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I would suggest swapping that order around: roll the die, then choose a miracle. It's subtle, but the die result should inform what you do, as opposed to the other way around.

You're correct, rules as written, the Population reaching 0 should always be a voluntary event here. But I do have a suggestion: when you roll anything that says "Sacrifice" (so like a 2-12) that's a bad thing happening, right? So that's where you can create the fall in population, or various other negative outcomes. Sacrifice means something bad has to happen, and there's only a certain amount of systems to interact with in the game (Population, Heroes, Floor, Landmarks, and Testaments). I usually defaulted to decreasing population on a Sacrifice because it's an easy consequence, and the kinda only way to actually fail with population. The reason that's not in the rules is because you could just fail turn one and lose. I wanted you to be able to build a bit of a buffer before the failures really start to pile on late. 

As for the boring part, sure lol! Design philosophy wise, I always like the definition of a game from Bernard Suits: "a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." So like, everything in this game is entirely unnecessary to interact with outside of the Floor eventually reaching 20 from rolling failures :) That's really the only part of this that's a game, otherwise I'd say it's a 90/10 split on story-making to game, and that's not for everyone! I appreciate the feedback!

Oh yeah for sure lemme clarify! You're going to roll a die before every miracle you perform. 1 "Round" of the game is the loop of "Roll the die, choose a miracle, perform the dice effects or text on the miracle to advance fiction, then move onto the next roll." Every miracle you perform should have a die roll associated with it. 

In terms of The Map, there's a far more popular and better designed game called "The Quiet Year" that was the inspiration for this game. Effectively, you use a deck of playing cards instead of a die and prompts for each card to interact with the map. Honestly, you might try playing that before this to get an idea of what the Map is supposed to be doing? They have this quote on their webpage: "part roleplaying game, part cartographic poetry." Cartographic Poetry is such a difficult concept to get across, but how I personally use it is to come up with a backstory for a world I want to play fiction in? Basically using a game to create a world for another potential game (or just the meditative activity of worldbuilding with rules for randomness). 

Anyways, all that is to say that you're super justified in your confusion! Hopefully that sort of helps?

Thanks for the feedback! Great question!

I had that same kind of thought when I added the part about "killing a hero" in there. In my game that inspired it, I had killed a Hero to end a War, which played out as kind of a trolley problem in the fiction. Ultimately killing one person ended a strife between factions that was plaguing my population and drove it up. 

Here's what I think I'd say on that: If you're playing through, and you don't think it feels right, go ahead and change it! It might change how the potential miracles balance the game, and you might need to add another potential miracle to re-balance, but that's also why that rule exists.

Do you like games? Do you like FREE things?

https://vitotamito.itch.io/goddie

This is a 1-Page Journaling Game that you can play by yourself or with other people. All you need is a 20-sided die, a pencil, and a piece of paper. Because I'm an obsessive person, I also included some extra little printable sheets that you can use to keep track of things and reference. In the game, you take on the role of a God, create a world, make up a mythology, and then have people lose faith in you until you fade from the world. Real meditative stuff

Here's a (soon to be released) review by one of my Playtesters:
https://merrileebufkin.substack.com/p/god-die-creating-the-artifact?r=f7j1i&utm_...

Enjoy!