I wanted to share a little mechanic from a rather defunct RPG project I was working on a few years ago with Matt.

We were working on a game focused on child and adolescent PCs that walked a tightrope tonally between a wholesome Saturday morning cartoon and horror. We had it in our minds that in general, if things went bad for the PCs, the fail state would look more like a scolding from the principal of just Things Getting Worse. But when things got really bad, the GM could put death on the table.

Literally!

Death tarot card

The GM would have a Death tarot card face down on the table. At any point (as long as you weren’t in the middle of resolving a player action), the GM could turn it face up. As long the death card is showing, any potentially lethal injury that could knock a PC out, kills them. It does not give the GM license to ice a PC out of nowhere, but it signals a ratcheting up of the stakes, and does give the GM more permission to bring the hurt than they usually have.

You can compare this with the 2400 games. These have a similar approach to lethality where the GM has to signal death as a possible outcome before a roll so players can decide whether to accept the risk. The death card does that too but it’s a little more playful and introduces deadliness as a quality of an overall situation rather than a specific roll.

We came up with some fun riffs on this mechanic. For instance ghouls, which in this setting were something between roving undead dandies and a drunken biker gang, put death on the table just by being in the vicinity, even if they’re not trying to hurt you. Because the death card is kind of meta, it lets you play with the tensions between what’s happening in the fiction and what could happen at any instant, while also providing a dial to indicate when it was safe to breathe and take more risks. We imagined the ghouls doing things like scooping up the PCs and dragging them to one of their parties which, because ghouls always put death on the table, was liable to go horribly wrong at any instant.