Role playing games often set up fantastic situations for their players to overcome. It might be a dragon guarding treasure, an evil space empire or a global corporate conspiracy. But will the hardiest adventurers handle an elimination vote?
Deathmatch Island is an upcoming game from Evil Hat Productions currently crowdfunding for its first edition. The central premise, where players compete on a sinister reality TV game show, takes a lot of influence from Survivor, Squid Game and The Hunger Games. But it also takes elements from shows like Lost and Yellowjackets as players explore the mysteries behind the show and their own characters.
“Survivor was the biggest influence,” said Tim Denee, creator of Deathmatch Island. “I’m a big Survivor fan, especially the Australian version. The thing I love most about Survivor is the way the game design encourages and rewards all sorts of gameplay and all sorts of players, from physical challenge beasts to devious snakes to those who get by on pure social charisma. I also love the underlying tension that, from the start, all the players know that only one of them can win. You need to work together as a team to succeed, and you need to be part of an alliance to avoid being voted off, but all this camaraderie is undercut by the unspoken truth that at some point you will be forced to turn on each other. It’s a fascinating dynamic, watching how people navigate this conflict between relying on each other versus eventually betraying each other. That’s a core part of Deathmatch Island.”
Even within the game, the characters are aware of the artifice in reality TV. The Game Master, called Production, becomes a character within the story trying to manipulate events and characters for its preferred outcome. The players eventually have to decide whether they are playing to win the game or reveal Production’s secrets to the world.
“I think that what people who aren’t fans [of reality TV] often miss is the kayfabe of it all,” said Denee. “Of course it’s not ‘reality’, of course production steers events and makes sure entertaining personalities are kept around, and of course the editors fabricate the final storylines for entertainment rather than the truth. That’s all part of the appeal, and those are all things I wanted to play with in Deathmatch Island – the more followers you have the more successful you will be, and while they’re never seen you can be sure that Production is always watching.”
Deathmatch Island uses the Paragon system first seen in John Harper’s AGON where mythic Greek heroes came together to find their way home. The game offers an interesting tension between the usual cooperative play of RPGs and something a bit more competitive. Everyone wants their team to win, but Paragon also gives benefits to the star player on the team.
“Something that grabbed me about the Paragon system was the friendly competition between player characters,” said Denee. “The best player character in any contest earns more glory than the others. It creates a fun individual success vs. team success dynamic, and leads to a lot of banter and hijinks between the players at the table as they simultaneously want to succeed as a team but also to earn the most glory as an individual. The Paragon system also has a natural storytelling quality to it; in AGON, the player characters are epic heroes of greek legend, and gameplay takes the form of boasting about your deeds as you recite your legendary epithet and so on. It was easy to update that to the modern day using the language of reality television; players roll the dice and then give confessionals about what happened, narrating what the audience would see in the final TV product, and giving their own spin on events to make their character seem like the star of the show.”
Deathmatch Island is currently crowdfunding through November 14th, 2023. A text complete version of the game is immediately available for backers. The full game is currently slated to ship in June 2024.
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