Comic Book / DIE

"I made this just for us. This is fantasy for grown-ups. Let’s play."

— Sol

DIE is a comic series written by Kieron Gillen with art by Stephanie Hans and lettering by Clayton Cowles. It was initially released via Image Comics.

In 1991, six teenagers sit down to play a tabletop RPG. They vanish. Two years later five of them reappear fifty miles away. One is missing an arm. They can’t seem to talk about what happened to them.

They try to resume their normal lives. They get jobs, get married and have kids of their own. And then, in 2018, the thing that happened to them comes back into their lives.

A role-playing game based on the comic, also called DIE, has been published in partnership with the games company Rowan, Rook and Decard.

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DIE contains examples of:

• Above Good and Evil: The Grandmaster of Die, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the place itself, is repeatedly stated to be amoral and not immoral while being confronted; it's simply a reflection of the humans who create it trying to give them clarity of purpose in the wishes they make doing so.
• Addictive Magic:
  • Neo gear runs on Fair gold, a mix between this and Fantastic Drug. Neos, including Angela, need new Fair gold every morning to power their gear. Ash directly calls Angela an addict.
  • While calling out the addictive nature of the Neo's reliance on Fair gold, Ash also recognizes that the Dictator power of Compelling Voice is also somewhat psychologically addictive.
• Almighty Idiot: Isabelle runs rings around harvest god The Skywatcher, a gullible pessimist who’s not too bright. The other gods she barters with are generally far smarter...
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: In the real world, Ash lives as a middle-aged man in a seemingly conventional marriage to a woman. Yet he is seemingly also very comfortable living as a woman (who romances men) within the game. Ash's friends try to ask in issue #4, but Ash changes the subject. She later admits that she was in love with Sol in the real world, so she's at the very least bi. Issue #19 finally has the group confront this matter when they're attacked by a manifestation of Ash's dark side, and come to the conclusion that Ash is gender-fluid.
• And the Adventure Continues: At least for Chuck and Molly. Once everyone else has escaped Die, the two Fallen resurrect - and the Elf Queen seen earlier in the series appears to offer them a job…
• Anthropomorphic Personification: In Issue #18, the original Grandmaster is revealed to be a personification of Die itself.
• Anti-Escapism Aesop: Ash finally defeats the game by giving its Grandmaster (the avatar of die) this: she and her friends entered a new world, gained powers and talents they never had, lived out their fantasies went on a quest... and they've had their fill, and request to leave. The Grandmaster respects this and withdraws, and thanks them for playing.
• Anti-Hero: Pretty much all the protagonist group end up acting as some variety of antihero along the way. They are initially on a heroic quest, and never want to be evil, but their various powers are all more or less designed to make them act ruthlessly or selfishly, while their antagonists try to force them to follow heroic clichés. Ash in particular is forever coming up with plans which are actually clever and effective — but which disgust everyone else (and often Ash too).
• Anti-Hoarding: A nasty part of the Neo's game mechanic. Not only does the Neo's gear need to be activated with Fair gold on a daily basis, but the gold itself disappears overnight, making it impossible to hoard. This becomes a core plot problem in #6, with part of the party trapped by the Eternal Prussian army. Angela could sneak them out, but the feat requires more Fair gold than they can collect in a single day.
• An Arm and a Leg: Angela lost her right arm after the teenagers’ reappearance. As a Neo, it’s replaced by a prosthetic, but Angela herself doesn’t wear one. In-game, Angela gave her character a cybernetic arm, which she received on arrival in the DIE world. Only when the party escaped the game and re-entered the real world did she realize that this meant that she lost her flesh-and-blood arm. Out of universe, it's a savage parody of the "cyberware" mechanic from games like Cyberpunk, where limb replacement was often treated by players as a casual power upgrade.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When the party have to undertake a journey to the center of Die from a mysterious island inside a small submarine, they naturally expect to meet Jules Verne as said island's Master. Instead, they find something much, much worse: H. P. Lovecraft.
  • In the next issue, after teleporting deeper in the island the cast are attacked by a giant squid, which they assume is another Lovecraftian monster. In fact, it's an Expy of the Watcher in the Water, and they're about to enter Moria.
