I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to prepare for my daughter’s birthday party today, but I didn’t feel like packing party bags, so instead I read DIE: RPG. DIE:RPG is a 416 page game written by Kieron Gillen with art by Stephanie Hans and a veritable cornucopia of guest writers and industry alumni. It’s based on comic of the same name by the same creators, the premise of which is that the kids in the 80s cartoon, Dungeons and Dragons, have grown up and gone back, and it turns out it is a much darker place than they remember.

This opens with about eight pages of introductory comic. Most people who read me regularly are aware I’m not a fan of pieces of fiction incorporated into the text of TTRPGs. It’s beautiful for sure — but opening with this, preceded by Gillen equivocating about whether or not this is the spin off or not (it is, Kieron, because you made it and released it after the comic), it’s not off to a compelling start. Then we get to our introduction: It introduces us to our paragons of which my first impressions are that they’re awfully ham-handedly and unimaginatively named: Emotion knight? Neo? Dictator? I wasn’t sure if my response to these naming conventions was unfair, so I told my wife in the car, and she laughed out loud: “They sound like my goth friend in high school wrote them”. Really, we couldn’t come up with anything better? Perhaps this is a call-back to the comic books in some way, but they don’t appear named with any clear convention in mind to me, and don’t describe most of the archetypes well. The descriptions of the paragons remain the same throughout the book, and they’re pretty good, it’s just the titling that’s as subtle as a hammer wrought of gold. Then we get to the “What is a roleplaying game” section. It comes across to me as patronising and wrong-headed, as it points readers to actual play (and hence probably Critical Role as the most prominent player) and that is both not an example of TTRPGs and not even vaguely what DIE is going for. Honestly, if you’re not going to try, don’t include the section. It came across incredibly negatively. This is the only part of the book I was familiar with prior to reading the whole thing, and it still comes across as negatively as I remember. This section literally stopped me for reading this book for months. And, in addition, this flippancy causes whiplash with the next section on tone, which describes the game as being about personal trauma and loss; if this is such a serious and important game, why aren’t you taking it more seriously in the previous paragraph? We get a brief detour (“Spoilers!” it says, suggesting that this is a book for all the players, which quickly feels like it is not the case) into the lore of the world this takes place in. The lore of DIE has been described as “goth jumanji”, and that’s pretty apt: It is trying very hard to be grimdark and horrifying in a way I find utterly uncompelling. “From your perspective, the games are all canon. From Die’s perspective, the games are all prey.” is obviously intended to be a banger line, but for me, it just doesn’t land as edgily as it feels intended to. I wonder if this is a philosophical divergence: I’m not interested, as Gillen claims to be, in exploring why people spend so much time on imagined worlds. I know why. I’m not interested in imagining my hobby as a parasite that preys on me and my insecurities. This seems like a profoundly self-hating perspective, that on the face of it has very little of value to add. But there are directions it could take that could be interesting: Explorations of the toxicities of different play cultures, for example, or an indictment of capitalism’s impact on folk art. I’ve read plenty enough of Gillen to know that for me, he usually doesn’t stick these complex thematic landings. Let’s see if he pulls this one off without my feeling like I’ve been sold nerd self-hatred as a product. Let’s put a pin on that and come back to it in conclusions.

Ok. I’m going to set aside that fairly poor first impression now, as I enter into the rules proper, and will try to loop back around to those questions again at the end. The rules explanations are pretty good, and clear, and well laid out with diagrams. Superficially looks like there was a lot of collaboration between layout and writing, and it shows, but I’ll come back to layout when I’ve finished the book. I quite like the dice pool system it uses, which is not unique, but is simple and works, and ties intimately into the paragon (this games classes) powers. Thematically I question the choice to not just make this a damned d20 game, though, as I don’t see the additional utility of the system aside from the activation of powers on 6s, and the failure of recognising the thematic power of using a d20 when the lore sets the world on a d20 seems an obvious own goal to me. There’s a flashback mechanic drawn from Blades in the Dark with the twist that it’s always from the real world. The “extra mechanics” section is a grab bag from modern RPG design. The basic rules are…fine, I guess? Like, obviously they are not where the juice is intended to be. That’s the —

