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Posted by Bundle Operator

https://beyondthebundle.com/2025-12-22/die-rpg/

https://beyondthebundle.com/?p=13561

Through Monday, January 12, 2026 we present the new DIE RPG Bundle featuring DIE, the RPG from Rowan, Rook, & Decard based on – rather, created in parallel with – the DIE Image Comics series (20 issues, 2018-21) by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans. In DIE you play a group of flawed and desperate real-world adults (Personas) pulled back into a cursed roleplaying game that, as teenagers years before, you had barely survived. In a realm stitched together from your obsessions, dreams, and nightmares, you’re power players called Paragons. Do you want to return to the real world or to stay here, where you can finally get what you want? Your whole group must agree whether you stay or go; the dead can’t vote; it can get bloody. What will you do to get home safe? What will you do to stay here forever?

Funded in a hugely successful May 2022 Kickstarter campaign, DIE is a pitch-black portal fantasy that gets all too real – a “Goth Jumanji.” As a Neo, Godbinder, Emotion Knight, Dictator, or Fool, you’ll travel the icosahedral planet of Die, visiting pocket dimensions inspired by all the games and settings you’ve ever loved. Each Persona class has ownership of one size of polyhedral die (d4, d6, d8, etc.) and can use its class die to change a particular situation – whether channeling your god’s power, stealing techno-magical Fair Gold, feeding emotion to your arcane weapon, or even manipulating reality itself. Your group will join in the Great Game of diplomacy and intrigue among the realms, and you’ll confront, and maybe succumb to, the personifications of your own strengths and weaknesses. When does the game end? You’ll all decide – those who survive.

In 1991 six British teenagers vanish while playing a tabletop RPG. Two years later, five of them reappear 50 miles away. One is missing an arm. They can’t say what happened to them. Resuming their normal lives, they get jobs, get married, and have kids. Then, in 2018, the thing that happened to them happens again. This is the setup for the 20-issue DIE comic book series. Writer Kieron Gillen, a longtime gamer who co-founded the video game review site Rock Paper Shotgun, designed DIE: The Roleplaying Game while writing the comic, and elements of each influenced the other.

DIE is a meta fantasy that poses the question of why we play games at all. The setting is a d20-shaped world where each face is a distinct region defined as “a certain slice of the elements that metabolized into RPGs. There’s a region inspired by the classic RPG worlds, sure, but there’s also regions inspired by the Brontës’ childhood shared fantasies, the early war-games (called kriegsspiel) of the 19th-Century Prussian military, and the melancholy of Tolkien. However, each region isn’t just playing out the tropes – it’s a hard twist on that genre. The D&D region is a hyper-compressed mashup of a million D&D worlds. The kriegsspiel is Prussian robots driven by pure mechanics. The Tolkien region is about World War I, and brings to the fore all the things in his work shaped by his time in the Somme.” The 20 regions interact with one another – a living argument about what makes up an RPG. Some regions merge into Great Powers – players in the Great Game, with motives and plans of their own.

Each region embodies an aspect of the Personas’ hopes, fears, fantasies, and obsessions. What do you do when the dragon speaks to you in the voice of your angry long-dead father? What happens when the orcs taunt you with the same insults as your childhood bullies, but now you’re armed with a greatsword? When your beloved ex-partner returns to you in the form of an emotion-draining vampire, will you resist?

Jim Rossignol, co-designer of TEETH (in our October 2024 TEETH Bundle) and Gillen’s longtime collaborator on Rock Paper Shotgun, interviewed the designer for a May 2022 Substack newsletter. Rossignol called DIE “a game where you play the once-teenage players of a TTRPG, who were dragged into the game (like in that D&D cartoon) and then forced to return to it as adults in later life, a bit like – wait – a bit like a forty-something writer who has returned to the preoccupations of his youth for reasons of existential examination and cultural-philosophical heartstringing?! Hang on a minute!”

“RPGs are all about the big questions,” Gillen said. “Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who can you imagine yourself being? Do you like that person? And perhaps, can you take this self-knowledge back to the world? Which is what DIE is really about, both in comic and game, and what RPGs are especially good at. […]

“The world wants to make us into consumers. It tries to make us think creativity is something that godly other beings do. RPGs show how easy creativity is. Some friends, some rules, an evening? You can make a world, a story, something personal, something better than what’s being sold to you by the simulacra, because it’s yours. RPGs remind you of your own power. Creativity is infinite and freely available to you. I love that. They’re the most democratic, even anarchistic form.”

DIE continues to tumble vigorously forward. In November the creators started a new Image Comics story, DIE: Loaded. (“They’ve finished with the game. The game isn’t finished with them.”) And Rowan, Rook, & Decard has announced a new DIE RPG campaign supplement, Metadungeon – not “Megadungeon,” but “Meta,” because the dungeon is, itself, a post-modernist commentary on the history of roleplaying. “Every floor is an era of gaming: Paragons will burrow down through the roughly hewn caverns of 1970s classics from the dawn of D&D, through the new factions and foes of the 1980s, the edgy darkness of the 1990s, and on into the schisms and resurrections of the 21st Century.” Metadungeon will be designed by none other than Gareth Hanrahan (Eyes of the Stone Thief). “It’s going to be half dungeon, half psychodrama, half history of the hobby, and yes we’ve done the math on the halves,” Gareth says. “This idea’s been knocking around for a long time – I had ‘What if Planetary but classic RPG campaigns?’ on my list of possible projects years ago, and I’m overjoyed it’s found expression through Kieron’s DIE.” Metadungeon crowdfunds in April.

This new DIE RPG Bundle subjects you to harrowing personal encounters and exposes your most precious buried secrets – for an unbeatable bargain price! Pay just US$14.95 to get all four titles in our DIE Collection (retail value $53.50) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete DIE: The Roleplaying Game, previously in last year’s Cornucopia 2024, along with three scenario collections: Vol. 1: Bizarre Love Triangles, Vol 2: Love is a Battlefield, and Vol. 3: Childish Things. The three collections new to the Bundle of Holding have a combined retail value of $28.50.

Rowan, Rook, & Decard has also provided to purchasers of this offer a 15% discount code good through January 26, 2026 for the print versions of all DIE RPG products sold through the RRD webstore.

This DIE RPG offer goes missing in the grim Blubbermarshes of the Vile, where the Deal-Maker traps it in a contract of eternal service, Monday, January 12, 2026.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/DIEtheRPG

https://beyondthebundle.com/2025-12-22/die-rpg/

https://beyondthebundle.com/?p=13561