Bad BloodThe Ashwater Reach
How to play. Ten minutes of reading, and you will not waste your first run.
What you are doing
The wells run green from here to the flats. Two holds share the water and blame each other for it: Kettle Bluff up on the rock, and Wick down in the wet, where the changed live. Saltgate in the middle trades with both and takes no side.
Something upstream keeps making more of whatever is in the water. Seven errands take you to it. What you do when you get there is the game.
Getting on the map
The reach is hexes, so there is no north and no south - six ways to go and nothing else. The keys sit under your left hand in the shape of the compass:
| Go | Key | Go | Key |
|---|---|---|---|
| North-west | W | North-east | E |
| West | A | East | D |
| South-west | Z | South-east | X |
Everything else is one key. F uses whatever is in front of you - a door, a well, a body, the relay. T talks. I opens the pack, Q the tasks. Space starts a fight with whatever is next to you.
The arrow keys pan the view rather than walk you, so you can look down a road before you commit to it. Drag the map to do the same with a mouse. The wheel zooms, or + and -. C or a double-click snaps the camera back to you.
Staying alive
Body, hunger and thirst run down the panel on the right. Thirst runs fastest, and in the harder seasons it runs faster still. Rations and flasks are cheap in all three towns and you should never walk out of one without both. Bandages stop a bad fight from becoming a dead one.
The clock never stops. Four game minutes pass every tick, three hundred and sixty ticks make a day, and travelling, talking, trading and fighting all spend them. A campaign runs twelve to fifteen days if you are efficient.
The taint gauge
This is the game. Everything else is arrangement around it.
The vial on the right is your blood. Ashfall, slag, the green wells and anything tainted that lands a blow on you all push it up. It does not come back down on its own. What it buys you:
| At | You gain | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | Nightsight | the dark stops mattering |
| 45 | Thick hide | skin plates over, +2 soak |
| 68 | Blood rage | +3 damage, and your appetite doubles |
| 88 | Foul marrow | the blood turns on you |
And what it costs: every point of taint loses you standing at Kettle Bluff and earns it at Wick. The bluff can see it on you. So the gauge is not a power bar - it is a slider between the two holds, and it only ever moves one way.
Fighting
Blows are exchanged in a panel of its own, one round at a time, and the rest of the reach waits while it runs. Walk into something, press Space, or let something hit you - all three open the same panel, and anything that joins in is dragged into it.
| Key | Round |
|---|---|
| 1 | Strike, or close in if you are not adjacent yet |
| 2 | Shoot - spends a quarrel, and needs the crossbow to be worth carrying |
| 3 | Give ground - puts hexes between you, and enough of it breaks off the fight |
| 4 | Hold |
| — | Or spend a stimshot, bandage, phial, ration or flask |
Nothing else happens mid-fight. You cannot travel, talk or tinker your way out of one - only win it, or give ground until it lets go.
The seven errands
They unlock in order. Q shows where you are.
- Bad water - recover the filter core from Cistern Row and bring it back to an elder.
- The courier - take the courier satchel back from the raiders at Bonefield Station.
- Two bloods - carry the Harrow ledger to the other hold and hear them out.
- The Aviary - fit a charge cell and an antenna spar to the relay.
- The marrow key - bring Dr. Imogen Kass at Saltgate three vials of tainted blood.
- Harrow - go in with the marrow key and take the sump codes from Warden Cole.
- The Sump - go down, and decide what to do with the strain.
Buy the charge cell and the antenna spar from Juno Ferris at Saltgate the moment you can afford them. Both are also findable, but a run that walks into the Aviary without them has wasted the trip.
How it ends
The console in the Sump offers four answers, and which of them it will accept depends on your taint and on your standing with both holds - the meter you have been managing all game decides the finale. Tempered, purged and spilled each want something of you first; purging and spilling both want a hold to have your word on it, which is an errand in itself and not something taint alone will buy.
Walking away is always available. It is a real ending, not a failure.
Which start to take
| Kin | What it means |
|---|---|
| Bluff-born | Start clean. The bluff trusts you and Wick does not. The harder line - your taint climbs from zero, and every point of it spends the trust you started with. |
| Wick-born | Start changed. Wick trusts you, the bluff does not, and the blood sits easier on you. Softer through the middle - but you begin partway up a gauge that never falls, and in a Sump year that head start becomes the liability. |
Four seasons set how fast the reach kills you: Thin season, The reach, Bad blood, Sump year. Take Thin season first. The reach is the honest one. Sump year is brutal on either kin and roughly even between them, which is the point of it.
Saving
The game keeps one run in your browser and saves as you go; Save in the topbar forces it, and the title screen offers to take up the last run. New run throws it away. Nothing is sent anywhere - the whole game is one page and it never touches the network.
A first ten minutes
- Take Bluff-born and Thin season. Walk out.
- Talk to everyone in your home hold. T, then work the keywords.
- Buy rations, flasks and bandages before anything else. Armour before a better weapon.
- Take the first errand and walk to Cistern Row. Fight only what is between you and it.
- Drink from a green well only when the alternative is dying of thirst. That is the whole bargain of this game, and you will make it eventually - just make it on purpose.