DIE #5

Anybody who's been keeping up with Kieron Gillen's latest project, Die, has been treated to a rich world and story. A meta, dark fantasy roleplaying experience, the story has been described by Gillen himself as "Goth Jumanji." Die follows 5 adults as they're called back to a world that swept them away as teenagers, a world where they become the characters they created for their own roleplaying game. One character calls themselves "the Dictator," and has the ability to control people who hear their voice. Another character plays a "God Binder," a Cleric-like character who doesn't worship gods, but barters with them for different effects. All of the characters are powerful on this world, but just regular (somewhat traumatized) people in ours.

As kids, the characters are implied to have lived up their fantasy adventure. They had romances, affected regional politics, and took part in large scale battles and wars. They treated the adventure like a game and toyed with the citizens and the world, as you would expect a group of teenagers running an actual game of D&D would. Anybody who has played or even watched a roleplaying group play a game can tell you how rarely the gravity of a person or party's actions is taken. But when an adventuring party destabilizes regional politics, what happens in that fantasy world? Most fantasy stories don't explore that space. Die explores that space deeply.

The consequences of the group's actions is felt decades later, as adults. Characters or entire regions remember who they are, in part due to the villainous machinations of the world's Grandmaster, and treat them with the reverence or fear they earned on their last trip. With age comes wisdom, so they say, and the party is more hesitant to treat the world like the same game they played last time. They establish relatively early in their adventure that they need to treat this world and the people in it as real, even if they haven't completely decided whether it is real or some form of simulation.

And that's where the crux of the conflict comes from in issue 5. While issues 1-4 established the world and the characters, issue 5 ends the first story arc with what will likely be the overarching plot for the rest of the series. When you have a life and a family in a whole other world, what would you do to get back to them? When you're hailed as a hero, savior, monster, or even god on this world would you want to go back?