the new lieutenant of the Dark Lord. The players think they’re going to have to confront them both. However, when they get to the end, the players discover that Rupert has already killed the Dark Lord. The world will be at peace now… and haven’t your experiences along the way taught you you’ll be happier here too? This means that the Encounters will be as much about giving players a chance to realise what they could be here. As such, we’ll be looking for at least one

encounter (or one theme running throughout the game) for each character to be tempted by. We keep the same backbone – a magical artefact, carried to the base. If Rupert’s in charge, and he’s the LOTR master, we take notes straight from Tolkien. The artefact is the one ring. The place it’s got to get to is a big volcano base like Mount Doom. Except, in our story, the Dark Lord has his room in Mount Doom, so you don’t get to sneak around. We’ll fill in other details from asking players questions about their old fantasy world. Er… will we stick with that? Who knows, but it’s enough to start with. We can bin it if the details change. Who is the Dark Lord? It could be generic, but with this game world, let’s make it personal. The character who has most connection to the personas? Valentines’ mum – who is also Rupert’s mum, remember. Have the Dark Lord inspired by her, and Rupert seemingly her servant… until the reveal. If she’s the Dark Lord, and her daughter is afraid of her judgement, her rule must be deeply conservative, so implying her death would lead to the overthrow of all these values. As such, we’ll have to filter the story with these ideas of persecution. Simultaneously, the people of the last redoubt could be a bunch of lovely sweethearts. Having the players’ old RPG characters be there seems logical – rather than tragedy, let’s make them be positive meetings, to give the players something to fight for. That’s Valentine’s thread. It’s her road to confront a fantasy analogue of her mother, with the world-view Valentine is petrified of externalized all around her. This means that Valentine needs a

chance to confront the mother analogue – so Rupert taking her down has to be after Valentine has had a chance to either stand up to her or not. Either way, Rupert turns on the mother (likely using the Master’s special abilities) but it sets the game up for a very different conclusion. Okay – Valentine is done. She doesn’t have a single specific encounter – the Dark Mother’s influence should tinge every encounter. How about Bob and Trudy? They’re two very different personas. Bob has a big core drive – his resentment over his wasted life. Trudy is more diffuse, with smaller urges. Even her “stymied creative urge” doesn’t seem to align with her other elements. Hell, for some reason we haven’t even asked anything about the Father and how he fits into all of this? Hmm. Trudy has always had a crush on Rupert… but younger, ambitious Rupert. Meanwhile Rupert is trying to get a girl who is “good enough for him”. These seem to somewhat dovetail. Rupert is certainly ambitious now. And Trudy? By actually fighting her way through all these dungeons, she’ll have proved she’s an amazing hero. This is their best selves! Or at least, that’s how he could see it. That Trudy has kids means it’s unlikely she could be seduced to stay in the world and abandon her real life… but you never know. That means that the encounters along the way should give her a chance to achieve purpose and show off. But what to do? Well, a setting does present itself – a library is a useful thing. If we’re dropping into a dungeon to explore, a

huge labyrinth with long walls of books is a great setting for an encounter. Hell, maybe more. If we’ve got a Library and we’ve got a Dark Lord who’s hyper-conservative, this segues into… well, book burnings, am I right? That’s the place they’re going – the Holy Library that the Dark Lord is trying to destroy. We can use literary figures who are Trudy’s inspirations (which include Sylvia Plath, and others can be worked out by asking questions) as the holy guardians of this place? That sounds fun. In fact, more fun than fucking Mount Doom analogue with a one-ring analogue. In which case, let’s throw away Mount Doom and use “The Dark Queen’s attack against this bastion of knowledge she doesn’t like” as the setting, and also throw away the one ring. She’s in the central area and in a ritual to destroy the book of light, from which all that is good flows. That sounds high fantasy, right? The problem is to get there before she does it. Let’s skip back to Bob. Now, one of his minor details kicks in here – “amateur historian” certainly interlinks with the Library setting. Including the 20 years thing – personal history is also history. Like in the first version, his ex-wife sounds like a useful flavour to add as an antagonist, but let’s look some more. She left him for someone. Trudy is worried that now her kids are leaving home, she lacks a purpose. Her husband leaving too seems like something that would horrify everyone – but especially Trudy, right now. So have two Nazgul-esque lieutenants, one based on Trudy’s husband, and the other based on Bob’s ex. Hmm. We don’t have many details about the husband. I’ll make a note to

ask for more during play, specifically asking about her worst fears about him. This is all feeling exciting but I want to step back and look at what I’ve planned. In terms of antagonists, I’m reminded that the creatures I’ve created may be informed by the ex and the mother, but they’re not actually the ex and the Mother. They are characters in this dark fantasy influenced by the fear. I don’t think stabbing your ex actually is a great way to work through emotions… but Bob’s core drive isn’t “Fuck my ex!” Bob’s core drive is “My life has been a waste.” Hmm. Well, there’s two lines of attack – one, when meeting his old RPG fighter character, see that that guy had an impact on this world. Perhaps all the good guards they meet all honour that old fighter? Most importantly, when we have an encounter we should see an immediate big impact. This is partially built in (they’re saving the world) but on the way, their actions should help people, and we immediately thank Bob hard. We show him this world appreciates him in the way the real world doesn’t. So – Valentine’s fear, Bob’s wasted life… while we’ve got a story for Trudy, it doesn’t actually really touch on what I identified as her main issue – as in, a stymied creative urge. Now, maybe we don’t need this – she already has a lot of input into the world, and her character was more diffuse than the other two – but we can give her a creative mission along the way? And a reward of being a major creative mind here? Okay – we’ve got a lot swimming around here. I work out a rough list of encounter ideas.

1) Arrival in the world. Perhaps they step out of a magic book? The good guys of the fantasy realm explain the situation – the Evil Queen and her lieutenant (Rupert) are storming this library. It’s chaos out there. The great book of light is in peril and has been cut off from the rest of the library by a grand wall of darkness. If they had one of the army’s passes, they could get through? This story is trying to seduce – we should signal that. I write the first note as Trudy (who I suddenly remember I made a note is a secret smoker) being passed a cigarette. “Don’t worry – it’s a healing cigarette. Smoke as many as you like.” Instantly the idea – this world knows you, and this world will look after you.

2) Exploring the Library. Encounter with order of gay monks who are being dragged away into captivity. First showing of Dark Queen’s attitude – plus seeing the Dark Queen’s face on the banner, so players know who it’s based on. If they rescue the monks, it’s clear their order’s precious knowledge will be hugely important to the world. Thanks, Bob. Plus, Valentine sees her mother’s threat.

3) A massive book burning with the Head Librarian being burned in the centre…. Introducing the two evil lieutenants. They will attempt to run, to bring warning. The Head Librarian, dying, begs Trudy to learn enough to tell the story of this place (her creative arc). They’ll likely try and make Bob help too – he’s an amateur historian, and it will feed into his “wants to make a difference” storyline. Nearby, watching in bunkers, are the utterly demoralised Warrior-Librarians (I’ll need to work out their statistics from the “Monsters” sections). If they can be motivated to go out and fight, it’ll be easier for the players to get around.

4) Lieutenants have gathered their major forces, and are about to start executing fictional characters – any character who stars in a book which is on a Christian Fundamentalist Ban List would be good (which is a lot of books – Harry Potter jumps to mind as a good reference). Navigating this encounter can be a huge battle (if the Warrior-Librarians from the last encounter were recruited) or a personality-based one. I have the idea that if one of the Lieutenants based on real-life people is actually killed, we should actually lampshade what’s happened. “Did you really think this was me? Is this really how you see me?” beat before they die, to make the players question what they’re actually doing. But really, “The players need to get the key off one of the Lieutenants” is all we need for a backbone.

5) The final encounter – have the final confrontation of Valentine with her Dark Lord mum, before Rupert kills her and makes the pitch. “People like her made the real world terrible. She’s not here now. Now this world will be great – let’s stay here.” Then we’ll see if we’ve done enough to tempt folks. I prepare a selection of useful stats for people they will meet, as well as gathering together a bunch of atmospheric things to do with books – as I live in a house with books, I will be generating random events based on picking a random book off the shelf. Clearly, we need some charming girls to flirt with Valentine and likely Bob as well. And, once again, I suspect Sylvia Plath will turn up for Trudy to bond with…. Hmm, someone has to be the Head Librarian. Asking Trudy to be successor to Plath certainly feeds into her obsessions…

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF • I skirt over writing more details on

characters the players meet and their statistics. How much would you have to pre-generate to be happy to play the game?

• I’m using imaginary locales, without a firm setting. How would you integrate an actual map to ground the experience?

• Both adventures are simple quest narratives. As an experienced GM knows, there’s many sorts of narratives. How would you use similar techniques to do – say – a detective story? A siege? A courtly romance?

• Rupert is a literary nerd and doesn’t actually like RPGs. Any ideas how to make this a bigger part of the game?

• You have the personas’ notes above. I say that I wish I’d asked Trudy more about her husband. What questions would you ask?

• Neither example uses Bob’s Catholicism. How would you use Bob’s religion? Is that interesting to you?

• The two above adventures are based on Bob being relatively blameless. Drama is usually more complicated than that. Can you think of ways to make the wife a more sympathetic element?

• The personas’ old teenage RPG characters are either killed or passively just advisors. Would you like them to be more active? Or would you not use them at all?

• The second example is meant to try and lure the players to at least consider staying in the world. Does it do enough? How would you make the world more appealing?

• The latter game goes deep into homophobia in the world setting, with gay characters being imprisoned. I considered going even further and having characters face execution, but decided against using it as an example. With some groups I would run that game. With others I wouldn’t. What are your limits? Would you not use that kind of overt homophobia as a theme at all? What themes just don’t interest you?

You’ve done your preparation. You’ve got the players all back together. Sit them down, let them relax, and then… DO THIS THING! PREVIOUSLY ON There's been a gap between the first and second sessions. As such, the players are unlikely to remember everything about their persona (or other people's). That the game’s juice is about people recognising elements of their persona coming to haunt them, this is a problem. Oh what to do? Go around the group, asking everyone to talk about their persona, and their feelings for the other personas. If they miss things which you're hoping to use in the second session, mention them. This is the trick which TV shows do – if something is mentioned in a Previously On, it's really telling you that it's going to be relevant in what follows. Savvy players will know it's a tell, but it's better than them not recognising something that should be relevant to them. If the player adds things that weren't mentioned in the first session, as long as they don't openly contradict what they said then or break the relationships in some way, write them down and consider using them. For many players, their persona will have solidified in their mind in the gap between sessions. RESTARTING THE GAME A little ritual can help enter the correct mindspace for play. When everyone’s got back up to speed ask all the players to pick up their class dice and close their eyes.

Tell them to lower the dice to the table, then release it. Wait a few seconds. Ask them to open their eyes. Tell them they’re back in the game, and begin. ENCOUNTERS

You have a series of encounters prepared, or are planning to improvise. Get to it, GM.

OPEN-ENDED WORLD GENERATION

You have your plan for the encounters. You know which of the personas’ backgrounds you plan to work into the D&D conventions of the world they’re exploring. However, this only mean the players will enter a fantasy world. You want to make it feels like they’re entering their fantasy world… which you then subvert. As such, much as in persona generation, you continue to ask questions during play, of larger or smaller details, from the players. For example, if you decide the story is set in the capital city of the largest Fantasy Empire, you should feel free to turn to the players and ask details as they arise. For example: What’s the symbol of the empire? What colour armour do its knights wear? How is the capital protected? How many times has the Dark Lord ever attacked the capital? What was your favourite inn in the city? Who lived there? And so on. It’s worth stressing what the questions above do. As in, they are designed to add to the game world and

give colour. This is decoration over the structure you have prepared. It is also likely that whatever they give you, you will immediately subvert it or play with it in some way. The symbol of the Empire will be on fire. The Capital’s impassable walls have fallen. The Dark Lord is on the throne. Your inn is on fire and/or the innkeeper has been brewed into beer. You can push this technique as far as you like. For example, run through a dungeon they played as teenagers, asking a player what’s around each corner, and then subvert it. For groups that like a lot of player agency, this is a good way to include it. Other groups can just keep it as an occasional spice. Find your own way. For less gonzo players, they may be worried about the coherence of the world. They’ll be right. It should be stressed that a certain incoherence may result from these choices. It’s reduced by these being surface additions to your underlying strong structure, but the key thing is that they’re traveling to their teenage fantasy world. That the world-building may be a bit broken is not a problem – it is in fact the point. Applying more cynical eyes to the chirpy D&D world is actually a lot of fun. Or horrifying. Or both. In short: ask questions of the personas. Fold those answers into the world. Continue.

OPEN-ENDED PERSONA GENERATION Much of the thrill of the game is about taking normal people with real emotional issues and giving them these supernatural powers. As such, as the

GM you should try to remind players of their persona’s real life even as they're going through the world. Part of this will be done solely through the weirdness of the encounters – if they encounter things that hark back to the personas’ real lives, it grounds things. The other side of this is to continue to ask players questions in game, and then immediately fold that into the action. In RPGs, as genre fiction, we tend to breeze past things which would be incredibly powerful if experienced for real. By linking it to something the persona experienced, then bringing that back into the play, it can make it real. It’s worth stressing, this is a key moment to try to use the persona name to make it clear you’re asking for a fictional answer, not a confession of some awful thing in a player’s real life. For example... <Character suffers an injury> GM: As a kid, was your persona ever in hospital? Player: Yeah. She had an undetected appendicitis. She almost died. GM: This hurts worse than that. This is even more true with emotional elements of the game. The Naomi Neo has met Fair Gold for the first time. The GM needs to convey how much they crave it. GM: Has Naomi ever had an unrequited crush? Player: Sure. GM: Tell me about it. Player: Naomi crushed on Gareth for a year. It was awful and sullen. GM: You feel about this coin the way you felt about them.

“Tell me about X thing” “Player tells about X thing” “This is like that” is a very DIE story rhythm. This can also be used to gather information about the present situation. As in, asking the Player about a persona’s background in their real world, and instantly working it into the game. For example… GM: Hey, persona, tell me about your favourite pet. Player: Oh, Floofy. Floofy was the best dog. He had enormous hair! GM: Well, a dog the size of a rhino with hair the size of an elephant has just come out of the undergrowth, yapping excitedly. Or at least, you think it’s excitedly. SESSION TIMING

I say the game tends to work in 2-4 sessions. Players being players, I suspect that will likely be taken as two: one for character generation, and the other for the actual adventure. In practice, there are two main problems in running the adventure all in a single session.

1) each character type gives a bunch of sophisticated toys for players to mess around with. It’s unlikely all players will have used even a fraction of their powers in a single session of adventure. Hell, some of them may have used none of them.

2) You may have generated much more content than you can possibly fit.

If you’re trying to do the whole adventure in a single session, I recommend the following…

Have a toilet break halfway through the time you’ve planned for the game. During this break, take a moment to take stock. How much of the adventure have you got through? How much do the players seem invested in playing? Are you actually going to reach the end of the game at the current rate?

If any of the above suggests that having another session is a good idea, now is the time to float the idea that, rather than trying to get everything into this session, you expand into a third (or more!) session. If people agree, decide a useful point to aim for by the end of a session, and go for that. As in, think where the next big cliffhanger is. A cliffhanger to end the session is always good.

To return to the hypothetical recapitulation of a Tolkien-esque world earlier, the adventure was to go from outside the gates of Mordor, via Shelob’s Lair and then towards Mount Doom. Two hours into the session, the GM realises they’re never going to reach mount doom in the hour that’s remaining. The GM suggests another session, and the players agree. Looking at the notes, the GM thinks it’s likely they can get to Shelob’s lair. The GM decides to end the session at the reveal of Shelob, and paces the adventure to reach there.

(The tricky one is if you have a little more content for a session – like, an hour more than the time you have, but not enough for a full third session. In that case, you choose between cramming it in or generating some more things to do in the next session. If everyone seems excited to do another session and timing is possible, I’d say the extra work for a third session is normally worthwhile.)

If that is undesirable – either due to real-life timing issues or lack of player interest or anything else – you will have to work out how to get to the end. This is likely to involve cutting various threads from the spine of the adventure. Remember: you can always bring the Master to the players for the final encounter.

Players may need a reminder that they are working against a time limit and should engineer their choices appropriately. Before the final encounter with the Master or an hour before the end of the game (whatever comes first) remind them that they’re finishing shortly, and a player may wish to start pushing their character’s narratives. It’s now or never.

RUNNING THE FINAL ENCOUNTER The final encounter is where all this has been leading, and the confrontation with the Master is going to end the game, one way or another. Everyone will have to decide whether to go home or not. To remind you, these are the actual rules... 1. The party can go home at any time

as long as everyone agrees. This is all personas, including the Master.

2. Dead personas (i.e. Fallen) do not get a vote. If the party votes to leave, the Fallen are left behind.

In other words, the final encounter will come from the above. At the simplest, it will be a fight scene. Your heroes gather and fight the Master. The second the Master is defeated, they take the vote and are transported home, leaving the dead Master behind. This is the game's core “if all else fails” story arc.

It can easily be something else. THE RITUAL TO GO HOME If the surviving personas seem to want to mostly leave, ask each individually if they “want to end the game”. Stop the second someone says no. Once all personas (including the GM’s persona) agree, tell them all to close their eyes...and then after a gap, tell them to open them again. They've escaped. Move to the “Leaving the Dungeon” section. However, it’s not likely to be as simple as just walking up to the Master and saying “Hey – wanna blow this joint?” THE MASTER’S ALLIES AND ABILITIES It could just be the Master by themselves, but it's likely that a satisfactory encounter may involve multiple antagonists. The Master’s character gives various abilities to the GM’s persona, with the Cheat Tokens being able to be spent to perform various impossible tasks. This includes magically summoning an ally. As such, they can increase the intensity encounter even mid-flow. Equally, they can be used to perform something extremely miraculous – as in, fulfilling a persona's unlikely wish, prompting them to them to switch sides (effectively giving the Master an ally). Most of all, even if you want the Master to stand alone, a Cheat Token can be used to simply avoid any blow – effectively working to negate the hit. In the case of the last one, be definitely sure to pass the Cheat Token over to the

player. Seeing the Master is spending their resources is key to selling the moment – as well as describing the impossibility of it. If it’s a killing blow, see the killing blow, spend the token, and then describe the injury healing. See “Running the Master” for more. If you're good, you should spend the Cheat Tokens so the Master has none when they die. If you have tokens left, I'd advise the players not seeing they have one. You don't have to spend them, but if you let the Master be defeated when you have one, they'll know you're playing softball. That said, better to fudge than make a game boring. And equally, you can easily manufacture a peril which burns through a Master's Cheat Tokens – especially as the Master will spend them to protect what they really want or desire. The Master is a character and a character doesn’t necessarily make good decisions. If they made good decisions they wouldn’t be a god in a pocket dimension. For example, a Master’s desire is to create a perfect art work. The final confrontation with the party is in his gallery, with his masterpiece in the centre. The party sets it on fire, and the Master immediately spends one of their tokens to return it to normal and stop it from being flammable. At which point the players slash it to pieces, and they spend another one. And so on… WHAT HAS COME BEFORE Before the encounter start, try to fold in elements from earlier in the adventure. If they made allies, have them show up. If they made enemies, have them cause trouble. Make sure the players feel their actions have weight and consequences.

IRONIC PROBLEMS This is the conclusion of the antagonist’s arc. You could be looking for ways to make their deal seem less appealing. If they are a pure villain, you can push this towards complete reversal of their deal. They have clearly got what they want, but at a cost which makes it pointless. This is the “you have eternal life, but as a statue” gambit. Especially if you have to end the game in a rush, something that direct can be useful. Look for the sting in the tail of what the Master wanted. This can be useful in the next category as well. FLIPPING THE ANTAGONIST If what the antagonist wanted is clearly not all they wanted it to be, it may become easier to talk them down or convince them of the wrongness of their position. The players and the antagonist talking it out like grown-ups is completely a justified end of the game. If the bad guy agrees to go home, this is a great conclusion. However... PLAYERS FLIPPING Some of the players may have been tempted to stay at this point. This can, for example, lead to them actively joining the antagonist in a final battle. Or forming their own side, or anything else. Once all the living players agree to stay or go, the game ends. It's worth noting that players can flip back and forth, being tempted and changing their mind. It's also worth noting the antagonist can decide to leave and the players decide to stay, and any combination.

In other words – any or all combinations are good. FALLEN BECOMING LIVING There's a whole section about “Running the Fallen” in the Running The Archetypes section, but the conclusion is a good place for Fallen to become human again, and so be able to go home (or at least get a vote on going home or not). At the least, a Fallen who kills the Master will live again – as the Master is a persona. As the Gamesmaster, you may be looking for a way for Fallen players to become human in the final battle, usually with another player making some manner of sacrifice. As said, more on this in “Running the Fallen”. IMPASSE AND THE END OF THE WORLD It's possible that you have a situation where the players cannot agree whether or not to go home, and there is no easy resolution. Equally, there is the logical question some players will hit upon – why actually make the decision now? Why not stay for another week and then go home? The game is set in a pocket universe. It is not stable. It will shortly cease to be, killing everyone unless a decision can be reached in good time – the dissonance between some people wanting to be there and some people not wanting to be there being the problem. In this final encounter, this should come to a boil. If the conversation is extending, the GM should start showing reality falling apart. Infinite monsters! The sky falling! Whatever!

