“We all love the triumphant feeling of victory, but have you ever felt the visceral joys of a brutal, hilarious, glorious defeat?? That’s right, this week we’re talking about the flip side of epic adventuring: character death. Death often means a sad premature end to your character’s adventure, but it doesn’t have to be! In the open world of collaborative storytelling, death can be an opportunity for reflection, surprise, and even laughter. Read on for some of our favorite ways to face oblivion. Remember, even in bloody defeat…
You can play with us!“
Play
Based on the famous movie, Final Destination, End of the Line is a game for 2-5 Players with one of them acting as Death. As you can imagine, staying alive is expected to be quite the challenge. Watch your back and do what you have to to survive, in End of the Line.
You can also save the End of the Line Sheet Template we put together so you can jump right into gameplay!
The DERELICT is a great big beautiful trash rocket smashing through space and it is jam-packed with ORCS, generations upon generations of them, sporing and scrapping, building murderous idols to their mad gods, and praying for DOOM when the Derelict will crash into heaven and disgorge every dead-hard big-toothed bastard in a glorious green tide. As an Orc you must fight and kill and pray and scheme and tinker and howl for a place in heaven. To stay up to date with OrcBorg Simply subscribe to their newsletter.
Watch
Speaking of death, handling in-game death can be sensitive. Connie from Transplanar produced a Lecture on Character Death on their YouTube Channel. What is the function of death in a TTRPG, specifically a game like D&D 5e? How can we play games without PC death as a stake, and why would we want to? What are alternative ways to create risk? Connie helps answer this and more in this YouTube Workshop!
Community
While you’re thinking about your next epic character death, you may feel inspired to create your own game. Sometimes getting started can be challenging, thankfully, the TTRPG community is full of resources. If you’re just getting started, the TTRPG resource jam will help you establish design principles, find other resources/books for design, help you write a budget, explain the process to funding a game and more.
If you’re an established game designer, don’t forget to include a Role Sheet Template as an offering in your Itch or DriveThruRPG offerings!
