Where is the TTRPG that never existed but should have, the Death Race RPG? In the last article, we talked about the inspiration behind a hypothetical game based on Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 and/or the Paul W. S. Anderson and Jason Statham Death Race reboot series. The original film, sequel, reboot, comics, and the mockbusters inspired by these films share mayhem, dystopia, and motor racing at their core. This entry looks at how those elements might be adapted into a hypothetical Death Race Roleplaying Game.
There could be group/team play where there are multiple PCs. What if it’s your team versus other players with NPC teams thrown into the mix to up the kill ratio? Do the teams compete or cooperate? How could you tell that story and keep the action as edge of your seat as possible? In the case of group play, how do you keep from losing focus or experiencing long pauses between player engagement? But the most dynamic option would be player-versus-player (PVP).
Alternately, this game may lend itself to solo play, with the player versus obstacles, few kill opportunities, and competing racers.
When building this TTRPG, the first question is how many people will play it in a session? Solo? Duet with the GM and single driver? A triumvirate with the GM, driver, and navigator? GM-led group play with player-versus-player elements? Round robin GM style with a group? This is the most important question for this project, and the creator’s decision will drive the entire game.
When crafting any Death Race TTRPG, a point system is going to be critical. However, scorekeeping is not a common element of TTRPGs since you don’t normally “win” a roleplaying game. Death Race would toss that norm out the window and run over it! Assuming a group-play TTRPG as opposed to a solo experience or an RPG duet (GM and 1 player), this would be a player-versus-player (PVP) style TTRPG. Each driver and navigator’s score would be a driving (ha!) element. Their scores should be tracked as the character’s experience points. Kills and finish line position would total up to one of the characters winning and leveling faster than the rest. As a competitive TTRPG, this game would fall into the rare category of players needing to eliminate other players in order to prevail. Why would they want to prevail? As discussed in each film, the racers have motivations that range from survival to revenge to financial to legal. Each character needs to survive the full race to achieve their goal(s). In this story, one race or a set of races represents the full campaign.
To “win” this game, the game will need to offer rules and guidance for a variety of skills and, hopefully, convey a setting fit for a savage satirical tone. Whether that tone is earnest or dark depends on which of the films the GM and players prefer. The satire will come from the GM and player interactions, it should be reflected in the writing and artwork of the rule book(s).
In terms of skills, auto racing, kills, and combat are core elements crucial to an authentic Death Race RPG. When discussing this hypothetical TTRPG, the rules need to cover skilled driving, death toll tabulation, position ranking, and racer popularity. Racer popularity leads to fans offering up sacrifices to improve the racer’s score. Their score comes from the property destruction, maims, and deaths each car achieves. This game might lend itself to press conferences with a chart of random press questions and/or confessional interviews, something met to showcase and boost the concept of a character’s Q-rating. Beyond the race, there would be scenes and conflicts around the character’s downtime, interactions between the “laps”, and rule meetings with the legal team and your agent. For this to feel like Death Race, not every character can survive and win, but every player should laugh.
To that end, there are some tabletop games featuring racing and dungeon crawling as sport. These games offer guidance on what you’ll need to pull out for a tabletop roleplaying game about high speed races and killkillkill. In terms of the game engine for this thought exercise, I don’t have any conclusions as to what system would be ideal. Nothing I’ve played was exactly the world of Death Race, but there are games that could inform a system.
In terms of racing, there’s 9th Level Games’ Thunder Road: Vendetta RPG, a polymorph TTRPG about vehicular mayhem. Introduced on Kickstarter and again during Free RPG Day 2025 with a free preview, this game uses the polymorph system where the player has a single die and rolls against static charts in order to determine success or failure. It’s quick, it’s brutal, and it offers a lot of edge of your seat action with its simplified system that maintains an old school feel.
Beyond the racing, there’s the spectacle, the viewership of the “game”. For that, there’s Goodman Games’ Xcrawl Classics, which brings in the element of televised spectacle along side a dungeon crawl. Here’s where side bets and character popularity play a key role. Studying this game will reveal some concepts and mechanics that are worth developing for a Death Race RPG.
When discussing the artwork, I mentioned MÖRK BORG. This style of violent, doomed storytelling may work as the basis for a Death Race Roleplaying Game. It’s simple, modular, and would support adding racing elements and celebrity ratings. If nothing else, its look has that outcast punk aesthetic that you’d want to see in a Death Race book. A good example of this is the water-based Mad Max/cyberpunk MÖRK BORG, Rustborn Bastards.
