Hello Dear Readers! The Red Room was gracious enough to answer some questions for you all. I meant to publish this last week, but I got a little sidetracked. In light of The Red Room’s newest release, Wretched Interbellum, I figure now is the time!
For purposes of full disclosure, I have worked with Red Room on a couple of occasions, the most notable is my bestiary, Wretched Folklore. You can get physical copies here and PDFs here. Miguel has also helped me with layout work for other projects of mine, such as my Cha’alt game jam submission: The Skeevers of Turner-Town. Working with them has been a lot of fun and I hope to do more in the future.
For those of you who don’t know, The Red Room is responsible for The Wretched RPG, a noir multi-setting game system that places the players in the role of anti-heroes who personify one of the seven deadly sins. You can be a bloodthirsty barbarian in Wretched Bastards, a lazy gunslinger in Wretched Country, or a lascivious pilot in Wretched Space. I previously reviewed Wretched Epoque, a setting set in Paris, France during the 1890s. It is one of the most unique settings I have ever read. I haven’t read Wretched Interbellum yet, but it is also looking to be a setting unique to the RPG space!
FYI: Miguel’s answers are labeled “MR” and Silvia’s answers are “SC.”
The Red Room qua gamers:
How did you get into the hobby?
MR: I started in the late 1980s. The first thing I played, even before role-playing games, was the Fighting Fantasy books. Later a friend of mine – who came back to role-playing games recently – told me about something called Dungeons & Dragons that had just been translated into Portuguese…
SC: Like Miguel I discovered first the Fighting Fantasy books. I was around 12 and only discovered Role-Playing games almost 10 years later, but I didn’t have anybody to play with at the time. The Portuguese scene is very small. I’ve played some Play by Forum and Play by Email, only started to really play once I met Miguel.
What was the first game system or systems you played?
MR: The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set for BECMI was the first thing I ever tried. I didn’t play it a lot, that was the only thing ever translated into Portuguese. Not much later I purchased AD&D second edition.
SC: To be honest I don’t remember anymore, most of the play-by-forum campaigns failed so I tried several at the time, but I was still trying to wrap my head around the all-TTRPG world. I do remember Call of Cthulhu was one of the first systems that got my attention and obviously Vampire the Masquerade because I was a Goth girl at heart.
Art is a major selling point for a lot of RPGs. What is your favorite RPG fantasy artist? Is there a favorite piece?
MR: Right now, Frank Frazetta and Paul Bonner, though having played AD&D 2ed for some time I have a special fondness for Larry Elmore’s art too. It would be difficult to choose one favourite piece.
Aside from what you have been publishing, what game would you drop everything for just to be a player? What about this game gets you excited to play?
MR: Kult has been my favourite game for a long time, and I would join any game of Kult. Except if it was 4th edition. Kill that with fire! What I always liked about it was the setting, especially for 1st edition: It was “Hellraiser the unofficial game”.
How would you describe your gaming preferences: Are you story-gamers? War gamers? Do you prefer exploration, Combat, or Role-playing?
MR: It’s difficult to explain. I hate story games’ rules, they do not work for me at all. They interfere with what, for me, is the most important thing in a role-playing game: Immersion. But wargaming isn’t about immersion as well… I guess this answers the other question, combat and exploration take the second stage, the playing of roles is what I find most interesting about gaming.
Do you prefer to be a player or a GM? Why?
MR: Game master. I think it was just out of habit. When I started I preferred to be a player, but shortly after I ended up being the game master most of the time. So much so, that I get bored of playing more than a short campaign now.
SC: When Miguel first started to challenge me to run games, I was not very convinced, but I started gradually to feel more comfortable in the GM role. Now that we play more often and I had the chance to run my own scenarios I’m starting to prefer to be the GM. It’s more demanding but more interesting.
The Red Room qua game designers:
The Red Room burst on the scene and published numerous titles in a short period of time. What motivated you two to get into game design?
MR: It may sound strange, but what made me start writing my own material was watching mainstream gaming – particularly horror games – being watered down, censored, X-carded into oblivion… When that happened I decided to translate to English and expand on a few scenarios I had written in the early 2000s. They were published by Grim Jim’s Postmortem Studios and, to my own amazement, some people liked them! Months later, I decided to learn how to do layouts and start publishing by myself. That’s when the Wretched concept came to be.
