“Making Your Own Sausage Is Awesome!” – A Talk With Kieron Gillen About The DIE RPG

In 1991 six teenagers sit down to play a RPG and end up trapped in a fantasy world. They fight, love, explore and do all the things you do when you play a RPG. Eventually the consequences of their actions become too much and they return home, scarred for life. One is left behind in the fantasy world, forever.

25 years after they escape, they have to go back. They’re more mature now, so surely things will go better. They don’t.

They’re still damaged people and the fantasy world throws their damage back at them, as they fight for their lives and their friendship. It’s a harrowing tale, with only a glimmer of hope at the center.

And now you can do it too!

Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ DIE ran from 2018 to 2021, winning many awards and even being nominated for a Hugo Award three times.

Alongside the comic, Gillen also wrote the RPG, which was released in a public beta alongside the first trade paperback and which Gillen has been updating ever since. And now it’s reached the point where it’s being turned into a proper release from renowned indie RPG publisher Rowan, Rook and Decard. It is currently fully funded on Kickstarter, beating its initial goal 10x.

I was fortunate enough to speak with Kieron over Discord about the comic, the RPG and the demystification and democratisation that’s central in his work.

—

Rasmus Lykke: You’ve described the DIE comic as “Goth Jumanji”. Is it the same description for the RPG or does the elevator pitch change?

Kieron Gillen: Hah. I think it’s certainly the first two words I say when describing either. The words after may change a bit, but it’s very much trying to show the same material in two forms.

Rasmus: Why make the RPG, aside from the obvious genre connections? What can be said about the theme(s) via the RPG, that you couldn’t cover in the comic?

Kieron: You haven’t quite said this, but it’s close to it. It’s easiest to imagine the RPG as a conversion of the comic, but it’s not really. They were developed simultaneously. For a while I was worried which was the tail and which was the dog – in the end, I realized it was less about turning the comic into the game and more the game and the comic being two lenses of examining DIE. As in, it has a reality outside of the work, and through the multiple viewpoints you gain a more complete picture. As a game, it speaks to some things. As a comic, it speaks to others. The medium is the message and all that.

It’s also telling that when developing the game and writing the comic, ideas bounced between them freely. It was never me trying to adapt one to another. I was trying to do the idea as well as I could in two separate forms. There’s lots of examples of ideas which originated in one, and then crossed over to the other. For example, the secret of the Fallen came from the game, not the comic. 

I mean, hating to lean into the quasi-mysticisim of the concept, this all feels a lot like a process of discovery.

Stepping back onto a simpler, personal level – coming off WicDiv [Ed. note: The Wicked + The Divine], one of the things I picked up was something the writer Leigh Alexander said to me . We’d just done the Magazine issue [Ed. note: The Wicked + The Divine #23], and she noted that my stuff is most interesting when it’s the stuff that only I could really do, based upon my specific skill mix. Which I laughed at, but then digested – like, the WicDiv issue was based on me knowing magazine design, playing text based RPGs in the 1990s, having the critic contacts to ask folks to do it, all the comic stuff, etc. It’s not completely unique, but it’s a pretty unusual mix. I decided whatever next, I’d try to do stuff where I can. So you get stuff like in Eternals where I’m hard coding name generators to make each Deviant names. And you get stuff like making a whole RPG from scratch, because why not? It’s the sort of thing you can do, so should.

Stepping back towards the RPG, there’s also stuff there which RPGs do – there’s a train of demystification and democratization in my work. It’s in Phonogram, it’s the punchline of WicDiv and all of that. It’s why I did all those writer notes. DIE RPG is me doing that, but more so. This is me telling you exactly how you create a story like DIE. You do this, add the elements you have made up, and it will delineate to a climax. Creativity is easy, and infinite and yours.

Rasmus: It’s interesting that you mention demystification and democratization, because I was going to ask you a few questions about formalism, which I think is connected. Is part of why you tend to experiment with form, due to making the work visible – to illuminate how “the sausage gets made”, so to speak – and thereby demystify it to a certain extent? Or is it more a personal interest in how the medium(s) work and how far you can push them? Or – I suspect more likely – both?

Kieron: I think part of that comes from just my critic brain, and coming to comics relatively late. I’m not a lifer. As such, my real appreciation of comics is coming from a brain which is already primed to tear stuff apart. Hence, formalism. Knowing what the gears do. And when you know how the Wizard of Oz does his tricks, it’s kind of your duty to share it.

(That’s not true. There’s no duty other than which you choose, but I clearly have.)

