8 Tabletop Roleplaying Games to Help You Navigate the Afterlife

As the impartial TTRPG scene has exploded over the current years, so has the creativity that comes together with an ever-expanding and modern buyer base. While wandering the afterlife (or wandering round as an undead creature) are well-trod storytelling tropes, sport designers throughout the globe have taken folklore and fantasy and merged them to create some extremely enjoyable and thrilling video games.

There are two sections to this listing, the primary coping with video games that happen explicitly within the afterlife, the bardo, the locations between life and dying. The second provides you video games the place you play undead creatures of assorted stripes. Let’s dig in.

Playing within the Bardo

Afterlife: Wandering Souls (Angry Hamster Publishing) is a dreamy, atmospheric sport the place characters tackle the roles of Wanderers who’ve moved on from the world of the dwelling and are looking for their closing resting place. The catch is that you haven’t any reminiscence of who you have been. As you wander the desert-like Tenebris seeking fragments of who you have been, your reminiscences seem in your pores and skin like tattoos as you discover a technique to untangle your previous and discover peace.

Wandering Souls makes use of cube swimming pools to maneuver the motion ahead, creating an environment that’s nearly like betting by yourself survival. You first start your journey if you take a ferry into the afterlife, and character creation instantly immerses you on the planet and the mechanics.

Follow Me Down (Joie Martin) is a classically impressed sport primarily based on the parable of Orpheus and Euridyce. It was efficiently funded by way of Kickstarter in 2021, and the preview ashcan is accessible by way of itch.io. With lovely paintings and an modern twist on the Powered by the Apocalypse sport system, Follow Me Down permits two gamers to retell the story inside a framework of chapters, referred to as the Books of the Dead. This is an exploration of grief and love and the lengths individuals will go to be with the individual they love, even when it means going by hell itself.

Afterlife (Xavid) is a Live-Action Role Playing sport (LARP) that enables gamers to discover totally different variations of the afterlife primarily based on up to date and historical religions. You should chant, struggle, and cut price with devils, angels, valkyrie, and Egyptian gods as you try to seek out the suitable match on your soul. As the Game Master leads the misplaced souls by rooms, Xavid’s lyrical prose creates an odd and fantastic setting for immersion and exploration.

Alone in Between (Matthew Gravelyn) is specific about how you’re and the place you ended up. You’re a ghost, and also you’re caught in between the world of the dwelling and the useless, trapped in a home. This is a solo journaling sport utilizing a deck of playing cards and a 10-sided die, and the narrative is led alongside by exploring and analyzing the issues that you’ve left unresolved in your life. Introspective and metaphysical, this sport dives into what actually ties us to the current, the longer term, and what could be holding us again.

So, You’re Undead

Death Mask (Ostrich Monkey Games) is a collaborative sport the place participant characters tackle the mantle of Revenants, cursed (blessed?) to guard Tomb-City from shadowy aberrants that stalk the streets. This is one other sport that’s mild on the foundations and massive on the vibes, permitting loads of interpretation amongst each the sport grasp and the gamers on find out how to work together with the tag-based mechanics. As you threat cube rolls to enact highly effective strikes you additionally threaten to Fracture your masks, which implies your character’s soul would possibly move on, but additionally implies that your sport would possibly come to the top.

Pull Me From the Earth (Corvyn Appleby) has a particular place in my coronary heart, because it was impressed by one in every of my favourite musical artists, Hozier. This two-player sport has themes of physique horror, queerness, and intimacy at its core, underlined by the truth that a number of the play supplies embrace grime and leaves. One individual performs the physique that has been unearthed whereas the opposite is the one who dug them out. Gameplay exists in a collection of questions (prompted by a deck of playing cards) that the 2 gamers ask one another in regards to the nature of their relationship and the circumstances of their lives… and their deaths.

Blade Undying (Club Xero) is a sport impressed by vampire lore, and owes loads of its JRPG taste to Kadokawa’s Dracurouge which, sadly, has by no means had an English translation. With a string of attention-grabbing, narrative-based mechanics that pressure the characters to hunt out emotional pathos for in-game mechanical foreign money, Blade Undying follows a gaggle of revenant knights as they discover the clans and world of the Failing Kingdoms which exist in full darkness. With violence and dying on the core of this sport, there’s loads of alternative for quick fight and the candy launch of undeath.

Thousand Year Old Vampire (Tim Hutchings) is a darling of the indie TTRPG scene, and for superb motive. This solo journaling sport has a pastiche-style rulebook that guides you thru the lifetime of your character and the lore of vampires all through the ages. Gameplay happens by a collection of pre-written prompts inside the e-book in addition to participant character decisions and cube rolls primarily based on sources you’ve gotten or lack. This three-time Ennie-winning sport has a beautiful bodily version as nicely, and the design alone makes it value your whereas to choose up a duplicate.

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