# Wretched MEN *Created:* 2026-11-05, *Modified:* 2026-11-05 ![[Wretched MEN (cover).jpg|600]] ## Setting **Wretched MEN** is full-bore, balls-out satire, and it commits to the bit. Hatia is a sword-and-sorcery world played with a straight face — a history and a politics, the North Wall, Boomistan, Oxvardrige, the Western and Eastern Ridges, the Northern Plains — populated by whatever the author found funniest to draw: Boomistani who explode when struck, Butt Pirates, Crabs, Dickwolves, Feminazi, Noballasi, Medusa, the Women Collectives, the Woman Catapult and the Woman Giant, trolls, dragons and the undead, with a chapter of humans to fight and a set of GM tips. The world itself is a reveal the book saves for the GM: Hatia is a gigantic woman tumbling through space, one realm of the Beyond, with the sun parked between her legs. That single fact explains the geography — the chest and belly have heavenly climates while the far parts are too hot or too cold, and travelling north to south is "following the sun" — and it explains the population. The natives decided Earth was living wrongly and set out to conquer it, discovered on the eve of the invasion that they understood nothing about human beings, kidnapped a boatload to study on Hatia, and lost the laboratory when the men broke out. The Real Men have lived free in the wilderness ever since. The book's advice is to keep all of this to yourself and let the players work it out from the landscape. Every region follows a template rather than a description: a juvenile alternative name, a biome, the natives, the tribes, the landmarks, the celebrities, and a 1d6 encounter table. The North Wall is *The Cock Block* — tundra, Medusas, Russians and Vikings, Lake Pearl — with six encounters running from Viking raiders to a stranger watching the party from cover. Real men adventure to sustain an erection that is the literal source of their power; their enemies are whoever the author finds funniest to kill; and the introduction is a wall of abuse that tells the reader, at length and in the second person, to stop reading and start pounding. Nothing is softened and nothing is explained, which is exactly why it works. The politics are four powers and one road. The Butt Pirate fleet and the Feminazi Oxvardrige wompublic are the real masters of the world, allied on the logic that both want to remake everyone and neither wants to sleep with the other; they spread the ideology with brainwashed agents and wells poisoned with boner-killers, and trade along the White Road. The Boomistani theocracy spreads its own creed by terror and general unpleasantness, held back mostly by nobody — including the Boomistani — being sure what the creed is. The Real Men raid the White Road because raiding is fun. Every one of these factions wants to convert the cosmos; the player characters just want to fuck some shit up. Below the politics sits the population, and this is where the book is most itself. The denizens are statted as monsters — Boomistani split into sacks, towel heads and religious scientists, each with its own paragraph of contempt — and the human tribes of the Real Men are the same treatment applied to the players: pick a race, take its caricature, gain a bonus in what the caricature is supposed to be good at and a penalty in what it isn't, in an order the book ranks from worst to best. The Women chapter does it to the other half of Hatia, listing them as trade goods with uses — boner relief, messenger — and observing that a message can be written on a woman and she will carry it. The editor's interjections ("Look up list of racial slurs in the Wikipedia") are part of the furniture. ## Mechanics ### Brains, Brawn and Balls The first version of **Wretched MEN** ran on BBB — Brains, Brawns and Balls — and this one keeps the three attributes while moving onto the Wretched engine. You roll six dice and keep the best three, one each for Brains (cunning, trivia, charm), Brawn (strength, health, speed) and Balls (daring, will, personality). The core's longer attribute list is folded in: Muscle, Agility and Toughness all read as Brawn, Wits and Magnetism as Balls, with a short mapping table for when the rules ask for one of the ditched scores. **Wretched MEN** also leans on opposed attribute rolls far more heavily than the book it adapts, and says so. ### Hate, Horniness and Hunger Where the core has Sins and Virtues, this book ranks three appetites: Hate (aggression and resilience), Horniness and Hunger. Ranking one first gives it a +3 Boon and a −3 Bane, second +2/−2, third +1/−1, and the GM is invited to apply them whenever an appetite is in play. Each appetite carries its own named Boon and Bane — Hate's Ferocious Might against its Blind Rage, and so on. ### Boners and Clusterfucks Perks are Boners and Drawbacks are Clusterfucks, at the usual exchange rate: every Boner past the free basic one costs a Clusterfuck, and a powerful one may cost more than one. Each Boner is written to the same three lines — a requirement, a trigger the book calls the *turn-on*, and an effect — and the list is where the book stops pretending: Addictive, Animal, Angry, Asphyxiation and Auto-Asphyxiation are among the early entries. It is also the power ladder, since a Boner commonly grants +2 or +3 to a whole category of roll. The optional rules chapter is where the book's tinkering lives — a Wretched Pool, Rage Rush, wild dice and exploding dice, a Crackshot rule and Dick Moves — with disease, poisons and a units-of-measurement aside for the rest. ### The Wretched Pool The optional rules are the book's best idea, and the one worth stealing for a straighter game. Anti-heroic behaviour earns points — dirty tricks in a fight 1 to 3, cheating at dice 1 or 2, backstabbing a trusted ally 4, leaving a comrade behind 3 — and each point buys +1 on any roll, spent now or banked for the next session. It is a reward system that pays the players for behaving badly, which is the design thesis stated as a mechanic. ### Gear Short and blunt. Weapons are grouped rather than catalogued, on the grounds that nobody needs the difference between a sabre, a scimitar, a gladius and a zweihänder — "It is just 'sword'" — with a Heft rating that eats initiative, plain damage, and a Special column whose first entry is "Your mama!". Past weapons and armour the chapter turns to capture gear with its own rules, which tells you what the rest of the book does with women. ### Adventures The GM chapter, *Tips*, opens by quoting Harlan Ellison and attributing it to "AM … misspelling GM for some reason", then states the design thesis: adventures in Hatia deal with food, sex and violence, and everything else is for sissies. A scenario, in other words, is someone or something keeping you from fucking, eating or killing — and the advice is to start small, with a peasant and his pie, and escalate until there is a famine in the land. ## Editions - **MEN** (BBB) — the first version, on the three-attribute Brains/Brawns/Balls system rather than the Wretched engine, and still on sale. - **Wretched MEN** (128 pp) — the version converted to the [[Wretched RPG]] engine. *In the library.* ## References - [Wretched MEN at The Red Room](https://moordereht.com/product/wretched-men/) - [The Red Room's store and blog](https://moordereht.com/) - [The Red Room on itch.io](https://moordereht.itch.io/)