Every game designer has cultural influences from books, movies, and/or music. What is your Appendix N?
MR: As you probably don’t want me to mention every item in it, I’ll just tell you in a general way what would be there: Every horror book by Clive Barker, every movie by David Lynch, and (of course) Twin Peaks. Also most movies by Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Hitchcock, Coppola, Scorcese, Stanly Kubrick, Jesús Franco, Wes Craven, Michael Curtiz, Blake Edwards, Paul Verhoeven, Ridley Scott. Every movie by French director Jacques Tati. Several books by William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, JG Ballard, Paul Auster, Umberto Eco, Joseph Heller, Poe, Lovecraft, and William Gibson. Also a few Portuguese writers you wouldn’t know. It would also include a lot of Giallo films, spaghetti westerns, bad fantasy, and sci-fi movies, Leonard Cohen songs, and poetry. Music by Motörhead. Soundtracks by Angelo Badalamenti, Ennio Morricone, Basil Poledouris, and John Williams. Not many comics, but some European ones, such as Corto Maltese and other works by Hugo Pratt, Lieutenant Blueberry, and Adéle Blanc-Sec.
I discovered you two with Wretched Bastards. Since then, you have published numerous titles using your underlying Wretched RPG game system. These titles range from spaghetti westerns to dark urban fantasy. Out of all the titles you have published, which one do you think best represents The Red Room and why?
MR: Although Wretched Darkness is my favourite genre (horror), what best reflects the Red Room is Wretched New Flesh, because it mixes most of our pop-culture references and because the setting is more unique.
AI art is a hot topic in the hobby right now. You use A.I. art in many of your publications. How do you see the role of AI in game design?
MR: Right now I think it is crucial for small independent publishers; AI has further democratized the business. It certainly isn’t as important as digital sales and print on demand, but having access to AI art allows people like us – who aren’t doing this to further an agenda or as vanity projects – to publish at a steady rhythm. Small independent games don’t sell that much and, if you aren’t a woke publisher, you are at a disadvantage in terms of advertising them. To make it worth the trouble, we need to make them cheap to produce and inexpensive to buy. If you are going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for art and wait weeks, months, or years for the artists to deliver their work, you are either doing a vanity project or virtue-signalling.
You have other authors who write for you. Who are they and what have they contributed to The Red Room?
Joe Coombs was the first one. He’s a British gamer and musician who has similar tastes in movies, books, and role-playing games as we do. He wrote a few scenarios, Wretched Apocalypse, and did some additional writing for other projects. More recently, Michael L Straus a Californian role-player who hosts the OG GM YouTube channel joined us to co-write Wretched Vigilantes. We had been in contact with him for a while since he decided to start writing again for RPGs when we started the Red Room. He wrote a couple more books for Vigilantes and he is now working on a Wretched bestiary. Then there’s the much-maligned Dick Pound, author of MEN. He’s a real person, though Dick is not his real name. As far as I know, he has no plans for writing anything else for us, unfortunately… We also published two scenarios by French gamer and musician Olivar Tripas. He found out about us through Wretched Époque and I convinced him to write something for the Red Room. He is now working on a full-game setting, Wretched Chambara. Judd Goswick, who has been a good friend since my first published work for Postmortem Studios, wrote a scenario for Wretched New Flesh and maybe he’ll do something else in the future. I recently invited Liam Thompson – he’s British and the author of the Sanctions role-playing game – to do a 2d6 version of Wretched New Flesh. I’ll try to get him to do some other things in the future. Chris Cotgrove didn’t write anything himself, but he edited several of our recent game releases (the ones that have much fewer typos). Last, but not least, British author and game designer James Desborough recently wrote Penney Tower, a mini-setting for Wretched New Flesh.
What is The Red Room’s next project?
MR: We have several, but the one I’m working on right now is Wretched Interbellum, a new game setting covering the period between World War I and World War II.
SC: My biggest next project is to rewrite Daughters of Darkness and The Sound of Madness, my first adventures for Wretched Bastards. Looking back I think they could have come out a lot better and since I rewrote the seven bastards for the second edition it makes sense. I will also write a new adventure featuring some of the bastards to be published with it, so it’s not just a recycling thing.
