Something very bad happened to you a very long time ago: you died and it fucking hurt.
Your blood is cold, but your skin is colder. Your heart might as well be made of stone. Your memory is like treacle. Sometimes, you even remember to blink.
Being dead sucks, but I know what will make you feel better. Wet your mouth a little, have a drink! It’s time for a party. Let’s…
Paint The Town Red is a sad vampire RPG from SoulMuppet Publishing about depression, partying and falling in love, and explores themes of trauma, vice and loneliness.
Your characters are Vampires, afflicted with the Curse of Undeath. Being dead feels horrid, and the goal of every character is to chase the sensation of feeling alive and escape the rot they feel in their soul.
Paint The Town Red is set in the greatest cities throughout history, where the Dead mass together to form an active nightlife. Sessions of Paint The Town Red feel more like boozy nights out on the town than heroic quests, complete with pre-drinks, loud music, smoking areas and hangovers.
During character creation, your vampire chooses a Passion, something that moves you forward and makes your blood run hot. These often impulsive and hedonistic activities will make you feel good, but they come with complications that will shape your campaign. Each character chooses a Passion during character creation from a wide list of options, but every vampire also must take Drinking Blood as their second Passion. You are a vampire after all.
At SoulMuppet, we've got a proven track record of producing beautiful hardcover RPGs with tight rules, luscious art and design that prioritise both aesthetics and useability. We’ve partnered with Johan Nohr (MÖRK BORG, CY_BORG, Into The Odd) and a stunning array of writers and artists to bring this to another level.
Here Johan has mangled the work of 19thc Czech artist Ludek Marold with splatters and streaks and blood. It looks like one hell of a party.
A vampire is ensnared by their passions, driven by an insatiable, pulse-pounding desire to be alive again. An impulsive, selfish and desperately unhappy creature trying to get their cold heart beating again. Unlike the archetypal gothic horror vampire, Paint The Town Red gives each vampire an obsession or Passion. This could be drinking blood, or it could be something even weirder like sleeping in other people’s graves, weaving tapestries or giving interviews to historians or journalists.
Drinking blood is not a biological or magical impulse for these undead, it’s a social and emotional one. If your blood is like ice and your heart has been broken, there’s nothing like a warm dose of someone else’s blood to trick you into thinking everything is alright. It’s barely even addictive.
Vampires are deeply social creatures, congregating in cities to indulge their passions and stave off the cold embrace of undeath. This often causes problems as old grudges fester like open wounds and new conflicts drive immortals to distraction. Eventually, every vampire is forced to move on, driven from their adopted home by escalating chaos. A few centuries pass, and it’s time to find another town to shower in scarlet.
You can also find several other types of undead, from stinking zombies and skeletons who revel in gluttonous misery, to cold-blooded liches chasing an unachievable obsession. Werewolves are slaves to the cycle of the moon, their misery waxing and waning with the movement of that celestial orb, whereas Ghouls don’t stop at drinking blood and eat their victims whole.
Are they dancing the night away or burning their way to a second death? Only time will tell.
The rules of Paint The Town Red are built on the engines of Orbital Blues and Best Left Buried but expanded to tell emotional stories of undead. In Orbital Blues we did “Sad for XP” now we’re taking it up a notch and doing “Sad for Health”.
In Paint The Town Red characters have two resources: Pulse (how human they feel and by extension how happy they are) and Chaos (how impulsive and dangerous they are, and how the environment around them reacts to that). Both these numbers rise and fall as your characters Paint The Town Red.
Your characters also have various Passions, inadvisable things you do that make you feel alive again, playing cards, drinking wine, sleeping in other peoples graves. For Vampires this also includes drinking blood. Not as a biological necessity but because it reminds you how to feel alive.
Characters have three stats: Savagery, Allure and Duplicity. These vampires are SAD. When you make a Check, roll 2D6 and add the relevant stat. You succeed on a result of 9 or more. Difficulty is measured with advantage and disadvantage numbers, rather than with a shifting target number, and your vampires always have the option to Get The Blood Running, re-rolling dice, at the cost of gaining Chaos.
