A Sense of Doubt blog post #1466 - Reviewing Die#2 - a comic about D & D

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1466 - Reviewing Die#2 - a comic about D & D

I reviewed DIE #1 with Sense of Doubt post 1400.

The first issue was prelude for the nocturne.

"I am not at all sure that the tendency to treat this whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good -- certainly not for me, who finds that kind of thing only too fatally attractive." ~ JRR Tolkien
- back cover epigram from DIE #1

As I write this, I know I am a bit late to the party as issue three is already out, and the store where I have subscribed to it did not provide me with an issue. Coupled with some other recent gaffs, that store is skating on thin ice in terms of my continued patronage. But I am a nice person, so I am likely to be forgiving. I expect all comic book stores to be as great as FANFARE in Kalamazoo, knowing they cannot possibly measure up.

Oh, but this is my review of Die and not comic book shops, so...

As mentioned in the previous review, Gillen does online writer's notes on his Tumblr. Here's his notes for Die #2:

http://pomegranate-salad.tumblr.com/post/182119037747/seeds-of-thought-die-2

Here's some review round ups.

ISSUE TWO REVIEW ROUND UP

https://comicbookroundup.com/comic-books/reviews/image-comics/die/2

TITLE ROUNDUP

https://comicbookroundup.com/comic-books/reviews/image-comics/die

So, if Die #1 is prelude to the nocturne, in Die #2, the nocturne begins.

To recap, in the early 1990s, six young people get together to play D&D. The DM, Sol (also Grandmaster), introduces them to six magical dice. Each player takes a die: D4 for Ash, the Dictator; D6 for Chuck, the fool; D8 for Matt, the Grief Knight; D10 for Angela, Neo; D12 for Isabelle, the Godbinder; and the D20 for Sol, the Grandmaster.

The players disappear from "our world" and re-appear two years later unable to explain where they have been, what happened to them, or why they returned without Sol.

Twenty-five years later, the survivors gather again and are drawn back to the fantasy world by Sol, who somehow sent his D20 (covered in blood) into "our world" as a means to fetch them back to "finish the game."

And so, the game is afoot.

Before I review the contents of issue two, I want to praise Gillen for his choices in making these characters who they are and the "class" they play in the game.

Especially, I love the "Grief Knight," who embodies a special take on the Paladin class that makes it much more interesting. The knights correspond to colors in an emotion wheel created In 1980 by Robert Plutchik .

So, the Grief Knight is just one of many knights who are associated with various emotions on the wheel.

As you can see, the "grief" emotion is at the center of the wheel along with amazement (which Gillen talks about in the comments from his newsletter shared below), terror, admiration, ecstasy, vigilance, rage, and loathing.

I love this idea!

The other character ideas are also very interesting. I love that there's a cyber-punk "Neo" character to lend the story a bit more variety than even the re-imagined D&D-style classes.

Also, Gillen has created an RPG game to play out stories in the world of Die, which is a totally meta thing to do and a bit excessive, I would think, in terms of preparation, but then, did you see his writer's notes?

Like how the paradigms for the characters is rich and complex, the world in which the characters interact and the subsequent series of events (plot) is also complicated and deep. Whereas the first issue can be recapped with the simple "after twenty-five years, they go back," the second issue cannot be so easily summarized. It's more of a "what's next" and a beginning introduction to the world in its characters where in the reader only arrived at the end of issue one. Describing the encounters in the second issue, the first unravellings of the rules of the world and the shape of the conflict -- both the larger conflict with the world and its new Grandmaster and the internal conflicts within the group of "adventurers" -- as well as the first decision, the route the group will take to meet their foe, are not easily summarized or even understood. This is as it should be. Gillen presents the opening bars of a long and majestic piece of music about this magical world, its denizens, and its heroes. The catchy riffs and first chords only hint at the grander scheme at play. Issue two gives the reader one glimpse at one of the twenty facets of the Icosahedron, a polyhedron with twenty sides.

One of the greatest strength of Gillen's writing is the many layers of each line of exposition, each line of dialogue, such as, in the initial conversation between Sol and his friends, we are treated to Ash's inner monologue: "This isn't a conversation. This is the sort of monologue you run in your head with lovers you'll never speak to again." Not only do the lines ring with truth, but there's layers more to unpack here as "Dominic Ash," presumably a man in the "real" world, is a woman in this world, who goes by "Ash," which makes those lines all the more pregnant with meaning.

