Wretchedverse

This article related to Dungeons & Dragons is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

The Wretchedverse is the fan-given nickname for a roleplaying game turned multiverse created by OSR publisher "The Red Room". Whilst it has grown into a multi-genre-spanning system and setting, its fundamental roots are in a mixture of Low Fantasy and Dark Fantasy.

See, the Wretchedverse is basically what you'd get if an OSR geek read the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition version of the Book of Vile Darkness, saw the section on playing antiheroes and nonheroes, and went "y'know, there's an untapped niche here!" before going on to publish a setting.

That's the basic deal with the Wretchedverse; you're not playing some bright and shiny hero, you're playing jerks, assholes, scum, lower-e evil villains, perverts, weirdos, the demented and depraved who faced off against things far darker and nastier than yourselves in hopes of somehow profiting or just because the alternative is a horrible, horrible certain death. Sleaze is as central to the overarching setting as lethality and bleakness; think of this as a grimdark take on sleazy 50s-80s movies and you've got the basic gist of things!

In addition to the titles below, the Wretchedverse does a netzine series called "Deviants & Dirty Deeds", which contains various for the different continuities.

The defining attributes of the "Wretched System", as it's called, compared to other Dungeons & Dragons retroclones, are that levels are capped at 14th or lower and that instead of Alignment, you pick which of the Seven Deadly Sins (Avarice, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Sloth, Wrath) is your defining failing - in Wretched, you're pretty much Evil by default!

Wretched Apocalypse

In case it's not obvious from the title, this is the branch of the Wretchedverse covering Post-Apocalyptic gaming.

Wretched Bastards

This is where it all began, with the Low Fantasy grimdark OSR retroclone. As such, it probably has the most expansions for it.

In terms of premade adventures, there are:

• The Seven Bastards: The OG adventure the rest of the setting was built from, a band of seven(ish) adventurers are hired to defend a village from an orcish invasion, despite the fact they were canonically kicked out of said village following the last orcish invasion.
• The Sound of Madness: The official prequel to The Seven Bastards.
• Labia - The Strange Case of the Cursed Vagina: A king hires several expendable adventurers to kill his sister for cursing his daughter's genitals to become a flesh-eating octopus-like monster. The fact that this exists should say everything that needs to be said about the Wretchedverse's themes!
• Daughters of Darkness: When a lamia (in this setting, a female-exclusive strain of vampire) infiltrates a Temple of Ksenia (then lesbian nunsploitation movies) and secretly poisons the neighboring valley, the party are hired to find the source of the corruption.
• The Goat Lady: Donna Lydia Alvarez, Lady of the Biscaya Mountains, hires adventurers to protect her realm of Baetica from intruders and peasant uprisings. Of course, things aren't that simple...

There are also some setting expansions:

• Scurvy: A pirate splatbook.
• Furry Bastards: Adds the Dhogor, a collection of seven beastfolk races (bears, cats, dogs, pigs, goats, amphibians and apes) as playable races.

Wretched Country

A Western branch for the setting, which is only appropriate since Italian "Spaghetti Westerns", with their gritty themes and antihero protagonists, were some of the inspiration for Wretched Bastards.

The titular corebook even contains a description of the Spaghetti Western subgenre of Western films, and some support for Weird Western, mostly in the form of setting-specific spells and a sample adventure in which the players are actors on the set of a Spaghetti Western film that are being sucked into a world where the film's story is reality.

This setting has one other publication so far; Coldheart Canyon, a Weird Western in which the players arrive in a small, forsaken town only to discover that the local miners have unearthed the bodysnatching ghosts of ancient, cannibalistic alien warriors, who have taken over the town.

Wretched Darkness

This is the Urban Fantasy branch of the Wretchedverse, and specifically a play on the legendary World of Darkness. This setting, which currently only contains a corebook, lets the player play a mutant "Child of the Night", a Deva, an Incubus/Succubus, a Loup-Garou or a Wampyr.

Wretched Epoque

The Wretchedverse does Historical Fantasy with this setting, based out of the Belle Epoque - that 43 year period between 1871 and 1914 prior to World War 1. This was a time dominated in the real world by governmental turmoil both overt and covert, and rapid technological advancement, so the game concerns itself mad scientists, secret societies, conspiracies, otherworldly things and horror. This is the time period between Steampunk and Dieselpunk, filtered through the Wretchedverse's trademark cynicism and bleakness.

Confused? Well, yeah, the Belle Epoque is a bit obscure outside of Europe these days, but this is the era of a lot of early science fiction, horror, crime and pulp novels - Edgar Allen Poe's works, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, H.G.Wells, H.P.Lovecraft, Frankenstein, Arsene Lupin, these are just a tiny fraction of the novels written here.

Luckily, the corebook thoroughly breaks down what the deal is with the Belle Epoque, as well as notable figures and events from it.

Aside from the corebook, the Wretched Epoque contains these splatbooks:

• In The Mouth of Hell:' An adventure in which Aleister Crowley unwittingly releases a powerful chaos demon in Portugal.
• (In)Sanitorium: An adventure in which a newly constructed sanatorium & spa resort inadvertently becomes overwrun by Lovecraftian horrors.

Wretched New Flesh

The "science fiction" branch of the Wretchedverse, specifically devoted to crossing cyberpunk, body horror, biopunk and noir, especially tech-noir/future-noir.

Wretched Space

The Wretchedverse take on the Space Opera.

Wretchsploitation

The D20 Modern to Wretched Bastards' Dungeons & Dragons, Wretchsploitation is the "real world" spinoff to the Wretchedverse, specifically focusing on stealing plots as much as possible from Xsploitation films. Alongside Wretched Bastards, this is the most fleshed out branch of the Wretchedverse.