The Red Room and the political discourse on line:
In recent years, many in the hobby believe that politics should stay out of gaming. However, The Red Room has certainly courted controversy. Do you believe game designers should stay out of politics, or does the game designer have a role to play in the political sphere?
MR: It should be each game designer’s choice. I didn’t want to get involved in political arguments, but being anti-censorship, anti-virtue-signaling, anti-safety tools, and being partial to politically incorrect themes made it impossible to stay away from discussions. Our games have no agenda at all, but we will not shy away from defending what we believe in.
I ask everyone this question as gatekeeping is a touchy subject. Do you think the hobby should engage in gatekeeping?
MR: I am absolutely certain that every hobby should engage in gatekeeping. The only problem is that it came too late since the “barbarians” entered the gates a long time ago. The people destroying every hobby from the inside do not belong there, they are parasites. They should have never been allowed or invited inside. But it is what it is. We’ll have to deal with it until they get tired and move along to ruin something else…
Is Game Design an art form? If so, do you think RPG companies should be afforded the same latitude to create in terms of what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable?
MR: I have a controversial opinion (another) about that among game designers: I don’t think it is. Though there may be art involved in the games (visual or written art), I don’t think the game design itself is artistic. Still, it’s a craft and it should be allowed the same latitude as art.
The Red Room qua Business Owners:
DrivethruRPG banned you from publishing on their platform as a result of your response to DriveThruRPG’s censorship of Men, a satirical game meant to be a joke. How did that affect your business?
MR: It affected our sales a lot. The revenue may haven’t dropped much, because OneBookShelve’s share of royalties was substantial, and that made a difference. But we have much fewer customers than we had one year ago, the our growth rate has been insignificant. A bad month could be terrible. And I’m not even speculating about how much we might be selling if we were still there…
SC: The biggest impact IMO is really in the growth rate. Not only is the indie TTRPG market small and closed, but our games are niche games, adding the cancel culture barrier to that. It’s really hard for us to find people that could be interested in our games and it is also hard for them to find us.
Some in the hobby believed the ban was warranted. Others, like myself, think DrivethruRPG’s hostile marketing clause is a backdoor way into the editing rooms of publishing companies such as yours. Do you regret your response to DrivethruRPG, or do you think DriveThruRPG was too heavy-handed?
MR: No, I don’t regret it. Even if we stayed quiet at the time, we were constantly being reported by people aiming to hurt our business. Sooner or later something like that was bound to happen. Also, even if they didn’t kick us out for “hostile marketing” after MEN I’m sure the next releases would need to be approved by their commissariat. They are a gaming store, they should not get to approve and censor what authors write and publish.
SC: Considering the sentiment against AI Art, that would have also created problems for us. Being out of DrivethruRPG was bad for business, but it did give us creative freedom. Now I don’t have to be concerned if my ideas are too edgy, stupid, or provocative.
After the ban, how did you adapt?
MR: We opened our store and, luckily, AI generators were improving at the time, which allowed us to keep publishing enough to get the Red Room going.
How important are webstores like Big Geek Emporium and Giant Slayer Games? What would you like to see from these fledgling websites and others like them?
MR: Our sales at both stores are still minimal. I guess our customers prefer to buy directly from us, so we don’t have to share royalties. But the possibility of expansion through other stores is real and it is very important. The problem is they haven’t yet been able to convince larger publishers to sell there. I believe when they have those, the stores will grow. Other than that, there isn’t much they can do about it.
SC: I would love to see the small stores flourish, but the public in general needs to change their mindset. We have all got used to what is more comfortable for us. We consume what is easily accessible instead of searching for things. For me searching for the entertainment I wanted to consume was a very big part of the fun.
The Most Important Question: Where can we find your stuff?
https://biggeekemporium.com/store/redroom
https://giantslayergames.com/store/the-red-room
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/miguelribeiro
There you have it! Check out The Red Room’s stuff (and their Youtube channel)! The company is doing something that very few are doing. I think Lamentations of the Flame Princess is the only other company creating content like The Red Room’s content. They are a fearless company and I encourage you to check them out!
Until next time, Dear Readers!
Lord Matteus' Ancient Tomes and Wondrous Items 