Welcome to Blood Red Dreaming

What is Blood Red Dreaming

This is the game that the Moral Guardians warned you about: that evil devil bargaining, magick using, demon invoking vile brainsucking game that convinces you that the walls between reality and fantasy are thinner than you think. When Patricia Pulling founded Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons, it is this game that she was envisioning. A game that tells players that they can step into a fantasy world and that the two worlds can affect each other.

...but...

You already do this every day. You live in a fantasy world of your own design, drifting through a harsh and uncaring reality within this bubble of delusion. Every day you trick yourself and deceive yourself and believe your own lies about the nature of reality and the meaning of life. Every one of us lives inside a fantasy. What Patricia Pulling so feared, was that people might choose fantasy worlds of which she did not approve, and over which the dominant hierarchy and mythology held no power. These moral guardians feared that you might tell your own stories, that you might escape the judgement of bronze age storm gods and the moral oppression of nomadic goat herders who hadn't yet invented toilet paper.

So this is a dangerous book. Clearly, a rebellious book now sits in your eager little hands. This book is a game, yes, but so is life. And, in fact, they are the same game.

So how brave to you feel?

How is this Different from other Tabletop RPGs

If you've played other Tabletop RPGs, you'll be familiar with certain conventions of the games: multitudes of dice, character classes, experience points, storytelling by murder killing hosts of allegedly evil monsters. Well, Blood Red Dreaming doesn't do most of that, and what it does do it does very differently.

Gameplay Resolution is done with a deck of cards rather than with dice. A Player's Avatar in the Shadowlands can do whatever the player themselves is physically capable of doing. Anything beyond the capacity of the Player requires the expenditure of cards to accomplish. Attempts at success can be bolstered by points earned through activities in the real world, like a pen and paper Pokemon Go. Character death is not a major set back, with penalties being only that the player cannot participate directly for the remainder of the session. Stories last a single session, like an episode of a TV series. These sessions can and will be strung together to form a myth arc, but each session should be a complete story in itself.

Combat is no different that any other story/action resolution attempt. All conflict in broken down into Scenes and Phases to keep things rolling and prevent sixty seconds of in game combat to taken three four hour gaming sessions. Negotiations, or heists or research in a musty library are all viable grand finales to a session if handled well. Story points have mechanical value in the game's systems, and negative consquences and penalties can be purchased to gain short term advantage now- and players will know when they risk major consequences nearly all the time.

If You've Never Role Played Before

Learning Blood Red Dreaming will actually be easier if you've never played another Tabletop RPG before. All Roleplaying games are basically collective story telling games. Most RPGs forget this for a simple reason. Most RPGs were built from the old miniature war games where old men moved civil war figurines across meticulously created dioramas. All really cool stuff, but if you just want to tell an amazing story then the baggage of this origin story needs to go. So sit back and relax. Think of this as improv, the storyteller is both audience and movie director and also plays all the extras, while the players are the lead actors and sometimes the villains (more often than many players would admit in many games). The rest will become clear in short order, sit back and relax.