The most counterintuitive thing about The Blood of Dawnwalker is that it doesn’t force you to pick a side. You can’t. The game’s whole design resists faction loyalty—because the protagonist, Coen, is a Dawnwalker, a vampire-human hybrid who belongs to no clan, no coven, no kingdom. He’s an outsider twice over: too human for the vampires who won the war, too monstrous for the people he’s trying to save. That’s not a limitation. It’s the entire point.
Most RPGs hand you a faction menu and let you grind reputation. This one does the opposite. The Blood of Dawnwalker sets you loose in 14th century Europe—a world where vampires have already won. They rule. They don’t hide in castles and brood. They govern, they tax, they hunt dissidents. And you, Coen, are a newly made Dawnwalker. You have thirty days (in-game) to rescue your family from the vampire lord Brencis. Every quest you take is a side quest—and every side quest is your main quest. Because time doesn’t pause. The clock runs.
So what factions exist in this pressure cooker? Let’s break them down by what we actually know from the developers and official materials.
The Vampire Lords: The Victorious Elite
These aren’t sparkly aristocrats sipping wine from crystal goblets. The Blood of Dawnwalker’s vampires are conquerors. They’ve subjugated most of Veil Sangora, the game’s open-world region. They don’t hide their nature—they wear it like a crown. The key figure is Brencis, the vampire lord who holds Coen’s family captive. The source material calls him out directly: “Storm Bren’s castle as soon as you are out of the prologue. However, remember that defeating him as a freshly made Dawnwalker will be a feat worthy of legends.”
That’s not just a boss fight warning. It tells us the vampire hierarchy is rigid. Brencis sits at the top of whatever passes for nobility in this blood-soaked society. Below him? Other lords, enforcers, and probably a court of sycophants who feed on fear as much as blood.
The vampires didn’t crawl out of the shadows to take over. They fought a war and won. The source phrases it bluntly: “vampires won their life.” That choice of words—“their life”—implies a struggle for survival and dominance. These aren’t cursed creatures hiding from sunlight. They’re victors rewriting history in their own image.
Brencis and His Inner Circle
Brencis isn’t just a big bad. He’s a tactical genius who controls a castle and a regime. The developers emphasize you can charge his stronghold early, but you’ll get flattened unless you’re absurdly good or absurdly lucky. That suggests the game respects faction power scaling. Vampire lords aren’t pushovers. They earned their place through centuries of brutality.
We don’t have named lieutenants yet. But the existence of locked regional difficulties—where every region has a minimum-maximum difficulty ceiling based on when you first enter—means Brencis’s influence radiates outward. Some zones are safer. Others are vampire strongholds where patrols will tear you apart if you’re under-leveled. The world’s difficulty is tied to the vampire faction’s control. You don’t grind gear to access higher zones. You get stronger by making choices that destabilize their grip.
The Humans: A People Under Occupation
The humans in The Blood of Dawnwalker aren’t a single faction with a banner and a war council. They’re fragmented. Some resist. Some collaborate. Most just try to survive the vampire occupation. Coen’s goal—rescuing his loved ones—places him squarely in the human camp, at least emotionally. But mechanically, the game doesn’t give you a “join the resistance” faction quest chain. It gives you choices with consequences that ripple through the human population.
The source material mentions “you can learn the dark secrets of witchcraft” and that “you must rescue your loved ones.” Those loved ones are human. That’s your emotional tether. But the humans themselves aren’t a monolith. Some will trust you because you fight vampires. Others will spit on you because you’re part vampire. The faction’s lore is about survival under impossible odds. They’ve lost the war. Now they’re losing their identity.
There’s no mini-game for managing human morale. No reputation bar. The source specifically says “no mini-games.” The consequences play out through story branches. You might help a human settlement by eliminating a vampire patrol, but that patrol was guarding a trade route. Now merchants can’t move goods. Starvation sets in. That’s how factions work here: not through meters, but through systems that feel organic.
Witch Covens: The Third Force
Witches in The Blood of Dawnwalker operate outside the vampire-human binary. They’re not on Brencis’s side—vampire lords probably see them as threats or tools. But they’re not necessarily allies to humans either. The source describes you using “your own blood to cast hexes that enable you to speak with the dead, move faster, brave the astral plane, and bring pain to your enemies.”