• The Bard: Both the Dictator and the Fool are Kieron Gillen’s take on this RPG class, with the Fool being the embodiment of the devil-may-care attitude while the Dictator is “like Bards, if everyone was fucking petrified of Bards.”
• Bargain with Heaven: Isabelle's character is a "Godbinder," similar to a Cleric in that she has a relationship to a god and uses divine magic, but more like a demonologist in that she can invoke any god and barters for their favors, usually pretty bluntly.
• Batman Gambit: Chuck pulls of a masterfull one in the final issue. Ash wasn't going to let him throw his life away in a Senseless Sacrifice, and instinctively uses her voice on him. Since the voice only works on one person at a time, Sol is freed to feed on Chuck, thus resurrecting as the Master they need.
• Battle Discretion Shot: Matt’s Grief Knight abilities mean that he’s usually the key warrior in any battle, but we don’t directly see that on the page.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: A recurrent theme of the comic. Pretty much everybody in it who wishes for something (an interesting game, cool powers, the return of their culture heroes, sex, the return of a pet dog, a chance to see old friends...) gets it. The consequences then invariably range from "disturbing" through "horrific" to "apocalyptic".
• Bilingual Bonus: The Fallen's binary in issue 2 translates to "wehunger" in ASCII.
• Bittersweet Ending: Chuck sacrifices himself to resurrect Sol, trapping himself in Die as a Fallen forever. Meanwhile, the others — realizing that Die itself isn't evil, just an amoral crucible for people's desires — return to Earth, traumatized by everything and having to adapt to a world that changed while they were gone. That said, they do seem to be better adjusted about certain things than they were when they left, and it turns out that Mistress Woe lied about Matt's father's death just to mess with the party, meaning that Matt is able to reunite with him.
• Breaking the Fellowship: The second arc kicks up when two of the party break away because Chuck likes their life in the world of Die and Isabelle doesn't think it's right to abandon that world in such dire straits. And by the end of that arc things haven't gotten any better as Isabelle and Ash have teamed up to take over Angria, with the others going on the run.
• Call-Back: Doubles as a Title Drop:
  • At the start of the first arc, back in 1991, Ash asks if “you only get one dice”. Isabelle and Sol correct him as the singular is “die”.
  • Later in the same issue, 27 years later, Sol’s d20 reappears and Ash returns the favour, reminding Isabelle that “the word is die”.
  • ...and in the final issue of that arc, there’s a darker callback. After Chuck and Isabelle refuse to leave, Ash suggests that “if they all die” then the rest of the party can still go home. Sol corrects her, stating that “the word is murder”.
• Cast from Sanity: Sol upgrades the Vancian Magic to make the caster lose a random memory after casting a spell. A wizard trying to rescue his children who'd been kidnapped and turned into a hydra, cast a spell to unlock their cage and forgot the hydra was his children and killed it.
• Cavalry Betrayal: An unintentional case. According to the dwarfs of Glass Town, the archmage of the Dreaming Lands fell prey to this. The spells he used to rescue his cursed and kidnapped children devoured his memories until he forgot who he was actually rescuing, with fatal results.
• The Chessmaster: It's implied that Die itself caused World War I in order to infuence H.G. Wells and J.R.R. Tolkien into helping create it.
• Comes Great Responsibility: Isabelle holds this view, especially after sacrificing Glass Town to lure Sol out of Twenty. The rest of the party aren’t so insistent about it.
• Compelling Voice: Dictators, including Ash, effectively have this power — although in their case it’s via emotion control, not direct mind control. The end result is much the same, though. Wise people don’t want to be alone with a Dictator — and, notably, even Ash has clearly come to regard the power as a low-key form of Mind Rape, and hates what it can do while finding it addictively useful.
• Cool Old Guy: Tolkien, per his real life self. In issue #3, he has a chat with Ash, and he makes it very clear that he does not like this dark fantasy take on his story at all. He also demonstrates that, while he can't overcome the Game Master's control over the world, he is still strong enough to perform small miracles on his own. He is the creator of the modern Fantasy story, after all.
• The Coup: At the end of the second arc, Ash uses magical bindings to take control of all the Dictators in Angria, whom she then uses to take control of the aristocracy, making them crown her Queen.