If they can’t come to a decision one way or another, everyone dies. It’s also worth reiterating that the second they make their decision as a group, whether it's to stay or go, the universe will actually stabilise. That’s the ultimate push to make a call, but you should increase the dissonance in several steps. For example, in the final combat, start one round saying the world is starting to fall apart. Start the next saying that the world is going to end when the round stops. It will likely turn to violence. Players gonna player. Other groups simply won’t – if it's simply “I'm not going to fight my friend” then look for ways to escalate the situation, one way or another. The question of most Western drama is "What is this person's true character?" True character is defined by action – what someone will or won't do. If they don't fight, you essentially end up escalating towards it being a question of someone fighting or dying when the world ends, or compromising. This is interesting. If it's because one of them is a Fallen and they don't want to leave them, you may want to suggest a way to reanimate someone. Start with “Let someone sacrifice themself and let the other character have their life” then go to other methods. See the “Running the Fallen” later for more on this. Or course, you will also be increasing the peril, so it's a question of leaving the Fallen behind or dying with them. You meanie. THAT’S ALL You can go to the next section now.

LEAVING THE DUNGEON And lo, the game ends. The point here is to swiftly wrap to a denouement. Remember all the rules for maintaining atmosphere. Generally speaking, these are the core things which happen upon their return. Any or all can be warped depending on what seems narratively satisfying. Describe them. • They will be back exactly where they

disappeared from. • While minor injuries and scrapes will

be healed, any larger injuries (especially those from a deliberate sacrifice) will remain. For example, if someone cuts their hand off to impress a god, get a new cyber arm or return a Fallen persona to life, they will be missing that appendage.

• Anyone who remained in Die will be missing.

• If you were playing in a public place, no one will have noticed you were gone.

(You may note that one of these rules was not true of the comic of DIE – the characters appeared elsewhere when returning to the real world.) Here's some things which could be included in the denouement if they add to a persona’s arc. • Desiccated corpses or skeletons of

similar detritus of those left behind. • No one else (other than the players)

remembering the people left behind in Die. Interesting elements of their life may be merged with some of the remaining characters existence.

• Reality is changed in a small, but significant way related to a player’s choices.

Make the scene short, dramatic, scary, and then hard cut to the aftermath. Ask them "How has this experience changed how you act in the real world? What do you do differently?" It's likely you'll want to say something in response to this. Work around the players, and let them say their piece, but keep it short. If you have an additional note to add to the player, say it after theirs. It should respond to their choices and help end their character arc. There's talk on what a satisfying arc for a character is elsewhere, but the core is whether or not a character overcame their core drive or submitted to it. It is likely to be ironic in some way. You are essentially looking for a grace note. It's likely one good idea will strike you, in which case run with it – especially in terms of the fate of the Master. To give two examples from playtests, in one game the Master was simply someone killing groups of players at a con to gain eternal life. They returned and his body was desiccated in the circle. This is a simple, gore horror ending. In a later playtest, the Master was an aggrieved writer and peer of several of the players – he'd written one great short story, and then his career flatlined while his friend’s took off. One persona was a young writer, who actually did hero worship this one story... and her career was taking off now. At the end, he is consumed by Die, and they return to the con... and that

evening the young writer wins a Hugo award, for a short story she has no memory of writing, going by the same name as the one by the now-vanished Master. This is a somewhat ornate one. In practice, a simple creepy, moving or atmospheric line adding to the player’s statement is what you want to do. Make their story better, not undercut it. For example… Player: Leaving Susan behind in that weird world has just changed everything for her. She knows she’s got to change her life. She’s going to write the novel. GM: It gets picked up and released. When your first author’s copy arrives, there’s a strange typo in it. You ask after it, and it’s the only one in the whole print-run that’s like it. The printer can’t explain it. The dedication has changed. It reads “I’m so proud of you. Love Susan.” NOT LEAVING THE DUNGEON In playtests, this has proved to be the less likely choice. The story DIE tells about whether or not to come home to the real world is culturally loaded – the Real World is something we must come to terms with, so in fiction the choice of reality over fiction is the norm. Especially in a game where your choice also limits the rest of the group, it becomes a harder thing for a player to do. When designing the dilemma, we have loaded the question towards going home. Players who have their persona choose to stay, despite the choices of the people who want to leave, are – culturally speaking – playing the bad guys. Many will be consciously aware of this, and have stepped into that role

willingly for the sake of improving the game via drama or because loyalty to their character’s arc takes them down this dark path. As such, if they play the baddies, they are aware they will likely lose, and revel in it. The Night King isn’t going to end up on the Iron Throne. There are exceptions to this, of course, and if a player is seemingly emotionally agitated by the way the game is going, it’s worth pausing the game to check in on them and make sure everyone is fine. The section on Bleed in the Advice for Gamesmasters section has more notes on this. You may think stopping will hurt the drama. You will be right. But drama is not worth someone’s emotional happiness. We are here to have a nice time. (There’s also an irony there, isn’t there? If you don’t check in with a distressed person at this point, in a story which likely says you should choose reality above fantasy, you have chosen fantasy above reality. That it’s likely done to a persona who is doing likewise is definitely an irony.) I digress – this is hopefully a fringe case. If they choose to say, ask each player for a brief image of what their life is like in this fantasy world. Then, as above, respond to it in a way that adds depth. If they choose to return to the real world, the formula is if they make it REAL you add an afterthought to make it WEIRD. If they make it WEIRD you add an afternote to make it REAL. If they stay in the fantasy world, it’s different. It’s already likely weird. What you should be looking for is whether they make it SAD or not.

If someone does an upbeat view of their fantasy life, with no showing of a downside, it’s likely you will add a SAD beat at least in a more serious game. There are two tactics – a short sentence which undercuts the triumph in the fantasy life or a sentence of something that’s happening in the real world, made worse by their absence. “What do your friends miss about you in real life?” Is always a good question. For example, for one to add an element of poignancy… Player: I end up becoming the head of the King’s Cavalry, bringing justice to all the lands of Anathon! Imagine me, riding ever onwards, to the horizon at the head of a column of soldiers. GM: We cut back to Earth, years later. Your mother is in your room, finally tidying away the toy soldiers from the shelf in your childhood bedroom. She does it in a business-like fashion. Heroic, in its own way. THE FALLEN PERSONAS LEFT BEHIND Asking the player “how does your absence impact the world?” Is a good way to get closure. Add a SAD or WEIRD response to them. Players may want to have an ironic scene of their Fallen in the world. Who am I to say no?

AND THEN… No matter what you do, when everyone finishes, applaud everyone and thank them for playing. They were great. You should also practise a little aftercare and decompression. Aftercare is a phrase lifted from the S&M community, and is about leaving room to emotionally support people and let them recover. I would advise for some time after a game to just unpack with one another, talk about what got to them and their feelings about what occurred. This is another good reason to plan so your session does not run up to the time someone has to run for a train. If someone has already left, check in on them as soon as possible. Once you’ve all done that, sweep up as many of the character sheets as you can and (if you have one) slide them into the Box of Crap, especially if they died. Some players may want to keep them, and you can let them, but definitely appear interested in keeping them, especially if they died. If ask, just smile. No reason. No reason at all.

WHAT THE RULES ARE FOR These rules are the procedural rules. They are intended to simulate the fantasy universe the story is happening in. It is designed to be light and based on judgement calls, while having a pretence of simulating an objective universe. Generally speaking...

1. Anything reasonable to happen should just happen. If there's no chance of it not happening, it happens. This is the majority of things. For example, a character walks across the room. No dice roll required.

2. The same goes for when the players are bringing their characters' skills to bear in trying to achieve a goal and there is a no real question whether they'll succeed or not. For example, playing a roguish thief, they try to pick a fairly normal lock. As there’s no time pressure, this seems entirely within their abilities. They pick the lock.

Conversely, trying to pick a lock in the middle of a melee sounds like the sort of thing that a dice roll makes sense for.

3. Try and be consistent in the application of the rules. If you've chosen that a thing should be a dice roll in one situation, an identical situation should also require a dice roll. Of course, there's a lot of leeway in terms of "identical". For example, earlier in the adventure a Wisdom roll was required to find the will to attack a ten-mouthed Katanga beast. The next time someone tries to do it, they should do the same. Unless – for example – the GM rules it only happens the first time any individual attacks a ten-mouthed Katanga beast.

We go into detail in the following section, and talk around uses of the rules, but you can find a stripped-down version of the rules on the Cheat Sheets in the handouts.

THE CORE MECHANIC

THE CORE MECHANIC IN A PARAGRAPH The Master sets a difficulty for whatever a character is trying to do. The person controlling the character assembles a number of six-sided dice equal to the relevant statistic. They roll that dice pool. Any 4+ counts as a success. If you match or exceed the difficulty in successes, the character pulls it off. There’s a bunch of minor things on top of that, in terms of adding more dice for other reasons and interpreting the results, but that’s the core. THE CORE MECHANIC IN MORE THAN A PARAGRAPH All characters inside the fantasy world have six statistics. These are... Strength: how strong you are! How good you are at hitting things! General melee stuff! Dexterity: how nimble and dextrous you are! How good you are at shooting things! Sneaking! The occasional melee weapon like a rapier! Constitution: how healthy you are! Do you get a cold? Do you bleed out on the floor after getting stabbed by someone with the aforementioned rapier? Intelligence: how much stuff you know! Fancy book learnings! Most wizard-type magic! Wisdom: how much you understand stuff and how much emotional control you have for those sensations! Most priest type magic! Charisma: your ability to persuade GM-controlled characters into doing stuff! Getting a discount while shopping! Soft human skills!

It’s worth noting these are the six Dungeons & Dragons statistics, generally used for the same purpose. In a real way, the one which differs most is Wisdom, which also defines your Willpower (which is used to determine a character’s capacity to resist emotion control). Each statistic is represented by a number, representing how good (or terrible) they are: 0 – Incapable 1 – Terrible 2 – Average 3 – Elite 4 – Heroic 5 – Ludicrously Heroic 6 – Seriously, this is getting stupid now 7 – Gandalf riding a Balrog playing Guitar Hero solos on Expert with his eyes closed To stress, everyone you have ever met in your life has a 2 in all their stats. If you’ve met an Olympian, they may have a 3. DIE’s heroes are much better than the greatest people on Earth. This is how you work out whether any character (whether controlled by a player or the GM) succeeds or fails.

1. Decide what the character is trying to do. For example, if presented with a closed heavy gate of the portcullis style, you may decide to try and lift it to open it.

2. The GM assigns a numeric challenge difficulty to the task. Difficultly 1 is the standard. Difficulty 2 is something which is unlikely for a normal human.

Difficulty 3 is literally impossible for a normal human without special training, and even then it’s extremely unlikely. Higher difficulties are even harder. For example, this gate is ludicrously heavy. Normal people would find lifting it extremely difficult. In which case, it's given a difficulty of 2.

3. Identify which statistic is relevant to a task. For example, if a gate needs to be lifted, it's likely Strength is the relevant stat.

4. Collect the number of six-sided dice equal to the relevant statistic. This is the dice pool. Unless the game explicitly says otherwise, if it says add a dice, it means add a six-sided dice. For example, if you have a Strength of 4, you would collect four dice.

5. Decide if there’s anything which makes the task easier. If so, add advantages. For every advantage, add a dice. For example, if you were a trained weight-lifter, you may add a dice.

6. Decide if there’s anything which makes the task harder. If so, add disadvantages. For every two disadvantages, increase the difficulty by 1. If there’s an odd number of disadvantages, add The Bad Dice to the dice pool. For example. if you were heavily injured, the difficulty may be increased by 1.

7. Roll the dice. Ideally, on a flat surface. If you can roll dice on a vertical surface, YouTube yourself doing this immediately, people will be impressed.

8. Any dice which rolls 4 or higher than counts as a success. A roll of 6 (or higher) counts as a success, and triggers any relevant Special ability the

character possesses. If the Bad Dice is included and rolls 4+, then remove one success.

9. Compare the number of successes rolled to the difficulty the GM set. If the number is equal to or higher than the difficulty, they succeed. For example, the player rolled three successes, and the difficulty was 2. They lift the heavy metal gate. Gate defeated!

That's the core mechanic. There's a few complications and ways to interpret it for storytelling, but it's all built on top of that sequence. Gather dice. Roll dice. Count successes. Compare to the difficulty of the challenge. If you match or beat it, you're sorted. Almost everything in the game is based on the above. If in doubt, you can stick to it and get the game ambling along well enough. THE PLAYERS’ CLASS DICE Each of the players has a special dice of their own. Generally speaking, each class’s character sheet will say when you get to add it to the dice pool. Unless the rules state otherwise, it is read like a normal dice. As in, anything 4 or higher is a success and anything 6 or higher is a Special. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

You may note steps 5 and 6 of the core mechanic mentioned these. Advantages and Disadvantages are triggers when there's other factors beyond the basic difficulty of a task or a character's statistics at play. They presently share a name with “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” in Dungeons & Dragons, but aren’t

mechanically similar. I mention this, in case you’re confused, but I figured they’re best to stick with as any alternative I thought of was either obtuse, gimmicky, made me shudder to say or all three. For each present factor in the situation which makes a task easier, add an advantage. For each present factor in the situation makes a task harder, add a disadvantage. Advantages are cumulative. As are disadvantages. Neither cancels each other out. For every advantage you add a dice to the dice pool. For every two disadvantages you add one to the difficulty. If there is a spare disadvantage left over, add THE BAD DICE to the dice pool. If THE BAD DICE rolls 4+ it removes one success from the dice pool. THE BAD DICE is a D6. THE BAD DICE should be obviously identifiable – you may place it on a podium in the middle of the table or in the area on the rules Cheat Sheet from the handouts. At the start of the sessions the players may wish to discuss which of the dice is THE BAD DICE. Dice which rolled particularly poorly in a previous session are prime candidates for being punished by taking on the shameful mantle of THE BAD DICE. Never use multiple THE BAD DICE, as otherwise the ceremonial scapegoating of the dice will prove ineffective. We must train the dice to be good dice. We must believe all dice can be saved.

Kate The Gatelifter approaches an even heavier gate. The GM ascertains it has a difficulty of 3, and that Kate should use her Strength, which is four. However, Kate has a Strength spell cast upon her (which gives an advantage to strength challenges) and she's a trained weightlifter (which gives an advantage to any test to see if she can lift something). Unfortunately, she's also drunk, which gives her a disadvantage on all physical tasks. Her final dice pool is four dice for her Strength, two dice for the two advantages and THE BAD DICE for her single disadvantage. She rolls 4, 5, 3, 1, 4 and 4. THE BAD DICE is a 5. She has three successes (actually four, but with one removed as THE BAD DICE was also 4+). She successfully lifts the gate. Hypothetically, if Kate had a second disadvantage – perhaps from being injured as well as drunk – rather than adding THE BAD DICE to the dice pool, the difficulty would have been increased from 3 to 4. We also may wonder how Kate ended up drunk and hurting herself. Pull it together, Kate. You're on an adventure. It should be noted that many of the rules that follow are actually just codified ways of adding advantages and disadvantages to a specific situation. A GM should consider them as examples of things which a GM may decide cause an advantage or disadvantage. CRITICAL FAILURES

If the dice pool results in no successes and at least one dice is a 1 then things go particularly badly. The GM should

ascertain what seems suitable, as derived from the fiction. For example, Gatelifter Kate is over-excited by her successful gate lifting. She's trying it again. This time she rolls a 3, 2, 2 and 1. Something has gone terribly wrong. The GM decides that she's sprained her back, and will cause a disadvantage to any tasks that involve her back. It is important to relate the level of punishment to the exact nature and difficulty of the task. For example, Chatty Cecilia is trying to talk a shopkeeper into selling stuff cheaply. She rolls a critical failure. The GM says that Cecilia explodes. The player asks whether that seems fair. The GM realises they've got all excited, so instead says that Cecilia has offended the shopkeeper, and now she has a disadvantage on all social interactions with people from the village. For most non-perilous feats, an ongoing disadvantage resulting from a critical failure is a good guideline. For perilous feats, an ongoing disadvantage and losing a Health (or some other form of physical hurt) is a good guideline. SPECIAL ABILITIES

In addition to counting as a normal success, each 6 or higher on a dice roll can be used to activate a relevant Special ability. Special abilities are signified on character sheets with the word Special with the text of the special’s effects after it. For example… Special: Increase Guard by one. So any six in the pool could be used to increase a character’s Guard by one. As

per the usual guard rules, it couldn’t increase beyond its maximum. It’s essentially a way to recover Guard in combat, and you’ll find it primarily attached to defensive weapons. A special ability can only be activated if the source of the special ability is relevant to the challenge. Nimble Steve is trained with his rapier, which gives him the Special “Increase Guard By 1.” In combat he rolls a 6, and he activates the ability to increase his Guard. Later, Nimble Steve is in a drinking contest, and rolls a 6. He cannot activate the special ability as his fencing skills are irrelevant when downing hardcore spirits. SKILLED OR UNSKILLED? In DIE all tasks are related to one of the statistics. If we say that astrophysics is based on Intelligence, all players – no matter what their training – would have to roll their intelligence to succeed in any time-based astrophysics dilemma which requires a roll. This would mean a fantasy cleric with intelligence 4 would have the same chance of succeeding as an astrophysics professor with intelligence 4. This may seem silly. DIE’s skill system works on an ad hoc basis. If it seems likely a character has no training in a task, the GM should add disadvantages to the task. There are some character classes which go the other way, explicitly adding advantages when performing certain sorts of tasks. You can consider this being “expert” in a subject. Conceptually speaking, if one player in the group is clearly defined as a thief, it is fair to assume that other characters who have not explicitly defined

themselves as thieves would get disadvantages when performing thief-related tasks. As in all things DIE, consistency within the game is more important than consistency between games. Ideally, you want all players to feel special, which means their character can do things the other characters can’t. INTERPRETING DICE The core mechanics state that if a player matches or exceeds the difficulty they succeed. That's still true. Don't worry. We're not going to change the rules at this point. However, the number of successes can be a way of ascertaining the degree of success. If a player's roll exceeds the difficulty, the GM can rule that they achieve it with a greater success. This can purely be in a manner of style or result in game advantage or both. Nimble Steve is attempting to join a dance college. The GM sets the difficulty level of 2 to dance to a suitable level. Nimble Steve rolls 5 successes – more than twice what he needed. The GM says the dance was by far the best dance student so far – and he gains an advantage when trying to influence the clearly starstruck dance students. Equally, falling short of the difficulty can be ascertained as a degree of failure. The effect of this depends on the nature of the task. Some tasks could be semi-completed (for example, climbing a wall). Other tasks are either succeed or fail – though a GM should have an eye on trying to “fail forward” leading to a more interesting situation than simply blocking the progress of the adventure.

Nimble Steve is trying to jump a chasm. It's difficulty 4. He rolls 3 successes, and the GM says that he's on the far edge of the cliff, hanging on. Perhaps he can scramble up next turn? If he rolled 1 or 2, perhaps he would have landed halfway up the cliff, hanging onto a vine and now has to try and work out what on earth to do. In short, failing to hit the full total may solve the immediate problem, but create a different problem. For example, Naomi Neo later is trying to hack open a door. It’s a difficulty 2. She rolls a single success. The Master notes the door opens, but a guard is on the other side, attracted to the noise. Naomi is through the door, and now has a different problem to deal with. Equally, if you set high difficulties, be aware that failure will be more common. Consider allowing successes to be cumulative across multiple rounds to match a target. For example, Naomi Neo is a trained hacker, trying to break into a closed system during a combat. The GM sets a difficulty of 4. She only rolls one success. The Master says they’re a quarter into the system. She keeps hacking while her friends protect her. “Nothing changes” is generally speaking an uninteresting result for the roll. In situations of life or death you can use the level of failure to ascertain damage. A useful guideline may be the amount of failure equalling the amount of damage. Slovenly Suzy is having a walk down a corridor in a dungeon when she steps on a trap. A jet of flame shoots down the

corridor. Dodging it is difficulty 3. Slovenly Suzy rolls one success, failing by two. The GM says that the player loses two Health. Ouch. Unless the story has made a situation dangerous, a partial success should be a partial success. Conversely, if danger is set up, the partial success is the amount of danger you avoid. For example, if you are trying to climb up a wall, a partial success would likely be getting halfway up the wall. If you are trying to dodge a flamethrower, how close you get to the difficulty determines how much damage you take. In short: the dice exist to be interpreted in an interesting fashion. More successes equal more cool stuff. The wider the level of failure, the worse things are. However, it should be noted, that truly terrible results are best saved for a genuine critical failure. This is one thing which makes players fear critical failures. GROUP TASKS Sometimes a task is one which an entire group of characters can do simultaneously and all contribute to simultaneously. In this case, set a total difficulty and pool all the characters’ successes. Nimble Steve, Slovenly Suzy and Average Annie are in a tug of war competition against some orcs. The Master says that the orcs will provide a difficulty of four. The players all roll their dice pool, and total their success. If they manage to have four between them, they beat the orcs. Go players! Players are strong like ox.

