Description
Gameplay Mechanics:
- OSR Compatibility: Easily adaptable using the rules of Wretched or other OSR games, combining old-school mechanics with a modern horror twist.
- Attributes and Skills: Characters are defined by core statistics (Strength, Intelligence, Wits, Agility, Toughness, Charisma) and a set of skills.
- Character Creation: Roll for attributes, select skills, and choose perks and drawbacks to create a balanced and compelling character.
- Archetypes: Define your character’s role and capabilities with unique feats. Archetypes include Archaeologist, Conspiracy Theorist, Cult Leader, Cybermancer, Demon Hunter, and many more.
- Fear Mechanics: Accumulate Fear Points from traumatic events, influencing character behavior and decision-making.
- Simplified Combat: Deadly combat system to enhance tension and stakes in every encounter.
- Ritual Magic: Designed to enhance the horror atmosphere, with rules for magic corruption.
Major Themes:
- Faith and Rationality: The game explores the tension between faith and rationality, questioning humanity’s reliance on science and reason in the absence of divine guidance.
- Human Condition: Darker delves into the resilience of the human spirit when exposed to overwhelming darkness and the existential challenges posed by a world in moral decay.
- Infernal Influence: Demonic entities manifest with increasing frequency, bringing terror and cruelty. The weakening of divine influence allows these hellish forces to corrupt societal institutions and individuals.
- Rise of Evil: As faith waned, malevolent entities that once lurked in the shadows of ancient civilizations found their way back, corrupting modern society.
- Corruption and Decay: The influence of these entities has grown pervasive, manifesting through wars, economic upheavals, and technological advancements. Humanity’s moral and spiritual erosion has created fertile ground for these forces.
- Twisted Progress: A religion of “Progress” has emerged, with rationalists and atheists turning to ancient pagan beliefs and dark practices, furthering the chaos and depravity.
- Silence of the Divine: The game world is characterized by the absence of divine intervention, reinforcing the isolation and despair faced by the characters.
- Struggle Against the Abyss: Characters must face a cosmos devoid of solace, confronting eldritch horrors and preternatural mysteries alone. Their actions are acts of defiance against overwhelming evil.
- Cults and Organizations: The game features various cults and organizations, each with its own dark agenda, influenced by infernal entities.
G Crees –
After enjoying Wretched: Darkness and all its excellent sourcebooks, I was really looking forward to Darker. Sadly, it was a real letdown. What you get is a slightly stripped-down version of Wretched’s OSR rule set, which, when used at the table, doesn’t add anything to gameplay and feels more like a GM’s homebrew rules. The setting is a recycled version of Wretched: Darkness and a poor reworking of the excellent 90s Kult RPG.
Finally, Red Room’s usual clean, easy-on-the-eye layout is gone. Instead, every page has a cityscape vignette background that makes the text really hard to read. Whoever thought this looked “pretty” surely never tried to read the finished product.
If you don’t own Wretched: Darkness, buy it instead of Darker. If you do own Wretched: Darkness, invest in one of its excellent sourcebooks instead—I suggest starting with Welcome to St. Cloud.
Miguel Ribeiro –
Though I’ve already contacted you by email, I’ll leave a reply here so other customers know that the issue has been addressed: We’ve added created an extra file for Darker without the cityscape background, which should make it as easy to read as any of our other books.
Mark Brooks (verified owner) –
An excellent game with a reworked and simplified version of the Wretched system. The Red rules that are the basis for Darker are closer to B/X in flavor and will adapt well to all manner of OSR scenarios. This is a grim game well-suited for contemporary horror, as the default setting is drawn directly from today’s headlines. The base setting takes The Silence of God for its foundation, and explores the consequences of nihilism when no Overman appears. Highly recommended. If you want a preview of the rules system, check out Red.