For me, when working in any medium. there’s always a key “why am I doing this in this medium?” One reason why I haven’t done a prose novel is that I haven’t felt an idea that feels like a novel in an interesting way. I have some good stories which would work well as novels – perhaps best as novels – but nothing which screams for it.

(This isn’t true. There’s a few I have, and maybe I’ll do it. I’m aware that in the same way Phonogram was my first comic, I’d want something similarly committed to be my first novel, or even novella. This is also how I’m wired.)

But getting back to the whole demystification side… Well, it shouldn’t be taken as just a “this is how the sausage is made.” It’s also “you can make sausage! You should make sausage! Making your own sausage is awesome!” When you’ve been around for a bit like I have, you do see those shapes in your work, and that’s one of mine. 

Back in the Phonogram days, I talked about the fantasy I loved being a transformative filter which you viewed the world through. I talked about how much I dug Parkour when I first heard about it – people in these French blocks, designed to keep people imprisoned, re-imagined as play parks. Teaching a way of seeing is transformative. That’s kind of what Phonogram was – why not think of music in this way? There’s nothing wrong with Fantasy being escapist, but I also like fantasy which reminds one that you can escape.

(Of course, that’s what DIE ends up being about in the comic, according to Ash. You learn stuff in the game, and bring it back to real life.)

Anyway – a long answer to say, an RPG does all that, but more so. DIE RPG is a whole lot of fun, but by the nature of the questions it asks the players, people have got some really interesting answers.

Rasmus: DIE definitely screams for an RPG, alongside the comic, to fully explore the themes. It makes a lot of sense that both were created simultaneously.

Building on what you said – about not working in a new medium, until you had an idea that screams for that medium – and the role formalism and demystification often plays in your work, I find that much of the more ‘straightforward’ formalism – examining the medium, playing with what it means to be a RPG or a comic – is found in the RPG, and not (as much) the comic. Was this a conscious choice?

Kieron: Less a conscious decision, but more than can only come through my own methodology. I tend to think DIE‘s sister book in my history is Phonogram – a book where I may try to evoke another medium, but it is completely NOT that medium. I lift some tricks, but it’s not deconstructing music in form, exactly. The RPG was always going to have more of that in the mix, through its nature. Like, Sol says in the comic about the game “this is Fantasy Watchmen” which is obviously tongue in cheek in the comic… but Sol is talking about the RPG, not the comic. 

The RPG is a sort of love song to a lot of forms of gaming. All the real world stuff is 100% me working in the rules-light (or free) narrative game tradition. The fantasy world stuff is stripped down “objective” world modelling. The thing I’m most interested in with DIE is how the two interact – the persona level stuff is less solid, existing only as narrative, but is about the real world. The character level stuff is arguably more solid, existing only as mechanics, but is about the fantasy world. There’s a whole mind/body Cartesian thing going on – the Persona are mind and the Characters are embodied.

At which point I imagine Grant [Howitt, from Rowan, Rook and Decard] throwing a brick at me. This is me just riffing on what is there, and I haven’t even touched the bit where we sneak in a quasi-Nordic LARP for 10 minutes…. but I’m aware this just makes it sound like the most wanky stuff imaginable, and in practice, it’s not that. This stuff underlies it, sure, but it just means the game asks interesting questions to the players, and the fact all players’ answers are valid, means the game hopefully has something for them. The game, at every level, is about “So… why do we play games?” and the “we” is “the people around the table.” By the end of the game, the players have come to some kind of agreement, possibly at sword point. 

I mean, the thing about RPG Watchmen as a goal? Above anything else, Watchmen is just a good read.

That’s what DIE had to do above anything else – I just wanted it to really reward and delight and surprise and shock people. And so far, that’s what people tell me about it. It’s addictive. I wish I had done it years ago.

Rasmus: That has been my experience, definitely. And it was why I wanted to run it, to surprise, delight, shock and reward my friends, with what I think is a pretty unique gaming experience. And it works for that, both as a fairly standard dungeon crawl, and as a more serious examination of who the players truly are and how they can use what they learn in the game, in their everyday lives.

Moving (for now) to slightly less complicated questions: I know you probably haven’t had many opportunities to play DIE as a player, but if you have, do you have a favorite class to play? And on the other side of the GM screen, do you have a favorite class to GM for?

