LET'S MAKE A SETTING TOGETHER! (PART 1)

(Also, a new game announcement!)

Greetings fellow warlocks of the Tome of Oddz!
When I was making my new game SANGUIS SANCTUS, I realized that I wrote many articles on “How to make a Setting”, but I haven’t really shown you how “I” make a Setting. And worst of all, I haven’t even invited all of you to the fun!
So allow me to make amends immediately, and LET’S MAKE A SETTING TOGETHER!

In this article we will be talking about:

🧛‍♂️My new game
📚Follow me while I make a new Setting
🩸How I’m making this setting
🎲Putting advice to action

INTRODUCING SANGUIS SANCTUS

Okay, before we begin: I am making a new game of which I’m pretty proud of, and it’s called SANGUIS SANCTUS.
It is a grimdark TTRPG set in an alternative 15th century, where a horde of demonic vampires is conquering kingdom upon kingdom. You will play as survivors cleaving their way through this vampire Anti-Crusade.
The game will be rules light, but “art and lore” heavy, compatible with MÖRK BORG.

You know what “art and lore heavy” means? That’s right: SANGUIS SANCTUS will have its own big Setting! And that’s when I thought that it might be helpful to guide you through how I actually made this Setting, so that maybe who knows, one day you could add your own stuff to this setting…

But maybe later.
So if you are interested in SANGUIS SANCTUS, it would mean the world to me if you followed my pre-launch page here on Kickstarter. The game is part of the Zine Quest 2026 celebration, and crowdfunding will launch around February 17th.
Also, you can already find a quick lore-primer on the pre-launch page, so check it out!

Now that I have introduced you to the project, so it’s now time to follow me through the process of MAKING the Setting of SANGUIS SANCTUS.

So, how did it start?

Back in 2021, me and my friend Emanuele Parascandolo (comics artist for Mad Cave Studios) had this idea of a grimdark medieval fantasy where vampires were taking over a world,while eating a couple of hamburgers. Originally it was for a comic book, which sadly never materialized (trust me, it happens many times, and I mean many). And so we put that project on a shelf.
5 years later I woke up one day and gave him a phone call, all of a sudden, to tell him “Hey, would you mind if I took that concept we had 5 years ago and I rewrote 80% of it?”.
He said “Go for it” instead of cursing at me for calling him during dinner, and so here we are!

Okay, now that I told you this background info about the idea, it’s time to start working on the Setting.

HOW I’M MAKING THIS SETTING

Like I described in a previous article about how to start creating your own RPG stuff, the first I usually do is putting my idea to paper, so I bought a small sketchbook (red, because y’know, vampires, blood and stuff). Nothing fancy and costly, because you don’t want something you would have the fear of ruining.
This is your sketchbook.
This is your Wizard Tower, your laboratory.
This is where your ideas go through a series of weird developments and then become magic.
And it helps your brain jelly realize that those ideas are no longer fleeting glimpses of your mind, but real and tangible things.

THE ELEVATOR PITCH

Now, I had to create my elevator pitch, something that would remind me what I’m working on, and something that would me explain the game/setting to other players. This time I didn’t wanted to use a lot of references in my pitch, so I went for:

”A grimdark fantasy RPG where you cleave your way through a vampire invasion”

That was good enough, but I wanted to add more Spice to this Setting, something that would help me make a more personal and distinct work.
I was enjoying playing a lot of the wargame Trench Crusade and the video game Blasphemous, both these grimdark games that are known for taking a lot of inspiration from real world religions and places.
So I said to myself, you know what? I really like doing research on religions and folklore, so why not base my game on this stuff?
And so the elevator pitch became:

 “A grimdark fantasy RPG set in the year 149X, where you cleave your way through a demonic vampire invasion.”

Voilà! This really convinced me to go further. Vampires are no longer a simple menace; they are the antithesis to humans, an adversarial force to mankind.

WE NEED A PLAN

Now, before I started to make stuff, I needed a plan and an objective (remember the P.O.R.C.O. process from this article?). I decided to take the game to Zine Month 2026, the annual February celebration of zines, and that I would hack an existing system.
I needed something brutal, something that told players that escaping death was something to really really celebrate for.
What better choice than the critically acclaimed MÖRK BORG?

And so it was settled: a zine, deadline for the project presentation in February, and Morkish Borgish. Got it.

What’s next?

GATHERING INSPIRATIONS AND DEFINING PILLARS

One big part of working on a project for me is having a good pool of references and inspirations, so I sat down to define those inspirations and make a Pinterest board for visual references.
Of course the first three, since they popped up in the first stages of the project, are Trench Crusade, Blasphemous, and Castlevania.
Don’t worry if you can’t come up immediately with something of inspiration, these things take a little while, and maybe even a little bit of exploration.
I was fortunate enough to have a torrent of inspirations coming to my mind, so I wrote them all down, and started building my reference board.

These inspirations will help developing the Setting later on, both on the visual and the mechanics’ side.
They will also be a good inspiration for pillars.

Pillars are the foundations of your Setting, the things that make it what they are. Ask yourself: What makes my world… well, my world?

Speaking of which, I already had one pillar: the Vampires are a structured adversarial force of otherworldly beings who invaded our world.

I wanted a couple more, one regarding society, and one regarding faith.
So I defined:
In this world, societies have been fractured and many of them rely on a shared religious or common concept. Life isn’t considered as precious as we consider it.
And:
Faith in this world, especially in battle, can manifest in the real world. Both for faithful and demonic forces.

Now, the last one is tied to a third pillar that … let’s just say I don’t want to spoil yet. But don’t worry, it will surely come up in future parts of this series!

Okay, we have broad concepts, inspirations, a plan, and an elevator pitch. What to do next?

A BUS RIDE PITCH

As I mentioned in this article on making a setting, what I usually do next is writing a longer version of the Elevator Pitch, that I call the “Bus Ride Pitch”.
This will help me explain the game to an audience willing to read around 250 to 300 characters, and to have the theme of the game always present in my mind when I read it.
Here’s what I made:

Okay then! We now have something to work with!
In the next part we will take a look at more in-depth parts of a Setting, like factions, adversarial foes, and more.
But before we leave each other, the title of the article is “Let’s make a setting together” after all.

LET’S MAKE A SETTING TOGETHER

As I was crafting this Setting, it came immediately in my mind that the world of Sanguis Sanctus was going to be huge, but most importantly very open to homebrew content. After all, there must be someone out there thinking “oh wait, but if this is our world, what happened to my hometown in this cursed version of the 15th century?”
And while I am working on including real world places myself (Naples and Hammamet, for example), I thought it would be cool if someone wanted to have their own takes, and make cities, vendors, and foul vampiric creatures.
This is why I am also working on some sort of “Living Setting ” to allow and encourage anyone to make their own homebrew content for SANGUIS SANCTUS, much like you can make your own MÖRK BORG content.
It will probably take a while after launch, so please be patient with me!

With all of that being said, thanks for reading, see you on the next one!
Oh, before you leave, please check out Sanguis Sanctus’ pre-launch page!