• Critical Failure: Mistress Woe describes herself as “Goddess of the Natural One”. When her power’s used to curse (or, as Isabelle puts it, “play with”) a target, this happens a lot. As Chuck and Isabelle discover, anyone around the intended target may also be caught up in this...
• Cross Player: Ash’s RPG character is female.
• Curbstomp Battle: Most battles involving Matt. When he’s filled with grief, he deals an awful lot of damage...
• Cyberpunk: Angela’s class, the Neo, are explicitly cyberpunk rogues. The Fair, the folk who grant the Neo their powers, are described in-universe as “What if William Gibson designed elves?”.
• Dark Is Not Evil / Light Is Not Good: An Emotion Knight's favored passion does not define their goodness of being a person, and the pinnacle of ability requires them to actually remove some of it from the world; a Love Knight can take away the love a married couple feels, a Fear Knight can obliterate a crippling phobia.
  • Kieron Gillen describes Joy Knights as the worst of the eight: a person who would be powered by joy in a battle would have to be a sociopath. The trio we briefly meet delight in Matt's anger and grief before they fight him.
• Dead All Along: Issue #18 reveals that Sol was already a Fallen when the party returned to Die, having been killed by the Grandmaster way back when he was stopped from escaping with them the first time. His "death" in Glass Town was just shattering an illusion set up by the Grandmaster as part of Die's overall plan.
• Deconstruction: Of fantasy RPGs, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, and also of Portal Fantasy.
• Destructive Saviour: Isabelle is seen as this after Glass Town is deliberately destroyed to lure Sol out to face the party. The people accept the loss and still idolise her. Even one of her gods, who doesn’t realise her exact role in this, thanks her for saving the people who lived there. Isabelle is not at all comfortable with this.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Sol. He’s initially set up as the main threat, but Ash kills him at the end of the first arc. At which point the plot shifts to the disagreements between the remaining party members. He revives as a Fallen, but by that point he's not as controlling.
• Disney Death: In Issue #19, Ash drags the Balrog-like manifestation of her dark side into an abyss, but is shortly after revealed to have survived the fall.
• Domain Holder: The Masters of Die's various realms, who are based on (and are implied to actually be the spirits of) various famous novelists. The Grandmaster stands above all of them as Master of all of Die, bordering on being an outright Dimension Lord.
• Do Wrong, Right: Played with, including a touch of Wrong Insult Offence. The Chamberlain of Glass Town attempts to reassure and compliment Ash, acknowledging the general distrust of her class but stating that she’s “not the same thing as just a common or garden Dictator”. Ash agrees, because “other Dictators are amateurs”. And then she takes over his mind. Possibly also a Shout-Out to Die Hard.
• Driving Question: How did a normal teenager like Sol create Die? Which is later replaced with the question of if he's even the one who created it in the first place.
• Dual Wielding: Matt eventually grabs the Maul of Rage to wield in addition to the Sword of Grief. The weapons point out that this has never happened before.
• Dungeon Crawling: While the party resents this trope since it makes for boring RPG campaigns (not to mention that it's even less fun when you're actually in danger), issue #18 puts them through a Whole-Plot Reference to the Trope Codifier for a high fantasy dungeon crawl — The Mines of Moria.
• Emotion Control: The basis of a Dictator’s powerset.
• Emotional Powers: The Emotion Knights, DIE's version of the traditional RPG Paladin, work like this. Instead of the traditional invoked Character Alignment, they choose a specific emotion (inspired by Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions) and use it to power their abilities.
  • Matt is a Grief Knight, and wields the Sword of Grief to channel his sorrow. If he is unable to feel sad enough, then his powers are weakened, so he sometimes asks Ash use her mind control to force him to be depressed. Conversely, it's implied that his power has no upper limit: despite struggling to fight off a single dragon earlier in the story, he later claims to Angela that if he were sad enough he could clear a path through an entire army to get to her.
  • Matt later also wields the Maul of Rage, when he feels a combination of anger and sorrow after receiving news that his father died while he is in Die, and blaming Ash and Izzy's delays for causing his absence. Apparently two emotional weapons have never been used as a combination before.
  • Joy Knights are fuelled by happiness, but are often horrible people who enjoy killing and use that to fuel their battles.