Keeping with racing and car combat, but moving away from RPG, there’s Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars. With hints of Mad Max and cyberpunk, this legendary tabletop vehicular combat game trades edge of your seat for fully realized rules, making each decision something to think through. This system offers deeper meditations on the quality of the vehicle and its parts, which will be critical to any game. If the creator wants to offer up a crunchier ruleset, this game offers a lot to consider.
On the RPG side of Steve Jackson Games, there's GURPS: Autoduel. This keeps GURPS complete system and mixes in cars. For gamers familiar with GURPS, this would easily recreate Death Race.
Which game should be the chassis beneath Death Race? Really, this one is going to require an original system or a deep variant of an existing ruleset with a deep focus on the automobiles, driving skills, character popularity, and score keeping.
Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, Kobold Press Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, Kobold Press, and Amazon.
ART AND PRESENTATION
Because there are six movies and eight comic books to pull from, there are going to be a variety of photo stills, posters, covers, hi-def screenshots, concept art, and more to build your TTRPG books around. Depending on the project’s tone and the art director, using art from the movies could be ideal. As with most of these hypothetical TTRPGs, the existing artwork looks phenomenal and would be both a time and money saver for the publisher. Alternately, consider the low-budget Roger Corman series and create original punk posters that use the MÖRK BORG layout style. For a publisher with the right contract, the books would be populated with art and celebrity photos from David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Joan Allen, Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames, Sean Bean, Danny Glover, Martin Kove, Yancy Butler, Manu Bennett, Marci Miller, and Malcolm McDowell plus photos of the cars and Kevin O’Neill artwork. If a publisher can obtain the rights for elements of the movies, these books would be crawling with notable Hollywood names.PLAY STYLES
Both Death Race movie series – the original and the reboot – feature multiple contestants, each vehicle piloted by a driver and navigator. There is a racing authority overseeing the race, the GM’s role. How do you orchestrate a game about two individuals in a single vehicle violently competing against other racers? The pilot and co-pilot as a team of two players and a GM might make sense. This isn’t quite an RPG duet with one GM and one player, but it isn’t far off. The pilot and navigator could be done as two players and the GM inform the rest of the world.There could be group/team play where there are multiple PCs. What if it’s your team versus other players with NPC teams thrown into the mix to up the kill ratio? Do the teams compete or cooperate? How could you tell that story and keep the action as edge of your seat as possible? In the case of group play, how do you keep from losing focus or experiencing long pauses between player engagement? But the most dynamic option would be player-versus-player (PVP).
Alternately, this game may lend itself to solo play, with the player versus obstacles, few kill opportunities, and competing racers.
When building this TTRPG, the first question is how many people will play it in a session? Solo? Duet with the GM and single driver? A triumvirate with the GM, driver, and navigator? GM-led group play with player-versus-player elements? Round robin GM style with a group? This is the most important question for this project, and the creator’s decision will drive the entire game.
SCORE KEEPING IN YOUR RPG
Both movie series are tales centered around winning their respective races with rules that denote victory over defeat. The original Death Race series includes Death Race 2000 (released 1975), the comic books dubbed Death Race 2020 (published 1995), and Death Race 2050 (released 2017), these are the Roger Corman-produced films and comic books that utilize a “traditional” score keeping system. The newer film series uses the year-less “Death Race” moniker. Led by Paul W. S. Anderson as director, producer, and author for the first movie (released 2008) and producer and story concepts for the three direct-to-DVD sequels (released in 2010, 2013, and 2018), this series has rules; it’s not about points, but survival and position.When crafting any Death Race TTRPG, a point system is going to be critical. However, scorekeeping is not a common element of TTRPGs since you don’t normally “win” a roleplaying game. Death Race would toss that norm out the window and run over it! Assuming a group-play TTRPG as opposed to a solo experience or an RPG duet (GM and 1 player), this would be a player-versus-player (PVP) style TTRPG. Each driver and navigator’s score would be a driving (ha!) element. Their scores should be tracked as the character’s experience points. Kills and finish line position would total up to one of the characters winning and leveling faster than the rest. As a competitive TTRPG, this game would fall into the rare category of players needing to eliminate other players in order to prevail. Why would they want to prevail? As discussed in each film, the racers have motivations that range from survival to revenge to financial to legal. Each character needs to survive the full race to achieve their goal(s). In this story, one race or a set of races represents the full campaign.