This method may be used when players are all simultaneously trying to perform a difficult task, to avoid having a scenario where if one fails, they all fail. This is most used when a group is trying to sneak into an area. This simulates the best character helping out the least capable characters. Nimble Steve, Slovenly Suzy and Average Annie are running from a cohort of orcs. They reach a cliff face. The GM ascertains to climb it is difficulty 2. Nimble Steve rolls 4 successes. Suzy and Annie roll 1 success each. The GM says Nimble Steve's player reaches the top at double-quick speed – and can throw down a rope to assist the other players get up in time. As the group would have required 6 successes in total, this seems fair to the GM. Of course, in some cases the character may not wish to actually help out their fellow characters. The GM could have given Steve options, saying that he could instead start to bombard the orcs with rocks. Nimble Steve considers the options, and suggests perhaps he can just run and leave his friends? The GM says yes. Slovenly Suzy and Average Annie, halfway up a wall, being bombarded by orc javelins, are giving Nimble Steve serious side-eye. ASSISTING ON CHALLENGES

Rather than setting a large difficulty to the group, sometimes a task doesn’t work like that. It’s one person really doing it, and others just helping out. For example, only one person can interrogate a target or pick a lock… but sometimes they can help advice or give backup.

Select one character – advisably the one with the best dice pool – and add one dice for every individual with skills assisting. Gatelifter Kate has recovered from her sprained back, and come back to have another go at that gate and found it’s been replaced by a door. She's brought two friends with her – Brawny Belinda and Hefty Herman. While she only has a Dexterity of 2, her friends oddly know a bit about lock picking. Kate has a go at picking the lock while her two friends give advice. Gatelifter Kate rolls four dice – the two of her dice pool, and two extra dice for the two characters giving her help. The most common use of this rule is for groups of GM-controlled characters assisting each other in combat. Rather than rolling individually for each creature, roll once and add one dice for everyone piling onto the individual hero. Gatelifter Kate has opened the gate. Behind it is an army of orcs. The front row rush her, and Kate finds herself attacked by three orcs. All the orcs have a Strength of 2, so a dice pool of 2. As they're all attacking the same target, rather than rolling individually they roll a single dice pool of 4. (Two based on their Strength, and an extra two for the two assisting orcs.) You may note that this is just a specific example of adding advantages to a roll, as described earlier. It's a preferable way of handling a situation to just rolling a lot. In a combat situation it is most likely to be used by characters of an identical type attacking simultaneously. However a character may delay their action to assist another character’s.

Yes, we’ve just mentioned combat. Don’t worry. We get to it soon. SETTING DIFFICULTIES

The key takeaway: look at the situation. Try to be consistent. Don’t stress too much.

A dice pool system has many strengths, but its main weakness is that it’s hard to predict the exact odds of someone succeeding or failing rather than a straight D20 or percentage-based system. Here are some useful things to consider when setting difficulty.

Key point – as long as the game is consistent, anything is fine. Consistency (see “Generating Rules” later) is what’s important in DIE. If one game has climbing a wall as 3 difficulty and another has it with 1 difficulty, who cares? Maybe walls are much harder to climb in this dimension. All DIE games literally happen in their own dimension, after all.

However, it’s worth noting difficulty increases quickly in DIE’s system.

• A difficulty of 1 is what an average

person will pull off 75% of the time. • A difficulty of 1 with a bad dice (i.e.

one disadvantage) is what an average person will pull off 50% of the time.

• A difficulty of 2 is something that an average person will pull off 25% of the time.

It’s worth noting that all our heroes have a minimum of “average person” in all their stats. With their higher stats, they will be pulling off things which normal people simply can’t. A Dexterity 4 character can with no training do acrobatics like the Gold Medal winning

Olympian (Dexterity 3 plus advantage for training, so a dice pool of four).

For some math for higher dice pools’ chances…

For a three-dice pool, a character will roll…

Zero successes: 12.50% At least 1 success: 87.5% At least 2 successes: 50% 3 successes: 12.5%

For a four-dice pool, a character will roll…

Zero successes: 6.25% At least 1 success: 93.75% At least 2 successes: 68.75% At least 3 successes: 31.25% 4 successes: 6.25%

That should be enough to let you know the chances.

In terms of actually setting the level, here’s two basic philosophies to guide you…

1) One is based on treating the

world as a simulation and just following from the character’s abilities.

2) The other is fiat.

(There’s a third about examining the analogous approach, but that’s so complicated and perverse, I don’t even want to suggest it, in case you actually go and do it.)

For an objective approach, to charm a guard to let you past them you need to beat their Wisdom stat as a difficulty. So, for an average guard, difficulty 2. However, equally, you may add

disadvantages depending on the situation – for example, if the guard is petrified of being executed by their boss, you can add a disadvantage. For fiat it’s just sticking to a rule of thumb. Something that most folks could probably do? 1. If it’s impressive? 2. If it’s Olympian? 3. If it’s cinematic? 4. So for a Guard, I’d likely set a difficulty of 2. It’s not something everyone does. If the guard doesn’t really care that much, I’d set difficulty 1.

If you’re leaning towards setting high difficulties, as we said earlier, definitely be aware of the interpreting dice and failing forwards. If you fail to charm the guard completely, the successes should still mean something. If you nearly get it, they’ll do it for a bribe or a favour. If you get a success, maybe you don’t get past, but they definitely don’t alert anyone you were here.

This is good practise anyway, but especially in these cases.

It’s also worth noting the other thing to modify difficulty is the approach the character is using to do it – as DIE’s system is based almost completely on your statistics, it will mean that someone trying to cast some magical ability (likely rolling on their Wisdom to hit a difficulty level) and someone trying to charm someone (likely rolling on their Charisma) could have the same difficulty. You may want to change the difficulty level depending on the tactic.

For example, a hero trying to climb a rock face may find it a difficulty 3 Strength or Dexterity test – but a Neo with a teleport ability may simply teleport up there, with no test required.

As I said. Look at the situation. Try to be consistent. Don’t stress too much.

COMBAT Combat has the most extensive set of rules, but they're all an extrapolation of the core principles above. When the GM ascertains that Combat has begun, we generate Guard, ascertain Initiative order and then proceed through a series of combat rounds until combat ends. 1) Generate Guard for all characters. 2) Determine Initiative Order. 3) Everyone takes an action in initiative

order. 4) Repeat step 3 until the combat is

over. GUARD AND HEALTH These are what decide whether you are alive or dead. • Guard represents your ability to

generally dodge, stay out of trouble and your “Guard”.

• Health is your ability to actually stay on your feet if you’re hit.

A player starts the game with Health equal to their Constitution. If their Constitution increases at any point in the game, their health increases. If it decreases, it does likewise. Unless otherwise stated, a character cannot have either Guard or Health higher than their Dexterity or Constitution respectively. At the start of a normal combat, a character sets their Guard to equal their ability. Guard replenishes quickly, while Health requires active healing.

If a combat starts without warning, it's possible the GM may rule a character starts with less or even no Guard. Nimble Steve is on guard, hand on sword when the orcs rush the camp. Slovenly Suzy is having a nap. She starts awake to find the party attacked by orcs. Nimble Steve has Dexterity 4, so has a Guard of 4. Suzy has a Dexterity of 2, so would normally have 2 Guard, but the GM notes that as she's lying on the floor, without a weapon and rubbing sleep from her eyes, she's entirely flat-footed and has zero Guard. In borderline cases, you may let the players roll their Dexterity as a dice pool and any successes become their Guard. In the above situation, the GM decides to be kind, and says that as she’s surprised, Slovenly Suzy should roll her Dexterity pool to see how quickly she’s managed to wake up. She rolls two dice (as her Dexterity is 2) and rolls a 3 and a 2. With no successes, she’s still got a Guard of zero. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re kind. Let’s put this in bold: Health does not regenerate by itself. Guard primarily regenerates whenever the character gets a chance to take a break between fights. There are ways for Guard to be generated during a combat, either by taking an action to recover your footing or a character’s Special abilities. When a character has no Health left, they fall unconscious and are at risk of death. (See later.)

INITIATIVE This determines turn order for all characters. Each character rolls their Dexterity and states their number of successes. The GM rolls for each group of combatants they control, noting their number of successes. All the combatants of the same sort act at the same time. The results are then arranged in order, from most successes to least successes. This is the initiative order. At the moment, there are no Specials which effect the initiative roll. Initiative Tiebreakers If a player’s and a GM-controlled character’s number of successes are equal, the player character acts first in the order. If players roll identically and have equal Dexterity, the order is ascertained in clockwise order from the GM. For ties of the GM-controlled characters, the GM decides which order GM-controlled characters act in. Nimble Steve, Slovenly Suzy and Average Annie are fighting some orcs and their boss, Orc-O the Orcward. The players roll their Dexterity and the GM rolls for the orcs. Steve gets 5 successes, Suzy gets 1, Annie gets 3, Orc-O gets 2 and the orcs (rolling as a group) get zero. The initiative order is Steve, Annie, Orc-O, Suzy and finally the orcs. THE COMBAT ROUND In initiative order, each player’s character declares what they’re doing and then does it.

If a player’s character is attacking another player’s character, it happens in this turn order. If a character wishes to defer their action, they can reserve their chance to act until later in the round, interjecting between any two combatants. They can declare an action triggered by an event occurring, if they wish (for example, by saying they will attack anyone who comes through the door with their axe. The moment a character passes through the door, they would be attacked.) A combat round simulates a period of roughly five to ten seconds in the combat. You can attempt any task you could achieve in that period of time. The key word is “roughly.” We encourage a cinematic understanding of five to ten seconds. It is reasonable to move a little and perform an action, such as charging and attacking someone or diving through a door and slamming it behind you. If the GM feels a player is trying to perform too much in a round, the disadvantages rules are there, waving at you, trying to garner your attention. For example, Nimble Steve wants to rush over, grab a sword off the floor and attack an orc with it. As this is going to involve some fumbling to grab the weapon, the Master says that the task has a disadvantage. You can move a short distance as part of any action which doesn’t require intense singular concentration. If you just move and nothing else, you can move further – about twice as far, which we call medium distance.

You may note all these are relative systems. Ranges are melee (as in, directly by each other), near (a little way away – near enough you can get to them quickly, far away enough that you can’t reach out and just attack them), medium (to get to each other, you’d have to leg it) and far (you’d have to leg it for multiple rounds to get to them). In terms of getting to people, I use the following… Melee: You’re by each other so can attack in melee. Close: You can move and attack in the same round. Medium: You can move close enough to attack next round. Far: You’ll have to spend at least one turn to move to Medium. If you want to use a map or counters or similar to explain space, you should feel free. If you’re an experienced player, you likely have preferences. If you’re an inexperienced player, you may have a preference too. Preferences are great. Have fun. ATTACKING

Attacks are performed by the core mechanic. A dice pool is assembled depending on the character's relevant abilities and rolled against a challenge difficulty. Generally speaking, a melee attack normally rolls a dice pool based on a character's Strength. A ranged attack normally rolls a dice pool based on a character's Dexterity. The standard challenge difficulty is the target character's defence. Violent Trevor attacks an orc with his fancy sword. His Strength is 4, so he

rolls four dice. The orc defence is 2, meaning the challenge is 2. After a character rolls their dice pool for an attack, the character causes one hit for matching the difficulty level and an extra hit for every extra success above it. Violent Trevor rolls four successes. He causes one hit for matching the orc’s defence of 2, and two more hits for the extra successes. DAMAGE Each hit removes one Guard or Health. Unless otherwise stated, Guard is removed before health. The orc has 2 Guard, and 2 Health. Violent Trevor caused three hits. The orc loses both its Guard and one Health. If a hit removes a Health we call it a Wound. This is normally used for special abilities which can only activate if a hit is a Wound. For example, a Ghoul has a paralyse Special ability if it wounds a player. It causes two hits a character with 2 Guard and 2 Health. The character loses 2 Guard, but is not paralysed, as they did not lose a Health (i.e. they were not wounded.) PAIN (AKA THAT REALLY HURTS!) A character can lose Guard with no penalty. However, if a character's Health is less than its maximum, a character may well suffer a disadvantage to their dice pools due to being in enormous pain.

If a character is at less than their maximum Health...

• While they have 2 Health remaining, they suffer a disadvantage on all challenges.

• While they have 1 Health remaining, they suffer two disadvantages on all challenges.

Hard Harris has 4 Constitution, meaning they start with 4 Health. They get hit through the chest with a spear, losing a Health. They have 3 health. As 3 Health is more than 2 Health, they have no disadvantages from pain. Everything is fine! They get hit through the chest with a spear again. They now have 2 Health, so suffer a disadvantage. They're hit through the chest again, going to 1 Health. Now they suffer two disadvantages. Hard Harris probably should do something about being hit through the chest with a spear. To stress the implications of the above, characters with a low Constitution may skip one or both stages of the above effects. Weedy Waldorf has 2 Constitution, so 2 Health. 2 Health is his maximum, so he does not suffer a disadvantage for being at 2 Health. They are hit, losing a Health. As they have 1 Health, they suffer two disadvantages. Weedy Waldord never suffers one disadvantage for being in pain. INJURIES Actual Injuries are primarily a narrative-based part of the game, based on the fiction rather than the process of losing Health. For example, as part of the narrative, a player has a hand cut off. They may lose

Health, but they will also now be unable to do anything which required that hand. It is possible that losing a Health in combat will also be accompanied by an injury if the narrative demands it. For example, putting your hand beneath an executioner’s blade and letting them hit you is a pretty good justification for losing the Health from the attack AND your hand. It’s worth noting that recovering Health does not necessarily mean that the effects of your injury are removed. It depends on the narrative reason of the healing. For example, setting a broken arm by medical means would recover the Health, but keep the injury disadvantage. A Godbinder’s miracle to heal them? Well, depends on the god, right? Always ask what is sensible in the narrative. INCAPACITATION AND DEATH This is a simple but also brutally deadly system. It’s been designed to support the one-off scenario this Beta is designed for. If you’re looking at a game longer than that, this is likely something you may wish to tweak. The Arcana has an alternate, more complicated (and forgiving) system. It is likely that if you have GMed more forgiving modern games, you will be twitchy about this. There’s more in the actual scenario about how death impacts the game. These are just the pure mechanics. Trust me. Anyway… If a character ever reaches zero Health, they fall unconscious and will die shortly after the end of the combat

unless they are healed by another character taking an action. If a character would ever have negative Health, they die instantly. The more negative Health a player would have, the messier the player’s death will likely be. Ouch. It's worth stressing that the general principle of “If something is reasonable, it should just happen” remains. For example, if a character is unchivalrous enough to slit someone's throat, you will probably skip the dice rolling and just kill the victim. Shooting at someone from across the room may require a hit roll to deliver hits – though normally with advantages due to the immobility of their foe. In this, and all things, the GM should ascertain whether they think something is reasonable or not, and once they have decided it’s reasonable, it remains reasonable (and repeatable) for the whole game. RECOVERING GUARD DURING COMBAT

As Guard represents how well a character is defending themselves, it's possible for a character to take a moment to recover their footing, concentrating on getting their balance back and ensuring they're not about to be hit by a huge troll's hammer or similar. To recover Guard, roll a Dexterity dice pool. The standard challenge difficulty would be 1, but it's possible that a GM may set it higher in situations where it's hard to recover your defences. If you match the challenge difficulty, and for each success above it, the character regains one Guard, up to their maximum.

Nimble Steve had 1 Guard left. He elects to recover his Guard. As there's nothing unusual about the combat, the GM keeps the difficulty at 1. As he has 4 Dexterity, he rolls four dice. He rolls incredibly well 6, 4, 4 and 5. He has four successes. He matches the difficulty level and with three excess dice. He would be able to increase his Guard by 4, but as his maximum Guard is 4, the fourth success is lost. He now has four Guard. It's suggested that a character (like in most other actions) would be able to move about as much as they would when attacking as when recovering Guard. Frankly, backing away while trying to avoid being hurt any more is what you probably should do if you're in a fight and want to recover your guard. DAMAGE OUTSIDE COMBAT

The above rules are used to manage damage in all situations in the game, whether in combat or not. The number of successes is certainly a useful guideline for the amount of damage a player could receive from a hazardous situation. Normally Guard should not be used outside of a combat situation, but it is possible the GM see rare exceptions. It should be noted that things which may seem to be an exception at first glance are actually not. For example, Nimble Steve is walking down a corridor, alert for traps. He sets one off, and a spear hurtles at him. The GM makes him roll a Dexterity-based challenge with difficulty 4 to get out the way. Steve rolls three successes, and the GM says that as he failed by 1, Steve loses on Health. Steve, clearly being fond of Health, suggests that as he was alert for danger, he should have

generated Guard and lost that instead. The GM notes that his diving out of the way had already been simulated when he rolled his Dexterity dice pool. Nimble Steve agrees, and then begs for forgiveness for being an over-anal rules lawyer. The GM comforts Nimble Steve, but tells him not to lay it on too thick. It should be noted that this could be true in combat as well, with hits circumventing Guard. This would be a judgement call of the GM, or based upon the nature of the Special powers. Dragon’s Breath that fills an empty room entirely is not something that may be sensibly parried. It’s rare, but worth mentioning. In most cases, heroes diving behind pillars or crouching behind their shields as dragonfire assaults them is what we’re all about, daddio. COMBAT ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES We could add a list of situations which add advantages or disadvantages, but it comes down to “Does something that isn't already included in the challenge rating or dice pool make a result less likely? Add a disadvantage. If something makes it easier? Add an advantage.” For example, for ranged combat: if you're at a close range? That seems normal. No changes. A bit further away at medium range? A disadvantage. A long way? Two disadvantages. Someone's concealed by a bush? A disadvantage. A brick wall? Probably two disadvantages. Someone is in the middle of a frenetic melee? A disadvantage – and expect to hit someone you weren't aiming at if you roll a critical failure.

You may wish to include such thinking on close combat. If you're in a narrow corridor, it's not as easy to swing a battleaxe. A disadvantage would make sense. Conversely, if you’re armed with a spear, you would suffer no problem – in fact, anyone attacking you who didn’t also have a long weapon may suffer a disadvantage. It’s worth noting, the more a Master uses these kinds of options, the more the game will focus around tactical manoeuvring as you are rewarding this kind of behaviour. This may not be the behaviour you wish to encourage.

WEAPONS (AND OTHER FORMS OF HURTAGE) You may note that only character abilities influence the amount of damage in the above set of rules. This is because weapons often have their own special rules, altering the amount of damage they give in certain situations, adding specific advantages or disadvantages or even giving access to special abilities. A selection of weapons can be found in the character sheets. It should be noted the GM shouldn't feel pressured to use these weapon abilities on GM characters – the players are especially trained heroes with fancy weapons. Sticking to the basic combat rules for all characters will gain advantage of speed, and you can still use advantages or disadvantages on them, as the narrative demands. Equally, monsters’ special abilities essentially act like weapon abilities. For example, the players are attacking a mob of orcs armed with spears, at the end of the corridor. The GM isn't using any rules for monster weapons, but

spears are longer than any of the players’ weapons. It'll be easier for them to hit the players and harder for the players to hit them... at least until they can get past the spearheads. The GM decides the players receives a disadvantage on their attacks. One player is dumb enough to try this with a dagger. You may be tempted to throw even more disadvantages at their attacks. However, the player is a Neo with a personal short-range teleporter? Ah! The Neo blips close enough to attack. Hell, the spear-wielder is more likely to get a couple of disadvantages on their attack, now they have a neo in their face. The spear-wielder is facing the other way and the players creep up behind them? Also no problem. In short, advantages and disadvantages are applied according to a reading of the tactical and narrative situation. The same process applies to other things used for hurting, such as magical spells. A jet of flame sets someone on fire? A couple of disadvantages on all rolls until the fire's extinguished sounds about right. It's worth noting that this process is exactly how the effects of the weapons for the heroes were generated by your friend, the game designer. GENERATING RULES You will have noticed that the last two sections amount to “make up something reasonable then keep it consistent”. DIE's core mechanic is designed to be simple and flexible enough to operate like this.

Many modern games take this approach to the narrative side of a scenario. Rather than planning everything in detail, a GM may have some basic characters available and a concept and then make everything else up, making a note to remind yourself of it. We do a lot of this too. However, DIE also uses this with the rules. Making a ruling for the situation occurs first, and then sticking to it from then on avoids the need to memorise rules that you don't want to. Your game can be as simple or complicated as you wish. Equally, rules described above aren't actually in the game until they appear in play. You should feel free to hack anything as you run the game. When a rule you've introduced proves sub-optimum you have various options. 1) Just roll with it and extrapolate what

happens in a world where something deeply counterintuitive is in play. If your rules have made daggers the best weapon, imagine how that would change society.

2) Change the rule via a Master or Grandmaster. See the section later – this means that someone in the world has literally changed it. This can very much be the start of a quest.

As this playtest set of DIE rules is mainly for one scenario, we'd say ignoring it is also an entirely viable option. If you run multiple one-off DIE games there's no need to keep the rules identical in each. Each is its own world, and the Masters do keep on meddling.