• Empathic Weapon: The weapons of Emotion Knights talk to their wielder and try to encourage their respective emotion. In Matt's case, the Sword of Grief tries to remind him of all the worst things in his life to increase his sadness. The other seven emotions are represented by their own weapons (e.g. the Maul of Rage) suspended in a cavern, and try to tempt Matt into wielding them instead.
• Enemy Mine: At the end of Issue #13, Ash convinces Little England to cease hostilities with Angria and join forces against Eternal Prussia.
• Escapism: Naturally a theme in a story about living a RPG. For most of the party it's deconstructed through the horrors of actually living through a campaign and when they're brought back they'd had to leave the lives they built behind. Chuck and Isabelle however are all for staying because they respectively don't care or are disappointed about their lives back home. This is a sticking point because the game can only be left by unanimous decision.
• Evil Me Scares Me: One of the reasons Ash desperately wants to escape Die. Dictators aren’t generally nice people, and Ash is aware that she’s finding it increasingly easy to use those powers to manipulate people. She finally has to face this and all her other issues in Issue #19 when confronted by a Balrog-style manifestation of all her negative impulses.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: Ash is more Ambiguously Evil, but she still expresses pride at what her son has become in her absence (a good paladin), and ponders where he gets it from.
• Exact Words: Sir Lane dares Ash to put a geas on him, to not rest until he sees her face again. And she does. Ash then escapes Die, so it’s unexpectedly 25 years until they meet again. By which point Lane is a worm-infested walking corpse who’s been dead for many years. His eyes have rotted away, so even meeting Ash doesn’t let him rest...
• Eye Scream: a recurring theme in the first arc.
  • Issue #1 - Sol has replaced his eyes with magical dice. The sockets are bleeding. He doesn’t seem to care much.
  • Issue #2 - Sir Lane the Joy Knight, who playfully teased Ash into binding him with a geas. Even dead, he cannot rest until he sees her again. And now his eyes are rotted and filled with maggots...
  • Issue #3 - the soldier of Little England who tried to rescue his friends and was caught in a gas attack. As Ash puts it, “his eyes ran down his cheeks like tears”
  • Issue #4 - the Archmage of the Dreaming Lands, who appparently “plucked his eyes out in woe” after failing to save his children.
  • Issue #5 - Ash comments on the Glass Town golems with eyeless sockets. She also calls out the eye injury theme as Sol's doing, driven by his fear. It's implied that if he follows the party back to the "real" world he'll spend the rest of his life eyeless and blind.
  • Issue #16 brings the motif back, as Lovecraft is shown to have sown his eyes shut to avoid seeing the eldritch horrors of his domain.
• The Fair Folk: Beings called "The Fair" appear as tall faceless humanoids with Tron Lines on them, and give the impression of being aliens or artificial intelligences (or both). The way they behave is not actively malicious, but detached and follows some kind of Blue-and-Orange Morality. Neo gear is a gift from the Fair and come with a stipulation: each morning the gear is dead until the Neo pays the tithe of Fair gold.
  • Much like the Fair Folk, the Fair are capable of giving players wondrous gifts or knowledge of the past or future, but will only do so after flipping a coin that comes up 1 — a perfectly Fair method of choosing.
• Fantasy Character Classes: The main characters' classes are all subversions or twists on the traditional RPG classes. The Dictator is the Bard, the Emotion Knight is the Paladin, the Neo is the Rogue, the Godbinder is the Cleric, etc...
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: The war between Little England and Eternal Prussia is explicitly based on World War I.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The godbinders in the world of Die have access to a wide array of fictional deities, ranging from simple-minded agricultural gods such as the Skywatcher, to sadistic and manipulative entities such as Mistress Woe.
• Finger-Snap Lighter: In issue 4, Angela lights up Chuck's bidi with one of her fingers.
• The Fool: Subverted a little by Chuck. It’s his character class, and he reaps the benefits, but he’s not exactly good or nice.
• Forever War: The war between Eternal Prussia and Little England has been going on for countless generations, and has been a bloody stalemate for just as long. In fact, when the party breaks that stalemate by destroying Glass Town and letting Eternal Prussia take the territory, Little England is pissed — not because of the edge given to their enemies, but because maintaining that stalemate was the entire point; H. G. Wells, the Master of Little England, believed that the stalemate was delaying Die's plans.
