# Blood Red Sands *Created:* 2026-10-05, *Modified:* 2026-10-19 ![[Blood Red Sands (cover).jpg|600]] Some games invite you to tell a story together. **Blood Red Sands** invites five people to a table and asks, plainly and without apology, which of them wants it the most. It's the swing to the opposite pole from Ralph Mazza's own **Universalis** — a competitive, GM-less swords-and-sorcery RPG where the cooperation is tactical and the default emotional register is aggressive. The subtitle promises "a competitive, in your face, testosterone fueled role playing experience in a brutal, over the top, heavy metal world," and for once the blurb is describing the mechanics, not just the vibe. It wants you to play to win, it thinks opportunistic alliances and inevitable betrayals are the point, and it has zero patience for wallflowers. ## Setting The world of **Abalahn** is a heavy-metal album cover that someone built a rulebook on. The five **Witch Kings slew the very gods** and have reigned for a thousand years, and everything downstream is dark, savage, and completely over the top. Their foul sorcery runs on human souls; beyond the alabaster towers of the **White Princes**, legions of soulless **Unliving** scrape out half-lives of servitude and torment, while scattered settlements of free people struggle to survive a desolate wasteland beset by foul beasts and devastating **soul storms**. The founding myth explains the register. The Chief Goddess hated the death and entropy baked into her own nature, so she birthed a daughter with naught but the good in her — the Blessed Daughter — and then a twin son who was everything she was not: cruel where she was kind, violent where gentle, and utterly without mercy. It's creation mythology with a built-in thesis: the world is split down the middle and always has been, and the only honest response is to be loud and grim about it. ## Mechanics **Blood Red Sands** is competitive, adversarial, and GM-less. There's no referee and no moderator to hand out spotlight time — all players start equal, and the rules are entirely unforgiving of anyone who won't engage. You win as a mighty hero who survives a string of harsh ordeals and finally topples one of the Witch Kings, or you win *as* the Witch King — the player with the most Victory Points earns the right to play the tyrant and crush the last hero's pathetic attempt to dethrone them. The whole game is structured as a **Saga** of ten **Ordeals**. An Ordeal is a scenario for a single hero, broken into **Chapters** separated by **Clashes** and strung into **Cycles**; one hero is eliminated each Ordeal until only one is left to face a Witch King in the **Final Ordeal**. Roles rotate around the table — a **Hero Player**, several **Faction Players**, and a rotating **Chronicler** who frames scenes — with the faction players working the current hero's opposition while keeping an eye on the wider competition. At the heart of it sits the **Right of Challenge**, literally the first rule in the book. With no central authority, any player can *rise up* — stand, lean over the table, and oppose a description, a mechanic, or a behavior that breaks the fiction or the fun. The challenged player can submit ("as you will"), negotiate, or appeal to the crowd, and the table settles it by standing or sitting: more people standing than sitting wins, ties go to the defender, and the loser says "as you will." It's a ritual of theatrical belligerence, and it's also the game's safety valve — a way to keep an aggressively competitive game from turning into an actual argument. When challenges escalate into genuine conflict they become a **Clash**, and the real engine comes out: a **dice horde**. Characters and other **Components** are literally built out of dice, and a "set" is **1d10 + 1d8 + 1d6 + 1d4** — no d12s or d20s — so a full five-player game wants a hundred dice. Each player keeps a personal **Dice Horde**, with a central **Bone Yard** bank seeded at the start of each Ordeal and bonus sets for the **Most Devastated Player** of the previous Ordeal, the current hero, and (in the Final Ordeal) the Witch King. In a Clash those dice are wagered and fought over tactically on a battle mat, damaged as **Battered** or **Devastated**; a Devastated die is crossed off the sheet for good. **Edge** tokens let you reroll dice — a token placed under a die shares its fate — and can stand in for spending a die. ## Editions - **Blood Red Sands** (Beta v3.0, 2009) — the Ramshead Publishing draft, a text-built playtest of the concept. *In the library.* - **Blood Red Sands** (2013) — the published edition from Galileo Games, the polished, fully-illustrated softcover that the 2012 Kickstarter bankrolled, and the version that finally made the beta's promise land. ## References - [Blood Red Sands — deep read (The Indie Game Reading Club)](https://indiegamereadingclub.com/blood-red-sands/) — Paul Beakley's 2015 look down the "what you need to play" dice-hole, with Ralph Mazza himself replying in the comments. - [Blood Red Sands — anybody know this game? (r/rpg)](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/21pdar/blood_red_sands_anybody_know_of_this_game_and_the/) — a 2014 community thread untangling the mechanics. - [Blood Red Sands — Competitive Swords-and-Sorcery RPG (Kickstarter)](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/galileogames/blood-red-sands-competitive-swords-and-sorcery-rpg) — the 2012 campaign that funded the printed edition. - [Blood Red Sands (POD, Standard Color) (Noble Knight Games)](https://www.nobleknight.com/P/2148048723/Blood-Red-Sands-POD-Standard-Color) — out-of-print listing for the Galileo softcover.