The Haul Presents: The (B:R)eached and Specter of Cain

Hi everyone! Hope you're doing well. I wanted to talk a bit about two closely related projects: one that's been in the works for a little while, and one that's only just now crystallizing. First, however, I want to talk about the Wretched Jam.

Preamble: Wretched and Alone

Wretched and Alone is a system for solo journalling games where a single character is put up against incredible adversity. You follow a series of prompts, journal them through a method of your choice or as established by the game, and try to stay alive. Through a bit of luck, and a fair bit of skill on the player's behalf, they might just make it out. However, most of the time, they're going to end up dead. The flagship games for the system are The Wretched, which tells a tale like the latter half of Alien, and The Sealed Library, where you play as the last librarian at Alexandria before it was burned down. If any of that sounds like something you'd be interested in, feel free to go check it out.

I was introduced to W&A through a friend of mine, Owlington, who made his own variant, You Are Alone, about being trapped in an asylum with nothing but your own ghosts to keep you company. That's also where I learned of the Wretched Jam, a game jam hosted by the developers of the aforementioned systems to invite other people to make their own. I realized, then, that I had found the perfect system to power one of my concepts.

The (B:R)eached
Like so many good ideas, the core concept to the (B:R)eached rolled over me slowly. At the time, I was working more actively on two other games that are in the Haul (The Brigade and Bureau/Nest, which I'll have to talk about later) and realized that the names were sort of similar. They had that whole B-R thing going on, and I half-joked to myself that I should write another one. Then, the word Breached hit me, and I started writing. I hit about a page's worth of fiction about an eldritch, extradimensional being that finds itself trapped in our boring, three-dimensional world for some amount of time before it's pulled back into the world from whence it came. That text, with some minor alterations, remains in the game to this day. It makes up the bulk of the first page of the game, and sets the stage for what is to come.

The premise of the game picks up after that. Before this being, the Presence, disappeared, it left parts of itself behind, like branches falling off a tree. Those branches have now become fledgling gods in their own right, and this three-dimensional, entropy-having world they've found themselves in is tearing them apart. They know that there is a way out, as the Presence was taken away from them. They have to work together in order to make their way home. I submitted a functional version of the (B:R)eached to the Wretched Jam, and as such, it has its own page. If you're just interested in that game, it has its own page here. The full version is part of the Haul, however, as well as my second attempt at approaching the system.

Spectre of Cain
The idea for Spectre of Cain was born from the Wretched Jam's community forum, where we'd been discussing alternate ways to approach the base system. Specifically, the core system includes the usage of a Jenga / block tower as one of the main sources of danger for the player, and we'd been discussing alternate ways to represent that which don't require the tower. From there, the idea got into my head that you had a resource of some kind, that started out at some reasonably high number and then persisted throughout the entirety of the game. If you ever ran out, you were dead and gone.  You'd then have to spend this resource to get certain results throughout the game.

One of the lurking ideas in the back of my mind has been to write a vampire game of some sort. I've had my brushes with the World of Darkness variants in the past, and while the narratives present have been interesting, I haven't really found any mechanics that really capture what I want out of the topic. Here, these wires crossed, and I started writing.

Spectre of Cain follows a vampiric lineage over the generations, as the curse is passed from host to host over many hundreds of years, if not more. The further down we go, the weaker the vampire becomes. With a bit of luck, and a bit of skill, however, they can summon up enough strength and surprise to pass on their curse one last time, and finally let their soul rest. I still need to fill out most of the tables necessary for Spectre, but the core premise of the game is fairly solidly established.