Gillen picks up issue two where issue one left off and establishes Ash as the narrator: "I was the Dictator. I learned how to tell stories." Stephanie Hans art washes color like light swept water colours across a three-panel page, revealing the fantasy-rich milieu in which the characters find themselves. for his part, Gillen doles out information slowly. Sol is now Grandmaster (whatever that means) having killed the previous Grandmaster. Also, Ash reminds us that the Geas binding them all to silence has been lifted, and she can freely share "everything." And this "everything" is so much that this sharing will happen slowly, piecemeal, and with vast tracts of landscape left in abeyance, pinned in our minds for future expansion.

First, there's recap of some of what brought them to this time and place starting with what happened twenty-five years ago when they left. By the rules of the game, harkening to The Wizard of Oz, if they all agree to go home, then they can make that magic happen. After casting a Geas binding them all to silence, the group vanquish the Grandmaster, and thinking him defeated, they "started the "there's no place like home," when the Grandmaster recovers, and snatches back Sol, which also severs Angela's arm, left behind with Sol in this fantasy planet-world shaped like a twenty-sided die.

Left behind, we learn that Sol killed the Grandmaster, assumed his role, and has worked to bring his friends back to the game ever since, "for so long." Every bit of language reveals more. We learn that the Grandmaster wanted to "connect the two worlds" -- this fantasy realm and the real world -- and that the Geas of silence was necessary because "the more people who knew," Sol says, "the more people would be dragged here. His plans for them were monstrous." Followed by the mysterious lines, packed with meaning, as Sol states in the page's final panel: "But we've won! He's dead. We can play! Fantasy i ours, now and forever."

I've included this page just described and others below.

There's much more as Sol gives them "a briefing we can't skip" as Ash explains, culminating in Sol's big reveal: "See, I even have a theme... you can never go home."

They are tasked with beating the Grandmaster, which presumably is Sol since it says so in the front character information page, but he does refer to the Grandmaster in the third person, IE. "defeat him," not "defeat me," which is another mystery to unpack.,"

The story continues to unspool from the point at which Sol proclaims the goal and vanishes, and so the characters begin to discuss their situation and their reluctance to play this game again. The first encounter occurs immediately as an eleven princess appears and entreats their aid in a very "help me Obi Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope" kind of way, even offering Chuck a reward that clearly hints at being sexual, at which point the D6 based Fool, runs her though with his sword, even though she looks just like his junior high wet dream fantasy. Upon this skewering, we see that this creature is no elf at all but "a fallen," also known as "a trap with legs" or "orcs," "something you can kill with no moral questions whatsoever." The art masterfully renders Gillen's ideas with more bloody washes and sepia-soaked cinematography style art work, like a cross between film noir and Miyazaki, darkness and light: FANTASY.

Text reveals more about the Fallen, who can breed "battery-acid wire"-like worms in the skins of the characters, who begin to power up for battle as the Fallen attack. The Fool rushes in, as fools do, the Godbinder brings the bear, and the Neo activates core system power. Ash presides overall, the leader, and uses here power of command to invoke Matt's sorrow, empowering his blade and his battle-readiness as the Grief Knight. There's so much in these pages that even in this detailed summary that I am still only scratching the surface.


With the Fallen defeated, the characters are left to decide which way to go to reach the Grandmaster and finish their quest to defeat him, which allows Gillen to reveal more about the places of the world, each facet, each side, of this twenty sided globe is a differently themed landscape/nation, such as Eternal Prussia, Angira, the seas of Gondol, and the war-zone of the Front.

They have experience with many of these places, and the theme of the issue reveals how their past returns to haunt them, embodied by "Sir Lane," an Angarian knight who Ash barely remembers but whom she ensorceled with a spell that he could not die until he looked on her beauty again, so he returns to find her, his eye sockets dripping maggots from where his eyes have been missing for over twenty years and his flesh a decaying mass or putrescence. Bathed in a slough of two decades of putrefaction, Ash announces that they will journey through territory where they were afraid to go originally when fueled by "youthful over-confidence" -- The Front, the war zone -- because "we can survive anything but our past," which is the final line of the issue, and one even more redolent with the promise of stories yet to be told than all the previous weighty exposition combined.

Gillen ends the issue with a long reflection and explanation on the way in which he created the characters and the dice they represent. It's the offloading of a ton of thinking, and Gillen reveals that this text is still only a scratch on the surface of the some 8000 word Bible that he wrote to pitch the series or maybe it was to launch the series. He's a writer right in my wheelhouse and who may be even more insane than I am when it comes to prep.

I may scan these pages and post them later as I do not believe Gillen has released them online. I find his thought process fascinating. The Cleric/priest class in D&D is more like a demonologist than a devout follower of the faith because he "summons extra-planar deities and bullies them into obering him."

