The Blood Tax: Campaign Setting & Modular D&D 5E Adventures

The Blood Tax

 The Blood Tax is a dark fantasy TTRPG campaign set in the Crimson Crucible, a city-state built on ritual combat, spectacle, patronage and survival. Players both battle in gladiatorial games and uncover the social and economic systems that profit from their blood, suffering and fame.

The Arena stands at the heart of it all, but the Crucible is much more than just sand and steel. It is a city of traders, priests, handlers, nobles, bookmakers, scavengers and beasts.

This campaign and setting work with any system and are compatible with D&D 5E. It is designed for a group of 1st-level characters who will advance to 12th level as the story unfolds.

In The Blood Tax, you will:

• Attempt to survive a series of ritual gladiatorial games in which spectacle is as important as winning.
• Deal with factions that see you as an asset, a symbol, an investment, an omen or even a disposable myth.
• Build your reputation with the Crucible Reputation System. It can lift you up, ruin you or completely change who you are.
• Uncover the machinery behind the games: the economy, the religions and the quiet agreements that keep it all running.
• Find out what the Blood Tax was really created to serve.
• Decide what it really means to escape or rise in a system built to contain both.

You can try to break the system. You can try to rise within it. You might even choose to help it survive, but you cannot ignore it. The Crucible already has a place for you. All you can do now is step forward, give them something worth watching and quietly hope that when the time comes, you are not the most interesting one to die that day.

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Welcome to the Crucible

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Forged at the Table

The Campaign

At the heart of The Blood Tax is a three-part campaign of interwoven arcs, designed to take characters from desperate survival to terrible revelation.

The campaign begins with a focused, linear introduction that brings the players into the Crimson Crucible, teaches them the brutal logic of the Blood Tax and places them under the gaze of the Crowd. From there, it expands outwards into a series of linked adventures across the city-state: arena bouts, faction entanglements, rivalries, punishments, recoveries, investigations, patronage offers, religious omens, escape attempts and social manoeuvring inside the machine that owns them.

Then, as the Sacred Calendar approaches its climax, those threads begin to tighten. Factions recruit. Patrons meddle. Priests interpret. Enemies remember. Every favour becomes a debt. Every victory changes what the Crucible thinks you are. Beneath the pageantry, the rituals point toward an older purpose, a sacred lie and a presence that has waited far longer than any champion.

The campaign can be run as a rising full-length story, a sequence of modular adventures linked by character choices or a collection of chapters and scenes that can be expanded, re-ordered, shortened or dropped into your own world.

Inside, gamemasters will find everything needed to run thrilling sessions at the table:

• Read-aloud text and dialogue seeds for encounters, challenges, locations, characters, monsters and items.
• GM advice drawn from hundreds of hours of running the campaign, including guidance on mood, pacing, player engagement, faction pressure, Crucible status and tying subplots back into the core adventure.
• Arena bouts, social encounters, investigations, rituals, rival champions, monsters, art, stat blocks and campaign tools.
• Modular material that works for veteran gamemasters, newer gamemasters, and tables that want to use the campaign as written or to carve pieces of the Crucible into their own setting.

Many thrilling sessions await your players: stories of blood, debt, ambition, survival and the slow discovery of why the institutions formed in the first place.

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The Gamemaster's Guide

• Main campaign arc: uncover the sacred lie behind the Blood Tax as the Sacred Calendar nears and the Saint Below begins to awaken.
   
• Key storylines for each faction:
  • Priesthood of the Red Tithe: enter the machinery of faith, where every wound is measured, every omen becomes a weapon and priests keep half-remembered truths suppressed.
  • Noble Houses: witness the cold, calculated cruelty of the Noble Houses, as House Serridan uses patronage and reputation in high-stakes power games.
  • Betting Houses: follow the money through Widow's Red, where odds are as reliable as prophecies and the house always knows which deaths are still up for negotiation.
• Mechanics custom-built for the Crucible:
  • Crucible Reputation System: track how the city sees your characters - whether as brutes, icons, omens, disappointments, investments or legends.
  • Entity Pressure System: measure how the First Witness’s attention grows as blood, fear, failed rituals and new discoveries bring it closer to the surface.
  • Tithe Value System: determine what each fight, injury, sacrifice and death means to the priests, the crowd, the factions and the ever-hungry sand.
• Major location adventures: run focused adventures built around the Red Basilica, Beast Pits, Drain Galleries, Confession Cells, Courts, barracks and other important sites in the Crucible.
   
