As Gerard Way once said, "They say all teenagers scare the living sh*t out of me.". The younger members of generation Z have been characterized in the gaming sphere as highly competitive, very pop-culture oriented with a very low patience threshhold especially for their entertainment.

Here's what happed with today's run of Shadow of the Dragon (which is the scenario made available in our quickstart!) which I ran at a potluck my friends and I had. Somehow, I am sitting at the kids table despite being 31. I ran the game for Badger, Francis, Clea and Johann (who was the only player over 17) for a game that took around three hours. Badger played Socrates, a disgraced young member of the royal family who was the survivor of the mass killing of a student's uprising which resulted in the cleansing of the entire university, it's student body and it's staff. Francis played Taylor, a rebellious knight turned mercenary in search of the resources to fund a rebellion. Clea played Gabriel, the abused ward of a young princess (it was her aunt who abused her) turned folk hero who seeks to take down the monarchy that ruined her life. Johann played Galstaff a young priest whose town had been burned down by the dragon.

The story began with the first attack. The party took on an attacking army of dragon cultists and saw firsthand the destruction the dragon could wreak on the city. The group of heroes have been hired by Lord Henry to deal with the threat of the dragon and its cult for half the dragon's hoard. While Gabriel and Galstaff defended the town from the cultists, witnessing death and destruction everywhere, Socrates and Taylor convinced Lord Henry to trust them with "Dragonbane" a magical rapier powerful enough to pierce the dragon's hide which he plans to use to get to the dragon's hearat. They also discover that Henry's mistrust of them was that one of them is in league with the cult, which both of them brush off.

The attack is fended off and the dragon flies away... for now. The lord's son, Percy mounts a counter attack but is interrupted by Gabriel and Socrates who are against the offensive being in the name of the king, who they hate. They'd just found out that the crown princess, Socrates' mother and Gabriel's abusive adoptive aunt is on her way to organize the city's defense and do not want the crown to take advantage of the crisis. Morale falls but Galstaff raises the flag for the goddess instead, uniting the front against the dragon cult which outnumbers their troops. Galstaff learns from a redeemed cultist (whose life he earlier saved) that the cult is right under their noses, living in the underground tunnels of the formerly burned university which is located in that very city.

Using their skills, they lure the cult's standing army into the city streets where half the batallion is decimated by traps set by Socrates. One such choke point fails causing the fighting to be concentrated in that area. Taylor leads the charge with Lord Henry while Socrates and Galstaff make their way into the underground tunnels to confront the heart of the cult. They enter the cathedral of the dragon and confront the cult leader who reveals that Socrates is in fact the traitor, ordering him to kill Galstaff and destroy all hope of the cult's destruction.

Let's talk about Galstaff. He is a sweet cinnamon roll. He is idealistic, naive, innocent, and is doing all of this to build an orphanage for children displaced by the dragon's reign. His love interest, another cleric, was lost in a previous attack and he has nothing else to live for. Clea deduces immediately at the beginning of Act III after hitting her third milestone that Johann's character is going to die at the end of the story. She is correct. All this happens before Galstaff and Socrates entered the chapel.

Socrates decides to betray both the cult and the city by killing the dragon priest with his magical rapier and seizes the cult's powersource, granting him power over the dragon. After having managed to sneak in through a secret passage, Gabriel reveals himself disgused as a cultist, having snuck away from the battle. He kills his traitorous cousin and takes the powersource for himself as the vision of his perfect world fills his thoughts experiencing visions of him killing the king, his aunt and forcing the kingdom into an age of peace with the dragon's help. Meanwhile, the battle goes sour when the dragon re-enters the fray. Taylor breaks his oath and abandons Henry to his fiery demise. His encounter with the dragon consists of him constantly trying to avoid it or run from it.

Galstaff realizes that tyranny is not a substitute for tyranny. Gabriel's perfect world is a delusion and that no one person may have absolute power. He casts one final spell to assimilate the artifact, and utters a final command for the dragon to self-destruct, freeing the kingdom from the dragon's shadow. The resulting firestorm kills everybody in the vicinity leaving a crater where the battle took place.

Clea, having successfully fulfilled her role narrates the epilogue: a resulting rebellion frees Gabriel's adoptive mother who rallies the kingdom under the banner of the heroes. Their actions are romanticized as nobody was alive to tell of what they'd done. All people know is that they sought out to kill a dragon, and a day later the dragon was dead. Statues of them are raised in the new capital under a new government led by a new benevolent queen seeking to reform the kingdom into one that serves its people rather than rules them.

So what did I get from this playtest of Shadow of the Dragon?

• The dragon in this story represents power. In other instances of this scenario, it's represented marxist or environmental themes. I do notice that it seems to be different every time.

• This particular iteration of the story with these players is about cycles of abuse which go from small acts of verbal abuse to mass kilings perpetrated by tyrannical governments.

• This was the very first TPK (total party kill) I've seen in this game. No, I'm not going to change the title because I've said several times that "At Least One of Us Will Die" isn't as catchy. The theme remains unchanged. It's a game about death. 

• There is also a theme about history and perspective, established when Taylor convinces the lord of the city to grant them dragonbane based on the mercenary group's many achievements all of which are exagerrated. In the end after their deaths, they are nearly deified for their acts even if nearly all of them acted selfishly the entire time.

Does One of Us Will Die work with teens?

Yes, I think it does. You'll just have to accept that they are highly competitive and may or may not see the TTRPG as a game rather than a literary exercise, but that's the beauty of the system in my opinion. As long as the players respect what it is and what the goal is, to confront the literary device of death, a story still gets told. Was today's "winner", Clea, playing competitively and constantly on the look out for death flags and red flags? Yes she was. Was she playing to win? Absolutely. Did she win? Well I don't think you can win at a TTRPG, but she says she did and she got to narrate the epilogue and accomplished all her milestones so she says she won, and who can take that away from her? Did she tell a good story. Absolutely! They all did.

This is how a social deduction game and a tabletop rpg can exist in the same space. It's a fun little exercise on your observational skills all resulting in a fun meaningful story getting told, each time coming out different.

Of course, teenagers will play differently from experienced roleplayers. They won't be able to think quickly on the spot so there is a little bit of handholding required here, but that is expected. One of Us Will Die at least provides some guidance or framework to make your character interesting and advance their arcs through the milestone system and the archetypes. It becomes very easy to offer guidance to players as the director. A lot of the game felt like a narrative tug of war with each player trying to tell their own part of the story, very much like how children do during bedtime stories when they want to direct the hero or make modifications.

I'd love to try this game out more with newbies to see what comes out. So far, I think they're a big part of my target audience. Get the quickstart, try it with your kids, please let us know how it goes.

https://titus171.itch.io/one-of-us-will-die/devlog/787071/can-teenagers-play-this-game-lets-find-out-one-of-us-will-die-devlog