Paragons, which come up next. The placement of three different advancement rulesets for different length games here at the front of the section is a huge WTF decision to me. Everything the advancement section speaks about is nonsense to me at this point in the book; I don’t know what any of these things are. Put it somewhere else. It barely even tells you what to do — most of it is in two other chapters, except for the third optional advancement option, which is here. Were the editors scared of the author, that they didn’t suggest, say, moving it to the end? Or to one of the two other sections on advancement? And it goes on, showing you how to advance in this clumsy but visually compelling map (I imagine the iconography means something to someone familiar with the comics? No wait, it’s an unfolded d20, I get it, you’re very clever Gillon), using the Neo’s advancement map as an example (you see the Neo’s advancement map before you see the Neo). A whole page is devoted to navigating the map. Sigh. It feels like somebody plays more videogames than TTRPGs in choosing to fight this particular design battle: Might have been smarter to just assume the audience wasn’t stupid, because this page of diagrams feel (uh oh is this becoming a theme?) a little patronising. Finally, it gets to the paragons themselves. As said earlier, these appear named by a teenager who’s just barely discovered metaphor, and the while some of the names are a little better in the context of their advancements and powers, most of them are not. Each paragon is basically a classes of Dungeons and Dragons reimagined in such a way that they are most vulnerable to their own worst impulses and implications. I don’t love the overwhelming negativity here — there is no joy in these paragons, just power and potential for harm — but it actually fits earlier stated themes of corruption and power quite well, and in play, I could see an interesting tension developing between the pettiness of the real world characters and the temptations that these paragons provide. On the other hand, while it’s been alluded to that we’ll make those real world characters, and there’s nothing so far about them, and the paragons have really taken the spotlight: I wonder when they’ll show up, as it feels like they should come first in the game loop. Anyway, in the absence of tension with the real world characters (later in I’ll be told they’re called personas), I’m left with little more than a bad taste in my mouth. There are some interesting approaches here though: each paragon feels like they’re playing they’re own minigames, which I really like in terms of a design approach, even though I am bouncing off the relentless gothiness of it all. By the end of this chapter, it appears at this point that each class is assigned a class dice, but aside from a number given for a special advance, this dice doesn’t seem to have any significant impact on running the paragon. Perhaps this is the legacy of an excised rule, or it comes up later? It’s weird that this stuff isn’t being explained 100 pages into the book. The most interesting part of the paragon section is the Master, which is the GM section. This states that it’s not adversarial, but the mechanics are obviously encouraging adversarial play. It seems there are rules somewhere else in the game to support either of these kinds of play (there’s a reference to the “Antagonist Master” in a sidebar), but not here, in the section devoted to the paragon. This is another example of the repeated messy information design: If you’re spending other chapters on the Master, don’t pretend it’s here, and don’t put half here and half there (and in this case, since in the sidebar). At this point it feels like it wants everyone at the table to read this 400 page book before playing, which like. That’s not for me. Please, this game doesn’t actually appear that complex, please present it in a way that I can play it with ease.

The next section is Rituals, which tells you how to pay DIE:RPG as intended. Remember that earlier, there were rules that you can apply to Rituals to make them more like Campaigns, which is the not-intended mode of play, if you want to. Because, it turns out, most of those advancements we learnt about? They won’t be seen if you play the ideal session length without the optional rules. Sigh: This is a game that’s either confused about its identity or too beholden to either notes or playtesting feedback. Ok, finally we find out about Personas, those real life characters! This is on page 107. The first time they’re named, that I recall. I got the strong impression from the earlier sections that the Master paragon was the “GM” of this game, which now appears to perhaps not be the case: This game is not explaining itself well. I went back and re-read the earlier chapters, and it really talks about the GM a lot throughout the rules, but doesn’t talk about the Master a lot. I breezed over the use of GM in those sections, but now O realise the distinction between GM, Master and their persona needs more dedicated expansion. They’re played by the GM, but are they a character? Is it their persona? Is the GM playing the Master, the persona of the Master, and the world? An entire additional layer of meta on top of everything else? The terminology and explanation really needs to be clearer if you’re going to introduce this complexity — it’s really the only level of complexity mechanically here at all. Certainly, rituals makes it pretty clear that the desired flow of the game is: Everyone gets together at the table, creates their personas, then chooses a paragon. It’s really unclear here about whether the GM is already set here, or not. It strongly implies both that the GM is playing their traditional facilitator role, but also in contrast that they just pick their paragon along with anyone else and realise they’re the Master part way through the first session.

