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You Will Die In This Place
254 pages, Hardcover
Published June 2, 2026
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October 19, 2026
Everyone interested in TTRPGs should read You Will Die In This Place as soon as possible.
On one level it’s a horror dungeon crawler about characters who've been exiled into the Abyssal Labyrinth and, rather than saving the world or defeating the big bad, are trying to find meaning before they inevitably die in this place. As a dungeon it’s strange and surreal and so fresh, and from a game design perspective it’s classes are so distinct that each of them arguably could be from a different TTRPG: the Muzeiiyd Mercenary is almost a worker placement game, distributing the dice they roll between different weapons for the different actions they can take; the Corpse Engineer is useless on their own but they have a Frankenstein's Monster-type creature who they program commands into using their dice that can potentially act multiple times a turn so long as its commands aren't blocked by anything; my favourite is the Zirbari Headhunter who doesn't even use dice and instead has a deck of cards where they try to put together poker hands, with higher-scoring hands letting them use more powerful abilities.
On the second level though, it’s the TTRPG equivalent of something like *The Beginner’s Guide*. Established indie designer Samantha Little discovers an old shoebox containing design notes, essays, microfiction, and art by her old friend Charlotte Avery, who she hasn’t spoken to in years. Samantha decides to try putting these notes together into a game, accompanied by Charlotte’s other writing and by her own commentary about both her history with Charlotte and the game design.
Running throughout the book, both within the game and within the commentary, is the theme of communication. The closest thing the roleplaying game has to a D&D-esque “alignment system” is a communication table, how incomprehensible the language is to the Royal Orthodoxy, the more acceptable violence against them is. The fear of having her words misunderstood is a constant recurring motif in Charlotte’s writing, yet throughout the book we see how Samantha, in her desperation to reconnect with Charlotte, completely misunderstands her. She disregards the alignment system as a parody of D&D, she thinks that Charlotte being a trans woman has nothing to do with the game while ignorant of how it connects to the game’s themes of being an un-person in an un-place, of having few places to truly feel safe in, of the relationship with omnipresent fear. Maybe the funniest example is her reassuring the reader that Charlotte wasn’t depressed when a few pages later one of Charlotte’s notes explicitly describes her experience with depression. Samantha’s commentary on an incredibly personal essay about transitioning by Charlotte is to talk about designing compelling NPCs, completely misunderstanding everything she was saying.
There’s also a clear conflict between Charlotte as a game designer and Samantha as a game designer. Samantha is an indie game designer success story with pop sensibilities who wants to make something marketable, Charlotte believes that the fate for the majority of TTRPGs is to be bought and put on a shelf and never played, so why bother making something playable? These two philosophies are constantly clashing with each other. The lore of the Muzeiiyd Mercenary describes a people on the periphery of Ashendeep who are reduced to instruments of violence by those in power, but Samantha struggles to turn that into a class and inadvertently reproduces that marginalisation by turning them into a warrior class. The Corpse Engineer is the most unchanged from Charlotte’s original design, yet it struggles to fit in with Samantha’s d20 initiative system and grid-based combat. Some of Charlotte’s stranger and more esoteric design in the dungeon proper is reshaped by Samantha into a combat encounter, because a proper dungeon needs a final boss. Right?
Ultimately I think You Will Die In This Place is not just fascinating as a TTRPG I want to bring to my table and play, but also as a novel about communication, identity, and how game design connects with them both. It’s the second TTRPG to ever make me cry. These thoughts are scratching the surface of a text that, in a just world where TTRPGs were rightfully seen as an art form, would already have dozens of essays of varying quality written about it. I think every TTRPG player should have it in their collection.
On one level it’s a horror dungeon crawler about characters who've been exiled into the Abyssal Labyrinth and, rather than saving the world or defeating the big bad, are trying to find meaning before they inevitably die in this place. As a dungeon it’s strange and surreal and so fresh, and from a game design perspective it’s classes are so distinct that each of them arguably could be from a different TTRPG: the Muzeiiyd Mercenary is almost a worker placement game, distributing the dice they roll between different weapons for the different actions they can take; the Corpse Engineer is useless on their own but they have a Frankenstein's Monster-type creature who they program commands into using their dice that can potentially act multiple times a turn so long as its commands aren't blocked by anything; my favourite is the Zirbari Headhunter who doesn't even use dice and instead has a deck of cards where they try to put together poker hands, with higher-scoring hands letting them use more powerful abilities.
On the second level though, it’s the TTRPG equivalent of something like *The Beginner’s Guide*. Established indie designer Samantha Little discovers an old shoebox containing design notes, essays, microfiction, and art by her old friend Charlotte Avery, who she hasn’t spoken to in years. Samantha decides to try putting these notes together into a game, accompanied by Charlotte’s other writing and by her own commentary about both her history with Charlotte and the game design.
Running throughout the book, both within the game and within the commentary, is the theme of communication. The closest thing the roleplaying game has to a D&D-esque “alignment system” is a communication table, how incomprehensible the language is to the Royal Orthodoxy, the more acceptable violence against them is. The fear of having her words misunderstood is a constant recurring motif in Charlotte’s writing, yet throughout the book we see how Samantha, in her desperation to reconnect with Charlotte, completely misunderstands her. She disregards the alignment system as a parody of D&D, she thinks that Charlotte being a trans woman has nothing to do with the game while ignorant of how it connects to the game’s themes of being an un-person in an un-place, of having few places to truly feel safe in, of the relationship with omnipresent fear. Maybe the funniest example is her reassuring the reader that Charlotte wasn’t depressed when a few pages later one of Charlotte’s notes explicitly describes her experience with depression. Samantha’s commentary on an incredibly personal essay about transitioning by Charlotte is to talk about designing compelling NPCs, completely misunderstanding everything she was saying.
There’s also a clear conflict between Charlotte as a game designer and Samantha as a game designer. Samantha is an indie game designer success story with pop sensibilities who wants to make something marketable, Charlotte believes that the fate for the majority of TTRPGs is to be bought and put on a shelf and never played, so why bother making something playable? These two philosophies are constantly clashing with each other. The lore of the Muzeiiyd Mercenary describes a people on the periphery of Ashendeep who are reduced to instruments of violence by those in power, but Samantha struggles to turn that into a class and inadvertently reproduces that marginalisation by turning them into a warrior class. The Corpse Engineer is the most unchanged from Charlotte’s original design, yet it struggles to fit in with Samantha’s d20 initiative system and grid-based combat. Some of Charlotte’s stranger and more esoteric design in the dungeon proper is reshaped by Samantha into a combat encounter, because a proper dungeon needs a final boss. Right?
Ultimately I think You Will Die In This Place is not just fascinating as a TTRPG I want to bring to my table and play, but also as a novel about communication, identity, and how game design connects with them both. It’s the second TTRPG to ever make me cry. These thoughts are scratching the surface of a text that, in a just world where TTRPGs were rightfully seen as an art form, would already have dozens of essays of varying quality written about it. I think every TTRPG player should have it in their collection.
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