‘Play to find out what happens’ is one of the Agendas from Apocalypse World, and it cemented  the broad intent of the game in a way that, when it came out, few games had really done so before. We were still in the thick of maximalist trad games even in the early 2010s, and people were still trying to have thoughtful reactions to the World of Darkness school of ‘your players are privileged to watch your story’ and the John Wick school of ‘your game will work better if you fuck with your players relentlessly’. As much as The Forge is derided in modern theory circles, people forget many of its predecessors were legitimately bad ways to run games. Anyway.

I was told even before picking up a copy that the GMing advice from Apocalypse World would carry over to all of the games I ran, and out of all the guidance within that game, ‘play to find out what happens’ was the piece that affected me the most. Not exactly because it was new, but because I finally felt seen with regard to what I was trying to do in my games. Little by little I did find a cadre of designers and other players that reflected my ideals: I think one of the most cogent distillations of how I run RPGs comes from Caleb Stokes in Red Markets: Your game should be told one third by the players, one third by the GM, and one third by the dice. But it was ‘play to find out what happens’ that first told me I wasn’t alone.

My current campaign has involved a lot of playing to find out what happens, and man I did not know what was going to happen in this one. Part of that is that the game has been highly unconventional, smooshing two different games together and providing remarkably few guardrails to what everything would look like at first. Another part is my decision to pull hard on the wheel and turn the whole thing into a metatext that took literally twenty years to write. This campaign is, in a lot of ways, my masterwork, which inevitably means it is shaking itself apart as it drives.

A little explanation. Well over a year ago after New Year’s 2025, I ran the session zero for what at the time was simply going to be a campaign of Apocalypse World: Burned Over. While Apocalypse World has since crowdfunded for a Third Edition, at the time Burned Over was a playtest layered over an existing hackbook, but more importantly it was a version of the game with some nifty bits of tech. The one I built my game around was ‘Forerunners’, a playbook and procedure for having the apocalypse happen during the game and your characters steadily transform into their Playbooks onscreen. I decided also to mush this together with the DIE scenario The Last Game Before Graduation, making it so that instead of getting sucked into DIE on the night of their last game, the characters would watch the world literally end. Using the DIE questionnaire to extend character creation meant that we had a very fleshed out high school, and using the Apocalypse World setting beats meant that of course the Psychic Maelstrom erupted, thinning the veil between the living and the dead and causing a cataclysm that killed most of the adults in the world. Of course. We ran that game for 18 sessions, running around the swamps of Florida and chasing psychics, swamp monsters, government conspiracies, and animals so cute they could psychically enslave you. 

The game ended with a gambit so obvious I’m surprised it took me until the end of the campaign to think of it. The stakes had kept on getting higher, in part due to one player who had taken the Restless playbook and was introducing new and horrifying monsters every single session. We had the abovementioned cuteness slaver, piranha snake hybrids, lava dolphins, gangs of bat-winged raccoons…the list goes on and on. By the end said player was a little suspicious that I was just going to ‘yes and’ everything, so he introduced a multidimensional conspiracy between two vast alien empires that actually started the apocalypse in the first place. “Cool,” I said. I did have somewhere to take that idea, and it was back to the start. I borrowed the DIE questionnaire innocently, because I thought it would produce deeper, more flawed teenage characters. But as much as I didn’t quite mean it at the beginning, by the end I was fully willing to buy into the idea that the first 18 sessions were simply the longest DIE Persona Generation sequence ever.

This Sunday everything paid off. My players have played DIE before, so there’s a level of trope awareness that’s keeping everyone cagey. But on Sunday, session 5 of this arc (and 23 of the campaign overall), it all clicked horribly into place. The Dictator was dictating, the Godbinder making some really shaky deals, and the player Master is rewriting physics, all while the party is chasing an NPC into the sewers so the Neo can get his Fair Gold fix. It took a few sessions to kick off, but the campaign version of DIE is now off and running, a machine I don’t think I can stop anymore. And while I’m very pleased with ‘playing to find out what happens’, there’s a part of me that feels more like I’m ‘playing to see how long it takes for this to implode dramatically’. Last session I put a character in a position where they had to kill their father in order to gain a level. Watching the utter torture of having one of my players choose between ability gains and a clear moral atrocity was, as a longtime GM, delicious. But the stakes of a DIE game are both high and, ultimately, designed for a game that lasts about 10-12 hours of play. I have exceeded this and, thanks both to my players and the game’s advancement rules, it feels like everything gets more dangerous the longer we go.

There is something else about my version of DIE that both heightens the stakes and makes me really want to keep the game going as long as I can. The advice for running a campaign of DIE is to make every face of the twenty-sided world that the game takes place in something that uniquely ties into character conflicts. I did this for maybe six or seven sides. The rest of the world is something way bigger, something my players started to really appreciate the implications of last session. My version of DIE is made up of settings we played games in together over the last twenty years, including but not limited to several earlier games of DIE. Every NPC they’ve met has been a character from one of these games; it’s not only a nod to our incessant desire to make references to and cameos from our older games, but also a chance to make some deep cuts, and make people think. I’ve started making allusions to one face that holds the ‘secret to DIE’, and what I have planned is bonkers. I think a real litmus test of this campaign is going to be if the characters make it there before the whole thing falls apart.

I think over the years I’ve generally been very pleased with how much we ‘play to find out what happens’. That said, it’s been a long time since a campaign has put me through the ringer like this one. I am both putting in more and getting more out of this game than I have from any of my campaigns in a good long while…that’s not to say I haven’t run other good games, but this one I feel keeps teaching me things. The challenge, of course, is to figure out what to do next when the dust settles, and how to take good lessons from a game that is so driven not only by the unique emotional torture of DIE but also the send-up of over twenty years of characters that I decided now was the right time to unleash.