GM CHARACTER PROFILES

MONSTERS, MATES AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN The process of creating monsters specifically for DIE was described in the Preparing the Second Session section earlier. Below is the pure stats stuff. To repeat the key thing from earlier… 1) Choose a basic profile. Consider

tweaking it. 2) Consider some Special abilities. 3) Consider other abilities. That’s it. 1) BASIC PROFILES Choose one of these as your core, or tweak appropriately. Note how few stats you need to have a workable DIE character. To stress – any stat not listed here is 2. CANNON FODDER MONSTER Stats: Dexterity 0 Defence: 1 This is useful for the mobs of creatures. With a Dexterity of 0, it means it will have a Guard of zero. This means it can only lose Health. With a defence of 1, it means two successes will take every individual down. Players will be able to mow through these, and they are likely only able to threaten the players if you use a lot of them together. Use as a basis for folks like: orcs, goblins, those friendly villagers who want to help but really aren’t up to the challenge.

NORMAL Stats: All 2 Defence: 1 Anyone you meet who is anything at all like a normal human being at the base, should have this profile. You’ll note it means that all their stats are 2. That means they’ll have 2 Health and 2 Guard. Use as a basis for folks like: the village guards, better classes of orcs, the noble dwarfs who are trying to help, some types of Fallen. ELITE MONSTER Stats: Strength 3 Defence: 1 As all other stats are 2, these will have 2 Health and 2 Guard, making them twice as resilient as the Cannon Fodder Monster. It’s far less likely they’ll be killed with a single blow. They could also recover their Guard. Use as a basis for folks like: the Elite Guards of the bad guy/noble leader, knights, most actual adventurers. HERO FIGHTER Stats: Strength 4, Constitution 3, Dexterity 3 Defence: 2 These are pretty handy. Guard 3, Health 3 and a strong defence. These are basically on par with a party member. Switch Dexterity and Strength for the more light-armour style heroes. Use as a basis for folks like: Conan, Aragorn, Nazgul, Red Sonja, anyone you

would put on the cover of your fantasy novel in skimpy clothing. MONSTER Stats: Strength 4, Constitution 4 Defence: 2 One of these is basically a good fight for a player or even two. They have 4 Health and 2 Guard, but also require 2 successes to hit at all. With a normal Wisdom of 4 these are still very vulnerable to emotional control. Use as a basis for folks like: that huge troll, that guy who’s a head taller than all his soldiers and is wearing the armour covered in spikes, the Mountain. HERO WIZARD Stats: Constitution 3, Wisdom 4, Intelligence 4 Defence: 2 Defence 2 likely simulates magical defences of the wizard in some way. This gives some strong dice pools to use. If you want to have a less top-class wizard or cleric, reduce Wisdom and Intelligence to 3. Use as a basis for folks like: Gandalf, Saruman, the Wicked Witch of the West, Dumbledore, Voldemort, Alan Moore. EPIC MONSTER Stats: Strength 6, Constitution 5, Wisdom 3, Intelligence 3 Defence: 3 A big ol’ monster with a big ol’ brain. This creature will have 5 Health, plus a Guard of 2. It requires 7 hits to kill, and 3 successes to even land a hit. Note the high Wisdom means that it’s very difficult to affect with emotional control. If you want it to be, reduce Wisdom and Intelligence to 2 or even lower.

Use as a basis for folks like: Smaug, balrogs, anything you really didn’t think the players would be foolish enough to actually fight.

2) SPECIAL ABILITIES Choose one (or more) to personalise the monster into something a little mechanically different. It’s worth noting what each special ability operates is not defined – for example “Close Combat Specialist” may be because the monster is trained especially in martial arts – or it could be because its hands are awesome stabbing weapons, or anything else you can imagine. To repeat a core DIE concept – all elements from the fiction should impact the fiction where appropriate. This includes how you choose to define your special abilities. For example, being a Close Combat Specialist because the monster is a trained fighter will not stop someone opening a door. Being a Close Combat Specialist because you have weapons for hands will, because you no longer have the hands to operate doorknobs. Anyway – a short list of options. Define <certain> and <set time> for yourself. (Only one option currently includes these, but more will doubtless follow.) If not assume they are “all” and “until the end of the combat”: Close Combat Specialist: Advantage on melee attack rolls. Ranged Specialist: Advantage on ranged attack rolls. Berserker: Advantage on melee attack rolls, the character has no Guard. Flaming attacks: Adds to the character’s attacks a Special: if this hit

causes a Wound the target is ignited. They suffer one further Wound every round until dead or the fire is extinguished. When ignited a character suffers a Disadvantage on doing almost everything. Freezing Attacks: Adds to the character’s attacks a Special: target is chilled, and now suffers a disadvantage to all actions until their next round. If already chilled and is chilled again the target is now frozen. When Frozen a character is immobilised until either unfrozen or can succeed in a Strength test against a difficulty of the number of times they’ve been frozen. Paralyzing attacks: Adds to the character’s attack a Special: if the hit wounds, the target misses their next action. Death Attack: When the character dies, they get to do a final attack at whoever killed them. Cleaving Destructive Claws: Add to the attack a Special: if this hit causes a Wound, it causes two Wounds. No Emotions: Invulnerable to all forms of emotion manipulation or draining, ether positively or negatively. Iron Will: Willpower for this monster is one higher than usual. Homing: Adds Special: advantage on <certain> attacks until <set time> to all ranged tactics. Secret Stealer: Adds Special: the character must say aloud a secret not known to the majority of the characters present. Vampiric: Adds Special: if a melee hit removes a Health, gain a Health to your maximum. This is a very short list. You should feel free to use any Special on a character sheet as an inspiration, or make your own. In a real way if you think of something neat that happens when they roll a six in a dice pool? Great,

you’ve made a special. Well done, you’re now a game designer. Game designer-high-five! 3) OTHER ABILITIES Should the character be able to do it? They can do it. If you want to give a wizard specific magical spells, choose miracles from the Godbinder’s sheet or use the Arcana’s Spells and Magical Generation System. But there’s a lot you can just make up as you go along… DIE's system is flexible enough for almost all abilities to work on the fly, giving advantages and disadvantages depending on context – for example, if the creature is very small, you may choose a disadvantage for a full-size player hitting it with their large weapon. Worth stressing: as in all the improvisation, once you have mentioned a rule, it continues throughout the game. All small things (or at least, small things of this type) should be a disadvantage to hit from that point on. Making the world seem coherent, even if we're making it up as we go along, is very much the point. More on this in the rules, perhaps obviously. Other major abilities of powerful creatures are chosen according to narrative appropriateness. A dragon can likely breathe fire. A wizard can likely cast spells. A merchant likely can sell you stuff you want. In combat, depending on how powerful they are, choose how often they can do something extreme. For example an ability they can use every round or every second round or every third round or just once a combat. Alternatively, instead of being predictable, you may want it to be random. For example, a

dragon has a 1 in 3 chance of breathing fire every round. The golden rule: if it makes sense that this is something this monster should be able to do, they should be able to do it. If not, they shouldn’t. Dragons may have a high Dexterity, but their hands are too large to pick pockets. Use your noggin’. EXAMPLE MONSTERS NON-SENTIENT GOLEM MONSTER Stats: Strength 4, Constitution 4 Defence: 2 Specials: No Emotions This would be good in a fight, and invulnerable to mind control. This is useful to think about, as a creature with low Wisdom is particularly weak to emotional attacks – which is a Dictator’s ability. Having no emotions means the Dictator can’t just take it out. Iron Will can be used to make it harder, but not impossible, for a dictator. BASIC FALLEN Stats: Dexterity 0 Defence: 1 Specials: Close Combat Specialist (brutal claws)

This would have a dice pool of 3 when attacking, but also go down with only 2 hits, due to having no Guard. In other words, useful cannon-fodder who can still have a chance of hurting players. GIANT FALLEN Stats: Strength 4, Constitution 4 Dexterity 0 Defence: 2 Specials: Close Combat Specialist (brutal claws) The above, on steroids. This would have a 5-dice pool for attacking, and 4 hits to go down – but with defence of 2 making hits much rarer. WIZARD FALLEN Stats: Constitution 2, Wisdom 2, Intelligence 4 Defence: 2 Specials: Flaming attacks, Raise Other Fallen to Life (Difficulty 1). An example of a support character. Sits at the back-firing magic spells (using its Intelligence of 4 for its dice pools). If a Fallen dies, it tries to raise it from the dead.

The core rules of each of the archetypes are included on their sheets in the handout. All require some special assistance from you, and all have advice on how to make their experience feel unique. You should read the sheets before reading any of this. You likely will want to have the sheets printed to read alongside this for reference. But to understand the intent here, most games try (to some degree) to have special abilities varying between classes, but they're mainly built on an underlying structure. There's some of this in DIE, because it's an efficient way to teach a game... but each class also has something that is radically its own. In the same way they each have their own special dice, they have their own mechanic, which is individual. The other players are unlikely to ever understand what the other players are up to entirely, and this is entirely as planned. The aim is to make each players' abilities feel somewhat mysterious to one another... and also make each individual feel precious and special. This is mine, and mine alone. In short: it's really about adding magic to the mechanics. But each is going to put different demands on you as a GM, hence this chapter. The following is a lot of useful stuff, but you will mostly be able to play the game just by reading the character sheets. I’ll be honest with you here: the variety of the players’ characters abilities and your involvement with them is the thing which is the largest cognitive load on the GM. This is one of the main reasons I

recommend starting by playing with a smaller group. The core of What You Do is also included on the GM Cheat Sheet for the classes, which is our attempt to help out. You are strong! You are mighty! You’ll be fine. DISTRIBUTING THE ARCHETYPES

It’s worth noting the game is based upon the GM distributing the classes. If there’s a class you don’t want to run (for any reason), you don’t have to give it to someone. And, as said earlier, you can always check in.

The classes that follow are in a rough level of complexity. Each section also includes further thoughts on who to distribute each class to.

It ends with the Fallen, which is the additional class that may or may not turn up in the game.

FULL VERSUS LIGHT ARCHETYPES

There are two sets of archetype sheets available. The Full includes all the rules and choices for each of the classes. While this edition of DIE isn’t as complicated as many games, it will often generate characters who have more abilities than will be used in a two-session game. This is not necessarily a problem. However, it certainly does take some more time.

If you’re playing in a less experienced group or have less time available (so you don’t want to spend so much time generating characters) you may wish to use the Light characters. Here you use the first sheet of the full archetype, but replace the second sheet with the Light version. This strims away many of the

secondary abilities of each class, and reduces the number of choices. You are left with a purer take on each character, which fulfils the core fantasy the game offers.

The Light characters are a little weaker than the Full versions in terms of power. As such, it’s not advised to mix Light and Full versions.

RUNNING THE FOOL WHO TO GIVE THE FOOL TO? While the core Fool is a playful fighter, it can be customised to any of the three core types of fantasy characters – fighters, thieves and wizards. As such, no matter what sort of things a player would like to get up to, they can do them as a Fool. It’s arguably the easiest class to run, with the least to worry about for a player. Most of their abilities are passive (so working with no active need for the player to do anything) or simple (the Fool’s lucky dice is powerful, but also works in an easily understandable way). If there’s a player who is less comfortable with being here, this is a strong choice. It’s not just a class for beginners. There’s a lot of impish fun to be had with the Fool. They are literal troublemakers. An experienced player can get a lot from the Fool, and play them basically as whatever class they wish. There is one more note – make sure to give it someone who gets the joke and is in on it. THE FOOL’S DICE They can add their D6 to literally any roll where they are acting in a foolish or daring fashion. You get to decide what that actually looks like, though you should be careful to be consistent in your rulings. It's worth noting that the higher the threshold for getting that extra dice, the more the player will be an irritant to the rest of the group (unless their attitude is

similarly devil-may-care). If the player is forced into behaviour that is nearly suicidal to get the bonus, they'll either not do it, or it will frustrate the other players to the point they'll draw weapons on them. This can be dramatic, of course, but something which should be built towards. I’d suggest that, rather than the above, you remove the dice any time the player shows overt concern and care rather than adding the dice if they're particularly careless. Entering battle with a grin is enough to get the dice. It's only holding back and carefully planning a methodical ambush which loses it. It should also be noted that, when the Fool’s dice is in a dice pool, the dice’s Special means that sixes can be used to generate more dice. In raw mechanics, the Fool’s Dice is actually one of the most powerful in the whole game. The If All Else Fails… is the Fool’s most powerful ability. It exists to get the party (or at least the Fool) to luck their way out of trouble. It’s worth noting the ability does not allow the Fool to dictate how they get out, or the situation it gets them in. Dropping them into a perilous (but less perilous) situation is certainly reasonable, though certainly should be less instantly deadly than the place they were in. It’s not an ability which tends to kill the opposition, unless it’s particularly amusing. What happens next is key. As well as the Fool no longer being able to use their luck abilities, the GM having the Fool’s dice is a constant threat. The players should always be aware that you have

the dice. You should play with it, holding it, making them aware you have this token that could just ruin whatever it is they’re doing. As a general rule, the level of disaster you drop on someone should be akin to the level of disaster that passing you the D6 avoided. Equally, the way you use the dice should be worse for the players than any plan which the Fool deliberately sabotages. You likely want to encourage the Fool to act in a foolish way. If the Fool does not respond to your quiet teasing of peril, hitting them with something particularly awful and passing them back the dice will certainly encourage the Fool to try and reclaim the dice in a less awful way next time. It will also encourage the other players to be more accepting of the Fool occasionally blowing things up – they’ve seen the alternative. As such, I would suggest being generous to the Fool when they sabotage a plan to get their dice back. The level of peril a Fool puts the party in to reclaim the dice does not have to be of the same level of the peril you used to get out of it. For example, if while talking to a GM character, a Fool says something that is clearly offensive and blows the attempt to charm them is absolutely the sort of behaviour that could get the D6 back in the Fool’s hand. Ideally, the Fool deliberately messing something up should get a laugh. It’s the character shouting “Hey! I think the Guards didn’t see us” beat and not a “Hey – I’ve just stabbed my friend in the back with my sword” beat. There is one exceptional situation to warn you of. If a player gets their dice back and immediately uses it to get out of the situation they’ve got themselves

into, they’re being an over-sensible rules-lawyer. Whatever the Fool is, it’s the opposite of that. This is called Pushing Your Luck. Immediately feel free to use the D6 to put them into an even worse situation, and tell them that they’re Pushing Their Luck. If they use the D6 to avoid the problem again, even after this warning, let them escape it, and then use the D6 to hit them with something that kills them instantly. They were warned. This can even be an Anvil from the heavens, if you’re feeling like going full Wile-E Coyote. Eventually a gambler pushes it too far, and their karmic debts will catch up with them. In practice, most players realise that this is a bad idea before it happens. If someone asks, “What’s to stop me just using my D6 to get out of trouble?” feel free to just smile and say, “Want to try and find out?” TRICKSTER WIZARD While the other two styles are simple, the Trickster Wizard option lets the player select minor magical spells. The Godbinder sheets includes a big list of pre-generated magic spells. The Arcana includes more, and rules for calculating them. Let them cast anything which is difficulty one that seems reasonable. You don’t need to tell them what they can do – they ask to do something, and you tell them. A player can use Charisma or Intelligence as their dice pool to cast a spell, according to their preference. A Fool using Wisdom seems heretical, right? THE BUZZFEED QUIZ

You may notice the Fool’s sheets include a lot more things which have

absolutely no use. This is because the Fool, more than any class, has less choices to make. As such, they may be left twiddling their fingers while the other players make their choices. As such, their sheet has a bunch of fun busy-work for them to play with. This is thematic: everyone else does homework. The Fool fucks around. Of course, it should be remembered – as all things the players generate, be aware of what is on the sheet. It likely will tell you something about the character, and likely can be worked into an encounter. SAD CLOWNS While many Fools will gleefully blunder their way through the adventure, there is another more serious route. Fools can find themselves starting to imprint upon the world and start to take themselves

and their friends more seriously. This is a great character arc. It also means they lose the vast majority of their abilities. Some players actually love this, especially in the one-off format. If a character goes the serious route, they likely are aware of this. However, it should be noted that this isn’t the necessary end of the route. The Fool gains their dice not if they are light-hearted. They gain their dice if they act light-hearted. A GM character can certainly point this out. An enlightened Fool is put in the position where to save their friends they have to bite back the tears, paint on a smile and dive into the fray. It doesn’t matter if they cry between encounters. In short: “But Doctor,” said the Fool, “I am Pagliacci."

RUNNING THE EMOTION KNIGHT WHO TO GIVE THE EMOTION KNIGHT TO? The emotion is the closest DIE has to a straight Fighter class. It’s a role which is primarily defined inside combat – or at least the threat of starting combat. It can be one of the easiest classes to play – you experience an emotion and then use that emotion to defeat your enemies. As such, if the Fool is taken, it’s a good choice to give to the least experienced player. If you guide them towards an emotion like Rage or Terror that is likely any persona would feel when exploring a bleak fantasy world then you can have a simple, yet powerful, experience. It’s worth noting that you may consider filling in the emotion on the sheet before handing over, if you want to especially guide them. However, it’s not just that. While a Rage Knight will have an experience akin to a classical Barbarian or Berserker, choosing a less immediately obvious emotion will change their behaviour considerably. What’s does a Loathing Knight do, for example? Equally, for a role-player whose persona is clearly driven by their relationship to a single emotion, giving them the Emotion Knight means they are going to explore their relationship to that feeling in depth. THE D8 Other archetypes get to add their dice more often to their dice pools. The Emotion Knight only gets to add the D8 to their dice pool when activating their most powerful ability, otherwise using it as a simple counter, sliding up and down the scale. This means that the process of actively picking up the D8 is

loaded for the Emotion Knight, akin to an elite Samurai finally drawing the sword. Of all the dice in the game, it’s the one which can be treated with most fear and respect. If you act like it’s a big deal the player has picked it up, it will signal to everyone else that Shit Has Just Got Real. It also isn’t a normal attack. CREATIVE VIOLENCE While the Emotion Knight is a combat-leaning character, when a player uses the D8 is equivalent to the other characters’ most powerful abilities – the Neo’s overcharge, the Godbinder’s major miracles, the Fool’s luck and so on. It is about solving intractable narrative-level problems. If you look at the adjectives on the sheet, you will see the scale we’re talking about. A GM should consider scaling encounters for grandeur to give players a chance to use the higher levels of their ability. The terms in the table are deliberately open to interpretation. For example, Roland Rage Knight and friends step out into the light to find the assembled forces of the Dark Lord facing them, stretching towards the horizon. Glenda Godbinder is about to talk to a God to let them escape, but Roland stops them. This is an Army, right? The GM nods. He’s level 3 Rage. He can handle an army… The interpretative aspects are key. The Emotion Knight’s violence can be mystical and even godly. Cut pathways through doors, or – to bastardize

Hendrix – cut down a mountain with the side of the blade. Clean the Augean stables of shit in a blizzard of blows. It’s worth stressing it says “defeat” not “kill” on the sheet. This is an Emotion Knight’s passion solving a single problem. To stress, this ability is almost useless for fighting a standard combat or individual. The adjectives are deliberately higher than that. The ability to defeat an army is great, but if you’re not facing an army, it doesn’t apply. For example, Roland has defeated the army, with its leaders there, bewildered. The party steps forward to fight them, starting a normal combat. Even if Roland still had rage level 3, he couldn’t use it in the same way- they are not an army, or any of the other adjectives. For simple combat, the Knight has plenty of normal abilities to use their rage for. Picking up the D8 is for something truly heroic… However, dramatically speaking, a Knight could turn something from an impossible situation to something which works like a normal combat… An angry Roland is approached by a tribe of almost as equally angry trolls, all baying for his blood. “Hmm? Is this a mob?” asks Roland. The GM says it is. Roland reaches for his sword… and a minute later, only three trolls are still there, the rest either dead or run. Three trolls aren’t a mob, and this is the combat. To state the obvious, many of the adjectives are much more impressionistic. Defeat a religion? A god? A belief? That could be just hitting something, but it could be something

much more philosophical. Note again the phrasing of the word “defeat” not “kill”. Get creative with the violence and reward lateral thinking. This is where an Emotion Knight can get poetic, if they want. A KNIGHT CHOOSING WHICH SPECIFIC EMOTION’S NAME The player is free to choose which of the levels of emotions they wish to name the Knight. This is to let them express themselves, and signal what about that emotion is core to them. Every knight draws from the full range on that prong of the emotion wheel. So whether a player says they’re a Rage Knight or an Annoyance Knight, they draw from Anger, Rage and Annoyance. If in doubt, guide them towards the word on the part of the spoke which they think is coolest. THE WEAPON’S VOICE

Half the archetypes get their own NPCs. The Neo gets their clinical AI. The Godbinder gets a head full of gods, whispering ideas. The Emotion Knight gets their sentient arcane weapon… and it’s arguably the most subversive and least trustworthy of them all. At least the Godbinder knows the gods are trying to barter and manipulate them. While the player gets to define the style of the weapon’s personality, they do not get to define what the weapon wants. What it wants is to actively push the character towards indulging in its emotion. For example, in these rules, we suggest running Rage Knights if you’re uncertain. Anger is easy to understand –

primarily, a Rage Weapon wants to be right in the heart of anger, which is primarily bloodshed. The sword is primarily very excited to kill people. How it expresses it is the thing the player defines – a murderous serial killer sword is one thing, a kooky cutsie sword is another. Either way, the weapon would be looking for ways to experience rage. The player will notice that the weapon can sense the emotion which powers it. In the case of a Rage Knight, the weapon will be able to sense nearby angry enemies. The question is what does the sword tell the persona? If the persona is trying to avoid combat, it’s contrary to the weapon’s desires. If a Rage weapon wants to be in a fight, and the player is trying to avoid it, the weapon will clearly lie and send their master straight into the ambush. It's not dumb. The push and pull between the sword as a friend and ally or an awful enabler is definitely a key part of the class. Depending on the emotion picked, this nature will vary. It’s worth taking a few seconds to think what exactly an Arcane Weapon powered by (for example) Anticipation wants… and then stick to that characterisation and desire. POWER-UPS Generally speaking, the weapons are going to grow more impressive as the Knight gains more emotion. You can use various visual effects, but a warning – growing weapons can seem cool, but risk reading as phallic. You'll likely be better off with energy fields or similar.

