Does Death have an agenda in your games, that might influence bargains offered in the Last Breath move, for example?
Does Death have an agenda in your games, that might influence bargains offered in the Last Breath move, for example?
Does Death have an agenda in your games, that might influence bargains offered in the Last Breath move, for example?
Hell yes! Asking players what death is like is one of the best starting questions to make a setting, I reckon.
I like death to be different for each character as they entertain the move. The cleric and paladin for instance have far disparate visions than the evil thief or agnostic barbarian. James has the right of it though – ask provocative questions, its just too good a hook to leave alone.
/s
my world has many gods, who play games with the mortal realm, but two are far better than all others at this game – Fate and Luck. Every GM Move, every Grim Portent is the will of Fate. Every dice roll is the influence of Luck.
Death is only supposed to collect the playing pieces when the players have finished with them, but for whatever reason, he sometimes offers them a chance to stay on the board, in the hopes they will ruin the game.
Once I had one of the players (a heavily Gaelic inspired druid named Caelwyn the usurper) roll a 7-9 after she had met death after succumbing to the assassin’s poison coursing through her veins. I quickly went and grabbed my wildwood tarot deck and asked her to draw from the major arcana to see what death wanted of her. She drew: number 20 the great bear and I read straight from the crib notes:
‘The Great Bear judges our lives through the eyes of nature, and its eyes are unclouded by morals and divinity. It thinks merely of balance and practicality, and rewards you with what you have done with your life, whether it be good or bad, helpful or harmful. The Great Bear represents nature’s final judgment of oneself, and none can escape that final truth of cosmic law. The Bear also represents renewal and reincarnation, as well as a passage into the realms of the mystical.’
Caelwyn was offered a re-birtth, but only if she became a cleric of the old ways, a true priest of nature, forgoing her druid powers and become a scion of nature. Effectively a cleric at level one.
The player thankfully said yes, and awoke apon her funeral cairn, just before the fighter Vardis was about to set her corpse ablaze and said to him, ‘believe onto me for I am a servant of all that good and pure’. Heady stuff!