Based on the system developed to create the film
Dead Minutes (2023), the
Dead Minutes RPG is a game about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.
As the players, you will act both as authors of this story, making zoomed-out, informed decisions about what happens next to the potentially billions of people in the afterlife, and also as point-of-view characters within the story, who are being impacted by these decisions and respond to them as individuals. The game will tell you when to make these switches in perspective.
The first half of this book gives you everything you need to play a session of
Dead Minutes, which takes 2-5 hours with 3-6 people.
The second half features an essay by
Patricia Reed that expands on the concepts of heuristic fictions and vital zombies in relation to the afterlife, and a series of afterlife generating 'seeds' contributed by different types of writers - a demonic boardroom presentation by writer and art critic
Habib William Kherbek, a ritual from horror game designer
Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, a premise by Arthur C Clarke award winning author
Chris Beckett, and a letter from
Selma Selman.