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The Blood of Dawnwalker’s hero, Coen, begins with a predictably humble origin story common to many fantasy heroes. Outside the small matter of a looming blood mass, where villagers feed on their vampiric overlords’ blood to ward off the plague, you meet him on just another day in the unremarkable life of an impoverished former-sellsword’s son. He starts out chopping wood, checking traps for hares, playing tag with his energetic siblings, and haggling with the local herbalist over his mother’s desperately needed medicine. 

I assumed this inauspicious beginning would become a distant memory once I, playing as Coen, imbibed the supernatural vampiric powers of a Dawnwalker. Surely I’m destined to become rich, powerful, and respected, I thought. I’ll become a willing participant to political machinations within gilded halls of renown. Maybe I’ll even get on the property ladder like in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and start my own IKEA collection.

No such thing happened. Instead, I was delighted to find Dawnwalker rejects that played-out routine of upward mobility. I was never wooed and welcomed into the halls of the vrakhiri; the game's vampire ruling class reviled me to the last. I firmly remained a peasant, an upstart subject challenging their feudal vampiric hierarchy. Dawnwalker may take place in the 14th Century, but the sense of class solidarity I saw makes for a very modern fantasy.

From Gareth the Arthurian knight to Oliver Twist, there’s a long line of fictional characters who treat poverty and precarity as a state to overcome and entirely forget once they’ve acquired  wealth and power. Games aren’t immune: My Dragon Age: Origins City Elf playthrough started in the slums but invariably ended in the throne room; And, for all Atlus’s nods to more democratic governance models, Metaphor: ReFantazio’s protagonist still sets aside his humble Elda roots for the Euchronia highlife.

And we can’t forget Geralt, the protagonist of The Witcher series and perhaps the defining hero of the fantasy RPG genre. With Rebel Wolves being founded by several CD Projekt staff, including The Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, The White Wolf is perhaps the most interesting comparison of all. Witchers are treated lower than peasants, yet, despite his claim to eke out a living from patchy contracts, Geralt still gets swept into the ruling class’s orbit. He treats with royals and enjoys their hospitality--even their bathtubs. Remember Geralt’s famous scrubdown? It comes right before his audience with the Emperor of Nilfgaard.

Put it this way: If you toss a coin to Geralt, he likely spends it at the tavern or smithy. If you toss a coin to Coen, that poor lad desperately needs it to feed his impoverished family.

That defiant attitude toward those who think they’re Coen’s betters shapes Dawnwalker’s worldview of power, class, and politics. It extends far beyond Coen; even accounting for branching decisions, it’s etched across its worldbuilding and systems. 

It’s seen in its vampires, who aren’t the kind to inspire class envy like the stylish, seductive, and sophisticated modern vampire. Brutish, cruel, and repulsively ugly, the vrakhiri hew closer to the original Eastern European folk tales that first inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For Brencis and his boyars, eternal life doesn’t come with eternal beauty. But it doesn’t matter when power comes first. Wealth is a welcome, but secondary, consideration.

And it’s equally visible across the extent of the vrakhiri's blood-tithe regime, which imposes industrialized cruelty across the valley. Peasants wade into fetid swamps as they farm for leeches, fed on their blood and stored for vrakhiri snacks. Handpicked maidens are trafficked under guard across Vale Sangora for unknown sinister ends. And boyar Bakir runs bloodthirsty battle royales where volunteers fight for his favor.

That feudal system of extortion is mapped out across the open world and through the game’s reputation system. You accrue notoriety, not political influence. That metasystem places Coen as a destructive interruption to an exploitative machine, well-oiled with peasant blood.

And yet, for all the vrakhiri's monstrousness, Rebel Wolves draws a complicated and unresolvable comparison between the vrakhiri and the valley’s former ruler. For many peasants, the new vampiric rulers are little different to the previous knyaz. Their new lords at least offer protection from the plague that’s taken the lives of millions across the rest of Europe, in exchange for serving as a living factory farm prone to ruthless displays of violence. 

After upending the social order and reducing nobles and knights to peasants, the vrakhiri can genuinely be seen as an equalizing force. Life was already poor, nasty, brutish, and short for the peasantfolk. Now that the underclass has expanded to everyone else, peasants rejoice in seeing one-time nobles now play jesters or serve as a moveable feast for the vrakhiri court. 

When commoners now play key roles in boyar courts, their loyalties are divided to the point many don’t need to be coerced by fear or propaganda to fight Coen to preserve the new status quo. For the peasants working towards Bakir’s inexhaustible taste for alcohol, or filling barrels full of (former peasant) Ambrus’s blood-fattened leeches, consistent pay beats the hardship of subsistence farming. And when either variation on society treats humanity as livestock to exploit, your choice of farmer can still make a difference. That choice between familiar or supernatural oppression is the moral conflict behind many of Coen’s decisions. 

Nevertheless, everyday life continues under the nobles’ shadow. And when you spend time in the communities you encounter, rather than chasing mystical swords, sabotaging boyars, or marshalling allies, it holds weight due to the ongoing countdown to your family’s slaughter. When the game invites you to help your father’s friend Volk--an aged, blind, and disconcertingly horny man--there’s a tangible cost: the lost time. Yet still, I fix his windows and slay the wolves roaming nearby, all for scant reward. When I ask Volk if he needs anything else, the ungrateful codger cheekily tries his luck for a footrub! 

The pattern repeats when I pursue a quest in Svartrau City, wherein the only way I can proceed is by spending hours helping nuns tend to the sick and dressing their wounds. These unwanted duties could feel like a waste of time, but I do them gladly. These acts feel earned, like they're more than just RPG busywork; these scenarios replicate communities surviving atrocity through mutual care and favours. 

Coen isn’t the only peasant who dreams of taking matters into his own hands. The careless, reckless Manumits share the same intention of taking down the vrakhiri. Drawing their support from the populace, or at least those their rash actions haven’t angered, Crake and his forces don’t easily draw my sympathies or allegiance. For him, peasants are collateral damage. Crake’s win-at-all-costs attitude even tempts him to consider calling for aid from nobles outside the valley. When that act risks recreating the same tyranny that made Brencis the more palatable despot, his ending felt the worst option to me by far--only slightly better than the one in which Coen simply abandons Vale Sangora by leaving the valley forever through a forgotten mountain pass.

Dawnwalker’s vampiric metaphor for the ruling classes resonates all the more today, when working-class precarity has heightened to the stage it’s been compared to neo-feudalism: Hypercapitalism extracts labor from our bodies for ever-dwindling rewards, while big tech extracts the expression of our emotions and intellect, just to sell it back to us. Pitted against such overwhelming forces, those old fantasies of joining the elite or effecting change as a benevolent ruler don’t cut it anymore.

I’m reminded each time I defeat one of Brencis’s boyars, plunging my fangs into a defeated adversary’s neck, that peasant power is where my class allegiances truly lie. When the monsters and their insatiable greed are real, The Blood of Dawnwalker knows the solution isn’t to join them: It’s to eat the rich.