Cursed Blood, part 6 - The Ascended
Cursed Blood Old School EssentialsCursed Blood is the codename for a Castlevania inspired setting of psychoactive horror I'm working on.
Despite starting from a place of "vampires are the bad guys", I noticed how Miserable Secrets by Rose Bailey never referred to them as such. I liked that.
To make the primary monsters of our game more unearthly and less like Bela Lugosi, I decided that they were ten or more feet tall.
I was also thinking a lot about Castlevania, the primary influence of the setting, both the video games and the cartoon. Look at how big Dracula is there! These creatures would tower over humans. When wandering one of their castles, the furniture is at a 2x scale,hopefully giving the impression of being a doll wandering through a human house, or Jack in the Beanstalk in the giant's dining room.
I also wanted to explore an idea posited by the very first episode of the cartoon. Dracula wasn't just an immortal warlord, but his castle possessed a thousand wonders, and served as a repository for an incredible amount of human knowledge. These creatures have a real interest in preserving humanity's works. Also notable in the animated Castlevania show is the reliance of the vampires on human necromancers to raise their armies. In Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, it's suggested that vampires lose their capacity for art. Here, our Ascended hold all the land and the power and collect the fruit of humanity's labors. But while they can wield magic, they can't create new spells. They can mimic human brushstrokes, but they cannot paint something truly meaningful on their own. They simply lack the ability. There may be a societal metaphor available there - I really couldn't say.
Taking certain other things (they mate with humans and produce offspring, for example) and we've pretty much discarded vampires as a concept. I started to relate them instead to the Enochian angels from the Gnostic gospels, who I half-remember as giants ruling the Earth. I haven't checked since I'm not sure where I read that to begin with.
I've also been working through the first Berserk hardcover from Dark Horse and I wanted to incorporate some of the the demon energy from that into these creatures. Some of the elders, then (Baron Larkhill, for example) consume not just the blood, but the flesh of their victimes. None of the Ascended need to feed, in my reckoning. Perhaps it is that they are gradually turning into great sharks, compelled by the degeneration of their mind and soul to consume humanity.
Berserk serves as a great touchpoint for Cursed Blood, although I think I would tone down the relentless nihilism for more of an esoteric fantasy.
The Ascended in Cursed Blood #
- The Ascended are and have always been.
- They own most of the land in the known world. Much of humanity works the farmland and pasture that surrounds their castles. They tolerate the existence of various cities and freeholds as long as a spear is never raised against them.
- They possess a variety of sorcerous powers. Some have incredible control over their form, with the ability to become mists or animals, others are merely thousands of times faster or stronger than humans. Very few know the viral language of control, called Mormore in folklore, that lets them implant suggestions in the human mind. These suggestions are communicable and can unfold in small ways or lie dormant for decades.
- They know a great deal about human biology, having had a millenia to dissect and understand the human body. However, the fact that so few of them die has led to a dearth of anatomical studies on their own kind, and they know far less about their own internals.
- They reproduce sexually but are nearly infertile. This leads to them occasionally impregnating human women. It's whispered that those who can become animals also father children with wolves, bears, and other beasts, leaving a wilderness scattered with magical chimera.
- The Ascended do not know where they come from, nor do they have any special cosmological knowledge. Many of them worship the same God or gods as humanity. The primary church of Cursed Blood is the Church of the Gift, which places The Ascended directly after the Holy Trinity in terms of primacy.
- The Ascended do not need to feed on human blood, but doing so is extremely pleasurable. Some are said to feed on human flesh, and there are as many preferences for specific flavors of humans as there are Ascended. The Larkhills, for example, find the taste of alcohol in human blood to be revolting - others may prefer only senior citizens, or the very young. Some have renounced feeding. Others insist that it is not necessary to kill when feeding.
- There is a long standing taboo amongst the Ascended about leaving people who've seen them feed alive.
- The Ascended cannot create great art but are known to be great appreciators and aesthetes.
The Castles #
A novel aspect of the Ascended is their residences. They long ago mastered the art of binding infernal powers into the stone and wood of their castles. Their homes are thus nearly sentient - they often seem bigger on the inside, contain secret rooms that not even the owners know about, and are packed with magical artifacts and treasures. All sort of infernal creatures spawn in the depths of these houses, and it's difficult to take the same path through it twice.
It's just as well, because every one of these castles has a defense system. If activated, it transforms and takes on a new aspect - some grow into enormous towers, others reconfigure from stately manors into dungeons and bunkers. Oftentimes, the human staff might be wholesale killed by this transformation. Adventurers who've triggered this transformation are usually deep enough into the castle that escaping means fording a whole new set of traps and trials on the way out. More than just the original keep but in reverse, it is instead a nightmarish revision, the parodic version you'd find scrawled by a lunatic who'd walked through it once and now remembers a castle that never was.