The Neo also reveals how Gillen let the dice often dictate the theme and paradigm of the character. A D10, Neo's die, is a binary 1-0 as well as being new to the game, not one of the original dice used when the game was created in the 1970s, which is why I have some twenty siders with only numbers 1-10 as they were used for D10s.

He goes on to explain all the character classes and how the die each has relates to or informs their powers and roles, but I won't spoil all the content here. But it's fucking brilliant. That's all.

"Rules? What rules"
~ David Arneson to Gary Gygax, upon being asked for a copy of the rules for the game he just played
- back cover epigram for DIE #2.

I can't wait for more issues. The fact that I could have already read issue three and the comic shop where I have subscribed to it failed to give it to me is just another strike mark against that shop, and its accumulating too many strike marks.

Here's page one of DIE #2.

Here's page two of DIE #2 with the recap of how Sol was left behind and how Angela lost her arm.

Here's page three of DIE #2 with some of the lines quoted in my review.

Here's page four of DIE #2 with that final line about never going home as described, both this page and the last are engineered to deliver that strong beat at the end of each page, which is also a tease to prompt the reader to turn the page.

Here's page thirteen of DIE #2 as the characters ready to fight the Fallen; Neo powers up and Ash prepares to evoke grief in Matt to bring forth the Grief Knight.

Here's page fifteen of DIE #2 in which Ash makes Matt become the Grief Knight.

A COUPLE OF REVIEWS... because

Found randomly.

https://bamsmackpow.com/2019/01/09/image-comics-die-no-2-review/

"What would be great to see is if the series creators can bring some depth to Chuck – a person may act the fool, but it is those who mask their complexity with humor that make for the best characters. Since we’re only two issues into the series, one can expect that many layers the characters’ personalities will be revealed to readers at a later stage.

Stephanie Hans’ art continues to be wonderful to look at. The colors and canvas finish give this book an eerie feel while still being captivating. The landscapes of DIE are breath-taking, while the character designs evoke fantasy favorites while still remaining unique and new."
https://www.youdontreadcomics.com/comics/2019/1/18/die-2-review


"Kieron Gillen once again hits it out of the park. The second issue of Die works in a massive amount of world-building, including both incredibly unique character classes and their affects (and effects) on their returning players. Perhaps the best blend of this belongs to Matt, the Grief Knight. His class runs on emotions, particularly depression and sadness. His reluctance and eventual forcing into the role again may only play across a few pages, but is ultimately one of the best character moments in the book. What could become a bunch of infodumps as the world and characters are fleshed out instead becomes character development while also playing off D&D stereotypes. Die was a breath of fresh air last issue with deconstructing how horrible being sucked into a fantasy world could be, and that feeling remains while exploring the world they were in."

Following are a lot of Gillen's content from his newsletter about Die #2 and some about Die #1.
************ If my hash tag works and Kieron takes just a minute out of his insanely busy schedule to glance at my review, I hope it's okay that I am sharing newsletter content. Please don't sue me. :-)

ALL TEXT BY KIERON GILLEN:

DIE 2 is out today, as is the second printing of DIE 1 (Or "DIE 1 2" as I like to call it, just because I like how it sounds. "DIE ONE TWO"). Last issue was the somewhat stately introduction of the concept, the characters and the tone. This is where we put the meat on the skeleton, and then rip the meat off the skeleton. Clayton said this was the most disturbing book he'd ever worked on, and this guy letters Redlands. The dance between what is Dark Horror and what is Fantasy continues. This issue gives you a lot.

Anyway – the preview is here, and you can follow DIE news here. You can get it from digital here or your local shop.

DIE
In terms of going forward, this is my big personal epic. It's ongoing with a planned end, and should be about half as long as WicDiv. Also, with my current plans, it's also the only thing on this list I'll be working on in 2020. Clearly, plans can change there, not least me pushing stuff until next year. Stephanie's drawn to issue 5, and she's just working on the cover for the trade before moving onto the second arc. The trade will drop in June, and it's called FANTASY HEARTREAKER. There's some pre-order links here.

Work? It's still early in the new year, with the deadlines yet to mash. I have a couple of tight ones to write around, but it should be fine. The key thing is getting more script to Stephanie, but I've broken the second arc to my satisfaction (and most of the rest of DIE too). This has been an interesting problem with DIE, actually – that I've been developing the RPG which recapitulates a hugely personalised first arc for the players has meant that I've been churning over that material endlessly. I've ran seven or so playtests of the game – which means there's eight versions of the core DIE story I've participated in. As in, I've obsessed over the first part of a story so much that imagining DIE as anything other than that first part was tricky. I've done my Fellowship. How do I get to Return of The King?

