Wretched Bastards is a low-magic, dark fantasy role-playing game. Besides being deadly and bleak, it is meant to be sleazy. The main characters aren’t heroes at all; they are greedy, violent, lecherous, cruel, untrustworthy scoundrels. They will lie, backstab, betray, double-cross, kill and pillage through this grim fantasy world. They aren’t heroes, because there are no heroes in the kingdom of Riget, only a handful in the Kharabas continent, and not a whole lot more in the world of Antillia. In Wretched Bastards low-budget European sword and sorcery movies meet spaghetti western! Even though this core book doesn’t include a full setting, the updated version has some content from The Seven Bastards, which serves a starting point for the world of Antillia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSdLsBn-qAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35Hro6ExDM&t=290s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7z_sdbaX4A&t=8s
Hayde –
Most of my active interest in TTRPG these days is on the educational angle for juvenile participants. This product is on the opposite corner of the universe from that. This OSR system core is the sordid pulp fiction book cover that skillfully persuades you to pick it up in public and peruse it in broad daylight, hinting at some literary nuance while wordlessly promising satisfying proportions of gutter smut. You’ll feel the inspirational wind at your back ready to sign on for the more-pondered-than-explored “evil-character-party adventure, down to XP mechanics for what sort of viciousness will score you the bonus XP. Like a book cover should, this $4.50 short-and-sweet (60p) entices you into the authors’ adventure series enabling our Jungian shadows a little oxygen. But more than just a commercial poster, it’s a work of art worth its own cost:
Marvel at the offense of puritanical sensibilities classical and contemporary: perverted religious theology as well as shameless bioessential differential in demi-humans & bluntly explicating the most visceral and unwoke origin of half-orcs.
I prefer those magic systems incurring risks for using magic, but this was the first time I felt myself looking forward to rolling badly just for the sake of contributing to a grisly story. The spell list for such a costly and risky artistry is punishingly small compared to the libraries of your childhood D&D.
Get your OSR grognard on with morale and henchman tables, and still enjoy fresh new facets of the old TSR mythos, (e.g. “Cockatrice: According to orcs, it tastes like chicken.”)
While the authors feign disuse of alignment, make no mistake: this game system is devoted to the exploration of D&D’s most pernicious knot–the articulation of good and evil is pushed front and center into the narrative by system design, albeit through the sewers rather than main street. Your depraved PC is almost sure to die after all. That’s all the solace pearl clutchers and snowflakes are afforded here…