The Afterlife stole Closure • 2018 rpg

Thomas Novosel • www.thomas-novosel.com

Each Player is a person. Take turns describing where you each are and what you are doing first.

Each player now rolls a d10, whoever has the highest roll is out of the game (they will only track how many minutes each player takes to describe their reaction).

In order of lowest to highest the current player describes a change in the scene of the next player; taking as much time as they want. The next player then describes their reaction; as fast as possible. If anyone hasn't described their reaction yet, the player who hasn't described a change does.

Finally, all characters are dead now. Meeting together on a grey subway platform, in reverse order of the previous round, you each arrive. The last player describes how they look when they arrive, and the current player their reaction.

Discuss for 15 minutes what you each look like in the afterlife and speculate about how you died. No matter what you do you cannot leave the platform. 

When the clock has the sum of the players reactions from the last round left, the out player arrives, telling everyone why they killed you all.

Author Comments

A friend of mine gave me a prompt and I worked to write about it without using it. Lately, I have been reading more horror stories, and combining that with my attempts at exploring parts of myself and things I struggle to understand through art. I think I made a game that helps explain how I feel about answers, that sometimes they just can’t be reached because they are gone and no longer around. It is horrible how we can feel about things we just can’t know.

Then there is that whole thing where sometimes hearing the answer leads to an unsatisfactory ending, any reason can feel like it is never close to enough to satisfy us.

We don’t always know why, but the best chance of moving forward is what we do now with the resources around us and the cards already on the table. We can’t work with what we can never have.

The end question for this game I guess is:

How do we find closure in the time we have left when we do get the answers to what we ask? And those answers do not change what has happened.

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