Wretched Bastards is a low-magic, dark fantasy role-playing game.
Besides being deadly and bleak, it is meant to be sleazy. The main characters aren’t heroes at all; they are greedy, violent, lecherous, cruel, untrustworthy scoundrels. They will lie, backstab, betray, double-cross, kill, pillage and rape through this grim fantasy world.
They aren’t heroes, because there are no heroes in the kingdom of Riget, only a handful in the Kharabas continent, and not a whole lot more in the world of Antillia; however, they aren’t the villains either: the malefactors here are the filthy orcs, who keep coming down from the mountains, located south from the village of Fork, trespassing into human territory.
The introductory scenario to this game setting, The Seven Bastards - and others in the World of Bastards series -, were partly inspired by the many rip-offs of Conan, the Barbarian (1978), movies like Lucio Fulci’s Conquest, The Barbarians, directed by Ruggero Deodato and the Ator series by Joe D’Amato and Alfonso Brescia. Most of these movies were European low-budget productions, many directed by Italian
filmmakers, such as the aforementioned Fulci, Deodato, Brescia and D’Amato, but also
Umberto Lenzi, Franco Prosperi and Tonino Ricci, among others. You can also look at the peplum movies from the sword and sandal boom of the late 1950s as inspirational sources. And, as you can assume from the title, The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, naturally, are also references.
When running the game, have in mind that it is supposed to emulate a low-budget movie with over the top action scenes, lousy special effects, bad acting, and much more
violence than the American counterparts. We also took the liberty of plundering the concept of protagonists as disagreeable antiheroes from western spaghetti and
applying it to fantasy. It’s not groundbreaking, it has already been done, but nothing is original anymore.