TRACKING THE KNIGHT’S EMOTIONAL STATE You’ll see the Emotional Scale on the additional emotional sheet. This should have the Knight’s major, average and minor emotions written on it, and passed to the player. DIE is based on Robert Plutchik's emotion wheel, which posits eight primary emotions, set in two antagonist poles. It's contemporary theory with 1991 (when DIE rules are meant to have been written) and works really well for an RPG setting. Generally speaking, levels 1 to 3 – the ones which we’ve labelled – are the normal levels of human emotions. Level 3 terror is about the level of terror you would feel if being hunted by someone with a knife around your house. Level 4 and 5 are a level of intensity which is beyond regular human experience. Most people will faint or run in an uncontrolled panic at level 4 terror. Level 5 will likely cause a heart attack. Above level 6 are an intensity beyond all human experience. The Dictator has more on this section, but even a level 4 experience could render a normal human being unconscious, or even kill them. For every stage of emotion an Emotion Knight suffers a disadvantage on doing things which are not relevant to that emotional state. So, if you are at level 5 rage, you are at FIVE disadvantages on things which are not things you can do when angry. If the emotion would help an Emotion Knight perform a task, they gain a single advantage, no matter how many levels. At level 3 or above, the Master may suggest behaviour which the persona wants to do, and if they don’t want to do

it, they have to roll with their Wisdom to resist. The difficulty should be half the level of the emotion, rounding up. So, if a Rage Knight is level 5 rage, the difficulty to avoid stabbing people will when all the enemies are gone would be a difficulty 3 test. Of course, the player doesn’t have to resist if they don’t want to. If they go with the flow, and even start selecting unwise but appropriate actions themselves, you may wish to give an advantage on the roll. It’s what they really want to do, after all. GAINING EMOTIONS None of the above really explain what should increase a Knight’s emotional state. Generally: look at all elements of the knight’s spoke, plus the adjacent compound emotion. For example, for a Terror Knight, you’ll be looking for the Emotion Knight showing Terror, Fear or Apprehension from the Terror spoke – plus an eye on them showing Submission and Awe. The compound emotions should be coloured by their primary emotion. An Amazement Knight’s feeling of Awe would feel different than a Terror Knight’s. The Amazement Knight is a “Oh god – wow! look at that thing! Isn’t it neat” while Terror Knight is “Oh god – look at that thingarggggghhhhhhh!!!!!” It’s worth noting that the wheel does not include all the possible combinations. If you want to go that deep, have a nose at the Wikipedia page. As always, read the scale. Levels one to three are normal – higher, and they are pushing towards madness and literally

impossible experience. To stress the above – a level 4 emotion is enough to make a normal person (Wisdom 4, so Willpower 4) pass out or worse. General rule: if a player is not playing or referencing the emotion, they are not feeling that emotion. It’s entirely fine to prompt the player to encourage expressing how they’re feeling. For Example… GM: A Monster appears in front of you. Player: I draw my sword! GM: It’s really horrible. Are you feeling scared? Player: Yes! It’s a monster! I’ve never seen anything like it before! GM: Move your die up to level 2 – “Fearful.” Here’s some specifics for how each spoke could work. If we move past this Beta, having more emotion-specific powers in the game is the sort of thing we’ll want to add, which can expand the class further. An Interest Knight playing a Sherlock Holmes-esque role is an obvious one. Annoyance/Anger/Rage Level 1: General unhappiness in a situation. “Who are these bastards who are trying to stab me? FUCKERS!” Level 2: You being attacked and/or hurt. Level 3: Someone you know and like being hurt. Possibly you being hurt. Overview: Some classes in combat are very easy to get a level 1 emotion. Oddly, for a class that’s most akin to Viking Berserkers, that’s not true with the Rage Knight. However, in any combat, especially one which extended, it’s likely there’ll be something which makes them extremely angry. The longer a combat goes on, the more that’s likely.

Worth noting – someone who is primarily excited by combat is, by definition, not annoyed. If you want to play someone who really likes combat, you likely are looking to play a Joy Knight. Interest/Anticipation/Vigilance Level 1: Going and nosing at something with gleeful curiosity. Standing watch, and actually trying to do the job. Anything that makes the player go “oh – cool.” Level 2: Standing, weapon out, seeing a horde charging towards you. Level 3: Arnie being hunted by the Predator. Discovering something which changes your understanding of yourself in a fundamental way. The half second before a dragon crashes into your army’s line, with you in the front row. Overview: With knights of this family, you need to be especially aware that “extreme interest” can count as a higher-level emotion and “minor vigilance” can be a low-level emotion. Anticipation is equally broad: “waiting for Christmas” is different from “Waiting for Christ’s actual second coming”. You can’t be too literal. It can also stretch to “curiosity”. It should be noting that “anticipation” does not imply something that is experienced solely positively. These Knights tend to start a combat at a high emotional level – “Interesting enemies coming at me! I am vigilant!” – which drops, with few ways to recover energy in a combat. A lot is based on a player’s actions – they tend to be either stoic (if interested in being alert) or quirkily energetic (if interested in interesting things). Serenity/Joy/Ecstasy Level 1: Whatever sparks serenity! Level 2: Whatever sparks joy!!!!! Level 3: Whatever sparks ecstasy!!!!!!

Overview: The Ecstasy Knight is a good example of a class where we realise emotions are not neutral things – they’re things provoked by subjects. Clearly, a Joy Knight is powered by happiness… But what makes someone happy? A kinder Joy Knight will use the compound emotions of Love and Optimism a lot, based upon their chipper demeanour and powerful feelings for other characters or persona. A harsher one is going to play at best as an emotionally unavailable joker akin to the Fool and at worst an active sadist taking joy in the murder of those who oppose them. It’s also a character where you may wish to think about the effect of drugs to induce emotion states. In short: The Joy Knight’s easy access to power entirely comes from to the individual Knight’s persona. Acceptance/Trust/Admiration Level 1: Forgiving behaviour which is not exactly like your own. Minor, low level trust – as in, going into battle together. Level 2: Any time the Knight takes an action which is deeply reliant on someone, in a life or death matter. Level 3: An act of trust which you know someone is unlikely to actually do, and huge stakes are on the line. When your liking for someone changes your behaviour. When you’re vicariously proud of someone else’s achievement. Overview: The dynamic of the Admiration Knight is definitely unusual. They’re chill and peppy, and are both natural followers (as they gain power by looking up to people) and leaders (they gain power by putting their faith in other people). More than most, they’re nice people. They are also unique in being able to lose their emotional state easily – e.g. someone they trust fails their trust, someone they admire acts

abominably. These should crash the emotional state hard. In some ways, the Admiration Knight is about using the power before someone lets you down. God, that’s a depressing take, right? As a Master, be looking for places to offer them a difficult leap of faith and people for them to like. However, for a player more interested in a serious emotional journey, making the persona who is incapable of trusting become a Trust Knight suggests a different character arc – as in, finally trusting people and then gaining the physical power they need. In short – a player who trusts easily should be tested. A player who doesn’t trust at all, should be supported as they build towards that moment. Look at their choices. Don’t be too generous with hitting level 3 though. Being impressed by someone’s stamp collection is not a level 3 emotion Apprehension/Fear/Terror Level 1: ”Oh no – is there a monster?” Level 2:”It’s a monster!” Level 3: THE MONSTER IS GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!?!?” Overview: In a very real way, the Terror Knight tends to be about facing their fears. They also get powerful very quickly, assuming they are actively terrified. There is a problem with this easy source of power – and it’s the rule that you suffer disadvantages when trying to avoid acting on your emotional state. If your emotional state is fear, that doesn’t often align to directly attacking the opposition – as such, you’re likely to get disadvantages on standard attacks. It’s also worth noting that creative violence is not based on the standard

mechanism, so can be used entirely effectively. Catharsis is very key here. The Terror Knight is likely to generate power and then burn it off as quickly as possible to avoid just running away. Moments of panic, then a basal level of dread. It’s worth noting that sometimes an attack would not suffer disadvantages – if cornered, and slashing your way out, this is acting on your fears… Distraction/Surprise/Amazement Level 1: A situation with a lot happening (for example, a busy melee or a loud environment, or just the player role-playing a lot of other things to think about – like how on Earth are we going to get home?). Anxiety would certainly fit in here. Level 2: Sudden change of situation – ambushes, being attacked from behind, etc. Level 3: OH GOD! LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT DRAGON! I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THAT BEFORE!!!!! Overview: Amazement Knights tend to find it easy to get a low level, and get occasional boosts to level 3 when something genuinely shocking happens the first time. They can be one of the lighter knights to play, but the use of the word “anxiety” may imply there’s other ways to take it. Pensiveness/Sadness/Grief Level 1: “Ennui” is a good word for this. When a situation looks hopeless, where all is lost, where you doubt your abilities. Level 2: The moment when life expressly doesn’t go the way you want. Most forms of loss. Level 3: Someone dying. If it’s someone you actually really like, or even love, this is one of those natural emotions which

may even hit level 4 and 5. Grief is a motherfucker. Overview: The Grief Knight is the Emotion Knight in the DIE comic, which was picked for literary reasons. The Grief Knight, like the Terror Knight, is a creature of catharsis – by using the abilities, you momentarily purge it. In terms of power, it’s easy to get to a level one, especially if a character leans into the Eeyore-ness of the archetype, but difficult to get higher. That said, when things are going badly, the Grief Knight is at their most powerful. “This is a gift, and this is the price” as Florence & the Machine are presently singing, somewhat randomly. Boredom/Disgust/Loathing Level 1: General dissatisfaction with a situation and/or boredom. Level 2: Seeing the insides of people spill out onto your sword. Level 3: Being locked in a room with Hitler. Overview: The Loathing Knight is unusual in that its level one is a state that is highly unlikely to happen during an adventure. DIE’s world is many things but “boring” is not usually one of them. Conversely, its other emotions are relatively easily to hit… go into a dungeon covered in gunk? That may trigger disgust for some personas, though unlikely above a level 1. The first time you see someone with their guts sprawling out from a sword attack? That’s likely to hit a level 2. As a Master, a player with a Loathing Knight is likely signalling “I want to see disgusting things and respond to it.” At the highest level, Loathing tends to be personal – either at a person who has wronged you or acted in a way you cannot bear or some enormous unjustness.

DRAINING EMOTIONS Key thing to remember – this is an ability which uses a standard dice pool. It does not involve the D8. If we were a computer game, we would be keeping a statistic for everyone else in the game, tracking how much they were feeling of all eight of the emotions at every point, so knowing exactly how many points could abstractly be drained from everyone else. We’re a pen and paper RPG, so that sounds like a lot of work. Instead, when an Emotion Knight wants to drain emotions, you should make a judgement of how much the target character is feeling. The players’ scale can likely help – it also should be noted that 3 is the normal limit of human feeling. It’s possible that a character is not feeling it in the slightest, in which case nothing can be drained. If an Emotion Knight succeeds in draining an emotion, the character should do less of the related behaviour. For example, draining Rage from an opponent mid-fight would make them distinctly less interested in murdering you. If the character is player-controlled, you should inform a player on how the character is feeling now. If they try to act contrary to their state, they may get a disadvantage. It is likely an Emotion Knight may try unusual uses for this. Can an Interest Knight drain the curiosity from a guard allowing you to walk straight past them? Maybe yes, maybe no. They’re not able to stop a person gaining the emotion again after they’ve had an emotion drained, so perhaps not… but it’s certainly enough to stop a guard being interested in something, and gaining

advantages to sneaking past. Alternatively, you could rule that it is sufficient – you can drain the emotion of interest and walk behind him. Generally speaking, Yes is a more interesting answer than No. It should be noted that this is a Charisma roll. If a player seems especially interested in this ability, encourage them to select a higher Charisma value. If you look at the emotion wheel, you’ll see there are complex emotions involving two different of the main emotions – for example, Love is between Joy and Trust. When draining an emotion, Love can be tapped by Joy and Trust Knights, leaving the subject out of love. The Critical Failure on a draining roll actually works as a success, draining all the relevant emotion – however, it leaves the target broken. They have had the ability to feel that emotion towards that subject removed forever. An adventurer who was afraid of a dragon will never be afraid of a dragon again. A guard who was looking out for mysterious noises will never be interested in noises ever again. A lover who was in love with her beloved will never love him ever again.

Dictators are the characters who tend to leave emotional messes in their wakes, but Emotion Knights can do it too. Can any of the above be reversed? It will likely require either the reality warping of a Master, a major miracle of a Godbinder or some other quest inside the world. It’s not easy. It’s worth noting the Light character does not have this ability on their sheet, which does not mean you can’t have them use it as a key moment of the game. The Arcane Weapon can always fill them in. Equally, that it is on the Full character’s sheet does not mean they have to use it. This is a loaded ability. It’s also worth noting if you don’t want to play with this ability, feel free to cross it out on the character sheet. Your game, your rules, Master. CHARACTER GROWTH If it makes sense in a narrative way, based upon a persona's character growth or direction, it's possible that an Emotion Knight may change emotion. For example, a Fear Knight may get in touch with their actual repressed anger and end the game as a Rage Knight. This is an element to consider for the story, and one which is unlikely to come up. When it does come up, it'll likely be obvious that it's an appropriate idea.

RUNNING THE NEO WHO TO GIVE THE NEO TO? What the Neo specialises is in is like Angela in the comic – something akin to a classic D&D Thief, Rogue or Assassin. They specialise in avoidance and stealth attacks. They are also one of the rare classes who can specialise in is ranged attacks. Earlier we did say that all the classes are flexible. It’s true, but only just. If we develop these rules further, expect many more tech and cybernetic options to allow the Neo to move into other roles. The Cybernetic Terminator Thug is only just about possible with the current cybernetic options. SAFETY-PROOFING THE NEO To state the obvious, the Neo has a need baked into the character concept. In many games, this can come across as an addiction and the Neo as necessarily an addict. Certainly other characters can treat them as such. This is obviously material which some groups may wish to avoid, for lots of reasons, all understandable. The high-like state can be played down and the simple mechanical need played up. This is much more like making rent. You’re useless without this stuff. The need can be purely practical. It can be about obsession, like someone losing themselves in their hobby, the one thing they’re good at. TOKENS FOR FAIR GOLD While you can just write down notes of how many gold the Neo has, tokens are often useful. I personally use chocolate

money, which has the problem of often not having a heads or tails, but at least is shiny. Using actual coins also works. COLLECTING FAIR GOLD The Neo's abilities are powered by the gold of the Fair – Fair Gold, for short. In the world, this appears every day and disappears in the morning. As such, anyone who needs it is constantly on the lookout for it. The Neo’s basic system – the AI and the hacking – is always operational. A Neo requires a single gold to activate each of their core abilities. They can also use gold to activate their Overcharge one-shot special abilities. As such, you need to ensure there is Fair Gold available to the Neo player. For example, when a Fallen is killed, they can release Fair Gold. As such, giving a gold in the opening encounter is pretty necessary – that initial choice of which of their main systems to boot up is a thrill of the class. By halfway through the game, the player should have at least got the opportunity to have got enough gold to activate all their abilities, and likely more. If Fair Gold is in short supply, it is often a good motivation to push the Neo into behaviour you wish to encourage. If Fair Gold is in great supply, it is a good tool for the character to use to get past a challenge – either with their Overdrive abilities, or a simple bribe to a character they met. Many denizens of Die may like the Fair Gold. You don't even need to explain it. Who wouldn’t want Fair Gold?

As such, it's the closest thing to a currency in the game – but it's still a currency that is only really of primary interest to a single player. Other players may want to divide the gold they find. This is fine. The trick is ensuring the Neo realises they want the gold. Those who are more mechanically minded will read the rules and already be hungry for it. Frankly, the second you put a gold on the table they may be grasping for it. Other players will likely require some guidance. This is a good chance to use the Question/Answer technique. For example, upon being confronted by Fair Gold for the first time. GM: What's the most your persona ever wanted anything in your life? Tell me about it. Player: <Response> GM: Looking at this gold feels like that. It's also true for when someone actively uses the gold. If you’re leaning that way, a drug metaphor can be useful. If not, a euphoria metaphor of your choice (”Like you’ve been dancing all night in the best club in the world”, “Like you’ve just hit the most satisfying plot twist you’ve ever read”, “Like you’ve just met the world’s best puppy”) goes a long way. ACTIVATING THE SYSTEMS The systems all exist (possibly in a Neo’s body) when they transform from their persona to their character. The gun replaces the weapons in the Neo’s equipment – while a Neo can’t use its fancy special abilities instantly, it can be fired as a weapon. In practice, the first thing a player tends to do is use that first gold to turn on their weapons. When each system activates, the AI system should make a statement, and there should be a visual effect. This is

the cyberpunk character. Don’t be afraid of the cool. The only system that does not start with the Neo is the pet. This materialises when activated. THE AI The suit has a built-in AI system, which is always active, which you should role-play. In a game with a large number of players, this is advised to keep minimal – the AI is a servitor system, and not as useful for drama as the Godbinder or the Emotion Knight's Arcane Weapon. In a smaller game, especially a solo one, having an AI intelligence for the characters to talk to can be fun. You can take a page from 2000AD’s Rogue Trooper and give each system its own AI if you really want a lot of things for a player to talk to. The AI can provide useful information, especially about the Neo’s abilities. It can also use the Fair Field ability to ask questions about the area, especially related to Fair-tech. This would include locating Fair Gold, if you want to give a desperate player a direction to go to find gold. THE D10 The abilities each system gives are deliberately defined broadly. The D10 should be added to any dice pool which it's reasonable for that ability to be used in. PET Pets are an adorable and popular ability. Make sure to read the limitations and powers of it – damage transfers from the pet to the persona’s character. The pet can’t be killed directly. We’re not

monsters. The only time the pet “dies” is if it powers down on a roll of a 0. If a player has a Fair Gold on them, the Neo should have a chance to use it to save their precious animal. Be nice to animals, kids. THE PROBLEM OF DAWN Fair Gold disappears at dawn, and the systems deactivate. While most of the one-off game will happen inside a single day, it’s possible others may stretch out to multiple days. In which case, the character will have to find more gold, and you (as the GM) should be thinking of ways to give the opportunity to find it. Gold can be used just before dawn to keep a system active for the next day. It’s a good way to use their surplus gold at the end of the day. Yes, the AI knows the time and will warn the player. FAIR FIELD HACKING This is a core ability all Neo possess. It is primarily used for “hacking” the Fallen, but a Gamesmaster should look to provide other abilities for a clever Neo to use. If a Neo is confronted by any machinery and asks, “Can I hack it?” the answer should usually be “Yes” or “You can try” if you’re being cagey. In terms of immobilizing a Fallen opponent, the target difficulty would be the target Fallen’s Wisdom in successes. If a Neo wishes to lock down a group, choose the highest wisdom in the group. If you succeed, you immobilize one Fallen. For each success above that, you immobile an extra one. For example, Naomi Neo is confronted by a group of four Fallen (Wisdom 2).

Naomi try to lock down as many as she can. She rolls four successes. This means three fallen (2 for the first, 1 extra success for each other one) are immobilised. While Fallen have been used as an example, this also works on all kinds of systems. Gun turrets and doors are popular. For non-sentient creatures without a Wisdom, a difficulty of half the intelligence of their makers would be a good rule of thumb. In other words, set a difficulty of one unless it’s a very fancy door. If a player wishes to actively try to take over an individual rather than just immobilising them, you will need to roll a Special, which will let a Neo be able to make the target perform a single action. OVERCHARGE Most classes have an ability to try and expend their resources to solve intractable problems. This is the Neo’s, and involves the expenditure of their resources. The ability lists what a one-coin use should be – minor extensions of the core abilities. The more unlikely the effect, the greater the cost. In some cases you will try to reject it, but you likely will want to at least humour it. It is not primarily aimed to be used as a combat ability, though certain gung-ho characters may wish to try cramming as much gold down their barrel to see what happens. For those who wish to try this, here’s the basic rule of thumb for assigning costs: If a player wants to attack multiple people at once, it’s one gold per person. Then roll a dice pool (once, applying the result to every target individually).

