Hi everyone. Death Game is now live on Kickstarter, the day has come. [Check it out here]
If you’re already planning to back, I’d do it now — there are early-bird physical editions available for a discount, but they could run out soon!
If you aren’t planning to back it, I’d still really appreciate you taking time to read through the kickstarter page. There are some unique elements to this game that might change your mind.
Before I tell you a bit more about Death Game I just want to reiterate how important your help is in making this game a success. If you like what I do in any way, or want to support my craft, please do what you can to share this project. Since the death of social media marketing (thanks Elon Musk) I really rely on my mailing list and word of mouth to get the word out there.
So if you can do any of these things, I’ll owe you big time:
Share the game with one friend or community you think would like it.
Share it on your social media in any way, shape or form. (please tag me! @laurie_eee on x @laurie.oconnel on insta)
Bookmark the page to come back to later.
Now tell me more about the game!
Honestly, everything is on the kickstarter page. But to summarise: Death Game is a narrative-driven tabletop roleplaying game when characters compete in a high-stakes battle for survival. It’s inspired by the death game genre: think Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, etc.
Throughout the game, players will pick up different characters, struggling against all odds for victory. As the number of competitors narrows and the stakes grow higher, you'll play until one of you wins, and the rest of you die. During that time, you’ll build an arena, work out the rules of play, and grow attached to your mostly doomed cohort of competitors.
The game features a rotating GM. You determine your arena by secret ballot, and you play characters that are almost certainly destined to die.
It’s two zines; the core game and then a collection of scenarios written by myself and fantastic guest writers, including
, Kayla ( ), and wendi yu.The team for this project is unparalleled. I have
on editing. I have Hodag RPG on art. I have Luke Earl (aethercorpgames) on layout. And I worte it, which I’m assuming is a selling point for those of you that actively follow my newsletter. This really is a classic Laurie O’Connel game: a great one sentence pitch, sharp, stripped-down mechanics, and mainly interested in finding out why we’re all so obsessed with this genre right now.Okay cool; but can I get a sneak peek?
Beyond what I’ve shared on the KS page and the newsletter already, there’s not much I can show. Except just this one thing.
Death Game also comes with an essay about the genre and how the game links into it. It’s currently incomplete and unedited, as new stuff keeps happening as I write it. But I’ll share a section of it with you now.
Feel free to read it if you like criticism. If you don’t and you find it boring, just head to the kickstarter page and read about the game itself, its mechanics, and have a look at the lovely art. Nobody’s keeping you here. But you follow my mailing list, so I do assume you’re interested in my opinions :)
On Death Games by Laurie O’Connel
“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
-Berthold Brecht
I first began writing Death Game in Autumn 2021, when Squid Game was taking the world by storm. Squid Game became an overnight sensation, showing a cast of hundreds of down-on-their luck contestants taking part in mostly arbitrary, always lethal challenges for the entertainment of a shadowy Front Man and mysterious, extremely wealthy VIPs. The VIPs would bet on contestants, speculating on their suffering during excessive parties on a secret, luxurious island.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that the show gained surprise popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, when speculators made billions on vaccine development whilst governments gambled with the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Death games are popular. They’re evocative. They’re a genre that seems made to turn into a tabletop roleplaying game; a game within a game. But for a while I’ve struggled with what I want this game to say.
There’s no point in writing a genre game without thinking seriously about the genre itself.
The irrationality of modern life
The ‘battle royale’ or ‘death game’ genre is defined on Wikipedia as “a fictional narrative genre where a select group of people are instructed to kill one another until there is one survivor.” It was defined largely by the 2000 Japanese film of the same name, in which a class of Japanese schoolchildren are forced to fight to the death by a totalitarian government. The Hunger Games, which shows ‘tributes’ drawn from oppressed colonies to battle to the last teenager in futuristic, dystopian America, was a western take on a similar concept.
The genre has been experiencing a serious revival in recent years. As I write, The Hunger Games sequel, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is going viral. Alice in Borderland was renewed on Netflix for a third season. But why, at this moment in time, are we so obsessed with the dramatisation of death?
Death Games speak to the rational irrationality of the modern world. I truly believe that they are a vivid incarnation of the way workers and young people today feel. If you are eighteen today, you were six when the banks crashed in 2008. The words you most identified with in 2023 were ‘climate change’ and ‘war’. And you are part of the first generation in modern history to expect a worse standard of living than your parents.
Most of us have never known the prospect of a stable home, job, or life. We are trapped in a rat race, a never-ending struggle for survival, as the wealthy look on and laugh. One competitor in Squid Game gave voice to the hopelessness of modern life. “In here, I have a chance. Out there, I have none.”
It seems ludicrous that we are fighting for scraps between each other whilst others feast on banquets beyond imagining. But according to the rules of the game, all is fair. We just never stopped to challenge the rules of the system itself.
We are used to violence and death. We see it flash across our TV screens every day. Footage of war, famine and starvation, contends with Big Brother and Love Island for space in our minds and our watch lists. The twenty four child tributes reaped from the districts of Panem seem beyond the pale to us, but between 2003-2011, US-led coalition forces killed at least 1200 children in Iraq.
When bombs fall from the sky in Gaza, killing civilians indiscriminately, or refugee children wash up on our beaches, we may be horrified, but politicians don’t blink. At least in Alice in Borderland, when competitors’ “visas” run out , they are killed cleanly by a laser to the head, rather than by a slow drowning in a ship pushed over by the Greek coastguard.
We tell ourselves that we like death games because they’re alien to us. The kind of killing we see in Saw or A Game of Werewolves is so ridiculous, it’s somehow easy to watch. It makes us feel safer. But in reality, death games are something of a fantasy. We dream of the rules of life being so simple and easy to fathom. We dream of a fair and even playing field, where at least we have a chance of winning.
Then, that’s what Death Game has to be. Fair. Not a players’ power fantasy where you move across the arena slaughtering NPCs, but a game where everyone is equally doomed.
Your characters have to be ready to die at any time, constantly in peril, but never because somebody else cheated. Always because everyone; yourselves, and the other competitors, and the GM, are playing by the rules.
And everyone should get a go in the GM’s chair. Why not? Don’t we all go through life thinking that, while we may struggle today, maybe one day we’ll be the ones on top?
[TO BE CONTINUED…]