Petra is Playing: DIE

03 Mar, 2026

Based on their comic of the same name¹, DIE is a very meta dark fantasy RPG by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans in which a group of flawed, mundane people gather together to play a cursed roleplaying game that transports them into a fantasy world reflecting their losses, failings, and obsessions. My DIE campaign honestly might be the shortest I’ve ever ran, clocking in at just three sessions, but those three sessions were not only some of the most fun I’ve ever had with an RPG, they were also the most emotionally resonant and impactful RPG sessions I’ve played, to the point that I almost cried during our finale. And don’t just take my word for it; one of my wonderful players, Maebh, also contributed her thoughts which will be sprinkled throughout.

At its core, DIE’s mechanics are incredibly simple; roll a pool of d6s equal to your stats, which will be one of the classic D&D six. Every 4 or higher is a success, and with every 6 or higher you can activate a Special, which gives you a bonus effect. Combat works the same way, but with each success counting as a hit. That’s pretty much the start and end of DIE’s core mechanics, but from this very simple, unobtrusive backdrop DIE is able to create an incredibly engaging play experience through its great characters.

Presentation wise, DIE is great. The presentation is very clear, with great formatting and use of its white space, the writing is captivating and informative, and the artwork by Stephanie Hans is great, both the original pieces and the art reused from the comic. That’s something I’d usually critique in a licensed game, but Hans’s work on the original comic is so phenomenal that I honestly can’t complain.

Unlike other games, there’s no “session zero” because character creation is so integral to the game that the rulebook explicitly calls it session 1. In DIE, everyone (including the GM!) gets to make two characters; a Persona, a flawed person from the real world, and a Paragon, a fantastical hero who the Persona transforms into when they enter Die. And Persona Generation might honestly be my favourite character creation system in any TTRPG.

I was running through “Rituals”, a section of the rulebook guiding you through the core DIE experience (more on that later!), which gives you a scenario called Reunion. In it, the Personas are a teenage RPG group who are reuniting years later to play another game. And from that basic premise, Persona generation gives you an expansive list of questions to answer. Your first questions are about the whole group, like “How long has it been since you graduated?” or “what was the fantasy world you played in?”. Then they get deeper about the members of the group, like “how did people think of you at school, and how were you different from it?” and “who was your favourite and least favourite person in the group?”. Then you ask a big question about the core of the character, about their childhood dreams and what they view as their core. And then, finally, you skip ahead years later and see where your group has ended up as adults, asking what's their family like? What do they do for a living? And why haven’t they got what they wanted out of life as a teenager?

These questions are amazing. They’re mundane enough that almost anyone can jump in to answering them, specific enough to give you a good point of guidance, while also being broad enough that you can go in a lot of different directions with it. By the end of the roughly ninety minutes we spent generating our Personas, we had a group of complicated people with rich personal lives and that felt differently about each other, leaving us with characters that after just those ninety minutes, I felt I understood better than characters I’ve played entire campaigns with.

But that’s not to say that the Paragons are boring. While DIE’s first meta layer comes from the isekai premise, the Paragon classes add an additional meta layer deconstructing traditional D&D classes - and each class has its own polyhedral die associated with it. The d4 belongs to the Dictator, who’s like if a Bard was a horror character and their emotional manipulation and enchantment magic had really bad consequences. The d6 belongs to the Fool, a charming rogue who gets more powerful the less seriously they take things. The d8 belongs to the Emotion Knight, a paladin sworn not to an oath or god but to an emotion, who gets stronger the more they feel it. The d10 belongs to the Neo, a cyberpunk rogue in a fantasy world, fueling magical gifts with enchanted Fair gold. The d12 belongs to the Godbinder, a cleric-as-demonologist making deals and negotiating debt with their gods to perform their miracles. And the d20 belongs to the Master, the GM’s Paragon, a half wizard, half reality warper who dragged their friends into a fantasy world and doesn't want to leave (which is also a very funny play on the “killer GM” archetype).

Much like those in Heart: The City Beneath, which I reviewed previously, these classes are amazing because they’re tight and thematic, giving you a character to play rather than a bundle of abilities without any real cohesion. They also work incredibly well with the Persona layer too; each of these classes explores a core theme, like the Neo’s need for Fair Gold, the Emotion Knight’s core emotion, or the Godbinder’s dealmaking, that are very easily applicable to a Persona’s mundane life problems. Maybe your Grief Knight is forced back into a depressive spiral he thought he’d moved past, or your Neo’s reliance on Fair Gold reminds them of their financial issues in the real world.

“Playing as Dictator (despite my protests given I knew what they were from the comic) is fucking awesome. A flirtation for information turns into grappling with someone's undying fealty to you, the unintended consequences of stealing people's agency. It brings a realism to the messed up manipulative nature of magically influencing people that makes jovial barding feel tense and emotionally compelling. Telling a zombie to die, and after a die roll, it dying, might be the best combat I've experienced in a TTRPG.” - Maebh, who played Agnes, the Dictator.

