In Death

A Roleplaying Game About the Afterlife

Available now on Itch and DriveThruRPG

Skills & Software

Solo Indie Project
Made with MS Word
Gameplay Design
Rules Design
Game Balancing
Layout & Printing
Lore & World-Building
Research
Playtesting
Artwork Sourcing
Quality Assurance
Editing

Background

In early 2024, I had just concluded work on Fall of Rapture, and was getting idle hands when Chaosium announced their Basic Roleplaying Design Challenge. The Basic Roleplaying System was the seminal system upon which Call of Cthulhu was constructed, a d100 roll-under system in which players didn't "level up" but increased their skills in small increments through use. The system was available for use by the public, and this contest was encouraging the public to do exactly that: create a new game using the Basic Roleplaying system, with the most unique promising ideas winning a share of prize money to bring the game's release a step closer to reality.

I had played Call of Cthulhu a few months before, in what was one of the most memorable tabletop campaigns I had ever run - a small, self-contained story based on John Langan's The Fisherman. I was immediately swept up with how grounded it kept its characters - they weren't adventurers or super heroes, they were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The stories became personal, relatable and the campaign ended in teary-eyed smiles and players who still remember character deaths in sharp detail. Having had such a great experience with the Basic Roleplaying system, I didn't need much more motivation to have a go at it myself (though the allure of money did help).

Two pages of a tabletop roleplaying game book, Copyright © 2025 JD Trotter

Concept

In Death is a tabletop roleplaying game about the Afterlife. The players take on the role of ordinary people from our regular world, albeit they are now dead and must deal with what lurks beyond the veil of death - ghosts, angels, demons, and worse.

The idea was born of "what happens when character's lose?" - the idea that all of your heavily-invested player characters might fall victim to a night of bad dice rolls and suddenly your D&D or Call of Cthulhu game is suddenly cut short, left with an unsatisfying ending that leaves a sour taste in everyone's mouth. What if the story didn't stop there? What if the players, although tragically dead and gone, still had one last chance to set things right?

The Submission

Two months of hasty writing and gameplay design got a version of In Death over the finish line for the contest. The submission version lacked a lot of lore and fine-tuning with next-to-no world-building, but the core concepts were present. Players were dead, they had unique statistics that reflected their ghostly state and haunting abilities to reach out to their living loved ones. The system was made to tell tragic, personal stories for players to get invested in - and clearly, someone at Chaosium felt invested to.

In Death placed as one of the top ten finalists out of over 190 entries.

Version 01

Over the next year, I would dip in to In Death between working and creating work for university - always making a point to revisit the project so it didn't end up shelved. If I had time off, no I didn't - that was In Death time. The game underwent two rigorous playtesting campaigns of ten(ish) sessions each (both ending with players in tears - an oddly good sign) and then was revised several times over.

The final versions of the game were coming together, and a finalised layout, font, and artwork* were all being pieced together to form the finished product, and a distribution plan was taking shape.

*The artwork for In Death is entirely historical depictions of death and the afterlife.

Design

I was falling in love with In Death and the potential stories to be told using the system. Mechanically, the player characters had to feel ghostly - their spirits couldn't die, they were destroyed (or sent to Oblivion), they could heal from mortal wounds, or exist without crucial body parts - a player could even be a severed head if things went bad enough.

Abilities were formed of one of three classes - ghostly abilities to contact the living, divine abilities to defend yourself, and godly magicks to fight the great monsters of the Afterlife.

The world-building had become a tapestry of extinct creatures dismissed as myths, chtonthic cities heralded by historical figures, the laws of ancient creatures and what happened to ghosts that forget who they were. Playtesters asked all the right questions, the answers to which lead to thick and rich lore.

All the pieces came together to create a fleshed-out, thorough and dense finished piece, and I had seen it in action - it worked. Players cheered when they were supposed to cheer and wept when they were supposed to weep. With the playtesting complete, the finishing touches were added and polished.

A page from a tabletop roleplaying game book. Copyright © 2025 JD Trotter

Summary

In Death is a labour of love and a project I'm deeply passionate about. Its creation was built upon a foundation of skills I had developed while writing independant content for D&D and developing Fall of Rapture, but it also brought new challenges. Unlike other projects, In Death was created fully with a public release in mind; mechanically, it had to be sound and there could be no room for misinterpretation or error. Every item, image and aspect of the book had to be legal and within my rights to use and distribute. Every rule had to be triple checked, every word choice pored over, and then it needed to be rigorously playtested.

It was, and continues to be, a project I deeply enjoy adding to and perfecting, but more so than anything, I look forward to seeing what other things come from its creation; the stories others will tell with the tools provided within.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse