# Blood Red Sands tags: #game/rpg/blood-red-sands ![[Blood Red Sands (cover).jpg|600]] A small-press, out-of-print curio that's easy to mistake for a Two Hour Wargames title — and isn't one. **Blood Red Sands** is Ralph Mazza's deliberately overheated dark-sorcery RPG from Ramshead Publishing, "a competitive, in your face, testosterone fueled role playing experience in a brutal, over the top, heavy metal world." It shares the blood-and-sand bloodsport imagery with the THW gladiator game, but shares nothing else. ## Setting The world of **Abalahn** is not doing well. It's a savage land of dark sorcery where the five **Witch Kings slew the very gods** and have reigned for a thousand years. Everything downstream is brutal and over the top in exactly the heavy-metal register the subtitle promises — this is a game that wants to be loud, grim, and a little silly about how grim it is. ## Mechanics The structure is built around **heroes and factions** rather than a party romping together. Play runs as **Ordeals** — a scenario for a single hero, roughly four to six hours — each Ordeal broken into **Chapters** divided by **Clashes**, and strung into a **Cycle** of Ordeals. A **Hero Player** runs the hero (starting with **Edge**); **Faction Players** run the opposition (starting at 0-3 Edge); and a **Chronicler** keeps the world consistent. The twist is the **Right of Challenge**, a competitive edge that lets players push back on events and appeal to the crowd, plus a **dice-horde** economy where dice pile up in each player's bowl across a session. The book's own pitch for it — "competitive, in your face, testosterone fueled" — is the honest description of how the challenge-and-edge loop actually plays. ## Editions - **Blood Red Sands** (Beta v3.0, 2009) — a Ramshead Publishing draft, out of print. *In the library.* - **Blood Red Sands** is a standalone game by **Ralph Mazza**, unrelated to the Two Hour Wargames line despite the "red/white sand" naming. ## References Out of print; no current store page. The library copy is the Beta v3.0 PDF.