If instead a player wants to target an individual, one gold per hit is required. For example, Naomi Neo is facing a mass of Fallen opponents. She asks if she can overload her gun to kill them all in a fully automatic way. There’s 10 Fallen. With ten opponents, the cost is an astronomical ten gold. Naomi swallows. No, she doesn’t have nearly that kind of coin… Other effects – like trying to blind the opposition, bring a roof down on someone’s head or so on are highly possible. Things which let the players escape from combat and go another way are definitely encouraged. The “automatic kill” is many things, but boring most of all. Overcharge is meant for player creativity. For example, Naomi Neo is still with the Fallen. Instead, she asks if she can fire her weapon fully automatic, trying to suppress the Fallen while the group escapes. The GM likes this, and sets a low cost of a single coin to encourage the behaviour. If the coin flip is a success, the event happens. If the coin flip fails you take narrative control. Simply making it fail is the sub-ideal choice – the Neo has spent their resources, and would be looking for something more than a waste. As such, look for complications and twists rather than straight refutations. For example, presented by a huge metallic door Naomi Neo puts a gun into hyperdrive and tries to cut a hole through. The coin is flipped, coming up tails. The GM says a hole is cut through the door… but the alarms all go off. Guards are coming. Big guards.

SACRIFICE In DIE the comic, when Angela returns to earth, she is missing a limb. This is because she had cybernetics in the world of Die. You may be wondering if a player Neo will also be missing limbs from any cybernetics they choose to describe. In short: no. However, if on the adventure, there comes a chance to upgrade a Neo with new equipment, and they choose to give up a part of their body, that part will be missing when they return to Earth. This is basically how all in-world sacrifices tend to play out, but is worth highlighting especially to the Neo. THE ONE CYBERPUNK IN A FANTASY WORLD This is a tonal point to think about. The players are being dropped into a Fantasy World. Visually, the Neo can have a different aesthetic. You basically have three main choices… 1) They are as strange as a magical

cyberpunk would be in a standard fantasy world. As such, characters they meet will act as if they’re genuinely unusual.

2) The magical cybernetics of the Neo are rare, but a known thing in the world. Especially if your Fallen has some elements of techno-magic, it certainly can fit in.

3) It’s not even commented upon. No-one comments. Even if asked.

All are great. I’ve used all three in different games.

RUNNING THE GODBINDER WHO TO GIVE THE GODBINDER TO? The Godbinder is arguably the most flexible and directly powerful of the classes. In terms of traditional D&D classes, it is most akin to a cleric, but if the player’s choices lean more martial, they can act like a knight. If the choices lean more academic in style, the Godbinder can operate in a manner akin to a warlock or any magic user. If you’re using the Arcana, a Godbinder who works solely through minor miracles and chooses miracles akin to what a wizard would cast in D&D is functionally identical to a wizard. But the Godbinder isn’t primarily for those who are looking for crunchy mechanics – it is also one where the player gets to interact with a series of god characters and explicitly barter for what they want. In other words, it’s the class whose abilities most involve role-play as a core element. If a player likes yapping to GM controlled characters, this is one of the best choices for them. USING THE D12 The Godbinder is one of the less complicated archetypes, in its use of dice. The dice is used simply as a tool the player brandishes to contact the god. Some people use it as a phone. Some people use it as an altar. Just make the players aware of it, and encourage them to lean into the ritual of it. The D12 is also added to any dice pool which involves a Godbinder’s miracles, including attacks (and the players’ physical attacks if transformed or enhanced by a spell in some way). So if

a player is transformed into a bear, they would get to roll their D12 in any dice pool related to bear activities. THE SECOND GOD SHEET There’s a second sheet with nine more pre-generated gods on. This will extend the Godbinder’s time selecting their abilities considerably, so do not necessarily pass it over. It’s likely better to keep it and then if they ask to play a different sort of god, let them fill in the miracles from the sheet. PLAYING THE GODS The player gets to define their gods, and then you play them. The names the player selects and the domains are your cue to their personalities, and you can build on that. The gods are big personalities, and I would suggest leaning them iconic. If you're a reader of the comic DIE, you'll likely have a selection of gods for inspiration. The gods, generally speaking, either want the player to owe them, or they want to cause things related to What They’re The God Of to happen in the world. When role-playing the gods – including setting deals – bear this in mind. Time is frozen when speaking to a god, and no one else can hear them. Describe that effect to the Godbinder as you wish. It’s a good idea for a god to pro-actively speak to the player in the first scene, to show it’s an option, and introduce the concept of Major Miracles. A favourable-deal early Major Miracle is a good idea to encourage tentative Godbinders to play with the system. The first hit’s free, after all.

I give each of my gods their own voice, though avoid any accent that could be read as offensive. I lean towards modes of speaking more than anything else. I would also think of staging – my personal trick is when playing a god, to go and stand behind the Godbinder and speak into their ear. Clearly, I get permission for this kind of boundary pushing. The effect of the Godbinder not being able to see who they’re summoning and everyone else being able to certainly increases the sense of magic. With up to three gods for the Godbinder, it's possible that they take over the game if the Godbinder likes roleplaying with them. If there's more players, lean the gods more taciturn. Of course, this excess of NPCs around the player means the Godbinder is a very good choice for a solo game. It’s also worth noting that a Godbinder can call on their gods to just talk to them. It doesn’t have to be all business. Gods tend to have strong opinions. MIRACLES There are two sorts of miracles. Major miracles and Minor miracles. Minor miracles operate like spells in a traditional game. These are primarily are those listed on the Godbinder’s sheet but can also be individually crafted, as explained below. Conversely, Major Miracles are bespoke effects, each bartered with by speaking to a god character. MAJOR MIRACLES In short: Major Miracles are primarily for interacting with large-scale plot problems, or when the players are in deep trouble.

These are essentially bartering with a god for them dealing with a large problem, in exchange for a service. There's no limit to what these can be, but the bigger the problem, the bigger what is required for you to do to pay off the debt (or to complete before the miracle is even performed). If the miracle is big enough to side step a major point of the plot – such as side-stepping a major problem – the task required should be as hard as solving the actual problem yourself. For example, a Godbinder and party are presented with a 100ft giant guarding the door to the lair of the Master. The players don't fancy their chances, and contact the God of Ice to ask if they can freeze the giant for them. Sure, says the God of Ice. But first you have to defeat a fire demon who is troubling the region to the east. The Fire Demon is an enemy about as difficult to defeat as the giant. A god can also just say “No, I'm not interested in a deal”. Especially if the players have pissed the god off somehow, or it is something that the god has no interest or ability in (for example, asking the Ice God to heal someone isn’t exactly their thing). You can also offer deals with are clearly something no sensible player would take... but remember, players tend to not be sensible. For example, a god which sets their cost as "You need to kill someone in your party" is not enough to stop at least SOME players from doing it. That said, that also sounds like it could be an interesting situation. I would advise against giving an offer that you cannot stand the players from saying yes to. Someone will always call your bluff.

If a player breaks a promise based on a Major Miracle, for any Major Miracle of any significant size, assume that they are at least in a five debt in the rules in Minor Miracles, as described below. In other words, it’s likely enough to kill a player outright. In DIE, religion will fuck you up. Gods occasionally do Major Miracles they really want to do, just for the fun of it, if it's aligned with their nature. This can be especially useful early in the adventure to show exactly how big a miracle can be. Wiping out the initial wave of Fallen is a good way to show how big things can be, for example. MINOR MIRACLES These are minor abilities, more akin to the standard spells in a role-playing game. The player picks them from the sheet. To create the effect, a Godbinder must roll a Wisdom roll against the spells level. As in, the spell’s level is its difficulty. When these spells have a target, your dice pool rolls simultaneously against the spell’s difficulty and the difficulty of the target’s defences. For example, a Gareth Godbinder casting a fireball (difficulty 2) at a group of Fallen (defence 1, so difficulty 1). If Gareth rolls two successes, they cast the spell and hit the Fallen as the number of successes matches or is higher than both the casting difficulty (2) and the Fallen’s defence (1). If Gareth rolled only one success, they would fail to cast the fireball (difficulty 2) so no Fallen are harmed. A player is not limited to the Minor Miracles they’ve picked. While you may likely use the Major Miracles, any similar

spell which their god could provide could be attempted. For example, there is no “create light” spell in the God of Light. This type of Minor Miracle can be attempted. For something that minor, a difficulty of 1 would seem reasonable. For a guideline of difficulties, see the spells of the other gods. Remember – the spell could only be accessible if your god’s area would cover similar areas. The God of Fire may let you create a light minor miracle, but it wouldn’t let you create a water-bolt miracle. Note: you should increase the difficulty by one if the Godbinder does not have that miracle as one of their selected ones. So if a Godbinder has selected a fireball, you cast it at difficulty 2. If a Godbinder tries and casts a Fireball and they haven’t selected it, it’s level 3. There are full Miracle (and spell) generation systems in the Arcana, included a bunch of pre-generated spells. That they’re in the Arcana rather than here is your tell that you don’t need them. It’s one of the most maths-centric bits of the design, and there’s more than enough on the Godbinder sheets. Miracles From Gods You Have Not Selected It's worth noting that a god you do not have a relationship with means you can't do Minor Miracles from their domain. However, you can do Major Miracles with them, based on a bespoke deal. This is likely harder, due to a lack of any prior relationship, but certainly there. God Debt If you fail to roll the requisite successes, the spell still happens if you are willing to accept the debt to the god. For every step you fail by, the god will take one

debt point. A Godbinder can owe no more than five debt points to any god. For example, Gareth Godbinder is trying to cast a fireball requiring difficulty 2. He only rolls one success. He decides he really wants to burn those people, so give the fire god 1 debt. A Godbinder can take on debt to add a success when performing miracles. If they are able to accumulate debt, they can force success. Is there a problem? Calling In God Debt There is a problem. At any time, the god may call in any number of these favours. If the player refuses, they suffer damage equal to the number of debts the god chooses to call in. Gareth Godbinder owes the fire god three debt. On the way home, he passes a field of wheat. The fire god wants it to burn. Gareth is going to refuse, but the Fire God points out that the Godbinder only has three health. If they say no, he’ll be reduced to zero health and keel over. Swearing at the hard-bargain-driving-bastard, they reach for their torch... The question of what is reasonable is key. For debt accrued from a Minor Miracle, a god won’t demand something akin to Isaac killing a son. It is worth noting that this may not be true for a

Major Miracle. The bigger the favour, the bigger the demand. It is suggested that both GM and player keep track of the amount of debt owed to each god. Leaving Die In Debt To The Gods Low-level debt, let it slide, especially if it’s just been forgotten. It’s a good thing to use to put a few weird notes in the epilogue. If a player’s response to escaping is to act in the world like the god would have wished them to, this pays off a lot of debt. If it’s deliberately running off without paying a big debt, do feel free to create physical injuries to the persona in the real world proportionate to their debt. A literal pound of flesh is perfectly acceptable in some cases. “How many minor miracles can you cast?” and other D&D-y questions There is no limit on the number of miracles you can cast in these rules, though the specific world the players arrive in may create some problems. There is an obvious risk in accumulating debt. “They’re Cantrips” is a good way to explain Minor Miracles to a D&D player. At which point they may go “Wait – Fireball is my Cantrip?” And then you go “Uh-huh” and they can go “Whoa.”

RUNNING THE DICTATOR WHO TO GIVE THE DICTATOR TO?

The Dictator is the Bard as a horror character. The Bard is someone who sings magical songs that alter people’s emotional states, either positively or negatively. The Dictator takes that and turns it into something intensely awful. The Dictator, as said on the sheet, is a character class which is the most dangerous, in how they can affect the tone of the game. If given to an immature player who does not understand the seriousness of its possibilities, it can easily be upsetting to all the players (including the Dictator when they realise they’ve overstepped social boundaries). As well as the core story of DIE, at least one reason why the GM gets to choose character classes is so that you get to judge which player is most able to handle something like the Dictator. Equally, it’s easy for you to simply not give any player the Dictator. If you’re at all worried about the Dictator, I would advise not including the Dictator. ER… WHAT’S ACTUALLY THE PROBLEM? The Dictator includes themes of consent and emotional violation. The Dictator’s challenge to the player is mainly one of navigating these boundaries and deciding what is acceptable, and seeing how treating other people like tools is a temptation to them. This can go to some dark places, and the reason why you want someone mature enough to play the Dictator is so that they don’t go there unknowingly.

To state the big obvious one: making someone fall in love with you and then having sex with them is rape. You have removed their consent. It’s rape. Admittedly, this is also true of (say) the Charm spell in D&D. But we’re a game which is looking at these sorts of things seriously. Any player who thinks this is a good idea should not be let near the Dictator. To be honest, they shouldn’t be let in your house. SAFETY-PROOFING THE DICTATOR It’s possible to safety-proof the Dictator too, to make it less charged. Remember that in these sub-realms of Die that the rules can warp. Maybe a Master has warped this world so the Dictator can’t change the emotions of anyone who came from a realm other than Die (i.e. It won’t work on the players’ characters). Playing with the emotions of the GM’s characters is interesting enough, and considerably reducing the chance of something going horrifically awry. If you realise you want to remove the possibility mid-game, the Master spending one of their Cheat Tokens to do the same is an entirely viable move. Frankly, it’s the sort of thing a Master may do for entirely in-character reasons – the game climaxes with a choice, and the Dictator is the player who can actively make someone do something they consciously don’t want to. The Master will obviously not want the Dictator to use the ability on them, making it a fair tactic. You can also safety proof the Dictator by limiting the emotions they can pick. Fear and Anger are “safer” emotions, as their most common uses are for directly

attacking someone rather than subverting them. If you only allow a player to select joy or trust it means they will be unable to create the compound emotion Love. Frankly, a player can make a real mess with just Trust by itself. THE FEEL OF THE DICTATOR’S POWER Here’s some things to keep in mind. Everything the Dictator does should be creepy. Both in the effects you describe when it happens, and how people act on it, and how everyone acts towards the Dictator when they do it. Everyone is a little afraid of the Dictator. You can signal this with friendly characters in the world. Make sympathetic people express their fears of the Dictator, having characters make the Dictator promise to not use it on them, threatening them if they do. Do things to give the players reasons to be afraid of Dictator themselves. The Dictator should be a little scared of their own powers. Most character classes have pretty tight control of all their abilities. If they roll well, they don’t have to use all those successes. The Dictator’s abilities are both more likely to succeed, and partially out of their control. There should be a reluctance to use the abilities in some situations. It’s worth noting that the Dictator can be extremely persuasive merely with the threat of using their abilities. Wolverine doesn’t have to stab people with his claws. That people know Wolverine could stab people is enough.

EMOTION CONTROL DICE POOL This is an exception to the core system. As described on the sheet, the D4 is a number of successes, which is then modified up or down by the number of successes in the rest of the pool. This means that if someone rolls four successes on the D4 and no actual successes in their dice pool, they are stuck at a level 4 rating – a level higher than most humans ever feel. It’s also worth noting that a critical failure (as in, no matter what’s on the D4, no successes and at least one 1) leads this to this being permanent. That 4 is enough to actually remove someone with Wisdom 2 (Willpower 4) from a combat, possibly fatally, should hint at how badly this could go wrong. THE BAD DICE AND THE DICTATOR DICE POOL If the dice pool includes a Bad Dice which makes you remove a success from the results, the successes of the Dictator’s D6s are removed first, and then the ones on the main D4. Donna Dictator uses her voice, and rolls a dice pool including a bad dice. She rolls a 2 on her D4 and 3, 4, 5, 2 and the Bad Dice is a 4. As the bad dice is a success, one of the two successes generated by her D6 is removed. Donna has two successes, plus or minus one success. If Donna had rolled no successes on her D6s, the D4’s 2 would have been reduced to 1. WILLPOWER

All characters have Willpower on their sheets. This is used for various characters, but primarily is for working with the Dictator. Willpower is not like

Health or Guard, in that it is not removed. It is the threshold by which a character can be overpowered by their emotions. It’s put on the sheet just to remember. While it could be boosted by special abilities, it is usually just twice the Wisdom. EMOTIONAL LEVELS You will note that on the sheet the player is given only the broadest idea of what effects their powers will have. The players are only really given a safety limit (3 is normal, 5 is human maximum, 6+ is supernatural) and a target for what they’d need to do to remove someone for combat (twice Wisdom – so with an average Wisdom, 4). This is one of the ways the player is encouraged to feel uneasy – they’re not quite sure what is going to happen. However, there is also a big DO NOT GO FURTHER THAN THIS sign. Will they push that far? Level 1 and 2

At level 1 and 2, in terms of low-level use of the ability, advantages and disadvantages may be added to their target, related to what the emotion is trying to make them do. One level of advantage (or disadvantage) per level of emotion is a good guideline. For example, using rage powers on a friendly warrior to make them aggressive at their opponent could justify an advantage. Increasing the amazement (which includes surprise and distraction) of a guard looking for thieves could lead to disadvantages to note someone sneaking past. In other words – it’s possible to use the ability at a low level to support other characters in their efforts. You can never have more than one advantage for an emotional state, no matter what

level you are at. There is no limit to the number of disadvantages you could have. Donna the Dictator makes her friend level 3 anger towards some orcs. They gain an advantage while attacking them. However, the friend she tries to stop orc fighting and start picking locks, they suffer three disadvantages. Hard to pick a lock when you’re murderously angry at some orcs. Level 3+

As well as above, at level 3 emotion, a character is being entirely overwhelmed by their feelings. for example, to flee from a combat. Most characters would likely act on that feeling without resisting. If a character wants to resist, they have to roll with their Wisdom to resist. The difficulty should be half the level of the emotion, rounding up. This is identical to the Emotion Knight’s compulsions. Level 4 and 5 Level 4 (i.e. twice the common Wisdom 2) or 5 is enough to make an average Wisdom individual remove from combat permanently. A level 4 fear could make you pass out. A level 5 could make you have a heart attack. Level 6

Anything above level 6 and you should be looking for supernatural effects. The higher, the more extreme. Hypothetical Example of Emotion Levels Donna Dictator uses their voice to make a monster fear the Dictator. With one or two successes, the monster would have either one or two

disadvantages to strike the Dictator. Frankly, if there was anyone else in the area to fight, they’d likely go over there. If there was no real reason for them to stay, they’ll likely leave. With three successes, the monster would have three disadvantages to strike the Dictator. The GM decides to make a Wisdom roll to see if the monster can resist fleeing. If it fails, the monster runs. It’s worth noting if the Dictator reclaims the D4 from the GM to use abilities on someone else, the monster could return to combat. The control is instantly gone. The Dictator’s only gets to use one manipulation simultaneously.. Intensity 4 should make the monster too afraid to continue the combat. They could run, as above, but if they do it should be in a way that makes it impossible for them to return. They also could fall to the floor in utter terror, defenceless, allowing the Dictator to kill them instantly in a free action. Passing out is another reasonable response. Intensity 5 pushes it further. A heart attack. If there’s a nearby cliff, the monster runs off it in its panic. If it fits the tone and limits of your game, suicide is a possible response at this level. They are so frightened they’d rather be dead than be in the Dictator’s presence another second. Intensity 6 could see the monster’s heart literally explode in its chest or tear their eyes out of their own head. Intensity 7 and more are increasingly theatrical. At level 7, you may be looking for unexpected side-effects. In this case, the heart exploding in a way which actually causes their chest to

explode outwards, temporarily blinding the Dictator. And so on. The negative emotion of fear makes the downside obvious, but it should be noted that all the emotions can be used in similarly aggressive ways For example, Donna Dictator has used admiration and ecstasy emotions to inflict a level 4 love on a monster. That’s not enough to make their heart explode in sheer joy, but it’s certainly enough for the monster to look at the player sadly, confused, tears streaming down their face going “Why?” when the Dictator stabs it through the heart, both literally and metaphorically. Supernatural levels of interest in the tip of your blade can easily lead to someone impaling themselves in fascination. And so on. The Dictator is a horror character. See what feels right. Which is normally “what feels wrong?” TARGET CHARACTERS WITH HIGH WISDOM (i.e. High Willpower) All of the above is based upon a character with a normal range of human emotional control – as in, a character with Wisdom 2. As the rules state, it takes twice the Wisdom to take a character out of a combat. A level 3 Wisdom would need six – and a level 4 Wisdom would need eight. A Dictator is extremely unlikely in any normal situation to roll eight successes, meaning high Willpower characters are hard to be entirely overwhelmed. This does not mean they are not feeling the emotion, however. In fact, if you’re experiencing it at five or higher, it’s more than a normal human being could

bear. It’s just that the character is still holding onto their faculties. How does this work? You extend the results of people with normal Willpower. You suffer disadvantages for every level of the emotion if doing a task which is difficult with the emotion. You gain an advantage on things directly related to it. At level 3 or above, you gain compulsions related to the effect, which they have to roll Wisdom to resist, at a difficulty of half the emotional level, rounding up. For example, Arnold Archmage has a Willpower of 8. Donna Dictator hits him with six successes to make him fear Donna. While this would be enough to kill someone with normal Willpower, it is less than Arnold’s Willpower. However, he suffers six disadvantages due to his fear of Donna. A “Run away from the scary Dictator” compulsion seems reasonable, and to resist Arnold would have to roll their Wisdom dice pool against a difficulty of three. It’s also worth noting that if a Master does manage to match a high willpower character, you will go straight to a 6 or 8 level effect, which is supernaturally intense. The character this is most likely to happen to is the Master, who tends to have a very high Wisdom. It is definitely the sort of thing a Master will spend a cheat token to get rid of.

