Cursed Blood, part 1 - Baron Larkhill

Cursed Blood is the codename for a Castlevania inspired setting of psychoactive horror.

Cursed Blood posits a world ruled by vampires, referred to as the Ascended. We originally started by creating characters for the game Miserable Secrets by Rose Bailey, as we were looking to play in a Castlevania style world. As time went on, it tended to bend towards a sort of horror inflected OSR experience. That is because of the kind of play I favor, which is heavy on discovering the world and the lore held within through exploration and problem solving.

My initial conception of the game, though, was that the player characters would inhabit the city of Basarab, a riverside city sandwiched between two powerful yet different members of the Ascended, and that the game would consist of politicking and adventuring in this city which was forever under threat of invasion and domination. I know better at this point in my game playing career to complain about things not going as I imagined.

The two strongholds of the Ascended flanking the city of Basarab are Larkhill and Thessaly.

Baron Larkhill #

Larkhill is the estate of the extremely old and dissolute Baron Larkhill. There are some who say the Ascended, many of whom were once human, suffer from the same diseases of old age as humans, but on an appropriately vampiric scale and level of horror. The Baron Larkhill seems to be proof of this. The death of his wife, along with his extreme old age, seems to have gradually driven him insane. There are rumors that you might find him living in his own filth at the top of the large, ominous tower at the center of the Larkhill estate.

These rumors are true. The Baron is insane, and possibly suffering from dementia. He spends most of his time sitting perfectly still in his small, dark chamber. Once or twice a year, he feeds on a villager from below, and he will oftentimes stretch that feeding out over several agonizing days, during which some awful screams are heard coming from his tower. These are dutifully ignored by his retinue.

In the time before, when the Ascended liberated the earth from the clutches of the great machine gods, Baron Larkhill was a great general. As such, the other Ascended ignore his dissolution. His children take advantage of his madness to run roughshod over his kingdom and the lowly serfs that tend to it.

The Baron loved his wife, and loves his children, in his way.

The Baron appears as he did when he was turned, as a lithe, beautiful blond man of about 19. He possesses a wide variety of powers commensurate with his age, but largely favors the usage of enormous strength, his teeth, and his claws, as well as silently gliding in and out of combat when presented with a prey to stalk. He should be treated as an extremely deadly adversary fit for combat with a party of intermediate ability.

• "Castlevania art arte" by barité is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

• Next: Cursed Blood, part 2 - Larkhill Village