DIE: A ROLE-PLAYING GAME V1.1 ARCANA KIERON GILLEN ©2019 ART BY STEPHANIE HANS COVER DESIGN BY RIAN HUGHES (This update with typos corrected December 2020) 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. ([email protected]) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1) ALTERNATIVE WORLD GENERATION METHODS 2) PRE-GENERATED SCENARIOS 3) ACTUAL EXAMPLE GAMES 4) EXPERIMENTAL RULES 5) ESSAYS INTRODUCTION Welcome to the Arcana. Make yourself comfortable. No, wait, not that comfortable. Put that back on, this minute. This is a respectable game manual. You’ll have noticed that the DIE Beta is a considerable beast. That makes it intimidating. It was even more intimidating when this bunch of stuff was included too. That’s why I removed it, you silly goose. There’re basically five sorts of “things” in the Arcana, helpfully arranged into numbered sections. Firstly, there’s alternate world-building and scenarios. The DIE Beta suggests a single set scenario – people who played an RPG as younger people getting back together and then getting sucked into a warped version of their teenage D&D game. This was chosen as it is a strong enough structure to work for any group you throw into it – plus the simple fact that kids getting back together as adults is the same structure the comic uses. This section gives my notes for completely different ways of running DIE – both in terms of the groups of people, and the worlds you drop them into. These are often considerably more demanding on a Master’s planning and/or improv skills, as you’re on your own a lot more. Still – there’s lots of fun stuff in here, which can be added to literally any game of DIE. There’s even one way which makes things simpler. Secondly, I’ve also included a handful of pre-generated non-traditional DIE scenarios, both of which can work as a single-session game, or as a prompt for a larger one. If you’re thinking of writing a DIE scenario for someone else to run or even making a more formal set of notes for yourself, these are likely a useful template to build from. One was originally in the backmatter for issue 7, but the others are new (and one is festive!). Thirdly, there’s additional worked examples of how various people have run DIE. If you’re still chewing over how a DIE game could go and what sort of prep you may wish to do, this is more grist for the mill. This is the Arcana at its most accessible – in fact, the only reason it’s not in the main text is that having five long examples of how DIE could run in the document could overwhelm a newcomer instead of helping them. Fourthly, we have some additional, slightly fiddly non-core rules. The most useful are probably the Minor Miracle generation, which are likely useful to a GM of a more technical bent. There’s a couple of other minor things. If there’s any future Arcana additions, this is likely where I’ll lob stuff for extra playtesting. Fifthly, we have some additional essays which I considered too self-indulgent or tangential to the main thrust of the DIE game, so I hide them here for the sort of people who read the Appendixes in Tolkien to find. This includes also some rough structural thoughts on how to generate an adventure. This was my first attempt to codify What An Adven ture Is, and trying to work out a way to give a hard structure for people to follow. When I found the core game (i.e. “Go to your old RPG World”) it felt extraneous. However, I wanted to get this in front of people to see if it’s of any use, and whether anything is worth integrating elsewhere. Feedback gratefully received. There are also the traditional designer notes because, as you may notice, I Can’t Shut Up. If you’re a newcomer and looking for more assistance, I’d suggest reading the third section, as it’s the one which is designed to be most helpful – and the second section for other examples of how to prepare for a game. The others are generally designed to try and destabilise your thinking, and get you to figure out what you find interesting. This is some of the weirdest stuff that is in DIE, and stuff which is most easily lifted to use in games elsewhere. Feel free to rip it to pieces and make it your own. Basically, this is me down the pub. After one drink, I’m fine, but at some point in the evening I’m going to start talking absolute nonsense and all we can do is pray that you still find it compelling. Thanks for reading. Kieron Gillen London Can I tell you a story? to run an adventure on. You generated the details of their teenage world by You know the way locales are generated asking questions during play, and then in the main rules? As in, “Just drop the deconstructing it. You made up personas into their teenage RPG world”? something to be nostalgic about, then Up until January 2019, that didn’t exist – you applied a darker lens. over a year into development and scarily close to the release of the Beta. Immediately, about 10,000 words of The most obvious idea in this whole different ways to generate worlds were bloody system and I hadn’t had it, until I no longer essential to the Beta. They was prompted by a playtest. This is, of were cut. course, one of the many reasons why we do playtests. They now follow here. This whole DIE ruleset is experimental, but what Before then I had a whole set of follows is the most experimental of it. different tactics for generating the It’s mainly of use if you choose to locale. Like, a bunch of them, and they generate a group who didn’t play RPGs all kind of work for different kinds of together – in other words, if you choose groups of personas. However, as fun as to go that way, you are wayyyy out of they were, they were also esoteric as all the safety bounds of the playtest. hell. Some would work for one group, but none would work for all groups, which But there’s other tactics to generate a mean it’s a bad thing to stick in a Beta locale. They’ve led to some of the most set of rules. fun DIE games I’ve run… but they also ask a lot more of the person running the Essentially all of them were much more game. The easiest way to use the based on extrapolating from players’ following is to add them as elements to obsessions. So a failed band ended up in the core DIE game you already know, to a horror version of the Reading music add weirdness to an already existing festival, and a group of workers at an IT standard fantasy world – for example, if company ended up in a hellish take on you’re in a traditional D&D castle, and actual office space we were running the open a door… and find yourself in your playtest in. A lot of games were set at persona’s teenage bedroom? That can cons, as a lot of playtests were at cons. be creepy and interesting. Then I hit a playtest where the group But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. didn’t actually go hyper-vivid, and just developed what the rules asked them to. I said in the main manual that the They were a group of people who played further encounters and world building RPGs at school, and then grew up. there weren’t a recipe, but rather a cupboard of ingredients and spices to I had no idea what world to drop them in, throw into a dish. This is the stuff you and then hit what is now the basic keep on the top shelf, as it’s so spicy. version of the game. As in, if you generate people who (at least mostly) A key idea here: you are running this played RPGs together, you can drop game. You are the keeper of this world. them into their old D&D world and get an I'm providing tools which are useful to interesting game with sufficient hooks you. Flexibility is absolutely key here. As are unpredictability and magic. The 1) THEY ENTER THEIR PRESENT players can see that there is some TABLETOP RPG WORLD meaning here – they can see you're actually clearly doing stuff, moving stuff I’ll put this here explicitly, to remind you from the (soon to be explained) Box of that it’s an option. The core DIE game Crap and similar... but they can't really rules describe a group getting back entirely understand it, not completely. together and getting dragged into their teenage RPG world.