Our God is Dead is a comedy RPG about fooling religious followers
Sacred shenanigans.
Hoodwink believers and hide the truth in Our God is Dead, a rules-light roleplaying game about running a religious organisation under false pretenses.
In Our God is Dead, the players become a group of religious devotees who wake one morning to discover that their deity of choice has suddenly and rather unexpectedly died. As clerics of the order, the players must work together to maintain the ruse that their god is still alive and pass out decrees in the hopes of retaining their high-power status. Should the truth be discovered, then the game is up and the player characters’ positions in the order are forfeit.
The upcoming RPG is played over a series of three acts, with each act serving to set up a different scenario for the player characters to tackle. The very first act sees players generating their own ideas about who their now dead god was and what they wanted from their followers - collectively making up details that they can use to trick people into believing their lies. These details then help to inform the players’ scheme during the second act of the RPG, which will see them crafting a plan to deceive the other members of the order and its believers into enacting their freshly made-up creeds.
However, plans naturally go awry and players will have to improvise in order to avoid being discovered. In Our God is Dead, players roll a d6 in order to pass a performance test with every lie they attempt to tell - success or failure is dependent on whether a player is able to beat the result of their previous roll. Success means continuing the ruse, whilst failures lead to complications that players will have to juggle throughout the game. Eventually, all the players’ actions will catch up to them in the third and final act, which sees the group attempting to cover up all the messes they’ve made.
The roleplaying game ends with players taking turns to narrate what happened to their characters as a result of the scheme and all their failed rolls. Players can use the game’s prompts and guidelines to come up with humorous endings, with the party voting on their favourite one.
Our God is Dead was created by Jordan Palmer, an RPG designer who also made the storytelling card game Mage Against the Machine, which was released by Murder Publishing last year.
The campaign for Our God is Dead is part of the Zinequest 3 event that took place on Kickstarter over the last month and featured various other roleplaying games including a hack of the RPG Artefact called Bucket of Bolts, as well as a solo roleplaying game from Star Crossed designer Alex Roberts called Precious Little Animal.
The Kickstarter campaign for Our God is Dead is live until tomorrow, March 9th, with a pledge of $16 (£12) getting backers a physical and digital copy of the RPG in May. Alternatively, backers can get a digital-only version of the game for $8 (£6).