• The Game Come to Life: The core concept of the series; six teenagers vanish into the game while playing a tabletop RPG. Gillen describes it as "Goth Jumanji".
• Game Master: Sol takes this role while also being a Player Character from a class called the Master. When Ash comments on this, Sol explains "it’s an unusual game. We’re all in this together." When the party returns to the game world, Sol has taken over the role of Grandmaster, the main antagonist.
  • The Master character class is Kieron Gillen’s take on the RPG Mage as Reality Warper.
• Geas: Twenty five years ago, Ash commanded the others to never speak of what happened in the game. The power is a key part of a Dictator’s powerset.
• Genre Deconstruction: To the Trapped in Another World genre that has become popular due to various Isekai stories. All the teenagers, like those common to the genre, were brought to the game world unwillingly. However, rather than being given game-breaking powers and having a fun time their powers are reliant on unhealthy behavior and all of them want to go home. And when they do escape, every member of the party is traumatized by their experience and suffers both physical and mental wounds. Then, when they return, powers that were once arguably a teenage power fantasy become even more harmful. Matt’s power relies on grief and negative feelings. What was once easy for an angsty teenager just draws him into the dark pits of depression again. And all the characters except for Chuck want to return home, but their conflicting opinions on what should be done regarding the fantasy world split the party apart.
  • The party later learns something that deconstructs the isekai elements more directly.When someone dies in their fantasies, they are reborn as Fallen on Die.
• Giant Corpse World: In their quest to find the core of Die the party travels to the sole island in the middle of a vast ocean. Traveling underwater, they learn that this large island is merely the fingertip of a massive human corpse reaching up from under the waves, with the party traveling to an air pocket in the cavern that is its nostril. Comparisons to Lovecraft are discussed at the implications of this revelation — all before the party meets Lovecraft himself, as the Master of this place physically identical to the corpse they're inside.
• Glowing Eyes: Ash the Dictator’s left eye blazes with fire and light when using her powers.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Sol in the present day. One eye’s been replaced by his own d20; the other eye’s replaced by the die he took from the previous Grandmaster. Both glow menacingly.
• Good Costume Switch: In Issue #19, after symbolically freeing herself of her negative impulses by drowning the Balrog manifesting them all, Ash's clothes change from black to white.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The Plot Coupon plot which Sol has created for his old friends apparently fits this pattern. They aren’t impressed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Chuck attempts one when facing the Grandmaster, suicidally attacking him, but Ash stops him. Which is exactly what he wanted. The party needed a Master to talk to Die, but Sol was currently undead and had to consume someone to resurrect. Since Ash used her voice on Chuck to stop his Senseless Sacrifice, Sol is now free to feast on him.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • J. R. R. Tolkien appears as one of the Masters of Little England. True to life, he's depicted as a Cool Old Guy who really does not care for this perversion of his work Sol has created.
  • Charlotte Brontë is the Master of Angria.
  • H. G. Wells is the other Master of Little England (of the sci-fi portion, specifically).
  • George Leopold von Reisswitz and his son, Georg Heinrich von Reisswitz, are the ghostly Masters of Eternal Prussia.
  • H. P. Lovecraft is the Master of the eldritch tunnels leading to Die's core.
• Home Field Advantage: The Masters (and Grandmaster) of Die are said to be most powerful when in their own realms.
• Insert Payment to Use:
  • Angela's class, the Neo, is a cyberpunk class that uses magitek provided by the Fair Folk that needs a payment of Fair Gold to run. A major wrench in this mechanic is that fair gold cannot be amassed for an extended period of time, as it vanishes overnight.
  • Sol has changed the rules of magic so that every spell cast by the wizards of the Dreaming Lands eats one of the caster’s memories. The consequences can be pretty horrible.
• It's All My Fault: Ash blames herself for Sol being left behind in Die because she hesitated at a critical moment while the party was trying to leave.
• Jerkass: Chuck. Not helped by the fact that the attitude partly fuels his powers...
