Die (stylized as DIE) is both a horror/fantasy comic book about role-playing games, and an interconnected tabletop role-playing game system. The comic book and role-playing game were developed simultaneously, with content from one crossing into the other, and vice versa. Both the comic book and the role-playing game were written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Stephanie Hans. Die was influenced by the portal fantasy and LitRPG literary genres.
The comic book series focuses on a group of British adults who are drawn back to an icosahedron-shaped world they originally visited as teenagers; the group left behind a friend upon their original escape and never discussed the experience. It was published by Image Comics and ran for twenty issues across four five-issue arcs (Fantasy Heartbreaker, Split the Party, The Great Game, and Bleed), beginning in December 2018 and ending in September 2021. The comic won the British Fantasy Award for "Best Comic / Graphic Novel" in 2020 and 2021 and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic three times.
Gillen and Hans created the role-playing game complement to the comic book with British publisher Rowan, Rook and Decard. The game was funded via Kickstarter in May 2022. The digital edition was released in November 2022 with the hardcover edition following in June 2023. The game won "Best Role-playing Game Core Product" at the 2023 Origins Awards.
A sequel, titled Die: Loaded, is scheduled for begin in November 2025.
Gillen has stated that the idea for Die came from a conversation with his longtime collaborator Jamie McKelvie about the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, in which a group of children are magically transported to the fantasy world of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The final episode of the show, in which the characters return to Earth, was never produced, and Gillen wondered what might have happened to the children. Additionally, Gillen was inspired by Stephen King's horror novel It, and particularly the theme of adults returning to childhood experiences of horror. Die<nowiki/>'s focus on role-playing games and game mechanics was born from Gillen's own interest in role-playing games. He has stated that while he played RPGs for most of his life, his interest was reignited in 2013, when he started to seriously consider "the nature of fantasy, and where this weird form actually came from." These ideas became core themes in Die.
Gillen collaborated with artist Hans during his run on Journey into Mystery, after which they began discussing a collaboration on an ongoing comic. Hans had primarily worked as a cover artist, and Die was her first ongoing comic. Gillen developed the role-playing game and the comic concurrently. Ideas developed for one then crossed over into the other. For example, the secret of the Fallen originated in the game. He stated:<blockquote>I actually tend to think of the comic and the game as two lenses of examining DIE. [...] It's also telling that when developing the game and writing the comic, ideas bounced between them freely. It was never me trying to adapt one to another, really. I was trying to do the idea as well as I could in two separate forms.</blockquote>
Paragons
Citizens of Die
In September 2018, it was announced that the Die ongoing series by Gillen and Hans would be published by Image Comics. The series launched its first story arc in December 2018. In January 2019, the first issue received a third print run and the second issue received a second print run. Ultimately, the first issue received five print runs in total; every issue in the arc received additional print runs. In August 2019, the second story arc began with issue #6; per Diamond Comic Distributors, that issue was ranked #95 for "Total Unit Sales" for comic issues that month.
The release of third story arc was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic; it began with issue #11 released in June 2020. In February 2021, Gillen and Hans announced that the fourth story arc, titled Bleed, would be the final arc. The final arc began with issue #16 in May 2021 and finished with issue #20 in September 2021.
When asked if the intention of series was to run for twenty issues, Gillen stated: <blockquote>We've got the numbers on the d20 on the back. So, it was sort of implied that we weren't going past 20. 20 issues and four movements was always the plan. The first arc is the travel to try to get to Sol. [...] Then in the second arc, the party is split. We follow their separate paths before we end with them coming together and Ash taking over Angria becoming the quote-unquote evil queen. Then in the third arc, we have a high-level war between the various regions of Angria. So we've gone from one party to two parties working at separate ends to a Lord of the Rings-scale world war. Then the fourth arc was always going to be we're going down a fucking dungeon. It's obviously a joke because we're doing a Dungeons & Dragons-esque comic, and we haven't gone down a dungeon yet.</blockquote>A hardcover collection of the twenty issues was released in November 2022. In August 2025, Gillen announced an upcoming sequel titled Die: Loaded which is set one year later; the first issue is scheduled for release on November 12, 2025. Hans will return as the illustrator. Gillen explained that Die: Loaded is both a sequel and an accessible new series for people who have never read the original series â "if it says #1 on the front and someone can't just grab and read it, something's gone amiss. We tell everything you need to know".
In 2018, Gillen announced that he was preparing DIE RPG, a role-playing game intertwined with the Die comic book. The player characters are teenagers who magically enter the fictional universe of a tabletop role-playing game. The game's narrative style is metatextual. Gillen stated that his influences for DIE RPG included the games Paranoia, Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, Legacy, Fiasco, Warhammer, and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as elements of Nordic LARP.
Each character type is called a Paragon. The gamemaster also plays a character: the gamemaster within the fiction. Paragons have special dice that grant them unique moves. Each character has six main statistics. The randomization system uses dice pools.
The original public beta version of the game was released for free online in June 2019 with the release of the trade paperback Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker. Gillen also ran a closed beta to further develop the game. Gillen highlighted that his early playtesting began before the publication of the comic and that reading the comic is not required for playing the game as it is not "like a traditional licenced RPG book".
