Death Sentence: This new one-shot RPG brings slasher horror to your Halloween tabletop

Fear in a handful of dice is the tagline for Death Sentence, which you can currently download Leo Andrade’s Itch page for just over $5.

Death Sentence is a tabletop RPG where players experience a full-blown slasher movie story in a single session. The game’s rules integrate roleplaying and dice rolling to realize (or subvert!) the genre’s tropes and a set session structure matches the flow of a classic slasher movie.

Here’s the pitch summary of the game:

Sessions last 2-5 hours and follow a 3-act structure.
The game is designed for 1 Narrator and 3-5 players. The Narrator controls the world, NPCs, and the Threat, while each player controls 2-3 PCs.
Character death is almost inevitable, but having multiple PCs reduces player risk aversion and enables bolder, more exciting moves.
The Threat can be deadly and hard to kill, such as owl-people, fungal zombies, or crazed killers. The PCs’ goal is usually to escape or destroy the Threat.
The action resolution system is simple: players roll pools of d6s based on their character’s Action Attributes, Traits, Relationships, and current circumstances. Circumstances include the environment, Injury status, and clever ideas.
Players can spend Drama Points to get more dice or reroll failures.
PCs have a Panic score that increases in response to traumatizing events. Rolling badly on a trauma check can spell disaster and always ratchets up the tension.

Guilherme Sassaki initially created Death Sentence, then Leo Andrade translated it from Portuguese to English, offering development editing enroute, and Luana Bibiano helmed the art.

There will be a chance to see Death Sentence as it was intended to be played as Leo will be running a session on the 28th of October, at 2 PM EST at Stillfleet’s Twitch channel.

After Halloween, the price goes up to $7.50.