• Jerkass Gods: Mistress Woe is the goddess of bad luck, and loves using it to torment people. Case in point, she calls in all of Isabella's debts to her to make her pass along a message to Matt about his father's death, threatening to brutally kill her and torture the Fallen she turns into if she refuses. And then the final issue reveals that Matt's father is still alive, meaning she lied just to screw with the party.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Sir Lane the Joy Knight. However, much with the rest of the series, his is a Deconstructed Character Archetype. They are explicitly "some of the worst people you will ever meet". It's implied that Lane only was in a relationship with Ash because it would fuel his powers.
  Kieron Gillen: "I've taken your feelings towards your wife, and I've used them to kill this bad guy. Unfortunately, those feelings are now gone. I've used your relationship to kill this Balrog" That’s the Knight of Joy.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: During the final arc, Sol realizes that he's missing memories of his early days in Die. As revealed in Issue #18, this is because the Grandmaster suppressed his memories of dying, becoming a Fallen, and being emotionally broken in Die's core in order to set in motion Die's plan.
• Literal Metaphor: When asked about where the group disappeared to and what happened while they were gone, they can only reply, “I can’t say.” Turns out Ash’s Dictator character placed a geas on the group, with their consent, and they literally could not talk about what happened, even when they tried.
• Magitek: The Fair's bread and butter, and seen in the Fallen cybernetic zombies.
• Mama Bear: Ash had a son named Augustus with the vampire Zamnorna. Her takeover of Angria is motivated entirely by a desire to protect him when court politics put him in danger.
• Manipulative Bastard: Due to her powers, Ash is seen this way by almost everyone, including the other players.
• Meaningful Name: Ash's class is the Dictator. Not dictator as in sovereign ruler, but Dictator as in "someone who dictates".
• Noble Bigot: When Ash meets H. G. Wells he is overall a polite and well-meaning character, but considers it a matter of natural fact that women are generally less intelligent than men.
• Non-Action Guy: Ash doesn't seem to carry a weapon or have any physical combat abilities. When a battle breaks out, she stands back and gives orders. Subverted a little in that she does actually have a ‘death touch’ ability - but doesn’t use it much.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In-universe. In his role as The Fool, Chuck’s powers are linked to his state of mind. If he starts taking things seriously, luck stops twisting in his favour and he becomes more vulnerable.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The steel dragons of Eternal Prussia are shaped like traditional fantasy dragons, but seem to be constructs that breathe fire and poison gas.
• Plot Coupon: It turns out that Sol has adjusted the world to force his old friends into an extended quest for a whole bunch of plot coupons. Not wishing to get bogged down in an extended cliché that is doubtless ultimately weighted against them, but still wishing to get home, they decide to Take a Third Option — rather brutally.
• Poor Communication Kills: A bit. Chuck and Isabelle wait until the last possible moment - i.e. when Glass Town is in ruins and the group is surrounded by soldiers from Eternal Prussia - to tell the rest of the group that they don't intend on returning home. As a result, as opposed to a rational discussion on the topic that could have been had in calmer circumstances, Isabelle warps her and Chuck away with her powers, and Ash decides that the two of them have to die for him, Angela, and Matt to go home.
• Power Nullifier: Sol twists reality to prevent any use of Dictatorship in Glass Town during daylight hours. It’s unclear if the nullifier field died with him, or if this will become a permanent feature.
• The Prophecy: The folk of Glass Town believe that the party are ‘Paragons’ and fated to deliver them from “the dominion of the devil boy”. This is technically true, but Glass Town itself doesn’t survive the experience.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: The climax of the first arc is reached when Ash reminds the rest of the group that Sol is a GM that likes to railroad the game world, so the plan is to cause so much chaos that he has to confront them personally. This is deconstructed when Isabelle objects to leaving the world screwed up so badly, because it and its people are real.
• Railroading:
  • Sol has mapped out a path to Twenty that can only be followed if the party retrieve three keys from three dungeons. Each key is guarded by twelve perils. The party are not impressed — and Chuck specifically calls it out as railroading.
  • Sol in general is basically a petty, control freak dungeon master with the addition of actually godlike powers. He creates a story and expects the players to follow it, no matter what they themselves think. When they go of the rails, he is pissed and starts changing the rules around to get what he wants.
