A dark academia solo journaling game from the creator of The Wretched, bringing new mechanisms and methods of storytelling to the Wretched & Alone engine.
A body lies hidden, a secret buried deep within the ivy-covered walls of an elite academy. You and your friends have committed a murder. Now, as the investigation closes in, you must decide what you’re willing to sacrifice to protect the truth.
Blood In The Margins is a solo journaling game built on the Wretched & Alone framework, blending the intrigue of dark academia with the weight of a terrible crime. Inspired by The Secret History, If We Were Villains, The Cloisters, and Babel, the game unfolds in three acts, guiding you through your time at the academy, the fateful events that led to the murder, and the aftermath as the walls close in. Will you escape suspicion, or will the truth seep through the cracks?
Because I know there's a lot of text on this page, here's a very quick overview of what's on offer here!
A new Wretched & Alone game, Blood In The Margins.
A reprint of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, out of print since 2020.
A short story chapbook as a £5 add-on, free to all physical backers in the first 48 hours. You can read that story here.
A limited edition bookplate if you back this project and GAST.
A structured three act solo journaling experience where your choices shape the fate of your character.
Card-based prompts guide you through life at the academy, the crime itself, and the final reckoning.
A setting that shifts between literary crime fiction and academic magic, shaped entirely by you and the decisions you make as you play.
A compact, beautifully designed book perfect for immersive storytelling.
Based on the Wretched & Alone system, a framework for solo games about isolation, dread, and inevitable consequences. Play with new mechanisms that build on five years of extensive playtesting, or construct your tumbling block tower and play classic Wretched & Alone.
I'm keeping things simple with this campaign. I'm printing Blood In The Margins and reprinting The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches, and that's it. (Head to the Add-Ons section to learn about The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches). No stretch goals, nothing to slow down fulfillment. Just the book, in your hands, as quickly as possibly. You can pick from the following pledge levels:
£20 Bundle: A physical copy of Blood In The Margins, plus the reprint of The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches. Includes digital editions.
£12 Physical Edition: A beautifully printed book delivered to your door. Includes digital edition.
£8 Digital Edition: PDF and epub copies of Blood In The Margins, ready to play.
Blood In The Marginswill be printed on 130gsm silk paper with a sturdy 300gsm recycled paper cover with matt lamination. If you've bought one of my zines in the past, it will feel very similar to them. My plan is for this to be saddle stitched, but the game is much larger than previous Wretched & Alone games and depending on the final page count after layout is completed, it may be perfect bound.
Below are some digital mockups to give you an idea of the interior aesthetic and the direction I'm going in with layout. Body text is set in Fanwood, with large titles and drop caps in LTC Goudy Text.
A mockup of the zine. Layout and cover design may change between now and project end.
When The Wretched first came to crowdfunding back in 2020, I wrote a Wretched & Alone game called The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches as a stretch goal for that campaign. It went out of print immediately, and has never been reprinted. Until now.
A digital mockup of a tarot-card-sized zine titled THE WONDERFULL DISCOVERIE OF WITCHES.
The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches is a game about human resilience in the face of overwhelming odds and almost certain death. It is a game about being separated from a community you loved, isolated and singled out and called witch, traitor, demon. It is a game about fear - both yours, and that of those arounds you. It is a game about not being believed. It's available as an £8 add-on, or in the £20 Wretched & Alone Bundle reward tier.
The Interview - Signed & Numbered Chapbook
Blood In The Margins is a game inspired by literature, drawing heavily on a specific genre of fiction. To celebrate dark academia as a genre, I've written a short story called The Interview - an inverted murder mystery about a killing at an elite academy, and the slow unravelling of the attmpt to cover it up.
A mockup of The Interview in chapbook form.
The epub version of The Interview is already available to read for free, and can be downloaded here. As part of this campaign I'm printing a physical version in a limited edition signed and numbered chapbook. It's available as a £5 add-on, but backers who support the project in the first 48 hours at a physical tier will receive a copy for free.
Mockups of bookplates for GAST and Blood In The Margins
Back both this campaign and GAST to get a pair of exclusive bookplates!
