Dead Minutes by Tom K. Kemp
Dead Minutes is a storytelling game by Tom K. Kemp about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.
As the players, you will act both as authors of this story, making zoomed-out, informed decisions about what happens next to the potentially billions of people in the afterlife, and also as point-of-view characters within the story, who are being impacted by these decisions and respond to them as individuals. The game will tell you when to make these switches in perspective.
You will all be working together to tell this story coherently, but will also be critical about the events that you create together, attempting to bring tension, gravity and stakes to the narrative. Throughout the game, you will all take on different responsibilities in order to help you do this.
By the end of the game, together you will have told a complex story about the afterlife, why it was bad, what dead people did to change things there, and how some of them feel about it long, long after.
This book contains the instructions you need to play the game, an essay by artist and theorist Patricia Reed, and a series of invented afterlives by writers Chris Beckett, Habib William Kherbek, Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern and Selma Selman.
Commissioned by STRP Eindhoven. Risograph printed and bound by no kiss? on EOS 100g/m² and EOS 120g/m² paper in black colour. Edition of 200, 36 pages.
1 Comment on “Dead Minutes by Tom K. Kemp”
The cover and also some pages from the booklet’s interior feature text that shows the top or bottom half of glyphs only. I’d like to point out that these letterforms are included in the font.
Charles Mazé originally made Mercure as an inquiry into Latin epigraphy and the typographic forms associated with that discipline. In addition to Regular and Italic styles, there is the fixed-width Mercure Transcript, “a set of signs and symbols for the transcriptions of Latin inscriptions into print with fragmented, false, broken or missing letters.”
Shown below is an overview of the twenty stylistic sets included in the font, taken from the Mercure specimen pdf. You can read more about the typeface at the Abyme website – and more about “Three Typefaces for Latin Epigraphy in France and Germany, 1846–63” in their revue, Abîmées.