I’ll take a detour here, to talk about personas: For such a core part of the game tension and theme, they feel under-utilised. Throughout the book, it seems they only have two real rulings to incorporate them: The flashback and the master’s instruction “personas always grow”. Everything else is tied into prompts associated with your paragon, specifically their powers, but also their unique “minigame” mechanics. There’s a hard limit on all of these: Powers only manifest on 6s, flashbacks once per session. This, definitely probably could be enough? You want the fun of the game to be in the actual fantasy, with the thematic weight being drawn out in the connections with the personas, right? It just feels like the intent of these mechanics may behoove a more collaborative storytelling approach: Those flashbacks being big narrative moments rather than just ways to succeed. Back to rituals.

A huge section of Rituals is safety tools: This is well done (in retrospect, it’s written by the creators of the Safety Toolkit). But overall this procedure might be a good and necessary set up for complex gameplay but boooy does it seem like it’s a chore. Part of it is “explain the premise”! Who is sitting down at a table playing DIE without knowing the premise? Are they going to walk away at this point if they decide they aren’t interested? This just needed a solid revision or two to make the first half of this chapter more than a very very long checklist and rules introduction. Oh and here the class die and the paragons are explained for the table. I’m now confused what the earlier section was for and who was supposed to read it. Why aren’t we starting here with the paragons, where the personas are? Was that a weirdly positioned pre-appendix? Some clarity on previously confused positions happens here: Each patron gets their own special die (badoom ching); the Master is the GM. Then it morphs without warning into GM advice on how to run the short “ritual” campaign, with no headings to disengage from the earlier onboarding procedure. Honestly, I’m giddy this is so poorly organised. I have whiplash from being confounded and by surprise introductions of core concepts. Honestly, it feels like the editor didn’t feel empowered to actually suggest changes to the text, and so no developmental editing occurred. Reading these first 150 or so pages blind and without foreknowledge is an exercise in confusion. I feel like my four year old is explaining a game they’re very excited about to me. I honestly need a break or I’ll spiral into negativity in response.

I took that break. It’s tomorrow, and I’m up to Running DIE, a chapter that is now confirmed to be for the Master paragon, who is also sometimes called the GM, and who also has rules in the paragon and rituals chapters that explain how to Run DIE. It opens with the Principles section: This is fine. It feels like the author was really, really trying not to be derivative at the expense of saying something useful. There’s a bunch on safety tools, oddly placing all of the responsibility for safety on one person who, as implied by the procedure in rituals, has no foreknowledge that they’d have that role. There are three pages each on running the game for each paragon — I hope you don’t have a full table if you hope to remember all that. No pressure. There is a section on the multiple levels of play that for me doesn’t feel helpful, but rather just an acknowledgment, of the fact that it’s a little confusing to play someone who is playing someone. I’d rather some actual advice on this universal challenge than most of the preceding advice to be honest, but we don’t get that. There’s then a bunch of ways to play the game differently, again really just acknowledging briefly them rather than actually helping you do them: “You can make any paragon the Antagonist” (wait, this is one of the first mentions of Antagonist outside the glossary, what’s that again?”). You can switch roles (and not personas? How does that work if you’re stuck in DIE??). I’m not a fan of “running the game” chapters in general— they tend to be both overwhelming and insufficient — and this one is particularly empty of meaningful advice and full of additional concepts that might improve or change your perspective on the game however aren’t adequately borne out. You don’t have to tell me that I can hack your game or what ways are permissible. It is, however, great if you tell me how to run it in different ways and actually support me to do so.

