'Mystery Is Interesting, But It's Less Interesting Than Empathy': Rolling DIE: Loaded With Kieron Gillen, Part 2
Concluding our chat with Kieron Gillen, creator of hit Image Comics series Die: Loaded.
When the first part of my conversation with Kieron Gillen about DIE: Loaded left off, he was telling me about what may be the biggest difference between the new series and the original. Where DIE was about a party of friends who already knew each other getting to know each other better through gaming, DIE: Loaded is about a bunch of strangers thrown together into a world based on gaming, something that some of them have absolutely no experience with.
That, of course, leads to a remarkably different dynamic between the characters. If DIE is about a long-running RPG campaign involving close friends, the kind of campaign whose sessions are so long and so consistently held that they can take on a ritualistic aura akin to going to church, then DIE: Loaded is on the other end of the RPG spectrum.
"DIE: Loaded is about a pickup game," Gillen says, referring to the type of RPG experience that typically happens between strangers who are attending the same public gaming event, such as a convention. It's "about people who really don't know each other at all, having their first experience of each other through the filter of a fantasy experience. They get most of the first arc set around a con. What is a city in an RPG world? It's a con, because that's where gamers get together to play. The idea of this is all about pickup games, people you don't know. That's kind of the core of it. "
DIE used three different, but intertwined narrative modes to tell its full story. While all three of those modes are present, to some degree, in DIE: Loaded, the balance is different. The narrative equalizer has been adjusted, so to speak.
Rebalancing DIE
The first of those modes has to do with the whole world of DIE being sentient and seeking its purpose. "The core conspiracy story, the idea of how the being from beyond time and space has influenced all of human history to make the opportunity happen and to do what it wants to do – the Roko's Basilisk aspect – is basically the DIE metaphysics, how DIE came to be," Gillen explains. "There's almost none of that in [DIE: Loaded] because we've done it, which means that, thankfully, we've played that and done it because it's really hard."
