“City of Red Waters” Review: Blood in the Debauched Bayou

by Graham Gentz

If anyone has spent any time in New Orleans, they know it kinda sucks.

And like anything, it’s complicated. But the surface level stuff, like the infamous French Quarter, is fundamentally Disneyland. The architecture is gorgeous and the history is certainly real, if not brutally horrifying, but it’s largely a bizarrely synthetic facade for wasted hedonistic tourists to be, nay encouraged, as shitty and awful as humanly possible. 

Which sounds like the perfect place to do crime.

I wholly welcome Inverrouge (in-ver-rooj), the “City of Red Waters”, to the integrated setting of the Dunwall-wannabe of the original book. The lightning walls and leviathan blood of the evertwilight Prague was old Europe. So why not cross an ocean for the new imperial. Dishonored, in turn, was inspired by the 1990’s aesthetics of Looking Glass Studio’s iconic Thief series. “City of Red Waters” feels like the first real departure in this line of inspiration in a bold and exciting way.

Ash McAllan’s work with the design and writing is stupendous. John Harper is back to work the layout and graphic design. The vital work of sensitivity readers Cass Redfield and Jabari Weathers is evident as well. To call the history of empire in New France “complex” is a gross understatement. “City of Red Waters” is a game of colonial horror (just known as “colonialism” to most of the world). So if you’re gonna dive into this cesspool of historical evil, you need to make conscious choices of what you present and how you present it. The intro page drops the thesis right where you need it: “In the city of red waters, colonialism makes vampires of us all.” Like the conquistador vamps from the MtG Ixalan setting, we’re matching monsters of history with the monsters of traditional stories. 

See? It’s a metaphor!

Do you like southern vampires, cosmopolitan or the swamp variety? They’re all here. The book’s three new Crew Types are hugely welcome, as in the many games of Blades proper I’ve played, no one has ever once wanted to play as the Assassins, and I can only sell drugs to ghosts so many different ways. The Emcees are partygoers and hosts, throwing galas, brokering deals, and blackmailing to their own ends. The River of Blood are the bloody revolutionaries. Who doesn’t want that. The Roots appear to be responsible for growing farmlands of literal Audrey 2’s, complete with blood feeding. 

I can confidently say I want to play all of these things immediately.

What the various “Forged in the Dark” games largely lack is the claustrophobia of the original. It really is an essential component of what does work about the deceptively complex number of different systems all at play in Blades. You’re gaining stress and Traumas, recovering only in small (desperate) ways, but unable to truly go to ground. You can’t actually leave the city to, as they say in mafia movies, “go lay low for a while” if the threats of danger ever become utterly untenable. It was a similar issue with the way Dungeon World missed with the goals of PbtA: there’s no spiral, no arc, no change. It just goes on and on and on.

“City of Red Waters” has ramped up the intricacy of the historical inspirations at play. There may be no lightning wall equivalent, but the “pressure cooker effect” of building tension and trauma until you blaze out or collapse, as a cool cool thief or otherwise, is a very real consequence of empire, corrosive capitalism, and in this case, a powerful vampiric overclass.

46 Pages is the perfect length to approach this new content. It has everything it needs to achieve its goal, a subtly difficult needle to thread in the TTRPG industry. I have no compunctions about buying it posthaste.

Some works just nail the pitch. 

To find out more, visit evilhat.com/product/city-of-red-waters