The Blood of Dawnwalker's vampires are written as rational actors, not cartoon villains

Rebel Wolves narrative director Jakub Szamalek has explained how the studio built the vampire mythology and villain roster for The Blood of Dawnwalker — and why he refused to write antagonists who are simply evil for evil's sake.

The game is set during the Black Death in a valley called Vale Sangora, seized by a vampire lord named Brencis who murdered the human ruler Skender and installed himself as feudal overlord. Brencis isn't a cackling supervillain — Szamalek describes him as a rational actor with a specific political project: replacing classical medieval feudalism with what the studio calls vampiric feudalism, where the population pays taxes in both coin and blood and swears allegiance to their vampire lord. Brencis was born to Roman nobility, which makes him as calculating and dignified as he is cruel. He rules through a carefully selected court of four vampires, each with centuries or millennia of accumulated personality flaws and personal agendas. The vampire mythology itself is built around a single image Szamalek kept returning to — teeth. In Dawnwalker's lore, a vampire can only sire new spawn by sacrificing one of their own fangs, breaking it from their jaw and burying it in the flesh of their chosen victim. Because procreation works this way, older vampires grow extra rows of teeth over time, which eventually begin erupting through the skin in unexpected places. The oldest vampires are covered in teeth breaking through from all over their bodies, pushing the design into outright body horror territory.

Rebel Wolves is a studio founded by former CD Projekt Red developers, including creative director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz who led The Witcher 3. The Blood of Dawnwalker is their debut game, and the emphasis on morally coherent antagonists fits squarely in that lineage — The Witcher series built its reputation partly on villains who had comprehensible, even sympathetic motivations. Grounding Brencis in a concrete political ideology rather than generic world-domination ambitions gives the court members something to actually disagree about, which is where the individual character work pays off.

The court's four members each have distinct goals that shape the campaign's structure — the game's menu apparently tracks them as individual targets rather than treating them as interchangeable boss encounters. How players engage with or dismantle Brencis's system looks set to be the central dramatic engine of the whole game.