The Blood of Dawnwalker is an upcoming vampire RPG with a dual focus.
By day, the game’s protagonist Coen will be a regular, righteous human, fighting against a cohort of powerful and ancient vampires. By night, he’ll join the ranks of the undead, using supernatural vampire abilities to thwart his new brethren, and find a place in the world.
Speaking to ScreenHub, writer Piotr Kucharski of developer Rebel Wolves described this duality as a significant, satisfying challenge for world-building and story development in the game.
‘It was challenging, there’s no other ways about it,’ Kucharski says. ‘You have to take into consideration the mechanics, the lore, everything connected to Coen being a daywalker … it gives you a lot of tools to play with, and also gives you a. lot of room to discuss things … how it will change if we approach the problem when you’re a vampire, how it will change if you’re human.’
‘In the end, it’s all about giving the players freedom of choice, right?’
The Blood of Dawnwalker interview – quick links
The Blood of Dawnwalker is part of an era-hopping vampire fantasy
The concept of a main hero with vampiric abilities was actually inspired by the ambitions of Rebel Wolves to tell an era-spanning story, with multiple sagas led by a familiar face. The studio aims to develop multiple Coen-led games, with each charting a different point in time.
‘We wanted to tell everyone outright that it’s going to be a saga, making a promise to all players that we want to make a few instalments of the game,’ Kucharski says. ‘If you invest your time with Coen … there will be a huge payoff, we believe so.’
Having a character that is naturally immortal is a convenient part of this plot, and it also means fertile ground to explore concepts like the power of temptation, the inner struggle for control, and what it means to be human.
‘We wanted it to be a saga in the very beginning, so we had to come up with a character that would be able to survive all that time and live longer,’ Kucharski says.
‘Vampires were an obvious [option] and most of us are fans of the vampire genre and theme, as one of the most recognisable motifs in literature and folklore … then we could add our own twists on it.’
The Blood of Dawnwalker: twists
One of those twists arrives early in the game, as protagonist Coen is turned. As Kucharski explains, traditional mythology has vampires being commonly turned by the exchanging of blood. Here, vampires must be made by the fang of another vampire, lodged into their heart.
This is played with in an early scene where Coen has nightmares about his sister becoming a vampire and turning him, with the traditional idea of blood exchange being subverted as the true lore of The Blood of Dawnwalker unravels.
Twisting this mythology further was another element that inspired Kucharski and the team. Vampire folklore and tropes like unending hunger and desire, seen across the eras, was researched thoroughly for this story.
Depictions in role-playing games, movies, and tales from Romanian and Slavic folklore were also a particular focus.
‘To me, as a writer, I think that the idea of hunger and how it’s connected to the character’s development was always nice, because you have to take this into consideration to make sure that players feel that your are a very powerful creature of the night, but you also have to keep feeding Coen, because if you don’t, he’ll lose control over himself.’
‘It’s about making the choices weighty, so you can feel the consequences.’
An added twist is that some quests will be exclusive to day, and others exclusive to night, so players will have a duality in how they explore the world of The Blood of Dawnwalker, when they tackle quests, and what outcome results.
The Blood of Dawnwalker: designing Coen as a brash young man
Embodying this inner turmoil, Coen is a young man entering a strange new world. As the game opens, we meet him as a simple farmer, the oldest of a large family dealing with all sorts of strife under the rule of their new vampiric lords.
He spends time with his siblings and tries to ease the suffering of his mentally unwell mother, going on errands and mini-quests to try to keep everyone together, safe and healthy.
Of course, this doesn’t last long, as the vampires swiftly disrupt Coen’s life and that of his family, forcing him to take charge as a supernatural leader for a desperate land.
In designing Coen, the Rebel Wolves team wanted a young hero who could reflect the inexperience of players, providing a window into this dark medieval world.
‘What’s really cool about Coen, being this young man who doesn’t understand anything that’s happening around him, is that he really corresponds to our players’ experience,’ Kucharski says. ‘And it is a saga, and we’ll be slowly revealing more and more about the deep lore behind everything that’s happening.’
‘It’s very natural that Coen doesn’t know, and he learns, and the players are learning with him.’
‘What I really like about Coen is that he’s a very empathetic character, he’s very connected in his own emotions. But he’s also very young, and from troubled upbringing. So obviously, he doesn’t control everything that’s happening, in his brain and in his heart.
‘I think that’s a cool main character, when you have someone who’s able to really feel for people, understand what makes them tick and how they behave … he’s a very human person.’
Players will also be able to take Coen down a darker path, with too much night-time indulgence leading to a degradation of his morality – but in every choice made, there are layers of understanding and humanity baked in.
It’s an approach that should serve The Blood of Dawnwalker well, with its layers of human connection and empathy marking it out as different.
Analogous to this game is CD Projekt’s The Witcher, which many Rebel Wolves developers formerly worked on. The iconic protagonist of this series, Geralt of Rivia, is a more muted hero that reflects common tropes of the action-adventure genre – he tends to be brusque and rugged, putting up a mask as an infallible, highly masculine hero to be mythologised.
The Blood of Dawnwalker: a relatable hero
Coen, at least in the first few hours of the game, is a far more flawed, relatable hero. His family relationships are particularly notable, with plenty of time devoted to building these interactions, and showing that Coen is a warm, empathetic character who’s driven by a sense of justice, and a desire to restore peace.
‘Designing him, our team wanted to make a character that will obviously look cool,’ Kucharski says, with a laugh. ‘But also someone who people want to cosplay as, or you know, write fanfic about – I believe we already have those written.’
Beyond having a cool, well-designed character to rally around, what equally excited Kucharski was the opportunity to play within a history-led sandbox.
The Blood of Dawnwalker: diving into medieval history
The Blood of Dawnwalker takes place in a medieval era, in a fictional location set against the real-life Carpathian Mountains, which stretch through Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and beyond. This is a similar backdrop to the tale of Dracula.
‘We wanted to keep it as historically accurate as possible, so there are quite a lot of hidden gems and histories for history buffs out there,’ Kucharski says. ‘But we also didn’t want it to constrict us in any way.’
‘So, for example, if we’re like you know, that is a cool idea, but … it wouldn’t happen this period of time, we’re like, “that is a cool idea, let’s do it”. It’s easier for us because we outright state that this is a dark fantasy setting based on real events, so you can really have some fun with it.’
Even wandering from historic accuracy on occasion, Kucharski found great pleasure in researching and exploring the medieval era, learning things about culture and folklore from the Carpathian-surrounded regions of Europe. Much of this knowledge-gathering has found its way into the game’s many discoverable books and notes, all of which add to the world-building players can discover.
While the vastness of this region, and the ambition of Rebel Wolves, could prove intimidating, Kucharski describes the scale of the game as being ‘exciting’ and rich as a writer.
‘It was really exciting,’ Kucharski says. ‘I played the game, and it was really fun to see how all the things click. It really gets you out into the open world, it really gets you this “one more turn” syndrome … every mark on the map, everything you get, it’s all about supporting the story. Even those small dialogues, small events, they’re about giving players something to talk about, some story that will stay with them.’
As the game heads to release, Kucharski is most keen to see players discovering this world for themselves, and to see how much thought and detail has been put in.
‘I’m very proud of, first of all, the world we created,’ Kucharski says. ‘I’m also very excited about the stories we told, because I think they’re all quite engaging. They have a lot of plot twists … behind all of them, there’s a payoff for players. Even if you don’t choose something that is necessarily a good idea for the character, you’ll still get something out of it. Some lore beat or story beat.’
‘I’m very proud of the team, of the work we put in. I hope that the players will have as much fun playing the game as we had making it.’