The next section is mostly solidly useful world and session planning advice, slowly transforming into lore that I don’t really care about (why give DIE the sentient god world a stat block?) and which has already been explored. But, if I were running DIE (as the GM, the Master, or perhaps his paragon?) this is gold. Seriously good. The echoes and their monsters are great, the session plan is great if you like railroads, there’s lots on customising NPCs here (although of course not called that). I repeat, the bestiary is genuinely great and its principles really could be used in any game to interesting emotion effect. This chapter is good. The incredibly strong response I have to the chapter feels a little jarring, in retrospect on second read through, as when I went back to the acknowledgements on my second pass of this review, and I realised that this was the part not written by Gillen. Ouch. I’ll just leave it at that.

The Campaign chapter is basically a repeat of Rituals but to set up for indefinite rather than limited sessions. As with most sections, it meanders from one topic to another like a confused old lady sitting at the bus stop in a nursing home cul-de-sac. It basically teaches you how to run a standard fantasy campaign, which has been done better elsewhere by other people, plus tries to retcon the lore so that indefinite play makes sense. I…this is fine. It seems an afterthought, a concession to the fact that to appeal to the D&D crowd you need to offer the hope of an infinite campaign, even if such a thing is exceedingly rare. I feel like doing this would really lean away from DIEs strengths and into its weaknesses, and the book itself supports this reading I think, through implication and text prioritisation (although judging by the poor consideration put into informational design here, this latter may be a mistake). This, as well as some of the other sections here in the latter half of the book, really feel like Gillen being given notes on what needs to be in a TTRPG book by someone else, and trying to meet the remit but not really understanding why or how to really make these sections sing.

We finish up with two additions, both that feel like appendices but only one of which is labelled as such: Scenarios, that I imagine are the kickstarter stretch goals that the guest authors wrote. I read most of DIE on my phone, but I went back on my PC when it came to writing my conclusions on my second pass to double check if these scenarios had any authors attached to them: They don’t, but looking at the credits perhaps it’s all Gillen. Certainly, though, in retrospect looking at the credits, retrospectively a bunch of sections are uncredited and implied to be Gillen’s work, that feels like it’s the product leaning into his fame and auteur status: To be clear the majority of the excellent monster writing as well as the rituals safety content was written by hired labour. That makes me feel a little uncomfortable, although I assume the co-writers here agreed on the vague crediting. And finally what appears to be an actual complete Master’s character sheet, a veritable tome in an appendix, but decidedly necessary and if I were to run this I’d be grateful for it.

I said I’d come back to layout now, at the end. While my first impression is of a clean, well-organised book, I was wrong: This book is not sufficiently broken up. It needs more subheadings. Things just blur into each other, and are impossible to find. It’s pretty, but white space here is often a liability, breaking even simple concepts up over many pages. The art is beautiful, but honestly don’t give me anything additional from the writing. It doesn’t complement the writing, and I wouldn’t ever flip the book over to show anyone any of it. A 400 page book is such a challenge to lay out well, I know — even a much shorter one — but gosh this one is a hash of ideas that desperately needs organising; I spent half the book actively confused, and I was searching for terms in the digital edition to help with my understanding. This is definitely not all the layout designer’s fault, but it likely speaks to less communication between editor, writer and layout designer than is ideal in a book of this size, communicating ideas of this complexity.

That is what is in DIE:RPG. I have so many thoughts, where even to start?

DIE:RPG feels like it was written by someone who has long since been disenfranchised from the traditional roleplaying scene and glances at it with disdain, writing an artistic response to that in good faith (DIE: The Comic Book), and translating that art back into the medium that inspired it, also out of excitement and good faith, but not actually having the design chops to pull it off. Potentially Gillen recognised this: He pulled a team around him to pull it off, including some of the best in the business. But at some point the design and writing chops being recruited were not brought to bear on the game, whether it was by fear of Gillen’s fame, or something else (time pressure, perhaps? An unexpected Kickstarter success has compromised many a game). There is a good game in this mess of a book, but the book is a dog’s breakfast.