Kieron: I haven’t! I’ve been so deep in playtesting, that I have never had a full game ran for me. A friend ran me a slight one, where I played a Vigilance Knight. It was mainly as I wanted to test some mechanics, but was also the moment when I realized that the Vigilance Knight’s exact intersection of abilities could allow them to use their arcane weapon as a danger sense. That’s a great example of DIE, for me – sure, there’s a lot of things designed into it, but it’s also designed to allow emergent aspects to come from the classes, choices and player creativity. Once again, I’m interested in posing interesting questions and giving people tools to explore. In my old life as a game critic, I was never a huge fan of puzzle games, where there was a set solution to a situation. I tended to like problem games – ones where you were given a more flexible set of tools. It’s telling some of that preference comes across.

In terms of running classes, not really. Designing them was a battle to make sure all six were as interesting and solid – there were definitely times where one class was better than another. Not in terms of power, but in terms of design. The only real answer to the question is the one class I most regularly don’t include in a game – the Dictator. Not that I don’t like them, but that they tend to lead to certain themes, and sometimes I’m just not in the mood for that.

Rasmus:It is definitely one of the heavier classes. When it’s the right fit, between player, GM, party and mood, it’s a wonderful class to include. But it does require the right circumstances.

Speaking of circumstances (and forcing a segue here), if – by some mystical magic circumstances – DIE became real and you were transported there, what class do you think you’d become?

Kieron: I think I could make a convincing argument for any of them, in terms of aspects of me. Which, I guess, was kind of the point when we made ’em up, right?

But to not dodge the question, I think most people would guess a Master, and those who know me well would say a Fool.

Though when running DIE, I tend to give writers Godbinder most often. Conversations with imaginary people in your head, somehow leading to stuff getting done. That’s literally the job.

Rasmus: Heh, that is very true.

Getting deeper, and continuing on from the premise of you being trapped in DIE: One of the core questions in the game is “Do you stay or do you go home?” What would it take to make you stay in the world? 

Kieron: That would be telling.

I think I would hate to find out if anything could.

Which is, of course, the point of DIE. Personas don’t really know going in. They may think they do, but they find out. As all the Powered by the Apocalypse games say, we play to find out.

Rasmus: That’s pretty core to the game, I’d say. “I would hate to find out if anything could.” is a very healthy answer. Maybe you’re more Godbinder than Fool, after all 

Shifting gears, because the Kickstarter has just launched and I can’t not ask you about its success. 

Not only was it funded in just 15 minutes, it has also blasted through every stretch goal listed so far. As of right now (about 17 hours after it launched), it has already reached 572% of its goal.

How are you feeling right now?

Kieron: C’mon. It wasn’t 15 minutes. It was 16.

It’s obviously great – being a British based company means overnight success does mean you’re left behind at that point. I’m sure they’ll be a bunch of more Stretch Goals posted by time this interview is up.

In terms of me, it’s really a relief. You’re just worried that you’re going to fall on your face. That we’ve hit the target means we can really just now concentrate on the work. The aim is to get this in people’s hands as quickly as possible, so it’s even more motivation for that.

Rasmus: From an outsider’s perspective, the success wasn’t a complete surprise (though the scope is staggering – and well earned!). The game has already been out in beta for years at this point, which I must imagine has helped build anticipation for the final game.

As I don’t imagine you’re as cold and calculating to do an entire beta for marketing purposes, what was the reasoning behind making a public beta for the game? Or perhaps more fittingly, what made you decide to make the beta into a final, purchasable game? 

Kieron: Thank you. I mean, you’re right. I would have been surprised if it had been a flop. The game’s been out there, it’s for a best selling comic, it’s being published by a really cool indie RPG company who’ve done lots of great games before, etc. But it is a relief.

I’m sure marketing was part of it, but it just felt like it being healthy to work in public, and that development cycle improves the game. And when I first released the beta, it was far from certain we’d ever do a full game. I released it as it was, because there was a very real chance the beta is all it would be. I’m a busy guy, right? The idea that I could make a game like DIE alongside everything else was very much a long shot.

But eventually we get to a point, and I realize the game is there. Hell, perhaps 3 games are there. In which case, as there is demand, and there is interest, it’s worth putting it into its best possible form and getting it in people’s hands. 

And let’s not put aside nerd glee. I’m going to have a classic RPG-sized manual with my name on it. How could I resist?

Rasmus: That is very cool.

I’ve followed the game from the start and know some of the changes that have occurred along the way and a few of those you’ve worked on for the final game, but can you get into some of the biggest changes from the beta to the final game?