• Reality Warper: The Masters and Grandmasters. They still have their limits, but they can rewrite the rules of magic and physics.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Deconstructed. Die runs on the rules of a tabletop game... including the fact a Master can homebrew aspects into it. Nor are the classes things you'd necessarily want to be stuck with, as a fellow party member or as one, such as the Dictator.
• Sadist: Mistress Woe, as the goddess of misfortune, takes great pleasure in seeing other suffering. Her worst act so far is having Isabelle tell Matt that his father died in the real world.
• Secret Diary: The Mourner and her followers have obtained Isabelle’s diaries from her first visit to Die, which are now treated as the ‘Great Books’ of the faith. Isabelle is extremely uncomfortable with this.
• Secretly Dying: Chuck casually reveals that he's terminally ill at the end of Issue #10, with #11 expanding on this and explaining that he was diagnosed a few months before the party returned to Die.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • In issue #3, Ash takes a letter for a dying halfling soldier. The letter is a heartfelt farewell to his wife and a plea that she don't let their son go to war like he did. After the soldier dies, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien himself appears and gives the letter to an eagle to deliver. It's later revealed that the eagle was shot down by soldiers and their superior called it "propaganda" and had it burned, just before sending the soldiers out into no-man's land.
  • Sol apparently loves this trope. A group of dwarves in a tavern tell a story about a wizard who's children were kidnapped and transformed into a hydra-like monster. The wizard, learned in the magical arts, went out to resque them, but for each spell he cast, he lost a memory, as Sol had changed the rules of magic. When he arrived at the hydra's prison, he cast a simple spell to unlock the cage, and it cost him the memory of what had happened to his children. When he saw the monster before him, he did what heroes do...
• Shout-Out: A lot of them to J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons: Tolkien himself even makes an appearance. Die is influenced by Earth and its fiction, so traces are to be expected everywhere.
  • Issue #3 starts of with Ash ranting about the name "Dungeons & Dragons". Namely how it's weird to name a game after something you'd want to get out of.
  • Also in issue #3, Ash has a heart to heart with a Little England halfling that looks a lot like Frodo Baggins who talks about his engagement ring. "Frodo's" wife is also apparently named Luthi, possibly from Luthien.
  • One of the dwarves mentions the prophet Jagger of a dwarvish religion, who preaches that one cannot always get what one wants.
  • Angela the Cyberpunk named her dog Case and her daughter Molly.
  • Sol changed the rules so that casting a spell costs a memory, just like wishing on the Auryn erases memories with each one. This along with the world of Die being a place that shapes itself after human storytelling.
  • Angela mentions as an example of AI alert sounds "Look out, taffer! We're after you!" And then "It must have been rats" when they give up searching.
• Sinister Geometry: Lovecraft reveals that the world of DIE inspired him by sending visions of a non-euclidean polyhedral shape. After pulling the image from his mind and mapping it to three-dimensional space, the party discovers that the shape becomes the seven standard dice for tabletop gaming.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Upon reentering the game world, Ash's line to undo the geas:
  "To speak of this place is no more shit upon the tongue.''
  • Most of the lines used by Dictators to compel people are dramatic (helped by their left eye glowing dramatically red as they cast their magic). Ash, given her roleplaying skills, is particularly good at this.
• Spoiler Cover: The second printing of issue #2, which shows the elven princess with her real, ‘fallen’, face partly revealed.
• Theme Naming: The 4 collected volumes are named after aspects of RPGs. They are also the names of the arcs that take place in the story.
  • Volume #1: Fantasy Heartbreaker: A term referring to Dungeons & Dragons's clones, which the titular game is.
  • Volume #2: Split the Party: A subversion of the classic phrase Never Split the Party, due to the main cast of this splitting up for this arc.
  • Volume #3: The Great Game: A term used to describe WWI, which made H. G. Wells (who appears in this arc) create the first wargame concept; the war influenced J. R. R. Tolkien to create The Lord of the Rings; Dungeons & Dragons was created and adapted from a wargame.
  • Volume #4: Bleed: A phrase used to describe in-game and out-of-game feelings crossing over from roleplay; this term originated from Nordic LARPs.
