Today is the digital launch of In Death: A Roleplaying Game about the Afterlife.

During its development over the last year, it has went through some ups and downs and some major changes. It placed as a finalist out of 190 entries in the 2024 Basic Roleplaying Design Challenge from Chaosium. It's undergone over 40 hours of playtesting across two short-form campaigns of deeply varying style and subject. It's had whole aspects of its system overhauled, rules remixed, stat blocks changed, images swapped and altered and is even available as a physical print (which is currently available exclusively at Angry Cherry NI). It has been a long road to this day.

In Death was originally a game made to tell heart-breaking stories. A system that didn't center superheroes or valiant magical heroes, but ordinary people from the modern world, who had seemingly lost everything. People like you and me who were suddenly faced with incomprehensible truths and overwhelming odds. The early chapters in In Death focus on creating a character that feels grounded, who lived a life before they lost it. In my mind, this system would be stories of those striving to persist in an Afterlife that sought to devour them, as they made one last struggle to set things right.

Then, my wife saw In Death - and its potential. And she told me she wanted to run a playtest campaign about an 80's summer camp slasher. We would play the slasher's first victims, rushing around the camp as ghosts using haunting powers to try and save other campers and unravel the mystery behind the slasher from beyond the grave. It was so thematically different from In Death's core setting that it shone a light on all the potential stories one could tell with the system. Suddenly, you could use In Death to tell stories like:

- A Beetlejuice-inspired campaign of the recently deceased navigating the strange and clerical side of death, defying Afterlife agencies and meeting bizarre, big personalities.

- A Patrick-Swayze-Ghost campaign about living in the ghostly version of your home town or city while trying to reconnect with your living loved ones.

- A valiant story of viking warriors who set off across the Afterlife to battle ancient beings in one last journey to secure their place in Valhalla.

- A film-noir style campaign of Afterlife private investigators who held other souls resolve their own unfinished business.

- A Stir of Echoes-style murder mystery where the players haunt the living to uncover the truths behind their own grisly deaths.

The list goes on. In Death's potential transformed so much in the eyes of just one other individual besides myself, and now, anyone can play. Today, we launch In Death to the world, and I'm so excited to see what the world does with it.

I hope you and your friends tell amazing, tear-jerking, hilarious, fulfilling stories with In Death. 

- Jacob