• Single-session one-shot adventures: jump right into shorter, vivid scenarios featuring major NPCs, famous battles, faction betrayals, sacred accidents, public executions and daily life in the city-state.
   
• and much more...

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The Setting Manual

• Faction Interactions: Priests bless what nobles support, nobles buy what bookmakers price, bookmakers take advantage of what priests hide and everyone claims the system is necessary.
  • Priesthood of the Red Tithe: deciding which wounds matter, which deaths are holy and how much truth the city can survive before the Saint Below takes notice.
  • Noble Houses: using fighters to gain prestige, create scandals, claim property, make art and fuel inheritance disputes in their struggle for power.
  • Betting Houses: offering certainty in a city where every rumour, injury, betrayal and prophecy comes with its own odds.
• High Houses:
  • Red Ledgers: with cold arithmetic, the Red Ledgers turns blood, debt and sponsorship into accounts that are always settled at someone else's expense.
  • Gilded Maw: focusing on appetite and show, the Gilded Maw consumes luxury, fighters, scandals and reputations with perfect manners.
  • Measure of Saints: wrapped in piety, the Measure of Saints invests in beautiful suffering and calls its profits moral clarity.
  • Velvet Dividend: with gentle words and firm control, the Velvet Dividend knows that cruelty is most profitable when it is disguised as something pleasant.
• Low Books:
  • Chalk Maw: street-corner odds and quick chalk marks turn panic, gossip and false information into fast money.
  • Beggar's Tally: prices the desperate end of the market, where the smallest wagers often carry the sharpest need.
  • Split Coin: focused on divided loyalties, fixed outcomes and bets made by people with inside knowledge.
  • Widow's Red: travelling through laundries, bathhouses and washing yards dealing in hidden wounds, blood loss and poison rumours.
• Role of the Common People: meet the survivors who keep the Crucible running, the people too small to control the system, including:
  • Beastmasters: breed, break, drug, worship, fear and occasionally love the creatures and monstrosities served up to the spectacle.
  • Wardens and Overseers: keep the Crucible running with keys, punishments, favours, schedules and the knowledge that every fighter is easier to control before they become famous.
  • Citizens: live in the Arena's shadow, cheering for what they fear and fearing what they need.
  • Arena Officials: the clerks of public violence, ensuring the right deaths happen at the right time, in front of the right witnesses.
• The Hollow Bastion: explore the intake chains, the Kennel, the barracks, Processional Ways, Bloodworks, Overseers' Spine and Lower Seals of the prison-barracks complex where fighters are sorted, broken, branded, healed and sent up to be seen.
   
• The Upper Terraces: walk the polished heights of the Crucible, from the Patronage Hall, to the Houses of Golden Witness, Iron Ledgers, Broken Laurels, Perfumed Knives and other noble courts.
   
• The Arena: enter the sacred machine itself: Noble Skyboxes, Priests' Dais, Red Basilica, Processional Ring, Sand, Lower Works, and all the mechanisms that create theatre, theology and public record.
   
• The Undercroft: drop through the Upper Descent, Drain Galleries, Choir Chambers, Confession Cells, Old Shrines and Sealed Red Doors.
   
• The Deep: beyond the Mouthward Stair, the Landings and the Lower Silence lies the part of the Crucible that no faction truly controls.
   
• and much more...

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The Player's Handbook

• Introduction to Play: learn what it means to enter the Crimson Crucible as a player: someone the city has decided can be spent.
   
• What is the Blood Tax: a player-facing guide to the ritual games, the public spectacle, the sacred excuses and the hungry social machine.
   