• Time Skip: The first issue begins in 1991, skips forward two years, then skips forward an additional 25 years to 2018.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The more that the party learns about the timeline of Die's world, the less sense it makes to them: Sol says he created Die, yet Charlotte Brontë says that she and her siblings visited it frequently as children after receiving a gift of toy soldiers, which we later find out that Sol carved from Angria's sacred forests after becoming Grandmaster. And further complicating things, there's the matter of Angela's daughter Molly, who shows up in Die as a Fallen and looking years older than the last time Angela saw her, despite them only being back in Die a few months.
  • The Fair eventually explain that this is all because of a Stable Time Loop: Die itself is sentient and capable of reaching through time to ensure its own existence. It subconsciously inspired the various writers whose works contributed to Die's world, as well as Sol to create the game, and later as Grandmaster to create the toy soldiers that were sent back to Charlotte and her siblings, while Eternal Prussia is currently using the remains of Glass Town to create the six dice that brought the party to Die. As for Molly and the other Fallen, they've been brought back from a future where Die has merged with Earth, which it will do once it has completed the loop by sending the dice back in time.
• Tongue-Tied: It turns out that at the end of their first visit, Ash magically bound the entire party from telling anyone on Earth about Die. There were good reasons for this, and they all agreed; if Earth found out about Die, the former Grandmaster could have started pulling more victims through.
• Touch of Death: Dictators have a ‘death touch’ ability, but as it’s such short range Ash rarely uses it. It’s pretty effective when she does, though...
• Tragic Monster: The Fallen are the revived, cybernetic corpses of previous players who are desperately seeking to steal the life of living players to go back to normal. As the RPG points out, Fallen that a Master's captured friends don't know are likely too far gone for any hope of resurrection.
• Trapped in Another World: Once the characters enter Die, they're unable to leave until their quest is complete or until all of them agree to leave. The first time they escaped Sol got trapped by the Grandmaster and left behind along with Angela's arm. The second time they're about to go when Chuck and Isabelle change their minds and decide to stay behind, to the dismay of the rest.
• Unwitting Pawn: Sol and the Masters were ultimately all this to Die itself, which inspired them to create the game world and its archetypes as part of the Stable Time Loop.
• Vancian Magic: It's said that the wizards of the Dreaming Lands used to have a more straight example where they'd forget a spell as they cast it and have to learn it again. Sol changes things so the caster also loses a random memory when they cast.
• Villainous Badland, Heroic Arcadia: Played with and fiercely deconstructed. In general on the world of Die, the more pleasant-seeming lands seem to be run on more moral lines, and oppose the badland areas; in particular, the rural, quasi-Arcadian Little England is in perpetual confrontation with the hellish Eternal Prussia. However, this confrontation is based on World War I, with all that implies; the rulers of Little England seem uncaring about spending the lives of their rustic subjects in an endless conflict.
• War Is Hell: Volume 3 "The Great Game" is about J. R. R. Tolkien, World War I, and The Lord of the Rings.
• Was Once a Man: The Fallen are the undead remnants of all the previous players who died within the world of Die. And after issue #5, that includes Sol.
• We Have Reserves: The wizards of Little England send entire generations of hobbits to die in the trenches as part of their endless war against Eternal Prussia.
• Wham Shot: In issue #16, the crew arrives at a mysterious island inhabited by pale, hollow-faced people and a cult who practices human sacrifice. Then they meet the island's Master: Howard Philips Lovecraft.
• What You Are in the Dark: As part of its themes on escapism, the story explores the motivations behind it. A lot of the party are disgusted upon looking back at the actions they chose out of desperation, which they begin to choose out of convenience, which is also informed by both their issues and the circumstances of their class features feeding into such maladaptive patterns. Ultimately, they come out the other end having confronted and defeated their darkness, but are left with the new trauma of having gone through it at all.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Issue #18 is based on the Fellowship's descent into Moria, which Ash lampshades. They start with suspiciously empty tunnels with nothing but corpses and a treasure or two to build tension, then they find an old tomb with a journal (Sol's journal, to be precise). Then, suddenly, they hear the beat of drums in the deep, and need to run with no explanation because there's no time. Only this time, the Balrog resembles Ash herself.
• X Meets Y: Chuck describes it in-universe as "those movies where a serial killer locks people in a room with a trap that's about to grind them into pâté" and Narnia.
• 0% Approval Rating: Sol. Nobody has anything positive to say about his reign as Grandmaster.

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