THE EMOTION KNIGHT AND THE DICTATOR’S SYNERGY The Emotion Knight’s scale of emotion is identical to the Dictator’s. The Dictator can, if successful, move the Emotion Knight up their scale. This is obviously a useful strategy. This is one area where the tone of the Dictator is key. As in, it should not just be viewed as a simple power up by the players. The creepier the Dictator’s powers feel, the less likely they’ll be used lightly. Make sure the emotions impact the fiction, not used casually. MULTIPLE TARGETS The sheet doesn’t describe this, but a Dictator can try to use the abilities on multiple people at once. For each person in the group, subtract one success from the pool. For example, a Dictator is cornered by three Fallen, each with Wisdom 2. They’re going to tear the Dictator apart, so the Dictator tries to use their Admiration and Terror emotions to create the compound emotion Submission. The Dictator wants these Fallen all on the floor hailing them. The Dictator rolls their pool, with the D4 in it. The D4 is a 3 and they roll two successes. As there are three Fallen being targeted, three of those successes are lost, leaving two successes. All the Fallen are now experiencing level 2 submission. Not enough to make them beg, but still a powerful emotion.

RUNNING THE MASTER WHO TO GIVE THE MASTER TO? You. You are the Master in the playtest. That makes it easier. At least there’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. They are the D&D Magic user as a reality-warper. CHEATING The guidelines on the actual character sheet show where they should be used. It should be noted that these are for when the Master is expressly and deliberately fucking with the players. Not you, the GM. The Master. As the Gamesmaster, you create situations where the party may be attacked, as a response of the world. As a Master, you spend a Cheat Token to do it in a way which is entirely unfair – and likely magical. They should feel different and be presented differently. A lot is to do with the simple symbolism of passing the token to the players – “This is something that is only happening because of this.” For example, for you as a Gamesmaster: The Master Malcolm is cornered by the party in his throne room. He rings a bell, and summons the guards the players were trying to avoid. The guards rush in. For example, for you as the Master spending a Cheat Token: Master Malcolm is cornered in the party in a dead end. There’s no escape. He smiles and clicks his fingers… and a

secret passageway opens, and guards rush out of it. When to use the Cheat Token? Whenever the Master would, which means the Master needs to “know” about an event to do it. Do not be surprised if you don’t use any tokens until the final encounter. The “survive an attack” use of the token significantly extends how long the Master can act in a stand-up brawl against the players. If the entire party are united against the Master, without the use of tokens, they will take the Master down quickly. With it, it extends into a suitably sized set-piece to climax a game. What to use as a token? Coins should be avoided (as they’re the Neo’s signifier) but almost anything can work. I have a preference for using dice unlike any other in the game, but that does risk confusion. If you can work out a token to do with the setting, even better. For example, during a story set at a music festival, I used a flyer for the festival as the masters’ tokens – and actually quickly photoshopped a flyer between sessions to use as the prop. The passing of the token is to lampshade that what’s happened is unfair, and to also show the Master’s resources are being used up. Do the tokens do anything for the player? As standard, no. However, that they are an element in the game means you should consider how they could integrate into your adventure. They are a free gift that your friend, the Game Designer, has left for you to fill with your own mystery.

(Or maybe I haven’t had a good enough idea yet? Oh, cynic. Of course, I have a good idea. I’m just keeping them over there, where you can’t see them and also the dog ate my homework.) CHEAT TOKENS Regenerate at the start of each session. If a player has any, collect them up. CHEATING WITH CHEATING Of course, you don’t have to use all the tokens. If you don’t, and there’s no reason why the Master character hasn’t, the players may feel that their hard-fought victory has been stolen, assuming they realise how many tokens the Master has. THE MASTER’S OTHER MAGICS During a combat the Master character is involved in, run this like the Godbinder’s Minor Miracles, but based off Intelligence statistic rather than Wisdom. A Master cannot accumulate debt to make their abilities cast. CHANGING THE RULES The Master’s normal magics are easier to comprehend – the concept of the Master messing with the rules of the game is one I want to develop in the future, as the Master works towards becoming a more robust class for players to use rather than an antagonist. Until then, stick with the conceptual rules tweaks below which draws a line between Minor Rules Tweaks and Major Rules Tweaks. Minor Rules Tweaks are changes with limited scope and possible advantages to everyone, not just the Master.

Major Rules Tweaks are changes which reduce another player’s options and are of sole advantage to the Master. The former can be treated as spells, akin to a Minor Miracle for the Godbinder. Use the difficulty of the nearest Godbinder spell (plus one) to get a difficulty, or use one from the Master’s own sheet. The latter will require a Cheat Token. For example, Malcolm the Master wants to tweak the rules of existence so that for a while daggers gain a special bonus to hurt people. This is an effect that could help almost everyone who grabs a dagger. This sounds like a Minor Rules Tweak, so the Master looks up an equivalent miracle. It sounds identical to Bless. Its difficulty is listed as 1, so it counts as 2. Conversely, Malcom Master wants to limit Donna Dictator’s voice so she can only work on people native to Die (i.e. not players). This limits the Dictator’s abilities, and the Dictator’s alone. This is a Major Rules Tweak. Major Rules Tweaks are limited to complications and limitations rather than entire removals. You could not remove a Dictators’ ability entirely. It has to be a reasonable limitation – for example, the Dictator’s voice doesn’t work on this room, or on players, or when someone else is singing. It cannot just remove a tool. The word “reasonable” is loaded. In universe, if a Master tries to cheat too hard, the reality which they’re trapped in will resist and likely kill them. They are a Master in a world that’s inside a ruled by a Grandmaster, remember, and the Grandmaster is the one who’s really in

charge. Cheat, but show some class. This could be a useful end for a certain sort of Master character, but Masters

tend to realize that breaking the rules too hard ends badly.

RUNNING THE FALLEN WHO TO GIVE THE FALLEN TO? Anyone who dies. With a flourish and a smile. RUNNING THE FALLEN If the players have not read DIE, they will not be aware of the nature of the Fallen. As such, this will be a surprise to them. Even if not, be sure to lean into the weirdness and horror of your friend lurching to their feet again, awfully changed. The zombie in pop culture is a trope so common as to deaden us to it. Your aim is to make this feel real and as unusual as it would be. When describing any player's Fallen activity, be sure to highlight it, (as much as the vibe / perceived age rating for your game allows). Assuming the players are leaning into the horror, describing seeing bones slide beneath gaps in the skin is about my personal minimum, for example. Equally (if not more) important, is making the experience a real one for the Fallen player themselves. What does being a Fallen feel like? Make sure the player knows. The technique of Asking Questions (See Advice for Gamesmasters) can be extremely useful here, in terms of asking a question of what something is like, and then telling them it’s like something else entirely. “You march through this grove, full of fauna. Hey, Fallen Player, tell me about how flowers smell” “<player answers>” “Well, you can’t smell that any more. All you can smell is the scents of your friends, and the pulse in their wrists.” Subvert. Make being dead truly live.

SECOND DEATH The sheet does not tell the player what dying when already playing as a Fallen means, but hints that it’s bad. It is bad. For each death as a Fallen, the persona slips further and further away. They die, and resurrect at the end of the encounter, with one lost statistic point. If they die again, they lose two statistic points, then three and so on. This is at the Gamesmaster’s choice. Reduce all stats to one before you reduce anything to zero. If a player reaches zero, they become a mindless creature. They can carry on playing, but they’re really a passenger that’s pushed around or carried. If any statistic is one and the player returns to the real world, they suffer a permanent ailment and impediment, which should be worked into the conclusion. If they’re still zero and they’re somehow brought back to the real world, their persona will be either physically (if Strength, Dexterity or Constitution) or mentally (Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma) dead. Bleak Bleak Bleak. RECOVERING FALLEN Bar the method described on the sheet of intra-party fratricide, the players may wish to pursue other methods for returning people to life from Fallen. The more sessions the game lasts, the more you’ll need to do this.

In terms of options inside the party, the Godbinder’s deities could possibly help – but are unlikely to do so without a good reason, which means a quest. A Neo with sufficient gold, perhaps. The Master’s Cheating ability is also an option, if the Master could be persuaded. The key thing in all of these is that the Fallen rules are written to demand sacrifice – a Fallen kills someone and takes their life, and the victim (willing or otherwise) becomes a new Fallen. As such, no matter what mechanic, a meaningful sacrifice for a player may be called for. Giving up parts of the body, parts of their memory and so on. A Godbinder is likely to be aware of this. A Master using a Cheat Token is aware that it’s unlikely to be as simple as that – the cheats have limitations. Bringing a Fallen back, only for them to become a Fallen again before they leave the dimension, for example. Perhaps being left behind, as it’s too late. Or the Master actually becomes Fallen due to making the wish, perhaps also not realising. It needs a cost. It also needs work. Equally, powerful GM-controlled characters could perform the task – something which obviously includes the Godbinder’s gods. They could ask for player sacrifice, or questionable activities inside the world itself. What are you willing to do to get a friend back? The relative ease or difficulty of returning a Fallen to life through any other method speaks to the tone of the game you wish. The harder it is, the more likely players will be left behind by their party who choose to return to existence OR a player murders another player to stop being Fallen. Either way –

and the latter automatically includes the former – the darker the ending will be. There is an exception: in a game with a pure antagonistic Master, the “Fallen murders the Master to return to life” tends to come across as a just ending. Dark, sure, but not abyssal bleak. If you want a lighter tone, a GM-controlled character (such as a god) offering a simpler quest to return them to life is a good solution. If you want a darker tone, the quests should be just as dark as the murder-your-friends method. In fact, possibly identical – a god insisting the Master is murdered is a good one, in that it moves the dilemma from the Fallen character to the whole party. Whether the god reincarnates the Fallen player before or after the task is done is a matter of style. It perhaps goes without saying that if the Players try to cheat the gods and not perform the task, the once-Fallen character will return to being Fallen as the others leave, trapping them in Die forever. Of course, I say the above makes it dark. For some groups I’m sure the gleeful inter-party murder is embraced with nary a care for the consequences. In which case, you should go and buy Paranoia, as your players would love it, and your Friend The Computer needs the money. Player Fallen can be hacked by a determined Neo to immobilise them. This is a useful leash. They can also be influenced by Dictators. FALLEN SHEETS There’s one sheet in the PDF. You may want to print a couple of them if you think it’s going to get messy. In reality,

people can share. Let’s spare mother nature our awful yoke. NON-PLAYER FALLEN Nothing gets resurrected if a non-player Fallen kills a player. All the other Fallen

are too far gone. They’re over the event horizon and can’t find their way back, and are trapped with their terrible hunger. Talking of a terrible hunger, I’m feeling peckish. Let’s have a snack before the next section.

This is broad advice for anyone running this game. There’s some more in the Arcana, along with the weirdo rules.

SAFETY TOOLS This is a game and a nice time. Let’s keep it that way. This is a brief overview of various ways to make the game safer. The core basics have been included in the text, but are repeated here for ease of access. All these are ideas from the RPG community, none of which are mine – google them up and nose. THE X-CARD As conceived by John Stavropoulos, this is one (or more) cards with an “X” drawn on it, placed on the table. If any player (including the GM) touches it, it means they are uncomfortable with the current topic or subject and we should change direction. It does not mean asking questions about what the element is, or naming it, though some people will say (“This is too violent for me”). X-card can be activated for any reason, even minor ones (characters with names who have bad connections for a player is a good example – X-card does not mean someone has fucked up. It means someone is bothered.). The original documentation is here: http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg You should also be aware as a GM to watch players. Not all players will remember the X-card, especially if stressed. You can also use the X-card, even if you said it. Don’t play DIE without the X-card any more than you would drive a car without

brakes. DIE has the potential to go anywhere, and that includes bad places. Don’t drive off the cliff. The X-card is the popular version of this concept, but there’s other more sophisticated ones which allow more nuanced expression. Have a look at the Script Change Toolbox (https://briebeau.itch.io/script-change) or Safety Flowers (https://breakoutcon.com/extras/safety-tools/) for more complicated versions of the same ideas. RATINGS AND GENRE This is in the opening discussion with the players, and gives broad guidelines for the sort of content which will be included. It’s a discussion of elements that may be in the game – inter-group conflict, for example – and is also is meant to warn players the game may go that way, which makes it less possibly destabilising when it does. It also allows groups who really don’t want to do that to angle away from it. VEILS AND LINES A concept I believe introduced by Ron Edwards in Sex & Sorcery, this is formalising content that can or cannot be the game. Lines are things which simply you don’t do. Veils are things which you include, but cut away from. One of my usual Lines is that I don’t include racial slurs or sexual violence. One of my usual Veils is explicit sex

acts. Don’t include the former at all. Cut to black for the latter. I’ve found doing this live on the table is difficult. You may wish to introduce the concept of Veils and Lines at the end of the first session, and then say you’ll make a shared document, and ask people to add anything they want as a Line or Veil to it. And clearly, make it anonymous. BLEED It’s less a tool, and more something you need to be aware of. Games exist in a magic circle – so you are not the persona you play. If I stab and kill you in game, it’s not because of my personal enmity to you – it’s my persona’s personal enmity to you. Bleed is what happens when the emotion of one crosses into the other. This is neither a good nor bad thing – some people actively chase bleed to process, play with or experience intense emotions. However others – especially those new to the form who had no idea

that this could happen – may find it too much for them, at least initially. Being aware of how emotionally agitated someone is key – X-cards exist for a reason, and you can always suggest (or call for) a break. AFTERCARE As mentioned earlier, this is a phrase lifted from the S&M community, and is about leaving room to emotionally support people and let them recover. I would advise for some time after a game to just unpack with one another, talk about what got to them and their feelings about what occurred. This is another good reason to plan so your session does not run to the time someone has to run for a train. If someone has already left, check in on them as soon as possible. As I said – this is the tip of iceberg, but it’s been put first in this section, even in this form, because it is important.

ALTERNATIVE MODES OF PLAY Here’s some thoughts on other ways of playing. ONLINE PLAY DIE spends a lot of time on the physical fetishism of objects, especially dice. As such, there’s obvious problems in terms of running it online. Firstly, it’s worth spending some time to think of ways to tweak the scenario to suit the fact you’re all distributed all over the world. Maybe the group hasn’t actually all got together in real life, but are still playing online. You’ll have to change the room the personas get transported to, but bar that, there’s few changes required. In terms of actually running it, there’s two main ways that groups work… 1) Real-world dice rolled locally and

everyone trusts everyone to be honest

2) computer dice at a shared source 1) Real World Dice This is the easiest one to fit into DIE, as it just involves working out alternate approaches. Obviously, you can’t pass a dice to the player. Instead, you should check they have their own set of dice, and ensure they have them to hand. Then tweak the style of speaking like so… “Take your DX. It’s a DX like any other. Close your hand. Concentrate. Now, open your hand. This DX? It’s the only DX in our game. It’s yours.”

It may be especially useful to decide who gets what archetype before the game even starts, to make sure they have the right dice. I’m the sort of fancy person who may actually mail each character a package, with a “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL I TELL YOU” sticker on it. That’s me. For abilities where the dice is taken away from a player, encourage each player to have a bag or a cup where they can put their dice, and symbolically remove it from. For passing to another player, place in the bag/cup and then just make a note. For passing players sheets like the Fallen, just mail it to them at an apposite moment. The Fallen is not a sheet that needs to be printed. In short: muddle through. 2) Computer Dice Even if you do all the rolling digitally, I would try to give each player access to a physical version of their class dice, even if they never actually roll it. As a prop for them to hold, it’s worth holding, and various classes use the dice in a non-rolling way. To play with no dice at all, you’ll have to tweak some of the key statements. For example, instead of handing out dice, fetishize the mailing of the character sheet. “You are a [Name of Class]. You are the only [name of class in this whole game]. You are special, [Name of Class].”

THE SINGLE SESSION I originally thought this Beta would be for a game that’d happily play in a single evening. Wrong, I was. That persona creation and character generation can balloon risks leaving no actual time to go on the real adventure. Plus a time gap between the mostly standardized first session and a second session whose encounters are entirely based upon the personas’ quirks mean you have time to sit back and think about what may be fun. The disadvantage to running two sessions is that players will have forgotten bits of their persona or character between the games but, on the balance, I think at least two sessions sits easier. This isn't necessary, however. If you are confident enough to improvise encounters based on the above, you can play in one longer session. Go ahead and do it. It's how I did all the first playtests of the game. To trim the content slightly to fit more easily into the session, you may consider the following... 1. Give more firm guidance to start

Persona Generation. Give a setting, how each player knows each other and suggest a key character in the group. It's easier to improvise ideas when given the specific prompt of “you're the old school computer club” than “you were friends at school”.

2. Use pre-generated characters. As you hand out the dice, hand out a character sheet with the abilities already chosen. The disadvantage here is that it will reduce the time with the players playing their

persona in real life, so give less chance for people to establish themselves in “reality”.

3. Use the Light versions of the second sheets.

4. Cut the number of encounters before the conclusion. Two encounters plus the first confrontation against the Fallen is a good number. You can always add another one if it’s running short.

5. Be very aware of how much time you have to play, and ensure you leave enough time for the final encounter and the epilogue. I would say that if there's an hour left of the session, you should be thinking of moving to the final encounter. Don't be afraid to bring the final encounter to the players if time is pressing. The Master can come and try and finish them off.

It's also worth noting that many of the above can be used in a two-session game, especially suggestion 5. THE HYPER CURTAILED SESSION If you want to, you can really cut this baby short. Persona generation, character generation, fight against the Fallen and then straight onto the final confrontation with the Master. I’ve played it in that format, and it still works either as a big battle or actually sitting down and having a serious conversation about family issues that have led to their estrangement and/or being kidnapped to a bleak fantasy world. I have a few ideas for other quick-start, limited planning versions of DIE down the line too. Beta, remember. Beta.

PLAYING WITH MULTIPLES OF THE SAME CLASS (aka "THE HIGHLANDER VARIANT") As standard, each player has a different dice. There is no more than one Neo, Emotion Knight, etc. This is to feed into the world, increase the importance of the dice fetishization and player individuality. After all, each class can be personalised in radical ways. However... If you want to play with multiple players of each class, simply do so. Do not change the actual ritual when distributed. Say there is only one of this dice, despite the fact another player clearly has one. See where it goes. Can both be right? Is one wrong? The name of this variant may give a clue to where I suspect the story will end up going. This variant is really me just thinking of a party full of Emotion Knights, each with a different emotion, running around like a murderous version of Pixar's Inside Out. This is also the solution if you want to try and play a game with more than the recommended number of players. THE CAMPAIGN “BUT I DON'T WANT TO RUN THIS AS A ONE-OFF!” you say, in capitals. Hey! While written as a single scenario, it can be run longer. It's not as if I can stop you. If we develop this from the Beta, clearly this mode of play is something we’d want to do. In the meantime, here’s some rule-of-thumb tactics for improvising

advancement. I’d suggest letting each player choose one new ability from their sheet for their character for every adventure. I would advise against being able to increase statistics. I would also consider starting characters with less choices and a lower statline if you really want to run a long campaign. Players are already extremely powerful in basic DIE. (For example, you could try starting the Dictator with one emotion, the Godbinder with one god, the Neo with one piece of equipment, the Emotion Knight with a cap on what level of sword attacks they can use, and the Fool without some of the ability to hand over their dice to the GM. Start the players with one four stat and one three stat too. I say, off the top of my head.) Also note that if running a long campaign, the present system deliberately leads towards relatively swift player death. You will likely use other methods to bring people back to life than the basic ‘eating another player’ – or make player death rarer. The easiest way to do that would be to avoid any instant death in any normal combat situations, and characters only die if not revived by the end of the combat. (They should die in some obvious “Oh, no, that person is dead” moment. Like being eaten by a dragon and then pooped out the other end.) I will mention one mechanic which I’m playing around with, which is a third sort of damage – as well as Guard and Health there are Hero points. Guard regenerates every combat. Health only regenerate when a character is healed. Hero points are a resource which includes the increased ability to survive chaos that True Heroes have. If you add

something like levels, for every level, gain a Hero point. Hero Points are lost after Guard but before Health, and only regenerate between sessions. You could try it so that Hero Points are lost only when you would lose the last point of Health, meaning they extend your “nearly dead” period rather than your “totally healthy” period. This is entirely unplaytested, I stress. Finally, if you wish to run this as a campaign, you'll have to bear in mind not to bring the character's interactions to the boil until the final session. If the party decide to go their separate ways early in the story, the game will effectively break. In the full edition, we'll have some helpful approaches to make the game operate even when the characters do go their separate ways. But for now, of if you go further than one-offs or very short campaigns, you're basically on your own. Good luck. Do tell me how you get on. MAKING THE PERSONAS NOT OLD FRIENDS GETTING BACK TOGETHER This Beta has a standard scenario of old gaming friends getting together. If your players seem particularly excited about trying something else, you can try it. In a real way, the possibilities are basically endless. For example: a playtest in a games company; a training exercise at work; an old people's home; a pick-up game at a con; group therapy; astronauts aboard a space station; Mad-Max-style survivors in the ruins of civilization; Roman centurions on Hadrian's Wall circa 100AD.

