Epitaph

for three to five players

On two vertical index cards, write a memory of being with people, and a memory of being alone. Fragments are best; more than one sentence is too long. Give one to your left player; the other, right — which goes where doesn’t matter.

Write a third memory fragment, anything at all, on a third vertical card. Hold onto this for now.

On three horizontal cards, write traits describing someone you know of who died. These are just examples:

—Always laughed at the wrong time
—Farmer
—Happy eyes

Shuffle those together with all the horizontal cards. Draw back three. Using them, imagine your character. Name yourself. Take turns describing who you are. After all have spoken, give the card you kept earlier to any other player.

Take turns narrating scenes from your lives, each time laying down a single corresponding card. When you lay a vertical card, the player who wrote it adds a single theme word to it, reflecting something from that scene.

When all cards have been played, each player composes their own epitaph of no more than 140 characters, to be shared online. Any theme words on your cards must be included.

Written in April 2015 for David Schirduan’s 200-Word RPG Challenge. There's a single-page PDF version with a nice sleek layout, and the Google Doc version is available, too.