A dog’s breakfast, you ask? Well, honestly read the review again if you skipped it. But the big jarring things are the terrible misordering of information, the legacy terms that cause confusion, the poor text prioritisation causing text to flow into each other. It reads like an unedited draft, to be entirely honest. There were a few typos in my version as well, which lends credence to there being not enough time spent on all levels of editing, early or late stage, and this might be evidence of a rushed production. Irregardless of cause, I found this an incredibly difficult book to read and make sense of, even though the rules themselves were for the most part straightforward.

There is a strong impression I get of in this book, which is that Kieron Gillon doesn’t like D&D. Huge “was teased for being a nerd in high school and has a huge amount of loathing for the elf game as a concept as a result” vibes going on here. The grimdarkness of this topic seems a response to a dislike of the place D&D has in his psyche in the same way that I, as a young woman, stopped playing D&D because it’s kid stuff and got back into TTRPGs through adult stuff like Apocalypse World and Sorcerer with sex in it and violence and aggressive writing. I was wrong in retrospect, and now I feel my response was immature, and the hence to me, the apparent self-loathing here strikes me as distasteful. It feels like a game written about D&D by someone who doesn’t like D&D, or at least doesn’t understand it, rather than a game written about D&D by someone who understands the appeal. As someone who likes playing games about elves and wizards, and thinks it’s a perfectly appropriate hobby for grown adults, it seems like a huge attempt to Make For Grown Ups something that can be made for grownups without the weird disdain it seems to have for the subject matter. Case in point: Die itself, the amoral god at the heart of the lore. If Gillen didn’t mean for this to say that Dungeons and Dragons is a destructive, life-destroying parasite that should be avoided at all costs, then he’s absolutely blind to what he’s writing. Maybe he didn’t: Maybe he just thought that it was a cool, incredibly creepy concept. But to not think further than that would be…gosh I can’t imagine being a creator of Gillen’s apparent calibre and not realise the implications he’s making there. And I spoke earlier, there are other potential takes on Die inherent in the concept itself that could have been leant into to avoid this interpretation, had he been conscious enough of the implications of it; these aren’t apparent in the RPG. Coming back to the question raised earlier, in the second or third paragraph: No, I don’t think Gillen sticks the thematic landing on this.

In addition, there are so many small things that feel like either missed design opportunities or failures of design imagination. Given Gillen’s inexperience with TTRPG design I suspect it’s the latter, but surely that’s what a strong team is for? Procedures like the ones in Rituals and in Campaigns are endless drudgery, where games like Errant and Knave 2e treat procedures with a relative lightness and elegance that is elusive to DIE: RPG. The principles are clunky, where this was a solved problem in 2010 with Apocalypse World. I mentioned early on, the reliance on d6s for a core mechanic could have had tremendous thematic meaning, but the Fool uses a d6 for their class die, rendering that potential toothless in the name of what perhaps was a visual metaphor in the comics. Using a d20 for the core mechanic would have made so much more thematic sense for a game set on a giant d20, ruled by a god that is a twisted metaphor for (another option?) the satanic panic, matching up for example with the unfolded d20 used for the class advancement maps, however they chose instead a fairly unremarkable dice pool mechanic. There is a lack of follow-through that fails to harness the potential symbolic resonance in the games concepts and themes, that really feels a little thrown together at times. And this sense of thrown togetherness is probably not helped by the slapdash nature of the (dis)organisation.

The lack of a clear assumption about who the audience for this book is super jarring, and it feels tied into what feels like a lack of familiarity with much more than the canon texts of the TTRPG landscape: It’s arranged like a D&D, but it shouldn’t have been. I, as a reader of the book from cover to cover, was absolutely confounded as to who it was for. The rules would dictate that the role of the Master be chosen early in the first session, but the book is written as if the Master is the one that read the book and will explain the rules, as well as will do all the prep. The structure that places the Master as just another one of the players feels inspired by No Dice No Masters, but in practice feels like either a meaningless nod to those games (or the concept that the “GM is a player too”), or a genuine design mistake. I could see a version of this game that had a truly GMless structure (or GMfull, whatever boats float), and that version I think, leaning away from the structural reliance that this has on D&D, would be much better in my opinion. In general, and as someone who really likes refereed elf games, I think this would’ve been better leaning into more popular indie TTRPG trends than the system it does use. If not No Dice No Masters, the crew books of Blades in the Dark as personas, or even as parties of paragons rather than individuals? Blades in the Dark is already clearly a significant influence, as is Apocalypse World (or at least Dungeon World); leaning into those influences I feel would be a strength and not a weakness here, as much as I prefer non-derivative works that really reflect their themes.

