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Chad Underkoffler is a perfect specimen of the North American gamer. There are the glasses, the goatee, and the Peter Jackson build; the blue flannel shirt, the black jeans, and the black high-tops. There are the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs and the Steven Brust books. There's the fact that Underkoffler sometimes calls himself "the Monkey King" and likes to pontificate on such things as the Lovecraftian notion of "things man was not meant to know."
So it's something of a surprise when the 32-year-old Alexandria resident makes an announcement: "The gaming convention of kill-things-and-take-their-stuff pisses me off."
It's even more of one when Underkoffler starts to talk about the kind of character he might create for a game of his own design, Dead Inside: The Roleplaying Game of Loss and Redemption. "If I did play, there'd be a big temptation to go for the 'soul-broke' scenario," he says. "Or I'd have sold my soul and found out that it wasn't worth it. You could do a really cool redemption storyline with that."
He pauses to take a breath. "Or I'd have put my soul into some object and lost it, like a scientist who came up with some really cool invention and sells it to a company that, instead of taking it public, suppresses it. I win the lawsuit, but then I come back to my lab and find that it's completely destroyed. That would be interesting."
Yes, Underkoffler freely admits that he's "a big, honking geek"--but he's probably the most metaphysical geek you've never met. Dead Inside, written in the free time carved out between his day job as an editor for a telecommunications-standards body and his freelance work for role-playing-game publications, is a response to his hobby's penchant for wallowing in darkness and violence.
Like most RPGs, Dead Inside includes mystical powers and occult lore, but instead of slaying monsters or finding treasure, the game encourages players to achieve self-understanding by creating characters who have somehow lost their souls. Then the game master takes them on a freewheeling journey to such places as the Bridge of Souls, Spectral Point, and Wyld Park, where they encounter magi, ghosts, and zombies. The game ends when characters, who began as empty "Dead Insides," regain...