When compared to the art of the comic series, Hans stated that the RPG art would be "a bit more full of detail and thoughts. My traditional painting style is not that far from digital art. [...] So, I donâÂÂt think it will be that different, but in the composition, of course, there will be some mock-up involved" and that "there are inspirations from the comics that I want to use for the RPG".
DIE: The Roleplaying Game was scheduled to launch on Kickstarter in October 2021, however, British publisher Rowan, Rook and Decard later announced a delay due to concerns around shipping and material shortages. The official Kickstarter for the game launched on May 12, 2022; it was fully funded within 24 hours. DIE: The Roleplaying Game includes two main rulesets â DIE Core, rules for games two to four sessions long, and DIE Campaign, rules for longer ongoing games. DIE Core is an updated version of the public beta game. The digital edition was released to Kickstarter backers on October 25, 2022. The PDF became widely available on November 29, 2022 with the hardcover edition following in June 2023. The first expansion, Die Scenarios Volume 1: Bizarre Love Triangles, was released on May 15, 2024. The second expansion, Die Scenarios Volume 2: Love is a Battlefield, was released in September 2024. The third expansion, Die Scenarios Volume 3: Childish Things, was released in April 2025. An entry level boxed set, titled DIE RPG Quickstart, which features a new scenario by Gillen is scheduled for release in May 2025.
In The Comics Journal, Mark Sable ranked the first issue as among the best comics of 2018, describing it as "the most memorable and accessible debut issue (he had) read in a long time". In 2019, Io9 called Die "subversive" and "a heady combination of fascinating worldbuilding (and) compellingly broken characters tearing each other apart", lauding Hans' "vivid, striking artwork".
At the review aggregator website Comic Book Roundup, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 10 to reviews from comics critics, the entire series received an average score of 9.4 based on 202 reviews. Chase Magnett, for ComicBook.com in 2021, wrote that "the arrival of DIE #20 is a bittersweet moment. Over the past 3 years, DIE established itself as one of the most engaging and wondrously conceived series in serialized American comics. Each issue read like a gift and engaged all of the facets that made this concept sing: richly-considered characters, fascinating settings and conflicts, a rigorous consideration of humanity's use of games and stories, and some of the most stunning artwork found in any comic from 2021. [...] So whether you're finally coming to DIE as it concludes or, like many of us here at ComicBook, tensely awaiting one last issue, there has never been a better time to discover one of the absolute best comics series in years".
Christian Holub, in his 2021 review of Die, Vol. 4: Bleed for Entertainment Weekly, commented that "it's always nice to see a creative team stick the landing. [...] The conclusion is fulfilling and satisfactory, so it feels like we can now confirm Die as a very good comic, one of the best mainstream offerings in years. Hans' painterly art makes Die look uniquely distinguished from every other fantasy series on the shelf, and proves more than capable of tackling the many, many different kinds of stories Gillen brings into their orbit. [...] Anyone who found themselves intrigued by Die<nowiki/>'s initial premise owes it to themselves to read all four volumes".
In terms of sales, both the individual issues and the trade paperbacks were consistently bestsellers. Bleeding Cool highlighted that "while it's unusual for monthly titles to increase in sales following #1", from the third issue every initial order for each issue in the first arc was higher than the previous issue and "Die #6 has the highest initial orders for an issue of Die since #1". Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker was #1 in "units shipped" and #9 in "dollars invoiced" on Diamond's "Best-Selling Graphic Novels" sales list for June 2019. Die, Vol. 2: Split The Party was #2 in "units shipped" and #6 in "dollars invoiced" on Diamond's "Best-Selling Graphic Novels" sales list for February 2020. Die, Vol. 3: The Great Game was #4 in "units shipped" and #6 in "dollars invoiced" on Diamond's "Best-Selling Graphic Novels" sales list for December 2020. Die, Vol. 4: Bleed was #4 in "units shipped" and #11 in "dollars invoiced" on Diamond's "Best-Selling Graphic Novels" sales list for November 2021. In January 2022, all four trade paperbacks were on Diamond's "Top 400 Comic Books" for graphic novel sales â volume one was #121, volume four was #208, volume two was #263 and volume three was #323.
DIE: The Roleplaying Game was included on Gizmodo<nowiki/>'s "The 20 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games of 2022" list â Linda Codega commented that it is "probably the game that I am most hyped to receive in physical form" and that the game "is a meta-textual love letter to gaming, storytelling, and their own comic creation. [...] It combines a very clever premise with the ability to do pretty much anything you want, but the consequences, the final decision, always looms large in the minds of you and your companions". Chris Lowry for Tabletop Gaming called DIE RPG a "Must Play." He wrote, "So, what makes this a Must Play? I found DIE RPG to be a mirror; reflecting back the breadth of a genre and my own experiences within it. It is a love letter to classic RPGs whilst containing some of the newest and most interesting ideas IâÂÂve ever seen, ideas that are both an innovation in mechanics and deeply clothed in self-referential theme".