But I've got something I'm happy with. It's telling that I sent a playtest version of the DIE rules to some close friends just after midnight on January 1^st (A tradition of mine – WicDiv 1, Ludocrats 1, WicDiv 18 and DIE 1 were all sent on January 1^st of their years). Mark Sable is apparently going to run a test game this Friday, which will be the first game not ran by me. Clearly, I'm petrified. Of course, Mark is also heroic, because the current draft of the rules is (er) idiosyncratic. Which is, of course, why I need to playtest it.

I better stop – I have some DIE pages to write for 6 before my guests arrive this evening. I'm starting another DIE playtest with Alex Hern, Tom Armitage, Ram V and Dan Watters, which is the first time I've played with a room full of geezers. Hmm. Let's see how that works.

After we mentioned Sally Couch has been helping us as a sensitivity consultant in the backmatter of DIE 2, the MNT reached out to interview her. She says things like...

"My role as a sensitivity consultant is to be that person to say, “hey, carrots and potatoes are really hard to slice… if your character is going to be cutting vegetables – they’re not like you, they would do this instead”. I give creators the idea of what it’s like to live disabled, and how I get around many daily tasks that are relevant to the storyline. For me, seeing disabled people in media was rare when I was growing up, and if they were there, it wasn’t ever anyone with limb loss. I had nothing to work on, no one to show me how I should be doing simple things like cutting vegetables or even watching my posture. This means that for every ‘able bodied’ person who wants to write about being disabled has even less of an edge, and would always have to assume. "

...and read the rest here.

In terms of sensitivity consultant, my basic take is "When researching ancient Sparta in three, I went to speak to world experts to get it right. I'd have paid much more to speak to an actual Spartan. Sensitivity consultancy is just an extension of research."

A: You kind of hit upon how it basically works - like, the Knights end up having a personal relationship with their emotion, and that axis. Still - if you want to think about it wider, you should look at what it's riffing on. This is the wheel, stolen off the Wikipedia page...

All the coloured areas are a single emotion in the system. So “Surprise” is also “Amazement” and “Distraction.” The most powerful emotions are the ones towards the centre.

So certainly surprise is in there, but amazement is too. So the “FUCKING HELL! DID YOU SEE THAT DRAGON!” would push the emotion. In other words, it could work great for an adventurer - they’d peak hard when they first see a new thing, and then likely decreases during a fight, unless something goes wrong (getting surprised, etc). Other emotions end up having different arcs - some emotions tend to be very easy to get low intensity of emotion and hard to get a high one, which ties into which abilities can be activated.

(To choose an alternate one, Rage is an easy one to talk about - if you’re not angry at the start of a fight, you certainly will be when that fucking thing hits you.)

I want to do more with the knights if I ever do a fuller campaign edition - there’s some Knights which I feel would work as a less pure-combat character. I have some ideas as a Detective as a Curiosity Knight sort of role, for example. But that’s down the line.

• Secondly, Gita Jackson interviewed me over at Kotaku about DIE. One fun thing of DIE is going back to the old games-critic stomping grounds. I also like that Gita says it's "Thrillingly Bleak" which is a pull quote if I've ever seen one.
• Thirdly, Diane Sousa interviewed me for a con, which never used it, so she lobbed it online. See me wave my hands in the comfort of my own office.

Also, we're back in DIE RPG playtesting, which means I better do my prep for the next session. It's... an interesting one. It's the good stage of playtesting where the feedback I'm getting is small, but also meaningful.

The other main trend this week was DIE 2 coming out, which has been a little humbling. It was only when the issue came out, and how hard it hit a certain strand ofpeople, that I realised the otherreason why I was worried about it. I was aware it was a wider issue, but the real thing is that the first issue was about selling the characters, the mood and the concept. The second issue shows the actual ideas. Many people could have had a "Go to fantasy world" story. Issue 2 is a huge download of how Stephanie and I have been thinking about this. Approval of the first issue is based on approval of execution of concept. Approval of the second is based around approval of our actual ideas. Are you actually going to go along with us? Oh, it seems you are.

In short, I feel blessed. Which is handy, as I could do with a hit bonus.

I can just hear Jamie going neeerrrrrrrd at this point.

DIE 2's going to a second printing. Press release here. Astounding cover above. Out Feb 13^th. Code DEC188162 if your shop needs it.

Occasionally you get a piece of art which makes you rethink plans in your series, and this is one of them. That Stephanie literally painted it overnight due to insomnia makes it even more astounding.

These pieces just seemed right after my comment about the "nocturne."






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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1902.24 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1331 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.