I have four years to live. No, I don’t have any chronic disease. I’m too prideful of my own life to take it away, and I always wanna be immortal. Rest assured I won’t kill myself by then. But I just know that death is waiting for me in 2030. The reason is out of the scope of this blog, so let’s not get into it. Just take it at a face value that I only have four years left to live.1
The countdown was originally five years. Last year I found a community that welcomes me, LFG Tabletop Community & Con. They invited me to be a player in their zeroth con, and then to run games in their first and second cons. For almost a year now I’ve been running a few games in their Discord server, but mostly I don’t run and just play in someone else’s sessions.
But now I have four years to live. It’s time for me to make games again. To run games again. I made an adventure for Appx. N Jam 2026, The Artificial Alchemist. Then I made a game for One-Page RPG Jam 2026, Late to Say Sorry. Those are after two-year hiatus of me not making any tabletop RPG works.
I’m challenging myself to run four different horror games this October. I’m gonna run Girl Frame sometime this month, then Orbital.2 Later in November I wanna start one of my white whale campaigns: Nobilis 2e or the grand Mythic Bastionland to Electric Bastionland to Silent Titans open campaign. Probably Nobilis first with its low session count.
I really can’t thank my friends at LFG enough for giving back the spark in my life through this hobby. Turns out making new friends, making new close friends, such that you thought you’ve been hanging out with them for years even though you just know each other for less that a year, is perfectly possible at any point in your age. I’d like to think it’s because this friendship comes from role-playing. Because me and my new friends at LFG have embodied various characters in many worlds together. We’ve spent virtual lifetimes with each other that, when it comes to IRL interaction, we feel closer than it is possible in such a short time.
Four years is a short time. There’s a reason why recruiters ask us, “How do you see yourself in five years?” and four years is the next best thing.3 A lot can change in four years despite being short. I just hope that these less-than-a-year friendships I forged at LFG last for a lifetime. I can’t afford to lose anything anymore, not when I need to make the most out of these final four years.
Seems selfish, come to think of it. I want my friendships to last forever, yet here I am telling the world that my life will end in four years. My friends will lose me and I’ve given them the due date. I don’t want anyone to leave me yet I am going to leave everyone.
I have a
I think I’m
Since my first ‘proper’ RPG was Nobilis 2e, and then I discovered OSR a decade later, character death is always a slap on the wrist. But earlier this year I ran Dialect, and a character death actually brought tears on the table to one of the players. Just last month I made a game about asking forgiveness from a dead loved one, the aforementioned Late to Say Sorry. Gradually, character death in RPGs becomes serious for me.
Participating in LFG community makes me realize that trad play style and OC culture is actually fun for me. I used to think OSR trumps all. Turns out collaborating on extensive backstories with my friends, getting emotional about what happened to my friend’s characters, and playing along with what the plot demanded is a lot of fun. So does player character death during session.
I learned about Nordic larp during my teenage-to-twenty years. The stereotype is that they’re more experiential, more unconcerned with plots or mechanics. That may be what I get from trad/OC culture play style. Not necessarily the game’s mechanic itself, but the embodiment of character. That I get to be someone else. Feel someone else. Married with OSR sensibilities, I can just act my character out within the game world.
Now I don’t wanna stop. I need to embody as many characters as I can, live in as many worlds, try as many games there is to play. I have a set deadline and it’s encroaching ever so closer. Four years is a short time.
I’m gonna make my final four years count. And you can join me.
Four Years Left
To give you a glimpse into what I’m feeling right now, I made a collaborative journaling game for exactly four close friends or lovers. Get it here!
Made for Minimalist TTRPG Jam 5. You can consider it my vent art regarding this four year deadline of my life. Hopefully by playing it you can feel what I feel right now. It’s a journaling game, but it’s not solo. It’s diceless. It needs no game master role. Most importantly, the playtime is exactly four years.4
Players share one journal together, adding more entries as the journal changes hands during the year. After a year of play, an anniversary session is conducted. Since the game runs only for four years, there can only be four anniversaries.
This one, and my previous game Late to Say Sorry, are what I call healing games. These games invite players to examine their relationship, or a simulacrum of it, and try to mend it during gameplay. It’s why both games don’t recommend you to play with strangers. I intentionally blur the magic circle for these healing games to work. But while the latter is about receiving forgiveness, Four Years Left is about giving apology.
You’re gonna give your apology, but it can never be forgiven in this game. Part of why I made it so is because this is my wish-fulfillment. I find myself easy to forgive anyone. When someone hurt me, if they say sorry immediately I’ll forgive them right that instant. As you can imagine, it turned me into a pushover. I made this game so that I can learn not to forgive someone, learn to stop. And that someone must either be my close friend or my lover, which means I can learn it in a controlled and safe environment.
Naturally I’ll experience how it feels to not be forgiven in this game. But I already had a lot of that in real life. Big deal. People tend not to forgive me even after I’ve readily forgiven them before. (Nothing’s wrong with that, all within their rights.) Says a lot about myself as a person, actually. Four Years Left lets you roleplay being me or the ideal me that I’m not.
It is deliberate that this game isn’t explicitly about mortality. Bet you wouldn’t even know that there’s a mortality theme in a meta sense if I don’t write it in this post. It’s deliberate because I still have hope that my impending doom never occur. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to stop feeling things. Four years should be enough for there to be a major change in my life that butterflies the doom away.
Feel free to play Four Years Left today and tell me how it ends in 2030. Hopefully I’m still alive by then.
Kinda funny because 4 is the number of death.
Not to be confused with Orbital Blues.
What the fuck does this sentence mean?
This is why I set the game’s custom noun to “commitment”.