TTRPGs have evolved over the years and Rowan, Rook and Decard are creating a new TTRPG that covers that history, along with a personal twist. The real-world part might be a bit too on the nose. :)
Written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan - the best scenario author in the business - the DIE Metadungeon is part history field trip, part punishing gauntlet, part nightmare hellscape made of your own desires and part lovingly-created Saw trap intended to teach you once and for all what THAC0 means.
The DIE Metadungeon is intruding upon our reality.
What is a Metadungeon?
It’s like a megadungeon - but more so. Megadungeons are really massive dungeons. Multiple floors. Entire ecologies and societies. A whole campaign’s worth of material. Exploration, interconnection, and secrets.
A metadungeon is like that, but as well as exploring a multi-level dungeon, you’re adventuring through fifty years of TTRPG history, from its birth to its glorious present.
(God forbid we do something straightforward for once.)
Reminisce about the games and movements of decades past - or discover the trends you missed. Meet your heroes (some of them), debate which is the best version of goblins, and join us in puzzling out what really makes gaming here and now, in the 2020s, unique.
And try not to get killed while you’re doing it.
What is DIE the RPG?
Based on the comic of the same name and created by the original writer and artist, DIE the RPG is an award-winning experiment in just how metatextual we can get.
It’s an exploration into how much the events of the 1980’s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon would mentally and emotionally scar the kids who got sucked into their own campaign. It’s goth Jumanji. It’s postmodern Gygaxian Isekai. It’s roleplaying games squared.
Players create a Persona - an ordinary real-world loser who’s bored of their job, regrets not going back to uni to get that MA, wishes they’d not had kids so early, and so on - and that Persona makes a Paragon, a two-dimensional author-insert super-powered fantasy hero in the vein of your average Dungeons & Dragons character to play DIE, a mysterious roleplaying game.
Then (wouldn’t you know it) upon meeting up to play this mysterious roleplaying game, everyone is transported into a bespoke otherworld and becomes their mighty Paragons. The choice as to whether to fight their way back to the real world or stay in a pretend universe is theirs - and dead players don’t get a vote.
With mechanics inspired by (but much less convoluted than) D&D, DIE the RPG is a love letter to roleplaying games, stories, play and what humans do for each other to survive.
And how do you make these things kiss?
DIE the RPG felt like a natural fit for the historical dungeoncrawl that Gareth has been threatening to write for several years now, and the Megadungeon Month event set up by Goodman Games seemed like a very sensible excuse to make it happen.
DIE shines when it blurs the lines between the fantastic and the mundane, so we’re keen to lean into that for the metadungeon and adapt the core DIE experience to fit. Usually, your game world is made up of thinly-veiled allegories for your characters’ real-world worries - here, we’re approaching that from the other side.
Each era of gaming that you’ve lived through (or badmouthed on a now-defunct forum, or lovingly pined over missing out on) has shaped you and made you who you are today - in this dungeon, at least. And the dungeon is all that matters.
Ready to face that nostalgia head-on? Want to fight a quite literal edition war, with edition trebuchets and edition supply lines? Eager to find out what you were missing back when roleplaying games were good?
What’s in the book?
It’s a big, full-length hardback affair. Each of the six dungeon levels is fully mapped and illustrated in an era-appropriate style, and comes complete with beautifully-written handouts.
They’ll all contain plenty of locations and adventure hooks, but also new era-specific rules that twist the play to represent the time reflected (and offer advantages to those willing to exploit them for their own benefit). And, of course, they’ll function as an interactive, if tongue-in-cheek, history lesson on roleplaying games from their inception to the modern day.
Unlike regular DIE, because this is a massive adventure, there’ll be mechanics for leaving the otherworld and returning to your grinding real-life existence - before being drawn, inexorably, back to the dungeon.
And, if Kieron will let us, we’ll put in a new deity for each realm of gaming for Godbinders to bargain with: an Old-Testament 1970’s overlord who frowns on players touching their own dice. A many-faced Janus of the 1980’s licensed game explosion. A brooding grim reaper tryhard of the 90’s. A turn-of-the-millenium Hephaestus, guardian of the Forge, set against the lumbering leviathan of the OGL. That sort of thing. (If Kieron won’t let us, please disregard this bit. But know that we tried.)
Who’s Involved?
The DIE Metadungeon comes to you from the fevered mind of Gareth Hanrahan (Dagger in the Heart, Eyes of the Stone Thief, The One Ring/Adventures in Middle Earth, Trail of Cthulhu, The Fall of Delta Green, and many, many more), a man who has played more role-playing games than is entirely good for a person, and written supplements and adventures for almost as many.
Gareth has a tremendous facility for setting up players and GMs to tell compelling stories, loading them up with tough and interesting choices, and (we assume) growing strong on the resulting psychic feedback.
Kieron Gillen (DIE - the comic and the RPG, The Power Fantasy, The Wicked + The Divine, and, again, just a bunch of good stuff) is closely involved in the creative process, from building and refining the core idea to contributing words to the book.
And Grant Howitt (Spire, Heart, DIE: The RPG, Eat the Reich, Hollows) retains his role as creative consultant, pushing everything in the Metadungeon as far as, and probably further than, it can go.
Stephanie Hans (DIE… too many beautiful things to list, honestly) will create the cover, and we’ll work with a team of artists to capture the essence of every era of the Metadungeon.
Get the DIE Quickstart
If you’d like a taste of what you’re getting into, pick up the free DIE Quickstart from our website:
https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/die-rpg-quickstart
