Great question! We made it up. It’s like a megadungeon - but more so. 

Megadungeons are really massive dungeons. Multiple floors. Entire ecologies and societies. A whole campaign’s worth of material. Exploration, interconnection, and secrets.

A metadungeon is like that, but as well as exploring a multi-level dungeon, you’re adventuring through fifty years of TTRPG history, from its birth to its glorious present.

(God forbid we do something straightforward for once.)

Reminisce about the games and movements of decades past - or discover the trends you missed. Meet your heroes (some of them), debate which is the best version of goblins, and join us in puzzling out what really makes gaming here and now, in the 2020s, unique.

And try not to get killed while you’re doing it.

If you’d like even more details, you can watch Gareth, Kieron and Grant in conversation about it here, complete with a handful of Discord alert noises we couldn’t edit out:

Based on the comic of the same name and created by the original writer and artist, DIE the RPG is an award-winning experiment in just how metatextual we can get. 

It’s an exploration into how much the events of the 1980’s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon would mentally and emotionally scar the kids who got sucked into their own campaign. It’s goth Jumanji. It’s postmodern Gygaxian Isekai. It’s roleplaying games squared. 

Players create a Persona - an ordinary real-world loser who’s bored of their job, regrets not going back to uni to get that MA, wishes they’d not had kids so early, and so on - and that Persona makes a Paragon, a two-dimensional author-insert super-powered fantasy hero in the vein of your average Dungeons & Dragons character to play DIE, a mysterious roleplaying game. The Godbinder is a Cleric with some aggressive divine negotiation tactics; the Neo is an anachronistic cyberpunk with a robot car (or dog); the bullet-proof Fool is simply too blasé to die.

Then (wouldn’t you know it) upon meeting up to play this mysterious roleplaying game, everyone is transported into a bespoke otherworld and becomes their mighty Paragons. The choice as to whether to fight their way back to the real world or stay in a pretend universe is theirs - and dead players don’t get a vote. 

RRD worked with Kieron to crowdfund, write and publish DIE the RPG in 2022. With mechanics inspired by (but much less convoluted than) D&D, it’s a love letter to roleplaying games, stories, play and what humans do for each other to survive.

To resolve challenging actions, players grab a few six-sided dice equal to their stat (we use the standard six, real classics like Strength and Dexterity, but our numbers are lower than usual) and roll them. Any that score 4 or more are successes, and you generally only need one to do what you need to do; any that score 6 are specials, which can trigger unique effects as determined by your abilities. Past this straightforward core mechanic, every class has ways to bend and break the rules to get what they want at a horribly steep cost: deals with deities, raw psychic bursts of emotion, cyberpunk fae bargains, and so on. 

If you’d like a taste of what you’re getting into, you can pick up the free DIE Quickstart from our website.

It’s a big, full-length hardback affair. Each of the six dungeon levels is fully mapped and illustrated in an era-appropriate style, and comes complete with beautifully-written handouts.

They’ll all contain plenty of locations and adventure hooks, but also new era-specific rules that twist the play to represent the time reflected (and offer advantages to those willing to exploit them for their own benefit). And, of course, they’ll function as an interactive, if tongue-in-cheek, history lesson on roleplaying games from their inception to the modern day.

Unlike regular DIE, because this is a massive adventure, there’ll be mechanics for leaving the otherworld and returning to your grinding real-life existence - before being drawn, inexorably, back to the dungeon. 

And we’ll put in a new Master for each realm of gaming for players to bargain with: an Old-Testament 1970s overlord who frowns on players touching their own dice. A many-faced Janus of the 1980s licensed game explosion. A brooding grim reaper tryhard of the 90s. A turn-of-the-millenium Hephaestus, guardian of the Forge, set against the lumbering leviathan of the OGL. That sort of thing.

OK, let's break it down.

The Digital, Standard, and Special Edition pledges get you the Metadungeon in its entirety as either a PDF, a standard hardback edition or a special edition that will pair beautifully with the existing special edition DIE: RPG rulebook. If you buy a printed book, you'll get the PDF for free.

Or you can get the Metadungeon as a boxed set with the Ultimate Metadungeon Boxed Set pledge. Remember the Red Box? Remember the old AD&D boxes full of rules, adventures, and more? Fun, weren't they?