Kieron: “The Beta” is a large moving target, right? The game was being playtested before the public beta. It’s gone through various living tweaks since then, with multiple files. There’s been a whole set of closed betas after that. One striking thing is that while a lot has changed – so, so much – the real core of the game has remained the same. Persona generation, to character generation, to arrival in DIE, that opening scene, the exploration of a weird, warped world and that climax where the players make a loaded decision. Even from the beginning, we had a satisfying structure. Everything has been execution, and finding better ways to execute things.

But I think the most telling stuff is the move from the Beta to release. Grant enjoys mocking me for the size of the manuscript I lobbed over, and rightly so, but the reason why it was so long is that a lot is guidance. Lots and lots and lots of guidance, often saying the same thing, in different ways, at length. The final game? It’s often about condensing all that down to the pure hit. Do this, and it’ll work. We start there. We present other ways of doing it in the book, but what we present first is a promise of a DIE game that’ll land for you.

The key word we like to use is rituals. DIE‘s Beta is full of rituals, and the main game is more so. Like, Persona Generation is where you make the messed up real world people. In the Beta, it presents it as a freeform section, giving ideas of what one could ask. In the full game, we present a set list of questions which should lead to a group that works. Part of the system is still asking more, and one knows players will always do that, but we give a firm way to make sure that first group of Persona you make are very much pure DIE fuck-ups.

Or when you reach DIE itself, in the Beta, we presented dozens of tactics to make a world which echoes the personas, and ask you to find one which works for them. In the full game, we present a DIE Core set up – a way of generating the world which will always work for whatever group you put into it (and we, of course, know what group you’re putting into it, as it’s built off the Persona questions outlined above). All those other methods are still in the book, but they’re not the first thing you see. And that way of generating the world? It’s a set of firm rituals. Ask this. Then do this. This will happen, reliably.

In other words, we think DIE is now a really accessible game. As I said earlier, this is all about democratization. That’s what the Rituals do. This is me showing, precisely, how to do it, as clearly as I can. One thing the Beta did teach me is that if you write so much trying to explain everything, in effect, you explain nothing, as people will forget vast swathes of it. So you boil it down. That’s what DIE‘s release is. It’s the distilled essence of all we learned from the Beta.

Rasmus: As someone who ran the beta – multiple times -, I’m glad to hear this. It was already good and it sounds like it’ll be great.

DIE was the first game I ever ran, jumping right into the narrative deep end. And we got some good games out of it, for sure. But I, as GM, didn’t quite hit the emotional high levels that I was hoping for, mostly due to inexperience. So to hear that the game is being made more… accessible, I guess is the right word, is nice. Especially when it sounds like you’re doing so without losing any of the complexities that make the game so interesting and unique. Just serving it in a more digestible way.

I have to ask; one of the things that drew me to the game at first was the simple fact that I’m a fan of yours and a process geek, both of which influenced much of the beta, with you discussing storytelling, RPGs and such. How much of that is still in the beta and how much was – perhaps quite sensibly – removed in the distillation process?

Kieron: It’s important to me that the game be kind to all its players – which includes GMs. The game works in all sorts of ways, so even if you’re playing a fun romp of DIE, it’s still a good game of DIE.

But yeah – early on, it put a lot of stress on the GM. This is the flip of the “It’s the same structure.” Sure it is. But specific elements of those structures have altered radically. I just didn’t know how to give a suggested world generation method which would work for all groups, as long as you give a specific set up. That came from running the game a bunch, and then hit the DIE Core one, and I realised “As long as you have the persona group having played an RPG together previously, this will always work for them.” And instantly, it’s easier for anyone trying to GM. 

In terms of my excess, it has been reduced a bit and moved around… but this is also part of the distillation process. There’s some things I said many times in many ways, and now say in a much shorter space. There’s some good essays we’re leaving out… but they exist, and are still available, right? As Grant says, I do have a blog. Maybe I’ll do a PDF or something? In a real way, if you have X number of pages, you want to try and include the stuff which is most useful for running DIE.

One thing we’ve added in the process is sidebars, which is fun. When I am derailing, we can move some of that there, and keep the main text pure.

Rasmus: That leads me nicely to my next question: Why did you choose Rowan, Rook and Decard as your partners for this?

Kieron: I’ve been a huge admirer of them for years. As a British Indie Games company, they’ve built themselves up from scratch, with a specific vision of games, which overlaps closely with what we do with DIE – what’s the line that Grant says in the video [on the Kickstarter campaign page]? Something like “like everything we publish, it’s deeply mundane and impossibly weird”. You can actually see DIE and Heart as sister games, in a weird way – the dungeon as psychogeography is a theme in both. 

