It's (Not) Dangerous to Go Alone: Death of the Author

Welcome to the (much delayed) second entry in It's (Not) Dangerous To Go Alone, my ongoing series about playing and critiquing solo TTRPGs!

 

When Samantha Leigh reached out to ask if I wanted to review their latest game, Death of the Author, I was an immediate and enthusiastic yes. I love solo games, I really admire Samantha's work, and the premise of the game was fascinating: a game about "a Character who attempts to gain control over their story, despite the wishes of their Author." Compelling stuff!

So I sat down with a Necronomicon deck of tarot cards that a friend gave me this past Christmas and about an hour later I had played through all five chapters of the game. I created a Character so obsessed with avoiding death that they began manipulating cancer cells to achieve eternal life, a Friend who betrayed me after seeing what I planned to do to their ailing great-uncle, and a Foe who tried to stall my research in undergrad and continued to stalk me even after their initial failure.

But the most interesting outcome was how the confrontation with the Author went. Throughout the game, your Character has the ability to change their story by altering the tarot cards drawn during various scenes, each time drawing the attention and ire of the Author. The Author retaliates by drawing Major Arcana cards, trying to steal your victory from you by altering the story to subvert your desires. But in my game, the Author was not an all-powerful force of nature; he was a puddle of nerves, afraid of where his own story was going and uncomfortable with what was being revealed about himself by him writing it. His interjections into the story weren't in the form of acts of God but warnings to the Character about pursuing this path, pleas to turn back, feeble attempts to dissuade them from their research. In the end, the Character stood over their Author, barely even sparing them a glance before walking out of the story (and beyond their influence) forever. They did not achieve their original goal, but they had still essentially defeated their creator.

Now a large part of this outcome depended on the deck of tarot cards I was using, and not just the value of the cards that were drawn. As I said, this was a Necronomicon-themed deck filled with Lovecraftian monstrosities, so the genre and tone of the game was basically set from the jump. On top of that, all the Major Arcana cards represented fears of some sort (fear of death, of madness, and of science being the Character, Friend, and Foe cards respectively), so the Author that the deck conjured up did not feel like a godlike figure of power but rather a sniveling puke of a man afraid of his story, his characters, and what they said about him. How to square this, then, with a game that is supposed to be about fighting for control?

The deck is quite horrific but set the scene beautifully.

Well it can't be. Not really. Because this game is less about fighting against a malicious tyrant trying to force you to conform than it is about bracing yourself against the relentless onslaught of the tyranny of chance. As Cezar Capacle recently pointed out in a post about how to make our cognitive biases work for us, we're wired to find patterns in a set of random data and create stories to explain it. It's arguably how reading tarot works in the first place, and it's the basic function of any solo game with a randomizer. This story might have an Author, but that Author is subject to the rules of the game the same as the Character is. More, even, as the Character always has the player on their side; the tenor of the Author depends largely on the cards you draw, which are then open to interpretation and pattern-creation by the player. The Author you end up with is the Author that you create to fit the story you're in, not the other way round.

Any misfortune that happens in this game is created by random chance and what the player brings to the table rather than by someone with their own ideas about what your Character should be doing. You could almost say that this game is a better simulation of real life than it is a character in a story since things tend to actually happen for a reason in stories (even if those reasons aren't necessarily nice or good). In this game, the characters and Author alike are swept along by the whims of the tarot deck, with only the player to steer the ship through the treacherous waters.

Pictured: your average Death of the Author player.

So does the game deliver on its premise? Are you playing "a Character who attempts to gain control over their story, despite the wishes of their Author"? Well, yes and no. The prompts in the early access version of the game that I played almost leave too much open to interpretation and don't try to force the Character in the direction that the Author wants enough. Indeed, it's never set out what exactly it is that the Author wants for the Character in the first place. I rarely felt like I was butting up against invisible walls or the dreaded railroad of the authoritarian GM. But in the end I had a fascinating relationship with my Author that probably couldn't have happened with a more heavy-handed approach to the game!

My best advice to people interested in this game:

• The Author is only as rough as you make them, so if you want the experience promised by the game you've got to be willing to get in the mud and put your Character through it.
• The tarot deck you use is going to influence you more than you might think, so be careful what you pick. I know that my next playthrough will probably be with my Mystical Cat deck and I'm sure that experience will be wildly different.
• Don't let the cognitive biases get you down; put them to work and enjoy the ride.
  

 

 

Death of the Author comes to Backerkit on May 14.