Bullets, Death & Revenge – A Blood On My Name Solo RPG Review

Posted onAuthorReyes Raine

A promotional image for Blood On My Name. It features a mottled red background and a well-dressed figure with a signet ring playing with the collar of their suit. They wear an expensive watch and look important. Lit entirely in red light, their face is obscured. Chromatically aberrated credits read Kienna Shaw & Jason Cutrone. The title BLOOD ON MY NAME is lit by glowing yellow outlines with a hollow centre.

Blood On My Name is a solo journaling tabletop game based on the Wretched and Alone SRD about a former assassin on a mission of revenge. You are dragged back into a world you left behind to GET REVENGE OR DIE TRYING. It is the brainchild of Kienna Shaw and Jason Cutrone, with the layout, art and editing by Dylan Grinder.

The team behind Blood On My Name have a vast catalogue of prior work and accolades. Both Shaw & Cutrone are award-winning writers and designers.

Kienna Shaw has had their work appear in publications like Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide, The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, and Land of Eem.

Jason Cutrone’s previous works include The Hare-Barons’ Estate, Acron: City of Neon Daylight, and the adventure module Orange Coloured Sky for Modiphius Games’ Fallout: The Roleplaying Game. The pair has also collaborated on many other solo projects, which can be seen on Kienna’s itch.io. 

Dylan Grinder, on the other hand, is the mastermind behind Heartheld Games, which publishes Become: Artificial Investigation. She’s also the creator of the widely acclaimed game Spoken Magic alongside other self-published titles.

“My name is Christine Andrysiak nee Lionheart, my codename was Andria. I was revered as one of the world’s foremost assassins dealing with targets in plain sight and bustling crowds. Subtlety and misdirection were my game. 30 years I was in the assassin’s game, since I was just 14, and I’ve been gone for 10. My hands had begun to tremble and my aim was no good as it once was.“

“Marcinek Andrysiak was my husband. He rarely smiled, only behind closed doors in quiet moments. By the time I found him, the house was a wreck. My Marcinek lay on the floor, lifeless and still, with five gunshot wounds in his chest, four in a diamond shape, and one through his chest. A tag marker from my former student Eliza Grenik, aka Maryland.”

The game is currently itchfunding until the 15th of May. So far, they’ve unlocked e-reader and mobile-friendly versions, and one of two possible posters for backers. They’re only 1k away from securing a print-on-demand edition of the game with distribution through Heartheld Games.

I want to take this moment to declare that I received a review copy of this game from Kienna Shaw. I am not being monetarily endorsed to review this product, but I do have an implicit bias to want to show this off in a good light to support Kienna Shaw & Jason Cutrone’s itchfunding efforts.

Design & Layout

Dylan Grinder’s work in Blood On My Name is visually striking and tonally consistent. The entire book has a simple tri-colour palette complimented by pure black. The three colours being red, blue and yellow. Not only are these primary colours, but the red and blue (often paired together in two-toned lighting) are often associated with the cyberpunk/neon urban/dystopia setting.

The banner for Blood On My Name's itchio page. It features a hand reaching for a knife, lit red and blue, with the bright yellow title BLOOD ON MY NAME along the knife. Chromatically abberated author credits list Kienna Shaw & Jason Cutrone.
The itch.io banner for Blood On My Name.
  • Red has correlations with danger, blood and violence, but also love, affection, and warmth.
  • Blue is often seen as secure, calm, and reliable, although it can also be cold and melancholic.
  • The contrast colour, often used to catch attention, is yellow. This colour is used on things like police tape, and caution signs. A warning of potential danger. Paired with red, these colours can also elicit hunger.

The black is more to emphasise these colours. If the background was anything else, the contrast wouldn’t pop as much as it does. It also coincides with the inspirations of dark back-alleys in the city, gloomy warehouses for gunfights and the dead of night when these shady go-ons take place.

A screencap from one of the John Wick films, showing the titular character in a blue and red lit scene with yellow string lights holding up his gun, dressed all in black.
While Sergio Leone (The Dollar’s Trilogy) is listed as the first inspiration, the art design and energy of the game wears its second credit much more apparently on its sleeve: Chad Stahelski’s John Wick films.

There’s some neat illustration work included in Blood On My Name. The itch.io page’s background is a nice showcase of the custom card suit icons, plus interspersed, more detailed, icons of a gun and what appears to be some kind of dagger. Admittedly, the last one isn’t very clear.

This matches the book, where on the pages dedicated to card prompts, each prompt is accompanied by a vector illustration of the corresponding card. Some cards have blood splatters — I won’t spoil why they’re there, but there is a reason.

The King, Queen and Jack cards all have their own designed icons as well. The Jacks seem to be all the same but the Queens are altered to fit their card suit while each King is entirely unique.

I’d love to show examples of this, but that involves showing the prompt pages, which will spoil the game. So if you want to see those card designs, you know where to find them: https://kiennas.itch.io/blood-on-my-name 

Mechanics in Blood On My Name

Blood On My Name uses the Wretched & Alone SRD by Chris Bissette & Matt Sanders. Generally speaking, the main mechanics involve a deck of 52 cards (excluding jokers), some number of 6-sided dice, on average 10 tokens, and most strikingly: a wooden block tower.

Wretched and Alone games generally place their protagonist in hopeless and bleak situations where they must do their best to survive or escape. That’s not always the case, but that’s the intended norm.

The deck of cards acts as an oracle, allowing certain events to trigger, things to change, and progress towards the end goal to be accomplished. In most Wretched and Alone games, the Ace of Hearts in particular is a special card: when drawn, it is placed aside and tokens are put atop it. Rolling dice and getting rid of those tokens acts as a counter toward success and winning.