Creating your own wretched immortal is quick and easy, involving choosing a single Passion and Power of Undeath, assigning your 3 stats and generating a brief backstory. Random tables have been included for all the options in case you want to make a character quickly, including a massive table of 100 different vampires from across history that is also a handy NPC generator.
Want to get a full look at our engine? Check out our Quickstart! It features the full rules of the game, including full character creation, allowing you to create your own vampires from throughout history. PLUS you can also find a full adventure inside, allowing you to play the game immediately at your table.
Queen Maev by J. C. Leyendecker, suitably bloodsplattered by Johan and ready for a long night out on the town.
Any city where the Dead gather is called a Necropolis. Each adventure is filled with 6 Faction and Locations, 6 fashionable Lurks or haunted Hollows and 24 Contacts of various states of undeath for you to meet. Each one aims to create 4-6 zero prep sessions of tightly themed, semi-historically accurate vampiric nightlife.
Six of these adventures are available upon project launch, and we hope to add loads more as we unlock further Stretch Goals.
Come to Rome! See our riches and sample our delights and our pleasures!
The first trilogy is set in the late Classical and early Medieval era, and included in the core book:
Party of the Century: 82 AD in the Eternal City, it’s time for the Ludi Saeculares, a once per century festival of the Dead. Vampires from through the empire and beyond have all shown up for the biggest party in the world. Written by Zachary Cox.
Hair of the Dog: 802 AD in Aachen, the winter after Charlemagne has been crowned as the Emperor of what will become the Holy Roman Empire. Europe has been a shitshow since Rome burned, with no where decent to hang out. The Franks are gonna try change that. Written by Zachary Cox.
Party Crashing in Splendid Ghazni: 1016 AD in Ghazni. Europe is out. That thing in Aachen was a bloody mess. Why not try Persia? Everyone is heading east to the beautiful city of Ghazni. It’s a good year to be a young vampire. Written byBasheer Ghouse.
The next three adventures are set a thousand years later, one can be found in our free quickstart, and the other two in envelope prop kits full of maps and cards.
Floating Underworld: Japan 1857 AD. Maybe the right move was to keep heading East after all. The dead in 1857 Edo know that while everyone is distracted with that war nonsense, they can throw a party large enough to crown their own Empress. Written by Hipólita.
A Modern Babylon: London in 1862 AD. It’s a big city. It’s overcrowded. The rookeries are bursting at the seams. There is more than enough to feed on and nearly enough to make your life work out. What could go wrong at the heart of an empire where the sun never sets? Written by Zachary Cox.
It Never Sleeps: New York 1929. As the Great Depression chokes the last bits of life out of the Roaring 20s, the American dream gives way to an undead nightmare. You came to New York because you heard it was the city that never sleeps. And for a vampire, what could be better? Written by Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis. You can catch this adventure being played on the My First DungeonPodcast, with Brian himself GMing and an all star cast.
These two adventures are presented in envelope adventures kits. The centrepiece of each adventure is a map produced by vampiric cartographer Aloysius King, detailing the lurks, haunts and key locations for each faction. The map itself is printed on a folding sheet of A2, large enough for everyone to see in play. The details of each city and the undead creatures that stalk them are set out in a bifold A4 pamphlet, lavishly illustrated to match Al King’s spectacular work. A set of 18 tarot cards contains more detail on the Contacts you can meet and the Locations and Factions you can visit in each city. All these elements are contained within a tactile C4 manilla envelope.
Want to take a sip before you buy the bottle? We made a quickstart!
The Quickstart for Paint The Town Red features the full rules for the game, including character creation, allowing you to create your own troubled vampires from throughout history.
The 94 page quickstart also features our first adventure: A MODERN BABYLON, set on the streets of Victorian London in 1862. The characters will become embroiled in London’s pulsing nightlife, facing off against a gang of werewolves, undead agents of the British Empire, and the lich who dwells in the Tower of London. None of them will take kindly to your characters spoiling their perfect immortality.
There are a whole spree of vampire goodies that you can grab... We're particularly proud of our two sexy bloodshot die sets by Runefable and our beautiful Undying Edition of the Core Book by Creative Quest!
