the water method

rpg idea sketchbook

Cursed Blood, part 3 - Larkhill Castle

Cursed Blood Old School Essentials

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

The Building

Larkhill Castle is a sprawling manor house inhabitated by the strange vampire family for whom it is named. They run the feudal holdings of The Boot with an iron fist, and keep the village in a state of manic terror.

The Entrances

There are two entrances to Larkhill Castle. The main entrance, a large gate, is usually guarded, although they have no particular reason to turn anyone away. Unless the person entering is carrying a bunch of weapons or wearing armor, then they may have questions. Note that the Castle is pretty much entirely staffed with humans loyal to the Larkhill family. Whether or not that loyalty extends to dying for the Larkhills is still to be determined.

The second entrance is through the stables. They connect to the castle through a basement entrance. Enterprising adventurers will no doubt find other ways in. Many of the windows are easily accessible to someone with rope.

The Basement

The basement has a makeshift prison, and a tunnel that leads to a series of deeper and older catacombs. The prison is minded by a blind moderately insance half-Vampire named Alexander.

There is a single prisoner right now: an elderly woman, Mother Stone, who has been accused of witchcraft. She is well regarded in The Boot, although most think of her as a benign folk healer rather than an actual witch.

Mother Stone has been acting as a folk healer for years, but she has been accused of selling potions to grant vampiric abilities by Florence, one of the village elders. She’s actually been creating tinctures of garlic and other allium that create an trace unappealing scent on the skin of the laborers, for them to place on the skin of their children.

She possesses some real power as well, much of which she has dervied from a book entitled The Transmutation of Vision, which details a series of arcane mathematics for summoning a magical intelligence and capturing it in glass.

The Transmutation is hidden in the dank woods outside of town. It is guarded by a coterie of vengeful ghosts, souls murdered by the Larkhill clan, including those ritually murdered by the Baron in his elaborate, months long feedings.

There are depths of the dungeons where additional horrors await. The Baron has been alive for a long time. Rumors abound of an ancient skeletal dragon that was flayed by the Baron a millenia ago and still stalks the depths.

The basement has winding, poorly lit passage that leads directly to the Larkhill Residence itself.

The Main Hall

Once inside the main gates, there are a handful of discrete buildings, the largest of which is the low, sprawling Larkhill residence. It is a two story, deceptively simple building, but an ominous gothic tower bursts from the center and stretches far above the surrounding landscapes.

The Larkhill Residence Proper

The layout of the residence should be considered flexible, but when we visited it, this was roughly the order in which we approached.

  1. The kitchens are directly above the small prisons where Mother Stone was kept. In the kitchens, an array of horrors are being prepared. The nobles of Larkhill consume not only human blood, but human flesh in a variety of ways. The core of their beliefs is that the most beautiful flavor human flesh & blood can take on is the flavor that intense fear, pain, and suffering provide. The kitchens are run by a large, portly man named Brad.

The ghosts in here are absolutely unbearable. The worst kind of semi-disembodied humans, minds destroyed, who cannot fathom what happened to them.

  1. Adjacent to the kitchens is the banquet halls. Here, you might find the youngest Larkhill, the vampires Lyra. She tends to dress in riding gear or other practical clothing. Lyra, being very young, requires very little sleep and is not much bothered by sunlight, so she is eating some very suspicious looking cuts of meat.

  2. The other area on this level include the stables, in which a few incredibly fine horses live. They are being possibly being prepped for one of Fergie’s hunt. The stable hands are all terrified to even talk to the anyone they don't recognize, assuming them to be friends of Fergie, who have a tendency to kill them indiscriminately. Fergie loves his horses, which are bigger than normal horses, built for the enormous scale of vampire bodies.

  3. Lyra’s bedroom is quite small. Essentially a bed, with a nightstand, some books that don’t look like they’ve ever been opened. Under her pillow is a small silver dagger. Who is it for? There are, curiously, no ghosts here.

  4. Shaw’s bedroom is large, it is essentially a second library. There are thousands of dead cats ghosts here. Shaw hates cats, and they hate him. Shaw also has a scrying glass, in the shape of a full length mirror, that once belonged to his father. The glass is attuned to the leylines and can communicate with like glasses. Originally used in the great machine campaigns, it is now used as sort of a study network, for Noblesse and a few privileged alchemists, etc, to exchange occult and scientific ideas.

  5. You might find Shaw in the main library, lurking. There are all kinds of weird books. The Baron, one of the oldest nobles at over 1000 years old, a general in the great crusade agains the machines, has spent a great deal of time mucking about with occultism and even clockwork and machinery. Shaw himself is mostly indifferent to the visitors. People pass through the castle all the time, especially traveling scholars. The main staff of the castle, including the librarian, Hobb have arranged for this to be the case.

  6. The study is a dusty room with shelves and also a small coterie of musical instruments. The study most notably has a demon named Amdusias bound to an ancient cherry wood cello. The demon was bound by the Baron in his younger days. The cello is difficult to carry and does not grant control of Amdusias if stolen, but he must accompany the cello. If freed, he can easily be convinced to come with the party.

  7. Fergie, as the oldest son, has the Baron’s favor. His room contains many things and is the largest of any of the bedrooms. You might find a wide variety of bottled bloods, infused with a variety of herbs to preserve their potency. There is a wide variety of torture equipment, as well as wood and steel weaponry. He has a workbench covered with mechanical parts, as well as a handful of small working clockwork animals (like pocket sized). On the walls hang portraits of himself, his mother, and his father. In the corner there is a full confessional, seemingly plucked out a church somewhere.

  8. The Baron’s tower is reached only by a long hand ladder through the lightless tower. The Baron has reached a state of semi-stasis. He has utterly transcended humanity and perhaps even moved beyond sentience. He only really moves during his annual feedings, in which several of the plumpest women from the village are brought to him, and he spends the next several months torturing and killing them. He will not engage in physical combat with the players. He rests, cross legged, on a stone slab, and wears only a loincloth. He appears as young and ageless as ever.

The Baron creates ectoplasmic hygiene in his tower. Ghosts are banished as soon as they are created. He knows his departed wife’s ghost is somewhere here but has been unable to summon her. The players could, conceivably.