On September 8, Dungeons and Dragons publisher Beadle & Grimms launches a new adventure anthology on Kickstarter. Faster, Purple Worm! Everybody Dies volume 2 features 12 original one-shots, each with one guarantee. You will die at the end.
You might have heard of Beadle & Grimms. Founded by five friends “as a mid-life crisis”, the publisher has made a name producing luxury D&D products. Co-founder Matthew Lillard (yes, that Matthew Lillard) tells me the group’s goal “is to elevate your home game with your friends”.
I caught Lillard and fellow co-founder Bill Rehor at Gen Con this year, after they’d finished running a private charity D&D game. A group of generous Extra Life donors got to explore one of Purple Worm volume 2’s many adventures. As expected, everybody died.
That’s the whole premise of a Purple Worm game: low-level adventurers go against a vastly overpowered foe, and they have to make the best of what time they have left. For all its deadliness, the adventure gets a lot of laughs. Lillard, despite a lack of DMing experience, is an energetic adjudicator. Rehor hangs out in the background, narrating insults thrown by the scenario’s big bad.
The pair tell me they’ve played Dungeons and Dragons together since they were 21. “We’re well into our 50s, and it’s our favorite way to spend a lifetime”, Lillard adds. Those decades of experience serve them well when it comes to innovating on the world’s oldest roleplaying game.
Death may be a constant in the world of Purple Worm, but the beast just keeps evolving. Each iteration challenges the way we think about playing D&D.
Things began with a 2023 television series, Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! This was a comedic short-form take on actual play, Whose Line Is It Anyway style. For about an hour, some of D&D’s most talented players faced the gruelling gauntlet of guaranteed death – with both humorous and heartfelt results.
Lillard tells me “we collectively have a great sense of pride” about Purple Worm, even though the original show lasted just one season. Despite this short run-time, its core concept was powerful enough to live on.
A series became an adventure anthology. Then, it became two. We’ve also seen Faster, Purple Worm! turn into a live show, with an emphasis on audience interaction.
“Last night, we brought forward the first iteration of a new adaptation”, Lillard tells me at Gen Con, “which was great”. “Basically, it’s a meat grinder.” “Every round or so, we cycle through players from the audience.” “We bring them up on stage, and we try to hold the tower long enough for the great Cleric to save the day.”
“We got through maybe 20 or 30 audience members”, Rehor adds, “and we got to play parts and get killed off in a glorious way”. “Everybody had their little moments, and it was a great time.”
I ask Rehor and Lillard what makes the Purple Worm so enduring. “People really find some new things about playing D&D that they hadn’t before in the freedom of knowing it’s about the journey”, Rehor says. “It allows you to do things you wouldn’t before, take some risks, and not worry about min-maxing your character.”
“Every step we’ve taken with this, we’ve sort of thought ‘well, this will be the end of it'”, he explains. “I’ve just been really grateful that people embraced it so much.”
“The live shows have been really successful, and people really seem to connect with it and get great satisfaction out of it”, he adds. “When we put the book out, we were like ‘I don’t know if people are really going to love this idea of everybody dying’, but when we went through the first round of playtests, the feedback we got was so encouraging.”
This project, it seems, is living each day as if it were its last. That’s fitting, given the themes it explores. As Rehor tells me: “The whole idea of Faster Purple Worm is that the inevitability of death should never quench your fire for living.”
You can learn more about Everybody Dies volume 2 on the Kickstarter page when it goes live at 9am PT. Or, if you’d like to talk more about D&D in general, you can join us for a chat in the official Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
