How to Overcome a TPK (Total Party Kill)?

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A lot of players put significant time into their characters’ backstories–much more than was common many years back. So what do you do if all the characters are killed?  Fortunately our Sidequest Decks: After the TPK is a whole deck of possible answers/ideas–and a few of them are in our free sample Sidequest Deck.

Note: You can also watch a video version of this post.

First of all, as a game master you should foreshadow in-game if certain choices are likely to cause a TPK.  And if the players are oblivious to the hints you’re giving it isn’t a bad idea to tell the players point blank if a decision will cause a TPK. (The players aren’t there, the characters are. So something may be lost in the translation if the hints aren’t getting through.  It is OK to cut through that fog.)

But if the players ignore your warnings or what you thought was a difficult encounter becomes deadly (due to some bad rolls by the players and good rolls for you) what do you do? Years, back we’d often either just roll up new characters and have new adventures in the same setting or even have the dead characters’ “cousins” show up with the same stats and similar backgrounds.

However, there are over 50 ways to bring the characters back in our Sidequest Decks: After the TPK deck.   These can be grouped broadly into a few categories:

  • The PCs fight their way out of Hell or otherwise satisfy some requirement to get back to the main world.
  • In heaven, the party does a favor for a god and is returned as a reward.
  • The party is somehow turned into undead, but the ceremony isn’t done quite right, so the PCs have some sentience and can work to become fully alive again.
  • Time travelers or a high-tech culture is watching them and saves them.
  • We break the 4th wall and somehow the characters are transported to another time & place and have to get back to the fantasy world.