They’re deeply ethical – the sourcing of materials was especially important in this project. We wouldn’t do dice if we couldn’t guarantee that they were made ethically. They’re a living wage employer, which is a big deal for the UK. With DIE, there’s also an attraction to it being a British gaming company too. I mean, that’s where Sol would publish DIE, right?

They’ve got great experience with kickstarters – this may be their biggest one so far, but they’ve handled them all in an amazing fashion. Like, as someone who backs everything they do, you notice the things in the mix. Like, especially in the pandemic years, postage has been deeply punishing, and they’ve done the work to find ways to ship reasonably to the whole world. 

They’re a small enough company that we can really form a partnership to craft this. The whole thing has been an unusual process, and I think it’s really work.

And I like and trust them personally. That counts for a lot.

Rasmus: And what about the other big partner in this, Stephanie Hans? Why was it important to bring her aboard the RPG, instead of just using the pre-existing art from the comic (aside from the obvious benefit for humanity of “More Stephanie Hans art”)?

Kieron: As if we could stop her. Stephanie’s been saying “And I MUST do a GM’s screen” since I first mentioned the idea to her.

You’ve mostly hit it yourself, really. Why wouldn’t we if we have the choice? There’s also strengths to it – while we’ll be including images from the comic, including others starts to open it up in different ways. We’ve created a new cast of iconic characters, which show you OTHER ways the Paragons can be other than the cast of the comic. That unlocking of the imagination is useful, and can only really be done by Stephanie drawing ’em.

Rasmus: Backtracking a bit, one of the core changes from the beta to the final game is the addition of a campaign mode. From what I gather, the beta has transformed into what is now called DIE Core, whereas the campaign mode is entirely new. What sets the two apart? And how does DIE‘s campaign differ from other RPGs?

Kieron: Campaigns are tricky. It’s telling how little most RPGs say about campaigns, especially the more traditional games. All they really do is offer you a progression tree, and then leave the group to their own devices. 

So DIE at least has to do that, right? I’m not being sarcastic. History has shown that folks can handle it, so by giving folks the technology, they will handle it. This led to the question of what advancement even looks like in DIE, which was fun. The characters are already pretty damn powerful in the beta. What do you add to that? In practice, they’ve reduced in number of abilities from the early beta, as I learned that in a short form game, players simply had too many “verbs” to learn and play with. So there’s some of that basic stuff – Godbinders get more Gods, Neos get more gifts and upgrades for those gifts and so on. There’s some increasing of stats, but only to a certain degree…. but power tends to max out on level 12 or so. After that, abilities tend to add flexibility to a class, or give big high level narrative advances.

That’s the fun thing about DIE advances – rather than just a list of levels you march through, or a checklist, you’re presented by an advancement map the shape of DIE‘s exploded D20 logo. You start at the bottom, and then pick one adjacent triangle every time you level up. As even the longest campaign should really end around level 12-14 at the absolute most, it means you’re always choosing what NOT to have, as well as what TO have. If your godbinder is going to end up as the head of a church, or discovering a new god or whatever else, right? Especially at the end, these are big story beats which feed back into the game, and are useful as components of a climax.

Anyway – that’s our take on the basics. You can just run a DIE game off that, really, essentially expanding DIE Core indefinitely. I wanted to do something else too. 

There’s a thing called Campaign Frames, which offers a specific sort of setting and campaign structure for games. I wanted to do one of them for DIE. In this case, it involves telling you how to create, on the fly, a version of the DIE D20 world based around the personas obsessions. So rather than having regions about WWI or the Brontës as in the comic, you have it of things which your personas are shaped by – their fiction loves, the books they never wrote, people they knew, whatever. And then, inevitably, at some point all those regions go to war, giving you an epic, psychological backdrop for your climax.

Basically, it gives you a campaign structure you can choose to use which works in a similar way to that of DIE Core. It’s more flexible and certainly more open – that’s the nature of campaigns – but we certainly don’t abandon you.

Rasmus: Speaking of sessions, a lot of the things we’ve discussed have been on a larger scale. But what about individual sessions? What makes a good, individual TTRPG session to you and how does DIE facilitate that? 