A photo of a desk, one king placed next to a joker, an ace of hearts with 6 tokens placed atop and one to the side. Four piles of cards sit in front of a collapsed Jenga Tower, three decks sit face-up side by side with the rightmost pile sideway, and a face-down deck below them.
The end of my session of Blood On My Name. I didn’t get very far.

Blood On Your Name deviates a bit from Wretched and Alone here. Instead, the Ace of Hearts is your Contingency, your ability to kill a member of your old secret organisation who’s betrayed you, and walk away with minimal consequence. To kill that member, you need to draw the 4 King Cards, placing them around a set-aside Joker representing your target until they form a crosshair. I really like this placement and the nuance of being able to both succeed but have varying levels of consequence afterwards.

The block tower is your main countdown toward failure. Certain events will prompt you to draw a block from the tower. If the tower falls, the game ends with your character’s demise at the hands of the One Who Wronged Them.

There is an option to refuse drawing from the block tower, which I often did when I felt like the event didn’t result in the situation needing to destabilise further. If I eliminate all the threats in a scene, why am I put in a worse position?

You do not need the block tower to play. Even the SRD says this:

“Not everyone has a block tower, and not everyone is able to interact with one. In The Wretched, the block tower is optional for this reason. We encourage you to keep the block tower optional and even make alternative resolution methods available if you can.”

“There was some discussion of this as part of Wretched & Alone jam:
https://itch.io/jam/wretched-jam/topic/796498/dicesubstitute-for-jenga-towers”

I do appreciate this look on things. It took me weeks to get my hands on a $5 block tower (I wanted it for other projects as well) and my shaky hands are a common joke and obstacle for me. I remember being the only kid in my class who couldn’t stack a small tower of 1cm cubes without my hands knocking it over.

The end of my game didn’t even come from removing the wrong block, my own shaky hand spasmed and knocked the tower over while I was moving a token. If I were to play again on my own time, I’d definitely look into alternatives, but for the integrity of the review, I wanted to see it as intended.

Further Reading

For more solo roleplaying games that use a deck of cards, check out my review for Queenless by Croaker RPGs, which uses the much kinder Firelights system by Fari RPGs.

Read More

However, something did catch my eye while I was preparing to write this section of the review. Alternatives for the block tower are great for accessibility. And as seen in the quote above, the SRD even comes with a link to an itchio discussion board with community brainstormed alternatives.

This would have been a great opportunity for Kienna Shaw and Jason Cutrone to adapt one of these alternatives to fit the themes and story of Blood On My Name, or even come up with their own. At first, I even thought they did, considering the set-up page includes a custom link described as such:

“If you do not have access to a block tower, or cannot interface with such an implement, refer to the following link for a list of potential alternatives: BOMN.KIENNAS.COM”

However, when you click that link, it doesn’t go to some custom site or handmade document. Instead, it goes straight back to the same discussion board linked in the Wretched & Alone SRD.

My biggest problem with this, is that it is not a Blood On My Name exclusive resource, yet the custom URL and the lack of explanation in the rulebook makes it look and feel to the passive reader like it is. I don’t know the logistics of custom redirect URLs, but something about it doesn’t sit right with me.

I did message Kienna Shaw, who had so graciously given me a review copy and the promotional material I used in this article, and she explained it to be a precaution in case the forum discussion disappeared. That way she could simply change where the custom link redirects to, rather than have a dead link that needs replacing entirely.

Another small critique I have is the entire concept of “Destroy your game notes”. Mork Borg does this with the triggering of the Seven Miseries and telling you to burn your book. But I don’t really want to burn my $60 gamebook that I want to play again. Nor do I want to spend 5 hours writing and note-taking and then destroy all of that because I was unlucky with an off-put muscle spasm.

I understand the intention and this is an entirely subjective point. The big unspoken rule of solo tabletop games is you can break whatever rules you want, no one else will know but you. It’s only your fun you’re messing with. And I will always choose to preserve over destroy.

Overall, though, I love the tactile, hands-on feel of the Wretched & Alone SRD, and the alterations the Blood On My Name team did only help emphasise the themes of the experience they want players to have. It doesn’t feel as impossible as the base SRD, but still challenging and with the odds against you.

Conclusion

“I counted nine corpses after I’d cleared the house. They barely got a glimpse of me before going down. Slowly, I thinned out Maryland’s circle. I patted myself on the back, and then I saw the reflection in the glass.”

“A woman, tear-stricken, her eyes darted between me and one of the bodies on the floor. She didn’t speak English like the rest of Eliza’s goons, but Polish. Her tone dripped in civilian panic and grief. She seemed about my age, I think that’s what stunned me. That fatal mistake.

“I turned to her, and she fired. The recoil threw her back, and I slid to the floor. I could feel the bullet in my heart, see blood bubbling out of my chest. Her aim was dead-on.”

I understand why the Wretched & Alone system was used for Blood On My Name. Revenge is barely straightforward and comes with many strings attached. But a lot of the John Wick films and revenge flicks in particular are a sort of power fantasy. You want John Wick to get revenge for his dog, you want him to get out of the lifestyle that keeps dragging him back against his will.

It feels like an anti-revenge message told through the lens of pro-revenge films like John Wick. Regardless, it’s a fun time, and if you’re okay with the high risk of failure, I’d say give it a shot.

Blood On My Name’s mechanics and tactile approach already earn a lot of points in my book. I do love a game with a unique physical element that makes it feel just that little less like creative writing with a dice roll.

  • Playtime: 4-5 Hours (Including Set-Up,)
  • This Game Is: Tense, Narrative-Driven & Engaging
  • Final Rating: Ace of Diamonds

More from the Team Behind Blood On My Name:

Read More Cool Stuff: