Here is the prelude to the story
That leads us to the grave.
So be it: we have had a glory
Not many have.John Masefield, The Fight on the Wall
For everyone of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death
Beowulf
Oh, Death, the iniquity! You prey upon the good and let the wicked live! Death, oh Death, how you hate the good, pouncing on them the moment they flourish! Why do you want to take my love?
First Continuation of Perceval
War! Does that absolve your guilt? You murdered men whose only crime was wanting to feed their children and see them grown. You made orphans of those same children and gave them up to the slow agony of starvation. You made widows of wives who knew nothing of realms or rulers. You stole the breath from their lungs and light from their eyes forever.
Stephen Lawhead, Arthur
After a pleasant youth,
After a troubled old age,
The earth will have us
Where are they who, before us
Were in this world?The Gaudeamus
Dead, she drifted to his feet.
Tell us, Love, is Death so sweet?Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elaine and Elaine
Every character in this game is going to die. Age will take some, but that dangerous profession of many characters will also reap as they sow.
O Quam Cito Transit Gloria Mundi!1
Character’s loved ones will die. Their enemies will die. Characters who are killed will die2. Their possessions and legacies will rust and wear and fade away. Arthur will die. Even the world itself will die in a sense, along with all the characters who do manage to survive to the ending3.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
The first implication is that when we introduce a mechanical element for anything in the setting, we should consider how it dies, and how to make that death interesting (sometimes even incentivized) for players.
We want characters to die. Giving the player some agency as that death happens4 and making sure they can feel the character’s arc is complete or unfinished in a good way5 can help make that palatable and even something players lean into.
One element of this is that old age should kill or retire characters (PCs and others). There should be a point where there’s less narratively to keep a character clinging to life, and the mechanics can support that.
Time also will kill a lot of things somewhat offscreen. Distant characters, obsolete technologies, ancient customs. This can naturally come from the progress of sessions, but relevant to this pillar, it could be good to let these deaths be mourned and given funerals. Players should see that the old custom is no longer getting the respect it once did, and the new fashions have buried it - the old technology, that old horse, that NPC who’s the last of the old order can all have those scenes where everyone knows it’s their last time in the sun - etc.6
In Defiance of Death
Arondir: Are you ready?
Bronwyn: No. Are you? … the alfirin seeds?
Arondir: It is a tradition among Elves. Before the battle begins, plant one.
Bronwyn: New life, in defiance of death.
The Rings of Power (Season 1, Ep 6)
This is a game about life. Death is a short story by itself, and only is given its long shadow by the substantiality of the life around it.
Most basically, deaths mean births if the population’s to stay at all stable. And removing characters from play means new characters need to come in to fill their places. If death can come at any time, so new characters can come at any time. Character creation needs to be snappy7 and possible to do while mourning the last character8 - and the same goes for side characters etc. - everything needs to be replaceable, in a sense.
But it’s not just about that. It also means life needs to matter. This is a reason why killing enemies has to have weight - because knowing that the bad guys aren’t expendable reinforces that the heroes aren’t either.
This means we need to feel the slices of life of characters before they die9, and to keep seeing them grow older until early or late they are cut down - anything that makes the characters feel like they’re not just mentioned to die the next moment.
How Could the End Be Happy?
But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why.
The Two Towers (2002)
“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”
J.R.R Tolkien, The Two Towers
The biggest question in death is: why did it matter?
Certainly a tricky problem to answer in any world. The legends give some themes that can be echoed, but however players choose to explore that the game will need to give a little space for this.
I think this is fruitful to keep somewhat unanswerable - no scorecards or achievement completion percentages at the end - but to let it be explored by the later characters reflecting on10 the meaning of the dead, and to allow player goals that can sometimes persist across these boundaries and see some returns over time (but never so much it answers the question by itself).
One simple element of this is to raise the visibility of inheritance - both literal and metaphorical11.
Footnotes
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“Oh, how swiftly pass away the glories of this world!” ↩
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But in seriousness, I do mean something by this. This isn’t a game with mooks and minions who exist to be mowed down and just kinda vanish into puffs of smoke (metaphorical but sometimes literal). We want the game to be able to focus on and support this; if a single soldier’s life matters narratively, then it says something if the only way it matters in the game - the only reason to even make it a fun encounter - is when it’s cannon fodder. That might be something we sometimes want to say (in terrible battles), but usually we want to say something else. We want to look for social considerations for wanton killings, stakes that make senseless deaths senseless, meaningful ways that deaths haunt the narrative and conflicts can be solved - even violently - without death as the only stakes. ↩
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Who, yes, escape the “every character is going to die” claim - but importantly none of these can have been born from the start, and they aren’t immortal either. This isn’t a claim of a high-lethality game that there’s some impossibly rare luck to get through unscathed - it’s a much more moderately lethal game, but time comes for everyone. ↩
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Without necessarily fully taking away the shock of death. There’s a careful balance between not overly shocking the players - such that it feels too bitter and bleeds into their overall game on one side and making it easy to feel that how it can be shocking and terrible for the characters (because that is what death is) on the other. Some deaths are probably easier to lean into randomness and its power to shock and provide unexpected new paths for the story (to discover e.g. how a character feels when everything was going well but by ill chance their friend fell ill and died) - because they’re more distant from the player’s involvement. Some will need a gentler touch because they’re closer. And this might need some sensitivity case by case (if a player’s real friend had fallen ill and died, that’s no longer a more abstract thing) - so things that are particularly shocking will need some forms of agency to redirect when it’s too harsh. ↩
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Since people will still be playing characters pretty close to those who came before, there’s ample room for the dead to haunt the narrative. Pass down obligations. Ignite feuds. Leave juicily broken promises and unfinished dreams for the next generation to be inspired and crushed by. Sometimes completing the character’s story is the weakest option in death. ↩
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A lot of this again is just how the narrative can work - but it bleeds into how we want to think about balance and visibility of the obsolete. We need to be able to see that it’s weak enough to not last, but still meaningful enough it doesn’t just get erased and replaced. ↩
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Games do this either by having few details to fill out, or by having them be quick (such as coming from other stats already prepared, having quick random rolls to break deadlock but not take a lot of calculation time, etc.), or by having them discovered progressively (i.e. you can start with a partially filled out character sheet and keep filling it out as you go) ↩
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i.e. the questions one answers first with a new character may be colored by the last death (which is good - haunting the narrative is amazing as we already talked about in these footnotes), while discovering what else is in this character might happen later. ↩
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And how do we expedite this because we don’t get to live day to day with these characters? One little trick is that characters need names. One thing I decided in an early draft, for instance, is that if you’re going to kill horses those horses need names written on the page. Anything that gives these characters texture or reminds the players of their histories (and encourages weaving that into the parts that they don’t have to be woven into - the backstories and downtimes) helps here, I think. ↩
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And mechanically being able to recall and maybe in cases utilize. ↩
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I mean, like inheriting traits and friends and unfinished projects. ↩