That’s how you play Death Throes. It’s a machine for running the early stages of a zombie outbreak – the stage where survivors still outnumber the dead, at least on a macro scale; society’s still holding together outside the outbreak zone and there’s something to get back to. Maybe it’ll turn out that the outbreak’s containable, or maybe the hope’s misguided. Maybe you won’t live to find out. The hope is what counts. 

Death Throes is Rooted in Trophy: it uses the Trophy RPG’s superb push-your-luck mechanics and a D6 dice pool to convey a sense of desperate people pushing onwards beyond their natural limits. Take risks for momentary advantage, at the cost of later consequences. It works really, really well. 

It’s a rules-lite game that can get you playing in less than an hour. Like a lot of rules-lite games, it’s improv heavy; you’ll make a lot of rulings to decide how things play out, rather than referring to a dense set of rules that cover every eventuality. However, Death Throes’ scenario design (also based on Trophy Dark) contains enough details, prompts, and texture that it’s easy to figure out what’s coming next. You’re improvising, but we’re making it easy. Plus, there are six scenarios in the rulebook that you can play while you're working on writing your own.

It does! It’s a great little game and it sells pretty well at conventions. Ex Stasis Games is still a tiny studio (there are two of us; neither of us is full time), but we were even smaller when we first made Death Throes. We kept the original Kickstarter very small scale and made a good, functional book that backers could receive as a PDF or as a print-on-demand paperback from Drivethru RPG.

This has two major consequences: 

Number 2 won out, here. We’re really proud of Death Throes and we’d like to give it a fair shot at getting more recognition. 

Actually, there’s a third consequence too: you can already get the game. We’ve made a cut-down, quickstart version (rules, most of character creation, and a scenario). When you hit "count me in!" to follow the project, you'll be redirected to the quickstart document.

We want to update the layout a bit, with a couple more years’ experience, and also revise the text in a couple of key places. Headline: we want to weave hope back into the game mechanics in additional ways.

Most importantly, we want to make a traditionally offset printed hardback edition. Offset printing allows us to do more with rich colours and hardbacks are sturdier, so we’re putting a more durable, pleasing product into your hands – and the hands of people who buy Death Throes off us later, but they’ll pay more for it than backers will. Hopefully this makes it easier for us to sell Death Throes to retailers, which makes it easier for more people to discover Death Throes, in a kind of virtuous circle.

All our stretch goals are more content and better book design. No extra charges, just more book for your buck. We're thinking ribbons, foiling, edge painting - all kinds of fancy finishes. If we have extra money we’ll add extra pages (maybe I’ll write a setting?), extra art (by original artist Erin Rea/Scribbleimp if she’s available, or someone with a cool, compatible art style if not), and luxury touches on the book (foiling! Painted page edges!).

Death Throes already exists and you’ll have fun playing it. Follow us, support us when we launch, and with your help we'll make it better.