The Final Undertaking
A downloadable undertaking
Tonight you will prepare the body. You will hang the heavy black curtain, and you will put out the call in the town paper. Tomorrow night, when the sun sets, the chosen mourner will arrive, with their matter to discuss. You will sit with the body on one side, coaxing the soul back to the body, and the mourner will sit on the other. The final undertaking will begin.
THE FINAL UNDERTAKING is a one player journaling game about grief, resolution, necromancy, and a town. It uses a d4, a tarot deck, and pen and paper to tell a story about an undertaker, who works in a town to prepare bodies for burial, briefly brings the spirit back to the body, and then facilitates a conversation between a single mourner and the deceased about their unresolved business.
In this game, you will use the tarot cards to form a spread that tells the bones of a story -- the deceased, the object they are being buried with, the mourner here to visit them, and the unresolved business between them. From your spread, you will be able to construct small narratives and write them down as journal entries.
Warnings
This game deals with topics of death, grief, and relationships. If you need to step away at any point, do so. The game will still be there. Your health is more important.
Purchase
In order to download this undertaking you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $8 USD. You will get access to the following files:
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Comments
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A beautiful endeavour, enchanting and morose, there are many things in this work that shine, but the one I want to first draw attention to is the one Kay foolishly says you can ignore: DON'T SKIP THE WORLDBUILDING! IT'S REALLY GOOD. Okay, that said, this is a game that plays you almost as much as you play it. Much like the eponymous Final Undertakings themselves, the game is both intuitive to slip into, and challenging to wrestle through. There are places you may find yourself wanting more guidance, but in the end, I found it to be all the better for them. In my first two hours with this game, I wrote more pages of inspired work than I have on my own game in the last week. I am deeply, deeply enamoured with the death-heavy world that Kay has created in this game, and as dreadful as it can be, there is a comfort in it, and I lowkey want to live there. Fortunately for me, this game lets me come back to it as much as I want. I'll be revisiting my undertaker often, I think. He could use the company.