Two Games

Basic Gameplay Resolution 

This is a game played on top of a table, hence tabletop. Like card games and classic board games, this game is played around a table or reclining in a living room. Blood Red Dreaming is a social game. It is a parlor game. Like classic parlor games, this game is a light and casual affair in theory, and tooth and nail battle in practice.

Blood Red Dreaming is a game of stories, of telling stories and enacting stories. The process of play is collaborative, as though the players are using their imaginations to build a movie in which they are writers, directors, and actors.
Playing Blood Red Dreaming feels like climbing through the wardrobe and coming out in a world composed of scary campfire stories instead of Narnia.

Blood Red Dreaming is a Role-Playing Game: an RPG. The players take on roles in a story and play those roles, much like actors in a movie. And like many role-playing games, the roles which the players take on can be developed. In most role-playing games, the persona which the player enacts grows as the game is played. But in Blood Red Dreaming, when the persona grows so does the player.

Blood Red Dreaming is ARG. An ARG, an Augmented Reality Game, is a game which is overlaid upon the real world and interacts with the real world. As Pokémon Go uses the real world and Google Maps as its game board, so Blood Red Dreaming uses the real world in its gameplay.
As Geo-Caching sends people out to places in the real world to find secrets, so Blood Red Dreaming sends players out to the real world as well.

A Game of Magic

Play is broadly divided into Excursions and Incursions. Excursions take place out in the real world. Incursions take place in the world of story. Excursions send players into the Bonelands. Incursions send Psychonauts into the Shadowlands.

Theatrical Gameplay

Blood Red Dreaming is not a game. Blood Red Dreaming is a story that uses a game to tell itself. The purpose of the Storyteller is to keep this true. The game elements of Blood Red Dreaming can easily overpower the story. Games want to be played. But stories want to be told, and the Storyteller is here to be sure that this is true. This is a game you tell and a story you play. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, it just has to be a story.