# Wretchedverse *Created:* 2026-11-05, *Modified:* 2026-11-05 ![[Wretched RPG (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Wretched Bastards (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Wretched Darkness (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Wretched MEN (cover).jpg|200]] ![[RED (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Orbital Decay (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Final Frontier (cover).jpg|200]] ## Setting The Wretchedverse is not one world. It is a single bad-tempered cosmology wearing a dozen exploitation genres, and the games that share it are meant to be played together: a nineteenth-century Parisian occultist, a swordsman on the continent of Kharabas and a survey crew on the rim of settled space are all in the same universe, at different points on its timeline. [[Wretched RPG]] is the engine; the rest are doors into the same house. One branch sits deliberately outside that continuity: **RED** adapts the Wretched mechanics into a generic system with no fixed world and no required anti-hero, and the MicroRed games are built on that offshoot while keeping their ties back to the Wretched settings. The premise is anti-heroes, in every sense — characters who are morally ambiguous or outright criminal, who may still save the day, and who are expected to do so for reasons that would embarrass a paladin. The OSR label belongs to the rules they run on, not to any mercy in the setting. The line's own word for the tone is **spaghettipunk**: spaghetti westerns, Giallo, Eurocrime, Conan, Star Wars rip-offs and 1980s post-apocalypse movies, made with enthusiasm and no interest in historical accuracy. The book says the goal is "not to make history, but rather to create enjoyable and entertaining role-playing experiences", which is as good a mission statement as the line has. The line is not a comedy, but it is never solemn either: most of it is played straight and sleazy, and the jokes that do land sit at the edges — an editor's aside, a naming gag, a vignette that goes further than it had to. [[Wretched MEN]] is the exception that proves it: a comedy from its first page, gleefully crude, and committed to the bit harder than anything else the Red Room has published. The connective tissue is explicit in the core book: all magic and every haunting come out of the Beyond, a dark dimension the settings treat as real and dangerous, which is what lets a character walk from one book to another without a conversion. Practically, the shared world means factions and monsters cross over. The Knights of Cydonnia, BurroughsTech, the Araknyd Brotherhood, the Daughters of Ksenia and the Warden Foundation turn up in more than one book, the Foes of the Wretchedverse chapter exists to drag one setting's bestiary into another, and Wretched Darkness explicitly tells you to bolt it onto **Wretched Époque**, **Wretched New Flesh** or **Wretched Space** for a different century. ## Mechanics ### The Wretched engine The standard engine is consistent across the setting books: seven attributes (Muscle, Brains, Wits, Agility, Toughness, Magnetism, Sex-appeal) on a 3–18 spread, skills rated 1 to 5, and a task roll of 1d20 + skill level + one attribute modifier against a target number of 10 (simple) to 30 (impossible). Characters take a Sin, a Virtue, or both instead of an alignment, and occupations and archetypes supply the skills and perks. Combat runs on a Defence of 10 plus Agility, two actions in a five-second round, and armour that replaces the base rather than adding to it. Two variants break that pattern deliberately. **Wretched MEN** folds the attributes to three — Brains, Brawn, Balls — and leans on opposed rolls instead of the skill ladder. The MicroRed games use six attributes and no occupations or levels at all. ### MicroRed, the stripped variant The line has a second, leaner engine. **MicroRed** drops occupations and levels: characters are archetypes with skills and experience points spent directly on improvement, combat is simpler and deadlier, and the attribute list is cut to six. It was built for RED and now carries Orbital Decay and Final Frontier as well, so it is its own half of the family rather than a house rule. Its characters take the Path of Sin and Virtue — a score sliding between −30 and +30 — rather than a Sin and a Virtue, and RED shows the engine's other temperament: it prints statted monsters where the Wretched core hands you a table for building them. ### What you need to play There is no box, and the buying order depends on which half you are in. The core (or the expanded core) is the engine, and the Wretched settings are books of rules *changes* that expect it — Bastards says so outright and tells you to bring the core or another OSR game, and Darkness and MEN are written the same way, adding fear, magic, forensics or a whole parody ruleset on top. The MicroRed side is standalone: RED, Orbital Decay and Final Frontier each carry enough rules to play without the core, which is why the publisher points readers at the free RED download alongside them. Beyond that, nothing needs buying in any particular order. ## The games - [[Wretched RPG]] (2023; expanded core 2024) — the engine and the anti-hero toolkit, with no setting of its own: seven attributes, occupations, rituals out of the Beyond, and a monster-building kit rather than a bestiary. - [[Wretched Bastards]] (2023; updated 2025) — low-magic, sleazy swords-and-sorcery in Antillia, with a full starter campaign in Andril County and seven pregenerated Bastards. - [[Wretched Darkness]] (2023; updated 2024) — modern and cross-era horror: the Beyond explained at length, Hammettville, the line's fullest fear rules, and a case file of real psychic and paranormal programmes. - [[Wretched MEN]] — the line's comedy, and the one that commits hardest to the bit: three attributes (Brains, Brawn, Balls), a tribe system that ranks the caricatures from worst to best, and the Wretched Pool that pays you for behaving badly. - **[[RED]]** (2024; revised 2025) — the streamlined MicroRed system, genre-agnostic and by the publisher's own account outside this continuity: the offshoot the MicroRed games are built on, with a statted bestiary. - [[Orbital Decay]] (2025) — hard science fiction in the solar system's dying stations and colonies: the corporate century that built them, and an ordinary day aboard. - [[Final Frontier]] (2025; revised 2026) — space opera on the rim, built on the **Wretched Space** setting: the 39th-century map, ten species as packages, and the jobs that pay for the fuel. Settings without a page here yet: **Wretched Country** (spaghetti western), **Wretched Époque** (nineteenth-century Parisian horror), **Wretchploitation** (1960s–90s exploitation cinema), **Wretched New Flesh** (future noir in a dystopian Moroccan city), **Wretched Space** (sleazy space opera) and **Wretched Apocalypse** (post-apocalyptic fiction). ## References - [The Red Room — core books catalogue](https://moordereht.com/catalog-core-books/) - [The Wretched line at Precis Intermedia](https://www.pigames.net/store/default.php?cPath=172) - [The Red Room — publisher site and store](https://moordereht.com/) - [The Red Room on itch.io](https://moordereht.itch.io/)