(Don’t Fear) The Reaper is a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) designed as a class project for Intro to Game Design (January–February 2023). Inspired by The Quiet Year and the Belonging Outside Belonging system, it explores how communities confront conflict, entropy, and existential inevitability.
Across 30 turns, each spanning a century, players chart the rise and fall of spacefaring civilizations that coexist in the same galaxy. Through tokens, events, and creative storytelling, players collectively build a cosmos under the shadow of the inevitable: the Reapers are coming.
Players embody interstellar civilizations striving to survive amid moral and material collapse. Conflict and cooperation unfold through community tokens, wars, and rituals of remembrance, as each player imagines how their people respond to cosmic doom.
(Don’t Fear) The Reaper invites players to negotiate the tension between collective meaning-making and inevitable loss. We aimed to foster emergent narrative through mechanics that enable creative agency yet maintain the awareness of mortality and transience—the very limits of human play.