The Undying Edition is the perfect companion for any budding scion of the night. It’s a handmade luxury binding of the core book created by Creative Quest UK. The corebook has been bound in black leather, with embossing, vampire bat detailing and a central blood red gem. The book edges have also been coated in black, so it blends perfectly into the shadows for maximum Duplicity and Allure.
You can also take your stroll through undead society to the next level with a set of bloodsoaked dice from the talented crew at RuneFable. Each die is lovingly handcrafted by the artisans at RuneFable, comprising a resin body with a gory liquid core that sloshes about as the die rolls. These dice are absolutely spectacular and the perfect way to bring your table to life. You’ll be able to add two different dice sets to your pledge as part of the Backerkit campaign, either a full set of polyhedral dice or a set of four six-sided dice.
We'll be charging shipping at a later date via a pledge manager on Backerkit. You will be able to add new items there, supply address details and alter your pledge, right up until we begin fulfilment.
We have two point fulfilment in the US and UK. Our non-US orders are all fulfilled by our UK warehouse. We will be prepaying EU VAT and Import Duties, and you will be charged the appropriate amount via Backerkit, so there will be no suprise charges.
Our art director Johan Nohr will design us a GM screen you can grab as an add-on to the campaign.
£60k - Bloodred Edgepapers
We’ll upgrade the physical core book with delicious, blood-red edgepapers to stands out on your shelf.
£75k - The Cold War
Vampires already ruled the world before surveillance networks, intelligence bureaus and world superpowers. Once McCarthyism and gulags started, everyone realised it was time to get the fuck out. It turns out the patience of the Dead is a terrifying quality in an intelligence operative.
A new softback physical adventure quartet set in throughout the Cold War waged between occult intelligence services, where you’re caught in the middle. We’re working with Helena Real, Sillion L, Wendi Yu and Laurie O’Connel on this expansion, with Joshua Clark of Orbital Blues fame stepping into artist shoes.
This will be a free digital upgrade for all pledges, with a physical available as an add-on.
£90k - The Mourning After: A Solo Game by Elliot Davis
Stitch together a night of sadness, revery and blood while fighting off a splitting headache.
Elliot is returning from his work on Orbital Blues: The Wanderer, to write a solo game that takes a zoomed-in look at a sad gay vampire’s bad fucking night. With a RED marker or pen in hand, you will literally paint the town red as you recover your disastrous memories of the night before.
This will be a free digital upgrade for all pledges, with a physical available as an add-on.
£100k - Swirling Edgepapers
Your blood red endpapers will be upgraded to a swirling miasma of bloody mess, with marbled printed endpapers.
Want to see how Paint The Town Red can run at your table?
My First Dungeon
We've teamed up again with the wonderful folks over at My First Dungeon to create a whole season of tragic disaster bastards. Join Shenuque Tissera, Drakoniques, Ed Spence, Superdillin and Brian Flaherty as they explore campaign stained memories of 1929 New York City.
My First Dungeon will be releasing episodes of Paint The Town Red throughout the BackerKit campaign and you can get started right now! The first episode is an interview with Zach, talking about their process of creating and running Paint The Town Red.
You came to New York because you heard this was the city that never sleeps, and for a vampire... what could be better?
stellalunaTV
stellalunaTV ran a fantastic one shot introduction into Paint The Town Red. Join the wonderful crew of Stella, Hamnah, Kendo, Quinn and Vyn Vox as they learn the game together and explore the quickstart adventure A MODERN BABYLON.
If you want to run an actual play of Paint The Town Red during our campaign, drop an email to [email protected] and we'll sort you out with promotional assets, share your games on our social media platform and crowdfunding upgrades, and perhaps even share some sneaky adventure or rules previews with you to show off in your games!
Want to read more about the game?
Zach Cox and Lin Codega from Rascal News talk "about vampires, mental health, and how to make characters dying really, really worth it." Read it here.
Dan Arndt from Fandomentals had Zach talking about the "Rat Race Towards Momentary Joy" and what it means to be a "sad gay vampire". Read it here
It's very easy to get Zach talking about vampires, depression and all things Paint The Town Red. If you want to interview them about this game, give them a shout over at [email protected].
