Being a vampire in a tabletop RPG is nothing new. With Paint The Town Red (not to be confused with South East Games’ beat ’em up of the same name), SoulMuppet Publishing aims to go deeper than the usual tropes, exploring themes of trauma, vice and loneliness.
Created by Zachary Cox (Orbital Blues, Inevitable, Best Left Buried) with art direction from Johan Nohr (MÖRK BORG, CY_BORG, Into The Odd) Paint The Town Red is a game “that will make you question your characters motivations, happiness, and what it means to be alive”, and is currently available in a 94-page Quickstart book (which you can find here). Your characters are vampires, afflicted with the Curse of Undeath. But being dead doesn’t feel the greatest. In fact, the goal of every character in the game is to chase the sensation of feeling alive and “escape the rot they feel in their soul.”
Set in the greatest cities throughout history, the Dead mass together to form an active nightlife. In fact, sessions of Paint The Town Red “feel more like boozy nights out on the town than heroic quests”, with characters having pre-drinks, listening to loud music, smoking areas and hangovers. This all sets the stage for the game’s first adventure, A Modern Babylon.
Taking place on the streets of Victorian London in 1862, characters in A Modern Babylon will become embroiled in London’s nightlife, facing off against a gang of werewolves, undead agents of the British Empire, and even a lich who dwells in the Tower of London.
The full game will arrive on Kickstarter in September 2024, and will feature three new adventures in addition to A Modern Babylon, expanding the campaign across thousands of years. It will also feature GM’s advice on running the game, other types of undead for characters to use (zombies, skeletons, liches, ghouls, werewolves and ghosts), and tools for building new cities for crafting your own adventures.