• Character Creation: build a fighter, captive, exile, debtor, volunteer, noble disgrace, condemned innocent or useful fool that fits naturally into the world.
   
• Origins and Backgrounds: choose where your character came from before the Crucible took notice and decide which parts of that life still matter.
   
• Species and Ancestry: adapt familiar fantasy ancestries into the Crucible's brutal social order, where difference may be exoticised, feared, sponsored or punished.
   
• Equipment: enter a realm in which every blade, shield, chain, charm, costume piece, hidden tool and stolen scrap has a story, a price and probably an owner.
   
• Adventuring Tips: player-facing guidance for moving through the Crucible between bouts: resting, recovering, bargaining, spying, training, sneaking, surviving and deciding who to trust.
   
• Glossary of the Crucible: a player-facing reference for the terms, institutions, colours, factions, titles, rituals and whispered phrases.
   
• and much more...

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Available in Obsidian Vault

For backers who want the full contents of the books in a prep-friendly digital format, The Blood Tax will also be available as an Obsidian Vault add-on. That means the material can sit in a linked, searchable structure built for out-of-the-box campaign prep, note-tracking, cross-referencing and live table use. If your preferred way to run games is with your notes open, your links handy and your worldbuilding connected, these add-ons are built for you.

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Available in Amsel Suite

For backers who use the Amsel Suite in their workflow, the books will also be available as Amsel Lore and Amsel Tome files as an add-on. If you prefer to run your campaigns inside the tools you already use, this gives you another way to carry the Crucible to the table.

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Rewards Summary

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Sample Pages

Sample pages will be shared here to give backers a clear look at the finished format, tone, art direction and table-ready usability. As soon as the layout is finalised for a representative sample location, NPC, beast of the Arena and adventure they will be shared here.

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Fulfillment

Pledge Manager

After the close of the campaign, and closer to fulfillment, we will be using the Kickstarter Pledge Manager to handle collection of Sales Tax, VAT and Shipping Costs.

The Pledge Manager will allow backers to confirm their shipping address and receive digital rewards (which will also be fulfilled through DriveThruRPG so that you can have access to those items in your DTRPG lLibrary.

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UK / EU Value Added Tax

Depending on your country of residence, your order may be subject to Value Added Tax. Kickstarter will calculate this VAT at the end of the campaign and collect this fee on behalf of the backer and remit it to the relevant authority. This charge is not a part of your initial pledge.

Fulfillment of Digital Rewards

Fulfillment of all digital rewards will be handled through DriveThruRPG (you will also receive digital goods through the Pledge Manager). When the DM's Guide, Player's Handbook, and Setting Manual are finished, polished and all art is in, backers will receive an email through DriveThruRPG with a code for each digital download. This will include any additional files found in the books so that you can use them digitally if desired.

We estimate that digital rewards will be polished and ready in August of 2026, but this is subject to the vagaries of production and backers will be kept informed of the state of the project with frequent updates on this kickstarter campaign.

Fulfillment of Premium Hardcover

When the digital versions of the books are complete, print files will be prepared and sent to the printer for verification and proofing. Physical proofs will be sent for approval, and once that is given the books will move into full production and ship shortly after that.

You will have the ability to change your shipping address through the Pledge Manager until addresses are locked. An update will be posted in advance of locking addresses to alert backers to make any last minute changes. When addresses are locked through the Pledge Manager, backers will receive a final email alerting them that they have 48 hours to make any changes.

Fulfillment and shipping of the Premium Hardcover books is anticipated to happen in November of 2026, but this is subject to the vageries of production. If there are any delays or hiccups, transparent communication will be issued to backers.

Shipping for physical goods will be charged after the close of the campaign, and closer to the time of fulfillment. This is a charge that backers are responsible for in addition to their pledge. Shipping payments will be collected through the Kickstarter Pledge Manager shortly after shipping addresses are locked.

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As of early 2026, many European postal operators have also suspended service to several additional Middle East destinations due to regional instability. Carrier service to some other destinations not listed here may also be unavailable or unreliable. This list is not exhaustive.