To “win” this game, the game will need to offer rules and guidance for a variety of skills and, hopefully, convey a setting fit for a savage satirical tone. Whether that tone is earnest or dark depends on which of the films the GM and players prefer. The satire will come from the GM and player interactions, it should be reflected in the writing and artwork of the rule book(s).
In terms of skills, auto racing, kills, and combat are core elements crucial to an authentic Death Race RPG. When discussing this hypothetical TTRPG, the rules need to cover skilled driving, death toll tabulation, position ranking, and racer popularity. Racer popularity leads to fans offering up sacrifices to improve the racer’s score. Their score comes from the property destruction, maims, and deaths each car achieves. This game might lend itself to press conferences with a chart of random press questions and/or confessional interviews, something met to showcase and boost the concept of a character’s Q-rating. Beyond the race, there would be scenes and conflicts around the character’s downtime, interactions between the “laps”, and rule meetings with the legal team and your agent. For this to feel like Death Race, not every character can survive and win, but every player should laugh.
WHAT GAMES COULD POWER DEATH RACE AND ITS VEHICLES?
Why write about Death Race instead of George Miller’s epic Mad Max? Death Race is about racing for a prize, Mad Max is about driving to survive. They’re different topics, one exclusively focused on racing in a dystopian world, the other focused on post-apunkalyptic outlaws fighting for guzzolene to keep their rides rolling. They’re different enough that the gaming experience I’d want for each would not be the same.To that end, there are some tabletop games featuring racing and dungeon crawling as sport. These games offer guidance on what you’ll need to pull out for a tabletop roleplaying game about high speed races and killkillkill. In terms of the game engine for this thought exercise, I don’t have any conclusions as to what system would be ideal. Nothing I’ve played was exactly the world of Death Race, but there are games that could inform a system.
In terms of racing, there’s 9th Level Games’ Thunder Road: Vendetta RPG, a polymorph TTRPG about vehicular mayhem. Introduced on Kickstarter and again during Free RPG Day 2025 with a free preview, this game uses the polymorph system where the player has a single die and rolls against static charts in order to determine success or failure. It’s quick, it’s brutal, and it offers a lot of edge of your seat action with its simplified system that maintains an old school feel.
Beyond the racing, there’s the spectacle, the viewership of the “game”. For that, there’s Goodman Games’ Xcrawl Classics, which brings in the element of televised spectacle along side a dungeon crawl. Here’s where side bets and character popularity play a key role. Studying this game will reveal some concepts and mechanics that are worth developing for a Death Race RPG.
When discussing the artwork, I mentioned MÖRK BORG. This style of violent, doomed storytelling may work as the basis for a Death Race Roleplaying Game. It’s simple, modular, and would support adding racing elements and celebrity ratings. If nothing else, its look has that outcast punk aesthetic that you’d want to see in a Death Race book. A good example of this is the water-based Mad Max/cyberpunk MÖRK BORG, Rustborn Bastards.
Keeping with racing and car combat, but moving away from RPG, there’s Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars. With hints of Mad Max and cyberpunk, this legendary tabletop vehicular combat game trades edge of your seat for fully realized rules, making each decision something to think through. This system offers deeper meditations on the quality of the vehicle and its parts, which will be critical to any game. If the creator wants to offer up a crunchier ruleset, this game offers a lot to consider.
On the RPG side of Steve Jackson Games, there's GURPS: Autoduel. This keeps GURPS complete system and mixes in cars. For gamers familiar with GURPS, this would easily recreate Death Race.
Which game should be the chassis beneath Death Race? Really, this one is going to require an original system or a deep variant of an existing ruleset with a deep focus on the automobiles, driving skills, character popularity, and score keeping.
FINAL LAP
Would a Death Race Roleplaying Game excite the tabletop gaming world? Chases and high speed combat have been a limiting factor in RPGs since their inception. If a designer succeeded at intuitive racing rules for a TTRPG, this could change roleplaying. If a Death Race Roleplaying Game were created, would you play it? Have you ever played in a Death Race-like setting? If so, tell us in the comments how it went.Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, Kobold Press Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, Kobold Press, and Amazon.