I wouldn't necessarily jump to the idea that a weird situation is in any way better. The more mundane the real-world setting, the more credible the resulting drama in the game will be when you put them in an unusual place. Playing cave people dealing with a modern fantasy world maybe an interesting role-playing challenge, but I suspect it’s one which is best for people who are already familiar with DIE. It’s also one which is gimmickier and distances us from the reality of the scenario. For this playtest, I'd strongly suggest keeping to a mundane setting even if you're not old friends, but – hey – it's your game. I would be particularly careful about making them all strangers. Personas who don’t know or care about each other will tend to lead towards a flat experience. Most importantly, if none of the personas had a previous fantasy gaming experience, the adventure generation described in this document will not work for the group. You’ll have to use some of the alternative world generation tactics from the Arcana. YOUR GAME SUCKS! DON’T WANNA PLAY YOUR GAME! There’s a lot of ideas in DIE. If you want to lift them and run your own game with another system, go knock yourself out. A persona design stage, followed by character creation in whatever system of your choice, followed by being transformed into those characters? That sounds like a fun time to me. Go knock. Be happy. I won’t mind.

ENCOURAGING (AND LISTENING TO) PLAYERS DIE is a role-playing game which presents a difficult role-playing problem. You’re playing a role-playing game where someone is playing a role-playing game. That’s easy to get you confused, especially with new players who may be having trouble with the whole “pretend” thing anyway. Here’s some ways to make it simpler. Firstly, make it clear that when they are transported to Die and are then transformed into a fantasy warrior, they are still their persona. That Susana the Library Clerk is now an eight-foot barbarian warrior with a sword that’s telling her to murder doesn’t change the fact that she’s still Susana. She’s just Susana with a whole lot of different abilities, in a completely different body. I have used the “mecha suit” metaphor. You are the person you always were. You’re just in this enormously powerful body. As such, encourage them to react as they think their persona would. Listen to a player’s decisions, and respond to them. Some personas, if threatened by a monster and now have a huge sword, are going to use the sword. That means they’re going to lean into this heroic fantasy character. They probably want to give a straight-up fight. Other people, who are just as powerful abstractly, will say “I’m a fucking librarian and they are scary monsters. I’m clearly going to run away.” That tells you as the GM they want a different sort of experience, and you should listen to that too. They

probably want a chase sequence, which could either end up with them embracing their abilities or some other manner of escape. Don’t punish a player for making honest, interesting choices. Expect to have a mix – many games have some characters who are virtually catatonic in shock, while others are treating the whole thing as a literal videogame. The interaction between these two sorts of characters can be golden. Seen the recent remake of Jumanji? I describe DIE in interviews as “goth Jumanji” and while all the bleak horror that implies is my personal preferred mode of play for DIE, it’s not the only one. You can completely run DIE as a comedy game if you want, and make it all about the comic juxtaposition between the people in the real world and their awesome (or limited) new forms. But even literal Jumanji could have turned into a heart-breaking thing if you let players at it. Maybe Geek Boy wants to be the Rock so badly that he murders his peers to stay that way? That’s the DIE way. A regular thing, especially for new players, is to look down at their character sheet to see what ability to use. Try to discourage this. I regularly ask players to “Look up at the fiction, not down at your sheet.” Listen to the situation the GM and players are describing, and answer honestly what you think you should do. Always trying to find something clever to do almost always ends up weakening the fiction. For example, a monster is about to come into the room you’re in. You could look

down on your sheet and work out a whole thing about bartering with a god to create an ice wall or anything else. And maybe that’s fun. But the “I shut the fucking door” is the response which rings truest, to me.

Doing the obvious thing makes the world realer, and gives people solid dramatic situations to build on.

PLAYERS PLAYING AS PERSONAS

There is a tension in DIE’s design which is difficult to circumvent. In practice, your group will find their own way. The problem is the transition from the real world to Die. Before that, we move from all players (including the Master) being in character with everything they do, to the Master taking a more traditional Gamesmaster role, providing narrative. Some players instinctively mimic the Master’s choice, and start playing in a more traditional way, treating their character more like a playing piece, moving between speaking as their character and narrating their character from the outside, leaning towards the latter. Others go the other way, and carry on playing their persona who is controlling their character. There isn’t a right option here. At least, at the moment, I don’t think there’s a right option. A group should find its own rhythm. The only problem with players choosing to stay in persona at all times is information flow towards the Master. The game is reliant on the Master (and, in fact, the other players) knowing what a persona is really going through, so they can tailor their choices towards serving that story. If a player is in character as the persona at all time, it

means they will likely be lying, because people lie. The solution is to regularly mine for information, especially when you suspect a persona is acting contrary to their desires. A question structure which is effective is one which separates the player from the persona. For example, “PLAYER NAME, how is PERSONA NAME really feeling right now?” That prompts the answer you’re looking for. Doing it will also put the idea into players’ heads, and they’ll be more likely to signal where their actions differ from their persona’s actual feelings.

For example, in this group Bertha is playing Antony. Players are about to enter a cave consisting of spiders with the face of Antony’s teenage bully on.

GM: So, everyone want to continue? Everyone else: Hell yeah! Bertha: Yeah, okay. I’m with you guys. GM: Bertha – how is Antony actually feeling right now? Bertha: Utterly terrified. He’s just become an arachnophobe too, but he’s always been vulnerable to peer pressure so is going along. GM: Great. Onwards. <GM makes note, and plans to bring Antony’s peer-pressure into it again later…>

PREMISE REJECTION

This is a concept I first heard codified by Robin D. Laws, specifically in his podcast with Kenneth Hite: Robin and Ken Talk about Stuff. Google and go listen.

Premise rejection is when a player (or the whole group) rejects the reason why they’re playing the game. Imagine the council in Rivendell in Lord of the Rings where everyone’s meeting to decide what to do about the ring of Sauron, and the players all come down hard on (at best) using this evil artefact as a cock ring and (at worst) just deciding to leave the ring here and go back to Hobbiton to hopefully sexytimes with Rosie.

It’s something all games have the possibility of, based upon a lack of what is described as “buy in”. Buy in is basically the players not agreeing (or understanding) why they’re there. If you’re playing a horror game, and you run away from the scary mansion, you are rejecting the premise. If you’re playing a game of heroic adventure and you run away from the heroic adventure, you’re rejecting the premise.

There is a lot about DIE’s design which tries to mitigate this. The stuff at the start where you say broadly what the game is? That’s meant to explain to people what we’re here to do. While dropping someone into a fantasy world and let them act however they wish may seem to be a recipe for players being awkward, there is actually only one moment in DIE when player rejection matters. It’s the section in the persona-playing section where a persona wishes to leave the table. Clearly, someone just wanting to walk out of the game is a problem, which is why I floated some

ideas about what to do if someone does. In practice, a player who bails at this point is either someone who wants to detonate games or an experienced player who is trying to play with the limitations of the game. For the former, there’s nothing you can do. For the latter, showing you’re open to them seeing how long the leash is is fine.

However, once the players are actually inside the realm of Die, there’s basically very little they can do which counts as premise rejection. What’s interesting is that players may believe they are rejecting the premise when in fact premise rejection in many forms is 100% part of the game. The most common one is “This is not real. I will not act like it’s real.”

The solution comes from the story you’ve set up. Follow the rules as set up in the world. Players who don’t grab the dice have 2 in all statistics. Players who don’t engage with threats are killed, and become Fallen. Players who die repeatedly become Fallen repeatedly, and have their strength and will slip away.

They key thing is to not make this appear vindictive. It’s neutral. It’s just stuff that’s happening, which is interesting. A player acting like the universe isn’t real will have to experience the horror of a universe that has no interest in their solipsism. This is a really interesting story. How can they find their way back from that? Well, that’s also in the “Running The Fallen” section, right?

However, there’s two ways in which premise rejection happens – either part of the party or the whole of the party.

If part of the party rejects the premise in some way, and the other part goes on an adventure, you have part of the group who are in some ways defenceless. Do a scene with the main group, and then skip back to the dissenters. Now, they’re either not doing anything, or not taking the magical abilities we’ve offered them. Die is a hostile place. Even if the Master is friendly, the Grandmaster who is above all our bullshit isn’t. All manner of awful stuff can happen, which likely kills them, which likely makes them become Fallen (with all the descriptions of physical horror as part of that) and gives them a nod.

Some players who are now cybernetic zombies will likely try to catch up to the party. They do so, and reenter the main story. If they continue not wanting to be anything… well, I’d ask them if they want to see how this ends up. If they do, tell them to go play videogames and you’ll shout at the climax where you can reintegrate them. If not, tell them to go home. I’d never invite them to play a game again.

Second is absolute premise rejection by everyone – where the party just refuses to engage with what you’ve thrown upon them, and head off and do their own thing.

This is actually the easier one. The players are in a world controlled (to some degree) by their antagonist. Respond to what they want to do, but be aware that your Master is there. You will likely want to make your Master more a pure antagonist who wishes the party

ill, and have him send problems at the heroes (either from in-world situations or using his powers). This makes it a “It’s him or us” situation, and if the players come to the Master, we get the conclusion that way. If not, the Master comes to them, which does the same (based on the same concepts of escalation as described in the earlier rules – as in, pushing towards a final decision from the group). Equally, there is the core problem of the world they’re in – they either all go home, or all stay, and if they don’t come to a decision, the world ends. Eventually, if they do nothing, they’re all going to die.

(And in the game!)

If you really desperately want the Master to remain sympathetic, remember Die itself is hostile and there’s always the Grandmaster. Die itself wants players dead. Die likes Fallen.

In a real way, the world is a closed circuit. Players do things. Reactions happen. See how the players respond to the reactions. Onwards. At the absolute worse, all the players will end up as Fallen and so be trapped in Die forever.

And the story about how a group of gamers get lost forever in their fantasies is 100% a story.

TL; DR: there is no premise rejection when all their rejections are part of the premise.

WORLDBUILDING AND EFFECT ON THE FINAL DECISION

To state the obvious: the nature of the world you visit highly skews the odds on the final decision.

The weirder you make the setting, the more likely players are to leave. Even if they’re going to rule it now, living in a hellish dimension full of warped elements is not something that’s attractive. The exception here is if they

get to rework it, somehow. Even then, their whole experience being in the weird, warped world is not likely to tempt them.

The more “normal” you make the setting (and the more the Master is clearly the villain of the world, and the world would be fine without it) the more likely you push someone into wanting to stay.

THE OBVIOUS THING ABOUT LABYRINTH SOME OF YOU MAY HAVE MISSED This risks patronising some of you, but bear with me. It's a useful example if you know it already. It’s about Sarah, a dreamy girl on the edge of young adulthood, rebelling against parental authority who accidentally gets her kid brother kidnapped by the Goblin King. She enters his realm, traverses a labyrinth full of weird stuff which forms a series of challenges. She eventually overcomes them, and triumphs, entering adulthood while still holding onto the love of all this fantasy. DIE is darker than Labyrinth, but the point of the story structure (and many story structures like it) remains the same. You go to fantasy to discover something about yourself and return understanding yourself better. Labyrinth is definitely one worth rewatching

while thinking about DIE, or fantasy generally. Hell, the Goblin King is a pretty close analogue to the role the Master plays in DIE. Anyway – the obvious thing. It's relevant for DIE. All the things Sarah meets during her travels in the labyrinth are the toys in her bedroom. Literally. Everything she meets we see in her bedroom beforehand. They are cultural detritus which the story transforms into the dressing of the mythic challenges. They are pop culture turned into whimsical horror set dressing. In short: look for the toys in the persona's bedroom.

DIE, NARRATIVE RPGS AND THE MARSHMALLOW MAN RULE I’ll save most of my worst rambling for the Arcana, but let’s sign off with this. I’d argue the major mode of narrative RPGs at the moment involves players influencing the game world’s creation directly. As in, rather than the GM creating the world the player moves through, the players and the GM collaborate in some way to create the details of the reality, not just the actions of the players’ characters in an environment. This operates across a whole world of scales. For example, in an early minor way foreshadowing this, Hong Kong Cinema combat game Feng Shui encouraged players to invent items to use mid-combat. So, if the fight is in the bar, players may say throw someone into a one-armed bandit sending coins flying everywhere. Until the player invented it, there was no one-armed bandit – the responsibility is devolved from the GM to the players. It’s a device to add to the freewheeling action-setpiece of the genre it describes. More narrative games give the players even more power; moments where they can get to dictate things. For example, to use a trad RPG setting, if the players discover a nest of orcs, in a traditional game, the players would assume the GM has a map, and the details of who’s in there and why. In a game of Dungeon World or similar, there may be a moment when the GM asks “the orcs have captured someone who you know from

childhood. Who are they? Tell me about them.” Clearly, the examples are coarse, and even the traddest of RPGs often have some elements of the player-as-world-generators (How many long character bios did we write in the 1980s?) but the point is there. Players get to add important elements to the setting and guide the narrative in meaningful and powerful ways. The argument is that if the players have made the world, it means more to them. These games are great. Frankly, most of the games I play are these sorts of games. DIE doesn’t tend to work like this. At least, not always. The players have lots of room to create things at the persona level. They can create almost everything about themselves and their identity. And, as we’ve talked about, this will then be interpreted by the GM to create situations to move or horrify the player. This principle is a useful one to consider throughout DIE. The players have given the GM something… but they don’t know how it will turn out, or what it’s for. This is designed to create a level of fear of what could happen, but also mystery. You simply don’t know what the consequences of some actions will be, and that is both terrifying, but also a delight. While the majority of these are based around persona generation, or the open-

ended persona generation above – the equivalent of “Tell me about your bully from childhood” “<Player gives details from the character>” “Well, this monster that just walked in the room looks like that guy” – it doesn’t have to be just that. I encourage using the principle widely. Listen to the players. Do something with what they give you. For example, to use a playful example, I once asked the players to name a work of art. They named the awesome ‘Truth Climbs Out Of Her Well’. At which point, I introduce a Godzilla-sized Truth Climbs Out Of Her Well into the game. Point being, the players have huge power – but the response is unpredictable. They know whatever choice they make, it will be fed into the game in some way out of their control… But it will certainly impact it. They can’t avoid it. And we think of the Ghostbusters, at the end of the original movie, told to choose the shape of the destroyer of the planet. They try to avoid thinking of anything, but Ray thinks of the Marshmallow Man, and a hundred tonnes of confectionery is going to fuck up New York. That is a very DIE moment.

And it’s lucky that Ray made that choice, as I always thought that their attempt to cheat the system was clearly doomed. If they think of nothing, I dare say that it’s not that the world wouldn’t end… it would be that an Evil Nothingness would consume everyone. And that’s a damn sight harder to fight than a Marshmallow man.

For all the fun and power in being able to make stuff up in a narrative RPG, there is a genuine magic to a player saying what they want to do and the GM leaning over and telling them what happened. There is a verisimilitude to it being out of your control – which is what most narrative games use the dice for. Being listened to. Being cared for. Because really? The GM as Master isn't true. The GM is a servant. They are attentively acting as a player’s senses, and every time they do so, they are deeply submissive. Each description is a little love letter, written directly to the player. There is a play to each player’s ego here, and even when describing the worst things, this is for them. Once again, we return to the Goblin King: “I have done it all for you.” Have fun. Kieron Gillen London

GAMEOGRAPHY I played a lot of games in the last few years, for the writing of DIE – both the comic and the game. Frankly, all of them influenced this RPG, indirectly or directly. At the absolute least, doing it brought a sharp focus on how I play a game, what I like and what I don’t. But these are ones I can trace specific elements to. That I can remember. There’s probably more. Paranoia The first RPG I ever played as a teenager which made me realise that game design, in all its part, could be art. Also, that art includes slapstick. The idea that intra-party aggression, if framed correctly to serve a higher aesthetic purpose, could be a feature not a bug starts here. Dungeon World/Apocalypse World I think it’s fair to call D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World the single most influential RPG of the 10s, creating its own narrative indie sub-genre. In terms of direct influence Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel’s Dungeon World – a narrative RPG that tries to capture the idea of how D&D feels to play – is the one you can see most finger prints on. DIE has little mechanically in common with either game, but DIE owes a huge amount to its grammar, visual design and especially how the Powered by Apocalypse games use playbooks. Monsterhearts 2 Talking of Apocalypse World… Avery Adler’s Monster Hearts 2 is a game of sexy queer teenage angsty monsters, and a metaphor run gloriously rampant. I always say, Ginger Snaps the RPG. DIE doesn’t mechanise relationships like Monsterhearts does for aesthetic

reasons, but I can’t say I wasn’t tempted. If you’re thinking of questions like “How to play responsibly” this slim, elegant and brilliant tome is just wonderful. For the record, if you were to try and run a WicDiv RPG, this is your choice. Alas Vegas A game which, for some reason, I keep on thinking is called Alan Vegas. Father of indie-RPG’s James Wallis’ latest project, a personal and deeply weird game of Lynch-in-Vegas amnesiac horror. The main influence was tonal – in that, it’s such a charismatic, argumentative manual where the writer is rejecting the neutral, service-industry tone of many indie-RPGs in favour of just coming in big and forwarding itself as an active collaborator in the game. DIE isn’t anywhere near that far, but as much as Paranoia, this was a tonal influence in how the rules could be expressed. When the Dark Is Gone Not actually an influence on DIE itself, but working an interesting parallel evolution. Becky Annison’s game (collected in Pelgrane Press’ Seven Wonders anthology) has all the players as a therapy group of adults, looking back at their time as teenagers who went to a fantasy world. If you’re interested in the emotional terrain that DIE explores, and want to try something that’s away from traditional D&D, you really should look at this. M.E.R.P.S. The ICE Middle-earth RPG, and the first thing I ever played. Generally speaking, whenever I made a dumb, instinctive decision when designing DIE it’s harked back to some formative thing I picked up from this. I would never play this game in 2019, but I simultaneously can’t escape it. How can I not mention it?

Fiasco Jason Morningstar’s seminal narrative storytelling game is, to use the idiom of the 1980s games press, a Coen-brothers-’em-up. I’ve played a lot of narrative games since, but Fiasco is what made me realise I could start a game like I start DIE. It wouldn’t surprise me if a later edition has more mechanised and guided group-generation options either. Halo Invented the “shield and health” dual-health system in videogames, which is a clear influence on the damage system in DIE. The mechanic meant that rather than fights either being entirely safe (when your health is high) or entirely deadly (when your health is low) it pushed all fights towards that razor edge. Blades in the Dark John Harper’s excellent game of magic-punk Peaky Blinders gang warfare. It’s a fascinating game – one of the most interesting on this list – but the influence is less in the game, and more how it teaches its rules. It’s a hell of a manual, and worth unpacking. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (3rd Edition) The system which grew into Fantasy Flight’s current Genesys system started here, and uses a whole mass of custom dice to create narrative effects. I always knew that DIE would run off a dice pool system (not least because dice pools were the new hotness in 1991 when Sol would have abstractly made the game)

but “reading” a pool of dice for more information than just “Success/Not success” led to the Special rules in DIE. Legend/Lords of Chaos Two RPG/strategy games with spell construction systems which are the clear influence for DIE’s magic rules. PLAYTESTERS Mink ette, Abigail Brady, Alex Sarrl, Will Cornish, Chrissy Williams, Laurie Penny, Claire Gamble, Pablo Vazquez, Ellis Saxey, Daniel Nye Griffiths, Alex Paynter, Marta Maria Casetti, Mark Sable, Juliette Capra, Steve Lauterwasser, Stephanie Hans, Tia Vasiliou, Jody Houser, Taliesin Jaffe, Sarah Gordon, Adlai McCook, Alex Spencer, Alex Hern, Ram V, Dan Watters, Tom Armitage, Sarah Jaffe, Dave Aldhouse, Duncan Thomas, Valeria Ragni. Rachel Nations, Jack Tang-Cockerill!, Henry White, Aaron Silverman, Cory Hodge, Ben "Books" Schwartz, Carrie Marx, Jenni Hill, Elizabeth Sandifer, Penn Wiggins, Anna Wiggins, Nassira Nicola, Emily Stewart, Marieke Nijkamp, Francesca Zappia, Rebecca Coffindaffer, John Denning, Kevin Grubb, Claire Salant, Wright Rickman, Josh Kaufman, Rocky, Chad Owen, Buddy Pollack, Ella Moran, Matthew Lettini, Tyler Cooke, Michael Rathbone, Anne Perry, Jared Shurin, Fleur Clarke, Andrew Griffin. Goose the Cat. SPECIAL THANKS TO… Mink ette, Jenni Hill, Ray Fawkes, Rian Hughes, Chrissy Williams, Mark Sable