I'm incredibly excited to collaborate with Hatched Games on their first GAST Horror Zine collection, which will be producing a boxed set of brand new solo horror games. Please be sure to back both projects before both campaigns end to receive a special, exclusive, free bookplate. The bookplate will be added to backers' carts after the campaign ends.
The image on the Blood In The Margins bookplate is W Heath Robinson's illustration of Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Haunted Palace. The poem depicts the decline of a once-great palace and the ruined monarch who dwells within, cataloguing the descent of a brilliant mind descending into madness. It was originally published as a standalone poem but later incorporated into The Fall of the House of Usher, where it is presented as a song recited by Roderick Usher. I've loved Robinson's work since I found a copy of Uncle Lubin in a second-hand book shop as a child, and I think the themes of The Haunted Palace evoked in this image are a perfect fit for a game about the quest for knowledge and a descent into ruin.
Blood In The Margins is fully written and is currently with my editor. The funds raised will go directly towards paying my editor and funding the costs of printing. By backing now, you ensure you’ll be among the first to receive a copy.
Timeline: One month for editing and layout, two weeks for printing. Shipping begins shortly after.
Production: All copies will be produced and shipped directly by me. I've been fulfilling print products for the last 5 years, and have my processes perfected.
Community: Join the Loot The Room Discord to share your stories and connect with other players.
I’m Chris Bissette, an award winning game designer and musician, and the original creator of The Wretched, the game that inspired the Wretched & Alone system. Over the years I’ve explored themes of isolation, survival, and inevitable collapse through game design, and Blood In The Margins represents the next evolution of that framework.
Beyond solo games, I’ve written for Fallout: The Roleplaying Game, Pathfinder 2, Discworld, and Dungeon Crawl Classics, bringing my love of immersive storytelling and rich world building to a wide range of settings. Whether designing sprawling adventures or deeply personal journaling games, my work is driven by a fascination with memory, identity, and the ways we construct meaning from our experiences. If you're in the UK, I currently have a new solo journalling experience showing as part of the Weird Hope Engines exhibition at Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham, which will be running throughout this campaign.
You can follow me on Bluesky, join me on Discord, or join my Patreon for behind the scenes access to everything I do.
🎲 WELCOME TO POCKETOPIA—a celebration of portable easy-to-learn tabletop games featuring 50+ creators launching together on BackerKit from March 13 - April 3!
🏆 Here’s how you can earn exclusive event rewards:
Cross-Collab Freebies: Look for projects marked as Cross-Collab partners! Back both projects to earn a FREE reward from each creator. The more pairs you support, the more freebies you collect! Blood In The Margins is cross-collaborating with GAST!
Pocketopia Dice Bag: Back 6 projects or more to unlock this exclusive reward, surveyed and shipped by BackerKit.
⚔️ Rewards at a glance:
2 FREE rewards for every Cross-Collab pair you back (one from each creator!)
1 FREE limited edition Pocketopia 2025 Dice Bag when you back 6+ projects
⭐ PRO TIP: Maximize your freebies by supporting Cross-Collab pairs! For example, support 3 Cross-Collab pairs (6 projects) to earn up to 6 exclusive freebies while unlocking the Dice Bag!
*Only pledges to physical reward tiers or main digital offerings (if no physical items are offered) qualify towards earning these limited FREEBIES. Please refer to individual project pages for unlock requirements.
I'll be collecting shipping for physical rewards after the campaign ends, once everything is printed and in hand. It's impossible to know how much this will be exactly.
If you want to take a look at current shipping prices from the UK, the Royal Mail website is the best place to check that. I'll be offering international customers options with and without tracking, so you can save some money if you aren't concerned about knowing exactly where your package is as it crosses the globe.
Until the book is actually printed and in hand I won't know how heavy the parcel is. What I can tell you is that it will almost certainly fall under the "Large Letter" parcel size, and will likely weigh somewhere around 400 grams once packaged up. This may not be entirely accurate, but this is my best guess based on several years of printing similarly-sized books.
This game is a love letter to dark academia and the storytelling possibilities of solo journalling, and a return to the system that built my career. Whether you’re drawn to its crime fiction roots or the hint of the supernatural, I can’t wait for you to experience Blood In The Margins.
