TTRPG Review: Dead Friend

fiona15351 visited me recently, and we went to my excellent local game store, where Fiona acquired a two-player indie RPG called Dead Friend, by a local game designer named Lucian Kahn.

It's an excellent game! It was also the catalyst for perhaps the most genuinely unnerving experience of my entire life.

The way the game works is that one player is the living friend and the other is the dead friend. The living friend is summoning the dead friend through a necromantic ritual - there are some cool physical elements to the gameplay related to the ritual that make the game much more immersive and contribute to an eerie vibe. The living and the dead each have their own goals, and those goals are at odds. It's really a collaborative storytelling game, with a deck of cards (regular playing cards or Tarot cards - we used Tarot) providing the random element. The players pick the setting and tell the story of the past relationship between the friends and the dead friend's death, and at the end there's a final confrontation between the living and the dead.

At Fiona's suggestion, our story was set at a boys' boarding school in the early 20th century; the living friend (played by Fiona) was a student, the dead friend (me) his late classmate. We had a pleasantly spooky (and sad) time creating the story of their lives and the dead friend's death in response to prompts determined by drawing cards, and envisioning the ritual as it progressed.

We came at last to the final confrontation between living and dead. The "weapons" each has are determined by drawing cards. At one point, Fiona played the Ace of Swords, which - per the table in the game book - was "appeal to authority." She had the living friend challenge the dead friend's ghost to prove he was not malevolent by reciting the Lord's Prayer. I decided that, based on what we had established, the ghost would not be able to do that. Instead, playing the ghost, I recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin but introduced an error - voluntas mea, "my will," in place of voluntas tua, "Thy will."

Then I got a nosebleed.

And I mean I got a nosebleed immediately, and a fairly bad one - it was like something out of a horror movie! I was deeply freaked out and am still a little unnerved by the whole thing.

We eventually made it back to the game; the instructions said that the winner of the confrontation is determined by consensus, and we were in immediate agreement that the ghost had absolutely not won this one.

But overall, terrifying moment aside...it was a really enjoyable game.