Kieron: There’s a bunch of levels to that, but we’ll hit the most basic ones first – that opening session of a game of DIE? It’s a tightly wound, highly playtested machine. From Persona Generation, to the IC Character Generation, to the arrival in DIE, the transformation, an initial weird encounter and a cliffhanger reveal of what’s really going on? That works, and customizes really well to teach people the game, get them to express their identities… and then gives them big meaty hooks to roleplay. Plus a cliffhanger. On a personal level, I’m a fan of a good end of session cut, and having the opening session nail that’s important for me.

Then to go to the last session in a game of DIE Core (or any DIE game, really) – we have the climax, where the personas all confront one another and make the decision. This alters every time depending on the Persona – not just how they act and what they do, but also the setting, as that’s also coming from the Persona. But that it’s a place with clear decisions and high stakes? That’s a good scene to go out on… and then lead to an epilogue, which is similarly designed to give you closure.

I mean, how many movies are saved or ruined by their last 10 minutes? That’s true in games as well.

Having these two strong poles helps give the middle sessions a structure. Players have desires, goals and things to respond to. And then the game provides the GM with a structure for generating things… and doing the prep needed to pull it off. DIE is a very low prep game, but we give rituals to make sure what you do is absolutely killer stuff. It’s very much “how to identify the stuff in the persona’s background you’re going to play with” and then how.

We do a lot of stuff outside DIE core as well – there’s one off scenarios in the back. A lot of them work well as a one off, but are quirky – we put CON QUEST in there, for example.

We hit the stretch goal where Grant and I are going to do another one off scenario, which is especially designed to give a DIE game in a one off format. It can go longer, but this really provides a hyper-guided set of Persona questions and flexible pre-generated encounters to give a crafted, curated experience. Or that’s the plan. It’s a stretch goal. We’re still to write it.

I mean… this question is very open. Like, everything we do is designed to make a good session. Rules do what they do, and get out the way, while providing a lot of narrative power. Tools for the players which can be used in increasingly creative ways. All that good stuff is what makes good sessions.

Rasmus Glad to hear that CON QUEST made the cut, because that’s both one that has an easy hook and also the scenario used for the wonderful play-through you did with Marguerite Bennett, Chip Zdarsky, Ed Brubaker, Emma Vieceli, Matt Fraction. Which was a great way to show off the game to a large number of comic geeks, as well as just being a great way to spend two hours, even if it’s being run off the old beta rules.

Which brings me to my final question: 

The DIE RPG has a lot of potential fans; comic fans, RPG fans, Kieron Gillen fans, Stephanie Hans fans, Rowan, Rook and Decard fans, etc. How have you made sure it appeals to – and works for – all of them?

Kieron: I think that’s kind of back to front. For me, with any creative endeavour, it’s not about trying to hit all those audiences. It’s about being clear of what you are and being welcoming to everyone who wants to get on board. It’s especially true of games, for me. It’s part of DIE where we get Buy In from the players – to make sure everyone is all on the same page about what kind of game we’re playing. It’s only more stressed and – here’s the word again – ritualised in the final version, where we collaborated with Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk (curators of the TTRPG safety tool kit) to create a series of questions which really explain what sort of DIE game we’re playing, including its tone.

I mean, when I read people talking about their RPG horror stories, most of them are born of groups just not talking to each other and making their desires clear. With an RPG, you’re forming a band, and you need to make sure you’re all playing the same kind of music. If you wanna play Salsa and everyone else wants to play punk, you’re probably in the wrong band.

So we’re clear about what we are. But we also do everything else to get out of the way. It’s got enough meaty toys and serious roleplaying challenges for extremely experienced players… but it’s also trying its hardest to be accessible in all ways to newcomers. If this is your first game, we want you to be able to handle it too. That’s really what I think about – lowering the barrier to entry while raising the possibilities in the system.

But really, it’s DIE. We do it, as hard and as beautifully as we can. That’s all you can do, and it’s all you should do.

Rasmus: Kieron, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Kieron: A delight. Have fun with DIE. Hope you don’t get trapped into a hell dimension where you’re tormented by your mean friend.

—

While Kieron’s advice at the end is good general advice for DIE (and life, really), it was also a direct warning to me. Because I’d told him that me, Sean Dillon, Ian Gregory, Mark Turetsky and Rob Secundus were going to be playing a game of DIE run by Armaan Babu a few days after me and him talked, for an article on this site. The game was a lot of fun and the article about it will be up soon. It’ll be well worth a read, even if this interview spoils that I wasn’t trapped in a hell dimension by Armaan. Because I clearly wasn’t… Right..?

The DIE RPG Kickstarter is available now and will run until June 10th. The DIE RPG will also eventually be available for retail purchase. Please help, Armaan trapped me.