That blood magic doesn’t come from vampires. Vampires drink blood. Witches spend blood. It’s a completely different relationship with the resource. Coen learns witchcraft alongside his vampire abilities, creating a hybrid skill set that neither pure vampire nor pure human could match.
The lore here is thin but suggestive. Speaking with the dead implies witches have a connection to the afterlife. The astral plane suggests a spiritual dimension separate from the physical world. Witches might be the original power in Veil Sangora—older than vampires, older than human kingdoms. They survived the vampire conquest by making deals, hiding, or being too dangerous to exterminate.
You’ll likely encounter witch covens as quest-givers, trainers, or antagonists. If the source’s line about “learning witchcraft” is literal, there’s a progression path tied to this faction. Spend blood to gain esoteric abilities. But spending blood reduces your resources for healing or vampire powers. That’s a faction trade-off: witches give you utility, but at a cost that affects your core combat loop.
The Dawnwalker: A Faction of One
This is the most important faction in the game, and it has exactly one member. Coen is a Dawnwalker—a hybrid created when a human is turned into a vampire but retains their soul, will, and mortality. The source calls it “a Rekiri or a vampire-human hybrid.” The term Dawnwalker suggests a being caught between day and night, life and undeath.
Faction lore usually positions the protagonist as an ally or enemy of established groups. The Blood of Dawnwalker reverses that. Coen is his own category. He has a wolf form (confirmed in the source), vampire combat abilities, human empathy, and witch hexes. No faction controls him. No faction fully accepts him. That isolation is the emotional core of the game.
The manual save option exists precisely because you might make a choice that locks you out of a faction permanently. The developers “encourage you to just roll with it and move on from a loss,” but they give you the safety net because the consequence system is harsh. If you betray a witch coven, you lose access to their spells. If you kill a vampire lord outside the story, the power vacuum creates chaos. The Dawnwalker isn’t just a character class. It’s a diplomatic nightmare.
How Factions Shape the Game World
Every mechanic in The Blood of Dawnwalker reinforces the faction structure. Dynamic weather isn’t cosmetic. Fog affects visibility for you and enemies. Vampire patrols might be less active during heavy rain. Witch rituals require specific celestial conditions. The weather becomes a faction tool you can exploit.
Locked regional difficulties are the developers’ way of making faction territory feel real. When you first enter a region, the game locks its difficulty to your current level and sets a max difficulty ceiling. That means vampire-controlled zones stay tough until you’re ready. But if you enter a human resistance area early, it stays easier. You’re not fighting scaling enemies. You’re fighting a world that respects its own power structures.
The playtime estimate of 50-70 hours isn’t for seeing everything. It’s for one playthrough. The source explicitly says “you can’t see it all in a single playthrough.” Each faction choice closes doors. If you side with the witches, you might lose the chance to ally with vampire dissidents. If you help humans openly, vampire lords hunt you more aggressively. Time pressure—the thirty-day countdown—means you can’t do everything. Faction commitment is baked into the schedule.
The Edge Case No One’s Talking About
Here’s where the factions get complicated. The Blood of Dawnwalker has no moral alignment system. No paragon/renegade bar. The consequence-based story uses the faction web to create moral ambiguity instead. You might destroy a witch coven to save a human village, only to discover the coven was preventing a worse evil from waking up. Or you might ally with a vampire lord against Brencis, and that lord turns out to be just as cruel, just more subtle.
The source material hints at this: “the consequence-based story is enough for those of you who want a bit of unpredictability.” Unpredictability means faction allies can betray you. Faction enemies can have justified grievances. The lore isn’t a static encyclopedia—it’s a set of living relationships that change based on your actions.
One scenario sticks out. The developers showed that you can speak with the dead. That means you can get information from people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. What happens when you use that power against a vampire lord’s ancestor? Or when a dead human reveals that the resistance leader was a vampire collaborator? The witch faction’s necromancy shakes the foundations of the other factions. That’s not a mechanic. That’s a lore bomb waiting to go off.
And that’s the thing about The Blood of Dawnwalker. Every faction holds secrets, and Coen is the one person who can uncover them all—but not in a single run. The glossary of factions isn’t a list you read once. It’s a puzzle you solve piece by piece, run by run, death by death. The vampires won the war. But the Dawnwalker might win the truth.
