The other day, with a group of three other people, I got a chance to play Jordan Palmer’s “Our God is Dead,” which, as the game’s itch.io page explains, is “a comedy role-playing game about clerics hiding the fact that their god has died just before a celebration in their god’s honor.” Players play the clerics, but in the process of play, they build out not just the clerics but also the god, the community, and so on… while having to desperately struggle to prevent others from catching on to the horrible truth: that the deity they venerate is dead.
The system is rules-light and quite simple; it’s ever-so-slightly more complicated than Honey Heist, but mostly in a storygamey way. Basically, when you are trying to do something to hoodwink your community, you roll a d6. You’re always trying to roll slightly higher than your last roll, which will allow you to succeed. Rolling less than your last roll means you fail, incurring complications and the need for someone else to step in and get things back on track. If you fail while stepping in, there are more consequences on top of that. Usually, the consequences are personal, though they’re not always for your character: sometimes you have to generate bad consequences for another character. Rolling a 6 is wild: you reroll and that becomes the new number you’re competing against in your next roll. That’s basically it.
I had a lot of fun with the game. The rules are very simple, and yet they achieve a kind of ramping-up of difficulty with each successive major task attempted by a character. The game is built around the idea of failing forward—failures are supposed to get resolved, albeit at some cost to the characters, and like in any one-shot, nobody was so attached to the character that they didn’t get a laugh out of the complications and costs imposed upon them. In some ways, the mechanic reminded me of what it felt like to play Dread using a Jenga tower, except of course that Dread‘s a horror game while “Our God is Dead” is essentially freeform comedic theological Fiasco.
The story that emerged from our game was silly and amusing enough—and to keep things clear in my mind, I took detailed enough notes—that I figured I’d write it up here, as a short break from grading my students’ final exams. If you’re interested, see below.
If the session writeup is more of a tl;dr for you, no worries. I’d still urge you to check out the game. It’s a lot of fun for a one-shot, and likely a change of pace from whatever you’re usually playing.
In the beginning, we defined our characters, and how they got each individually got an inkling that something was wrong during a religious rite. Here’s what we came up with:
- Braho the Master of Numbers was a bureaucratic type in an office filled with paperwork. His ritual involved taking some paperwork to an altar, where it was supposed to be spontaneously destroyed. When he brought it over, nothing happened for a long time as he waited, and then suddenly a gust of wind from an open window sent the papers flying.
- Mortimer the Keeper of Measurement and Meter was in another room in the temple complex, standing before a large pachinko-type machine. His ritual involved dropping a stack of papers into the machine, at which point they ought to be guided by divine power, sorted in a mysterious way reflecting the god’s will. Instead, the papers dropped through the slot and descended immediately, devoid of any divine guidance.
- Ignaliochus the Orator was standing before a tableful of bland food arranged in geometric patterns, singing the divine melody which would transubstantiate the food into a delicious, succulent feast. Finiishing his song, he tried the food, only to discover it was awful-tasting… and no matter how much more he sang or how much more perfectly he sang, the food remained awful.
- Tefen the Matriarch (a low-level functionary of the sect, despite her grandiose title) stood at the edge of a fishpond, with shredded bread in one hand and shredded paper in the other. She dropped both the bread and the paper into the pond, expecting the fish to do as always—to approach and devour the paper shreds and bread completely. Instead, the fish avoided both, sticking to the far side of the pond.
At this point, we took what we’d developed so far and defined the god our characters served. We decided that the god’s name was Axom, also known as The Great Equilibrium, one of many gods worshipped in the kingdom where our characters lived. Axom’s holy symbol was that of a mechanical gear, to represent Axom’s portfolio of reliability, stability, the status quo, and regularity. Among the myths associated with Axom included the following:
- In the beginning of time, the universe was as like an unassembled machine, which Axom discovered and set about to assembling and starting up.
- Once, long ago, there was a city that was destroyed in an earthquake: everything was shattered by the shaking of the earth save the temples to Axom.
- Once upon a time, ages ago, Axom’s first devotee lived in a simple, plain home. He worshipped Axom, and in doing so became rich and blessed in many ways, but he never moved to a larger home. Others, believing he had never gotten rich or any other benefit from Axom, mocked him and eventually drove him from his home, destroying it. The next day, however, the devotee was discovered once again living in a modest, simple home of exactly the same style and character as the one that had been destroyed.