Now, I have little to zero interest in exploring the psychological depths of the human soul through the medium of roleplay, but I know that there are plenty of people who are: This game is for them, and not for me. DIE:RPG definitely has some interesting things to say about how power corrupts, about how petty relationships between normal people can twist and become stale and cruel. Is it something I’d want to explore for 10 to 16 sessions, or indefinitely? Nope, definitely not. They should’ve spent more time on DIE:RPG one-shots and less on campaign play if they wanted me to give this a go. I am not a believer that art for adults has to be bleak drudgery, my life has enough psychological complexity that I don’t need Kieron Gillon or a comic book fan friend to be my therapist. And I’m a little disappointed, because I feel like the lore of DIE:RPG wants to say more than just an exploration of the pettiness of humanity when provided power: I feel like it wants to speak to the toxicity of subcultures in a way that could be really resonant in an internet-centric social-media centric always on world. It’s disappointing it doesn’t go straight there. I feel Die, the amoral god itself should be a metaphor for Dungeons and Dragons and the challenging and complex shadow it casts over the rest of the hobby. Gestures to the former are made in the final pages of Scenarios, although not the latter, and it feels overall that in a book of this size, the chance to really double down on clear potential for thematic coherency is a significant failure. I’m confident that future additions to this will do some of this work, though, at least in terms of some additional scenario work that is coming. It just seems like a huge missed opportunity.

It also falls down in some areas because it doesn’t want to assume that its players know about TTRPGs: Maybe they like the comic book and wonder what are these roleplaying games all about, I’ll check that out! Or whatever, it probably was on the front page of Kickstarter and got random fans that way. So, it opens with a glossary of terms that defines a bunch of stuff that is either nonsense at the time or that is incredibly obvious. Gillen patronises the “what’s an RPG section” embarrassingly because clearly he doesn’t believe it’s worthwhile, but then walks through the game like a child showing you her new toys, with no apparent forethought or reason. This is a game I can’t imagine has a significant audience of the Brand New to RPGS (although sure, it’s possible), but is both bending over to accommodate them and failing to explain anything within it satisfactorily to them. In doing so it both alienates the experienced and the inexperienced; quite an achievement.

And hence, it’s an achievement to me that it has such a following despite all of these flaws. A game is not its text: A game is its play, at your table. And the reports I’ve gotten from DIE:RPG are of emotionally resonant, deep, and memorable play. My response to the tension between my criticisms of the book and those play reports is that a good table can truly make any game sing, and also that play truly sings in the unexpected interactions between the players and the rules, not in the expected ones. It’s one reason I have that disclaimer at the top of these reviews. The fact that I got through the read-through of this book and have written (checks notes) ten additional paragraphs of analysis, tells me that at the very least it’s clearly a whole-hearted attempt to create a piece of art with high production values in the medium of TTRPGs. I think that if the themes that this game actually manifests appeal to you and your friends, you’ll probably have similar experiences to the reports I’ve heard. Art elicits a response in us humans: This, as much as it’s deeply flawed, is a piece of art.

But, because of those flaws, it’s also a deeply inaccessible piece of art in my opinion: Hard to understand where it should be easy, and poorly explained where it is complex, an exercise in parsing similar but different terminologies: A thoroughly unusable text full of heart and passion. While it’s not a piece of art that lights me up with excitement, I can fully recognise why it might for some. And for that reason, it’s probably worth checking out? I guess, your mileage may vary. If you want to delve into the psyche of your friends, there are games I’d personally prefer to do that in, but there’s nothing else that does this specifically for the nerd subculture, so exploring that might be more appealing here than in something like Bluebeard’s Bride for example. And that bestiary… well, it’s fire. It’ll honestly be a resource for most fantasy games. So, yeah, again, your mileage may vary. But while deeply flawed, DIE:RPG is never uninteresting.

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