The boxed set contains one book or pamphlet for each chapter of the book (meaning each level of the dungeon, plus supplementary material), and a sheaf of player handouts - the player aids that you have to buy separately with other editions. We might throw some fun little extras in there too, depending on how this crowdfunder goes.

This boxed set's our favourite version of the Metadungeon: it lets us really go to town with the design, and bring each decade to life in everything from the colours we choose and the graphic design styles that call to mind each era, to the paper we print on.

You'll get the PDF for free, too. 

OK, connoisseur. You've already got all the DIE: RPG books, you've been there, done that. But we've got NEW STUFF for you, and it's all here. The Return Visitor pledge gets you the Metadungeon boxed set, plus the new DIE: RPG demo kit. 

Take your first steps into Die with the First Timer pledge and get the core DIE: RPG rulebook, the standard hardback Metadungeon, plus the PDFs. 

Opt for the Deep Delve pledge and get the core rulebook, plus the quickstart and GM screen, along with the Metadungeon and player aids, and of course the PDF.

With the Everything DIE pledge, you will own all the DIE there is to own (except the £200 fancy dice set, but we have an add on for that). This pledge gets you the DIE: RPG special edition, GM screen, quickstart, all three volumes of DIE: RPG Scenarios (featuring adventures from Kieron Gillen and a host of exciting indie RPG authors), plus the Metadungeon boxed edition, player aids, and the brand new demo kit.

The DIE Metadungeon comes to you from the fevered mind of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (Dagger in the Heart, Eyes of the Stone Thief, The One Ring/Adventures in Middle Earth, Trail of Cthulhu, The Fall of Delta Green, and many, many more), a man who has played more role-playing games than is entirely good for a person, and written supplements and adventures for almost as many. 

Gareth has a tremendous facility for setting up players and GMs to tell compelling stories, loading them up with tough and interesting choices, and (we assume) growing strong on the resulting psychic feedback.

Kieron Gillen (DIE - the comic and the RPG, The Power Fantasy, The Wicked + The Divine, and, again, just a bunch of good stuff) is closely involved in the creative process, from building and refining the core idea to contributing words to the book. 

And Grant Howitt (Spire, Heart, DIE: The RPG, Eat the Reich, Hollows) retains his role as creative consultant, pushing everything in the Metadungeon as far as, and probably further than, it can go. 

Stephanie Hans (DIE… too many beautiful things to list, honestly) has created the cover and we’re also excited to be working with Rick Hershey, Sar Cousins, and Saga Mackenzie for the interior illustrations and maps.

We'll match the aesthetic for each chapter to that era of play: Rick will create black and white and full colour images that take us from the seventies through to the turn of the century, Sar will deliver the glorious technicolour of the 21st century, and Saga's going to do all the maps so they're beautifully consistent.

And, while we're on the subject, huge thanks to colleague Elaine Lithgow, whose job description does not include "artist" or "graphic designer", for letting us use one of her mini-dungeon map as our background image for this entire crowdfunder.

Several TTRPG movers-and-shakers - Goodman Games, Kobold Press, Monte Cook Games, Ghostfire Gaming, Loke Battle Mats, Troll Lord Games and your friends at Rowan, Rook and Decard - plus a bunch of other interesting creators are all doing Backerkit campaigns at the same time, and they’re all for books about Very Big Dungeons. Which is exciting, right? And perhaps profitable.

If simultaneous crowdfunders don’t get you excited, we’re also offering a free PDF of a top-drawer luxury exclusive-to-this-event DIE scenario written by Grant “Honey Heist” Howitt, which we’ll send you if you back two or more of these megadungeons during this glorious month of multifunding.

We're taking our time on this book. Writing starts once crowdfunding is finished, and we're giving ourselves time to really do our finest work: we've built in plenty of time for writing, editing, refining, polishing, testing and - most importantly - having additional good ideas as we go. So it'll take a while, but the final product's going to be something we're incredibly proud of, and something you'll have the time of your life playing.

We're also leaving plenty of time in here to expect the unexpected. Because there's always something unexpected, whether it's a huge upheaval to global shipping or a brilliant idea about form factor.