We’re over 1000 words in and I’ve only written about character creation. I wasn’t joking when I said that DIE’s character creation system might be my favourite in any RPG I’ve played so far.

The actual structure of DIE begins with the Personas being gathered together by their old GM around the time of a school reunion, and you’re encouraged to just roleplay these Personas catching up and making small talk before the GM’s Persona distributes the dice, and the group enters the teenage fantasy world you established earlier, which is so much fun. Honestly, watching my players roleplay as a group of regular people catching up was so enjoyable that I almost didn’t want to introduce my Persona and start the campaign proper.

Your campaign has a clear start point, when the Personas arrive in Die, and a clear end point when they reunite with the Master and decide what to do next. So how do you come up with what happens in the middle? The answer is, you kind of don’t. Let me explain.

So during character creation, you’ll be left with a pretty extensive list of aspects of each Persona, a list including people, places, passions, careers, and dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled. DIE GM prep is looking over these and figuring out every character’s core lack, the primary thing that they want out of life and can’t get. Maybe a loved one died and they want to see them again, or they want to escape their mundane life and feel special. For each core lack, you prepare a key encounter, which is basically a way to confront them with that lack. Maybe they’re able to meet their parents again, or the people around them regard them as a hero. And that’s kind of the end of it, because for everything else you’re not sure of? DIE says “just ask your players”.

“If your TTRPG group is like ours (a discord call full of GMs), then this is the game for you, the way DIE is run facilitates the GM playing, and the players GM-ing, trading a baton as heartstrings are pulled and connections are forged.” - Maebh

I’d be lying if I said that giving up narrative control this way didn’t make me nervous going into it, and I say this as someone who’s already a very improv-centric GM. From the outside looking in, turning around and asking my players who they see and where they are and having to improv from there felt like it’d put me on the spot in a way that I was worried I couldn’t improvise my way out of. In practice though? I found it really natural. After getting so used to it during Persona generation, I trusted my players to give me great material to work from, whether small scene-setting details or entire locations and characters, and what always be something great that took the story in an interesting new direction and wouldn’t have been something I’d have thought of myself. And the fact that the game’s setting is “teenage TTRPG world we’re stuck in as adults” means that there’s not only a lot of freedom to introduce wild concepts without worrying about world logistics or consistency (my teenage D&D world certainly operated on the rule of cool over everything else), but it also means that the characters are going to have an immediate emotional hook into what’s introduced, whether that’s wonder or terror or just cringing at what your teenage self thought was cool.

“DIE stands at the pinnacle of the TTRPGs I've played when it comes to player agency, AND it is the best example I've ever found of my own personal platonic ideal of the medium, collaborative storytelling. Everything about the way the game is constructed, played and run is formatted around taking disparate individuals’ ideas and forming it collaboratively into a cohesive whole. I love it. In less than one session I was more invested in these peoples’ lives and stories than I've ever been in the longest running and deeply personal of D&D campaigns.” - Maebh

This entire setup is communicated in a part of the core rulebook called Rituals, and Rituals is honestly one of the best game-specific GM resources I’ve ever seen, giving you a great way to run a short DIE campaign. It provides the starting point, when the Personas enter Die, the ending point, when the Personas finally reunite with the Master and have to decide whether to stay or return, and it gives a lot of helpful, actionable advice on how to prepare the encounters between them. Rituals is so good; many RPGs will have a short prewritten adventure to demonstrate how the game is ran, but Rituals instead gives the power to you, the GM, by clearly showing you how to make a great campaign for yourself.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have many issues with DIE, although for the sake of fairness I’ll acknowledge that one GMs heaven is another GMs hell. As someone who’s been running improv-style games with minimal prep since I got into the hobby, improv GMing is pretty much second nature to me. I can, and have, run sessions where I only have one sentence of prep, but I could see both GMs and players struggling if they’re not used to running improv-style games. Even then, you could prep more extensively and run something a bit more structured if that’s something your players are alright with.

Another issue I had was with the classes, or more specifically some of the abilities. Not all, but a lot of character abilities are only used in combat, but while admittedly this could be more to do with how I ran DIE, there were only two incredibly brief combats throughout my entire campaign, leaving me a bit worried that my players couldn’t use any of their cool powers.

Those are just small critiques though. DIE is great and I can’t recommend it enough. Usually when I’m done with a roleplaying game, I’m alright to put it down for a while. But DIE is still stuck in my head, to the point where I’ve already started up a second Rituals campaign with a different group after wrapping up my first, and as soon as I’m back to running games in-person you can bet that a longer DIE campaign is high on the list.

Maebh, who contributed some of her thoughts to the review, also makes amazing music and comics. You can find her on bandcamp (leighapparently.bandcamp.com) or her instagram (instagram.com/leighapparently).