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See a summary of the game in this thread.  

In this thread, I want to talk about social contract setup for Death's Door.  In the quote box is the extant draft of the rules directly targeting social contract and how-to-play.  I would appreciate general feedback as well as answers to a very specific (if "touchy-feely") question: Does this do a good job of addressing and gently setting aside the typical western society death taboo?  Take into consideration that the person reading this has already been interested enough to have picked up the book and read the cover copy, so they know the game is about death, and have opened the cover anyway.

QuoteBoundaries, Certainties and Strictures
There are some lines you never cross.  Death is not one of those lines.

Boundaries: Make clear before playing what lines will not be crossed.  
This is, bluntly, a game about death, and death is not an easy thing for everyone to deal with.  Setting boundaries that will not be crossed is the first thing this book talks about, because it already goes places people are uncomfortable with by talking about death at all.  If you, as one of the people playing this game, do not want this game to go in a particular direction, say so now.  The game is wide enough in scope that it will not noticeably suffer from saying "My dad died of cancer, and I really would rather we didn't have cancer come up at all."  Or, to inject some personal experience: "Nobody plays kids.  I've got kids, and I don't want to deal with that."
Boundaries don't have to be about our own personal taboos, though.  It can be anything that you, the players, want to formalize.  "I want to play this game, but if it's all stark and grim, I'll go postal.  We need some comic relief." would be one possibility, as would "Yeah, but not too much humor.  If this turns out to be Laurel and Hardy meet the Grim Reaper, I'll go postal."  Or even "No going postal jokes."  "Please, no hokey clichés" would be a strong candidate for a game like this.
Write down the boundaries at the top of the tracking sheet, in the section provided.  This will act as a reminder for whichever player is taking the role of antagonist to keep from crossing those lines.

Certainties: How Death's Door works.
•Each protagonist has Death's Door.  Only the protagonists have it; that is their defining characteristic.
•They will die at the end of three sessions, and not sooner.  You will play this protagonist three times, and then they will die.  For the protagonist it could be minutes or it could be weeks or even longer.
•What they die from is immaterial.  Or more accurately, it is very specific: they die because they are at Death's Door.  Terminal diseases, suicide, etc. while they may be how the death happens, they are not the cause of death.  One way of looking at it would be to say they don't die because something kills them - they die because they are fated to die.

Strictures: These are, like boundaries, limits on the possibilities in the game.  
You can, if you like, consider the strictures as my strongly suggested boundaries.  You can play without them, but you won't be playing Death's Door.  These three concepts are very fundamental to how this game was designed – the second stricture is quite literally the first thing that got written down about it.
No answers.  There is no "cure" for Death's Door.  What is Death's Door?  There is no text, religious or medical, that holds the key to the mystery.  How does the protagonist know they are at the Door?  I don't know.  How do they get rid of it?  They can't.  Why is it called Death's Door everywhere it is acknowledged at all?  I don't know that, either.  In Death's Door, as in life, there are no answers.  This doesn't invalidate the quest for those answers – hell, this game is exactly that, for me – but it's important that, at the end of that third session, when the protagonist walks through Death's Door, we don't see what's across the threshold.  Not so much as a light show to suggest Good Place/Bad Place.  The door closes.  The protagonist is dead.  Move on.
You are the carrier.  The vector for Death's Door is the player.  The next victim of DD is the next protagonist created.  There is no "in game" logic to it at all.  If the protagonists were people, it would probably seem very unfair.  The protagonists we choose to play are the vehicles we use to approach Death's Door.  
No Death.  Death is not personified.  This is not "Meet Joe Black: the game".  There is a certain comfort in personifying death, whether it is the pretty, slightly whimsical Death of Neil Gaimen's The Endless or the cold imagery of Charon on the river Styx, it is, at least, something.  Someone.  I don't want you to have that comfort, however slight.  Death's Door is, obviously, focused on death – but not Death as a concept, death as a fact of life.  You live, you die.  This is, in a way, a very specific case of No Answer, but narrowly enough focused that it's worth emphasizing.  Personifying death can be a dodge, a way to avoid dealing with death, and just dealing with the symbology of death.

James