Our characters, concerned by what they had seen, were scheduled to perform a major ritual, which they did: they went to the great census printer, an enormous machine that annually printed a miraculously accurate census of the kingdom on beautifully colored paper. Igaliochus intoned the divine song that set the machine into action, and Mortimer pounded out the beat while Braho input the necessary papers into the necessary slots. Standing by the output slot, Braho stood ready to read the output, but then something terrible happened. The machine went out of synch, the machine’s gyroscope spinning out of time. When the papers emerged from the slot, Tefen was horrified: the first few sheets had always contained the names of the faithful devotees of Axom, but the papers she held in her hand contained lists of the names of animals in the kingdom.
The characters exchanged nervous looks, realizing what must be true: Axom was dead. But today was the time for the Census Feast, a great celebration within the Axomic faith! It was the start of the bureaucratic new year, the day of coming-of-age for youth. A feast would be held, in which fortune fish would be served to all attendees, and the national census read aloud!
Clearly, the characters had to scramble to prevent anyone from figuring out the horrible secret of Axom’s death. We set out to planning what we would need to do. We identified four major problems needing to be dealt with:
- removing anyone within the temple who might interfere with the ceremony or discover the truth,
- replacing the nonsense census list with an accurate one made by us,
- preparing fortune fish—fish stuffed with divinely accurate fortunes befitting their recipients—for the feast, and
- animating the giant mechanical automaton that Axom always moved for the ceremony.
For each task, we had to take a role, and this is where the rolling of dice began.
The Distraction of the Clerics:
Braho started out by dismissing all prying eyes on staff—emptying out the kitchen, for example. Tefen worked on a seating arrangement designed to place dignitaries and clerics of our order near their enemies and frenemies, the better to keep them distracted during the ceremony. Mortimer performed careful measurements of nonsensical distances. However, when Ignaliochus attempted to convince attending royals that they were desperately needed elsewhere, he lay on the explanation a bit too thick. He ended up coming off as being sarcastic, and offended the royals.
Braho stepped in and berated Ignaliochus, begging the royals’ forgiveness. The royals agreed to look the other way, but Braho inadvertently roused the attention of the other clerics in the vicinity while also angering Ignaliochus. Tefen rushed over and began a sing-along of holy melodies, which got the other clerics dutifully singing, resolving the conflict. However, Tefen attracted the attention of the royals, one of whom noted down her name for future invitation to the palace. (This is not good: visitors to the palace face a high mortality rate.)
Still, things were in place for us to go on to the step part of our plan…
Falsifying the Census List:
Braho went into the vaults and found a copy of the previous year’s census printout. Ignaliochus stopped by the city’s graveyards to figure out who’d died in the past year, so that their names could be removed from the census, compiling a list without a problem. Mortimer, however, ran into problems: he visited the local bakeries, reasoning that all those who were coming of age that year would be receiving coming-of-age cakes. A miscommunication led to one of the bakers taking down an order for a hundred coming-of-age cakes, which Mortimer quickly stated were to be delivered in Braho’s name.
Hearing of this, Braho came to the bakery and explained that ceremony this year would include coming-of-age cakes for all newly adult attendees this year, an addition to the ceremony. The baker agreed to bake them, but was now suspicious that Braho was up to no good.
Finally, Tefen was busy trying to beautifully dye a sheaf of papers onto which the new census could be typed. Lacking skill in this art, her papers ended up black and useless. Ignaliochus intervened, reasoning that the previous year’s census could simply be edited on the original paper on which it was printed.
With the new Census papers ready to go, we moved onto the next stage of our plan…
The Preparation of the Fortune Fish:
At the feast, fish containing written fortunes of miraculous applicability were to be served to each attendee. Mortimer went about town, collecting gossip that could aid in crafting preternaturally precise fortunes. Ignaliochus, however, struggled to write suitable fortunes based on this gossip. Mortimer intervened, collecting more gossip, but ruining his personal reputation in town. Braho intervened and reprimanded Ignaliochus again, tossing out the fortunes already written and ordering him to simply write the same six extremely vague fortunes over and over, reasoning that since each table seated six attendees, the duplications would go unnoticed. Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment, when Braho composed the fortunes, one of them would turn out to be a private phrase of special meaning to his wife, who would be at the party and undoubtedly be enraged when she heard the phrase used in a fortune.
