Grandma Death
So, I was watching the new Netflix show The OA the other day and it has a great representation of Death that I think fits very nicely with DW Death rules. Instead of Death being a faceless cloaked figure who doesn’t seem to have a reason to “bargain” with you, Death is a loving grandmother welcoming you back home. This makes RPing Death easier and makes it easier to come up with “bargains.” In the show (spoiler warning), the main character dies and Grandma Death wants to stay dead because she knows her life will be suffering. The main character wants to go back, and Death agrees but takes her sight so that “she won’t see the suffering she experiences.” Later, (spoilers again!) the main character dies again, again Grandma Death wants to welcome her home and let her live with her dead family members for eternity. The main character wants to return, Death let’s her on the condition that she uses her life to save her friends (she also gives her some kind of power and gives her sight back).
Neat idea, but you took all the sting out of dying. I mean, she gets her sight back AND powers and all she has to do is agree to help her friends, which she would probably do anyway? My Death is meaner. 🙂
It’s not really a deal if it’s something thy would accept anyways. A death deal should be something where the character actually needs to make a hard choice. Should the friendly drui sacrifice his soul and morality to keep his blood pumping? Should the Paladin hunt down his own order he thought was destroyed, because a different god saved them during a battle they were destined to die in? Would the mage who wanted to show the world magic can be used for good live with an elemental of chaos within his body? Would the greedy thief want to live if he had to give up all wealth forever?
Giving up your sight is a pretty hard choice. There was more background on the character that she really wanted and longed to be with her father, it was the entire reason she wound up where she did in the first place. Her “friends” were also basically strangers to her – not an actual adventuring party.
That said, the second death wouldn’t work well for DW, but the point wasn’t the exact deals, but that making Death a loving grandmother makes the reasons Death asks for anything make a lot more sense than just “Death is a meanie.”
You could just ask the players what death appears as each time one of them dies. It can be more meaningful that way. Personally the death in the games I GM is an angel assigned to watch over the afterlife. We even had a session where the job changed hands. Death can be a character with actual goals, not just a faceless entity, so I try to make the deals have some impact on the world. Like when the Barbarian told death he would kill a monster and she asked him to slay a creature created by a god that devours souls. It was currently on the mortal plane sniffing out the physical gate to the underworld and if it found it, then it would devour the soul of everyone who ever died and become too powerful even for the gods to stop. I posted more examples a while back on a different group, I could hunt down that post again if you’d like.