# Wretched Darkness *Created:* 2026-11-05, *Modified:* 2026-11-05 ![[Wretched Darkness (cover).jpg|600]] ## Setting **Wretched Darkness** is the line's horror book, and by default it is set now: modern cities where the supernatural is real, the police are out of their depth and the factions have been at this longer than the player characters have been alive. Five of them get named in the introduction — the Knights of Cydonnia, BurroughsTech, the Araknyd Brotherhood, the Daughters of Ksenia and the Warden Foundation — and the book expects them to be the rope the characters hang themselves with. Behind all of it is **the Beyond**: a malevolent realm beyond the veil of our reality, home to things the book compares to the Great Old Ones, which break through when they can and are invited through by mortals who want what they are selling. Every supernatural event in the setting traces back to it, and the player characters get the choice the line keeps offering — stand against it, or make a pact and profit. The Beyond is also what makes the cross-era promise work: it is the same realm in the nineteenth century, the present and the far future. It is built to move between eras. The timeline chapter runs from an occult present to the far future, and the introduction says explicitly to bolt it onto **Wretched Époque** or **Wretched Country** for the nineteenth century, **Wretched New Flesh** for near-future surrealism, or **Wretched Space** for the void. The sandbox itself is Hammettville, a city with its own generator, and the book closes with the Paymon Tator scenario and a Tarot-encounter appendix. Hammettville earns the space: a downtown given over to degeneracy, a subway that has become a netherworld, police as one more predator, a mayor on the take and a council at war with itself, and the people living at the fringes preyed on by the Children of the Night, the Wampyr, the Loup-Garou and whatever comes through from the Beyond. The influences are declared and they are the right ones: Clive Barker, Cronenberg, Lynch, Carpenter, Romero, Craven, Argento, Hooper, Fulci and Bava, with Burroughs, Bukowski, Gibson and Leonard Cohen in the margins. The GM chapter takes that seriously and gives advice by subgenre — Giallo, gore, supernatural, psychological, apocalyptic, surreal and sci-fi horror — rather than one generic horror register. ## Mechanics ### Rules changes on the core Like its stablemates, **Wretched Darkness** is a book of changes to [[Wretched RPG]] rather than a fresh engine: Styles of Play, then Rules Changes, then the material that actually earns the book its place. Factions and origins hook characters into the setting's power structures, and the Foes of the Wretchedverse chapter pulls the monsters of the other settings into the same bestiary. ### Fear Points and the panic threshold The expanded fear rules are the heart of it. Characters accumulate Fear Points when they meet trauma, the supernatural, or a critically failed Wits check under stress. A character's Panic Threshold is half their Wits, rounded up. Once Fear Points are past it, the player rolls 1d20 + Wits modifier + circumstantial modifiers − current Fear Points and reads the result on the Panic Table, where a total of 1 or less means insanity rather than a fright. The optional rules on top let terror work for the character as well as against them: an Adrenaline Surge gives +1 to physical actions for every two points over the threshold, to a maximum of +3, and heightened senses follow a similar curve. ### Forensic science, magic and the dead The forensic sciences chapter is a working investigation subsystem — evidence, tests and a Forensics skill check against a Target Number set by the mess at the scene — and it sits beside a full magic chapter, a zombie-apocalypse chapter, the paranormal and the factions. This is a big book, and most of it is usable at the table without preparation. Magic is the core's chapter printed again rather than revised, which is its own statement: the Beyond works the same in a modern city as it does anywhere else in the line. ### Real cases and the paranormal The paranormal chapter is the book's most distinctive move. Instead of inventing a mythology, it walks the documented record — ghosts and hauntings (the Winchester House, the LaLaurie Mansion), psychic research (the Stargate Project, the First Earth Battalion, *The Men Who Stare at Goats*), UFO sightings such as the Phoenix Lights, cryptozoology — and then tells you where the statistics live: poltergeists and cryptids in Adversaries, the rest in the core. The factions chapter does the same with real programmes and real agencies. It makes the game feel researched, and it hands a GM a shelf of true stories to steal. ### The cast and the monsters The adversaries chapter is a real bestiary rather than a generator: Apostles of Pain at Defence 18 with seven Health Dice, whose powers cost activations out of those dice; demons that cannot remain in our world without a host and possess anyone who fails a Wits avoidance roll; and the rest of the Beyond's fauna, all of it statted. The major characters make the setting's power personal — Brenner König, the precognitive High-Priest of the Followers of Tedric; Hafez Saqib of the Araknyd Brotherhood, who walks into dreams and advises heads of state; Henri Vaugrenard, a scholar of 1852 who fell out of his study into somewhere considerably worse. Each is written as someone to meet rather than something to fight. ### GMing on the fly The last chapter before the scenario is a refusal to let a session die for want of prep: story seeds and tables for when the players arrive and nothing is ready, opening with a location generator whose worked example is a man with a dead car, a light in the window and an asylum that should not be open. Together with the city generator and the scenario, it makes the book playable cold. ## Editions - **Wretched Darkness (2nd Ed)** (486 pp, 2023) — the second edition, with Sílvia Clemente, Joe Coombs and Raven Wulfgar as additional writers. *In the library.* - **Wretched Darkness (2nd Ed, updated)** (526 pp, 2024) — the current build, forty pages longer, with the interior art reworked. *In the library.* ## References - [Wretched Darkness at The Red Room](https://moordereht.com/product/wretched-darkness-2/) - [The Red Room's store and blog](https://moordereht.com/) - [The Red Room on itch.io](https://moordereht.itch.io/)