With the fortunes written, Tefen stuffed the fortunes into the fish without problem. However, Braho then bollixed the distribution of the fish to the ceremony attendees: entire tables received identical fortunes. Scrambling to cover for the error, Ignaliochus began giving a speech about how wise Axom had preordained the seating arrangement to reflect the “bonds of fate”—in other words, that the fortunes were supposed to match among the attendees at each table. This saved Braho’s bacon in the moment, but would ultimately anger some clergy as it violated religious orthodoxy: someday, this would give rise to a heretical schism within the faith.
Still, with the fish served and fortunes received, we were ready to move on to the last stage of the plan…
The Moving of the Great Automaton:
A great mechanical automaton stood in the outdoor venue for the feast, a tent with and enormously high ceiling. The automaton was the product of artisans from across the kingdom, festooned with clocks and well-known to move only by the intercession of Axom. Traditionally, the automaton’s left hand was to wave goodbye whilst the right hand would beckon for onlookers to approach, a holy gesture in the faith.
Braho hired people to sit atop the post holding up the roof of the tent, who could use strings to move the upper body of the machine like a marionette… and by chance, hired the best puppeteers in the kingdom for the task! Meanwhile, Mortimer managed to jury-rig a pedal system for controlling the automaton’s lower body. The automaton was moving, albeit a little more stiffly and awkwardly than usual. To divert attention from this, Ignaliochus gave a speech to the attendees about the automaton, which seemed to draw their attention away from it somewhat. Meanwhile, circulating in the crowd, Tefen tried to get attendees talking about how beautiful the automaton’s movements were—a bit of emperor’s new clothes that backfired on her. To cover for her, Ignaliochus began shoting from the stage, which again drew attention away from the automaton, but caused many attendees to become annoyed with him, finding him perhaps too intense or even, possibly, suspecting that he had lost his mind.
The ceremony, ultimately, was a success. However, there was one thing left to determine:
Our Characters’ Ultimate Fates:
We rolled repeatedly to figure out whose fate would be determined first, and whose last. Each player narrated the outcome for their character in turn. The result was the following.
Braho was approached by the suspicious baker, who accused him of being up to shady things and demanded a collossal bribe from him. From behind a neaby shrubbery, his wife overhear this, and immediately assumed he was cheating on her, so she emerged to berate her supposedly unfaithful husband. Pleased, the baker just smiled and doubled the amount of his demanded bribe. Rather than face all of this, he fled the town.
Meanwhile, elsewhere during the ceremony, Tefen was found by one of the royals whom she had impressed earlier. She was led to a royal table, introduced officially, and seated beside an important courtier. However, lacking all proper royal etiquette, she promptly committed one of the most grave offenses of the royal family possible, and was arrested and led off to the royal dungeons in chains.
After the ceremony, Ignaliochus was officially reprimanded, but found many supporters among the faithful as well. He soon found himself caught up in sectarian violence, and though he struggled to get his followers to stand down, they instead grew more violent and launched a holy war. Finally, after years of being virtually imprisoned by the sect, he himself was assassinated.
Finally, Mortimer was left with the sole burden of the knowledge that the god is dead. Although he was now hated as a gossip by the whole commnunity, he nonetheless tried his best to keep things running through the schism, until the fighting greww too much for him. Ultimately, some time after the ceremony, he fled, allowing the faith to collapse. When he finally settled in a new town, it was not as a cleric but rather as a baker specializing in coming-of-age cakes.
Ultimately, without Axom to maintain the kingdom, equilibrium was messed up and stability was threatened. Chaos ruled the land, and the kingdom collapsed. People lived in disarray, unable to count on anything stable or regular.
However, one day, a man moved into a small, modest home and began to speak of a god named Axom. He became rich, but did not move from his modest home, and he was mocked by those around him for supposedly failing to become rich. His house was destroyed in the night, but in the morning he was discovered in a similarly modest home of the same style and details as the one that had been destroyed…