How Hybrid Can You Get in Bloodborne?

 Scaling in FromSoft games is always kind of a weird thing. While you might see Elden Ring's Meteorite Staff, which cannot be upgraded but starts off with S-rank Intelligence scaling, you'd assume that the staff would only get better the higher-level you got. And yet, the general wisdom is that it doesn't actually scale all that well (perhaps it's because the base Sorcery Scaling doesn't go up?)

Bloodborne's gearing and stats are simpler than most other Soulsborne games, and I think the broad intent of the game is that you pick between Strength, Skill, Bloodtinge, or Arcane and mainly level that one up (the latter two being a little trickier given that you need either special weapons or gems that you can't get until a good chunk through the game).

However, while putting Arcane gems in your weapons will remove their physical damage entirely, and thus make any Strength or Skill scaling do nothing, I've been playing around a little with my current character:

Using an Uncanny Burial Blade, and now with the Blade of Mercy as his secondary weapon, each comes with a little bonus arcane damage. Unlike a weapon swapped to Arcane thanks to a gem, though, this will combine with the normal physical damage it usually deals. The weapons have a bit of arcane scaling, and this actually means that you benefit from both stats.

That said, the arcane damage is very minor. That said, though, I've invested so little in Arcane that I don't know what the full potential for its damage is.

Generally, I've leveled up primarily Skill and a bit of Strength. This works ok for the Burial Blade, which gets ok scaling in Skill and middling scaling in Strength. The Blade of Mercy gets zero scaling in Strength, though, and S-tier scaling in Skill. It's a lighter weapon and strikes faster and for less stamina, though, so its actual damage number looks smaller, but I suspect that it's actually the harder-hitting weapon between the two (I still used the Blood Rock out of the Nightmare of Mensis on the Burial Blade because that weapon was the whole reason I made this character). (My original Skill-based character focused on the Burial Blade as her main weapon. Man, did I struggle through most of the game with the freaking Threaded Cane?)

At 50 Skill, I've started to hit the real diminishing returns on investing more points into Skill. My initial plan was to put more into Strength, but now I'm thinking I might put more into Arcane. Maybe this will account for just a tiny buff, but with the Burial Blade up at +10 and the Blade of Mercy at +9, the scaling is actually hitting a point where I'm seeing the damage numbers go up with another point of Arcane.

I really like Arcane conceptually in Bloodborne, but it's very reliant on getting good Blood Gems, and the guaranteed drops take a long time to show up (with the best really not coming until like, the Fishing Hamlet near the end of the DLC). I could farm Chalice Dungeons, but I... don't want to do that.

Indeed, both Arcane in Bloodborne and Advance in Lies of P are these playstyles that I really love on a conceptual level, but the games don't really do much with them. In Lies of P, there are at least two weapons (or blades, sepcifically) of each elemental damage type, but it's really just those six weapons you'll be using. (Though I think at least in Lies of P, you can also spec into... what is it, Motivity and Technique and benefit from the physical scaling as well. Hm, is it too early to revisit that game? I only played it last year. Surely I'll be diving into Control Resonant like crazy once it comes out, and I asusme that will be my obsession for the next several months.)

As much as I adore Bloodborne, it's really interesting to think what it might have been with a longer development cycle and the benefit of the next ten years of gameplay innovations. Like, what if Byrgenwerth had been a full area of the game rather than just a single building (I know that the Lecture Hall was originally meant to be part of it, which makes a ton of sense). And what if we'd gotten a more diverse roster of weapon options and even gameplay options. While the various Hunter Tools can function kinda like spells, it's not really a viable character concept like it is in Dark Souls or Elden Ring. But really, I'd mostly just like to see a version of Bloodborne that allows players who lean into one of these concepts or the other to have full support with what they can find in the game.

We don't need "spells" in the same way, though - it's a different era. But I think it would be cool to introduce various 19th century ideas, maybe getting some slightly steampunk options that allow for a different style of gameplay.

I don't know. Duskbloods set off my Bloodborne nostalgia, and truly if From wants to use some of the ideas developed there in some new single-player game, I'd be really eager to see.

Back on My Bloodborne Bullshit

 Yeah, I guess the Duskbloods really got be nostalgic for one of my favorite games of all time, wishing that the new game would be paired with a game in the same universe but in a more traditional single-player format.

I return to Bloodborne every now and then. This time, the motivation was to make a character who could get the Uncanny Burial Blade as soon as possible. The standard Burial Blade can only be purchased after beating the final (or second-to-last, depending on the ending you're going for) boss. It's a thick scimitar-like weapon that transforms into a reaper's scythe. So you knew I was going to be obsessed with it. But given its normal acquisition, it's basically designed as a New Game Plus weapon, a mode that I've never really been eager to do in these games.

But! The Chalice Dungeons! There's a code for a Chalice Dungeon that lets you acquire it pretty early on in the game. As with the infamous "cummmfpk" dungeon, you need to do a little legwork first. So, much of my afternoon was spent going through Central Yharnam and Old Yharnam, getting the first Chalice to get into the chalice dungeons. You actually need to go through two layers of the first chalice dungeon to get access to this one (getting the Phumeru Root Chalice,) but especially if you have no qualms about pumping your level up with the aforementioned cheese dungeon, it's not too hard to get through. The enemies in the actual dungeon where you find it are very tough, but with enough HP you can make it through.

The Burial Blade is a little slow, especially in its transformed mode, but it has a huge arc, and puts a little Arcane damage on top of its normal slashing (similar to the Blade of Mercy and other Siderite-enhanced weapons). I actually don't know if it's worth leveling Arcane at all, but right now I'm going hard into Skill (must check to see what the soft cap is).

One thing I sometimes forget is that Skill also determines the damage of visceral attacks, so if you're good at parrying (and I'd say I'm... decent at it) you wind up striking very, very hard with those viscerals. I will say that I do not like the Threaded Cane much as a weapon, and swapped to the Saw Spear once I got it, which doesn't scale as well with Skill but especially at these low levels, it hit harder.

However, I'm going all in on my Burial Blade.

Anyway, having played a lot of Elden Ring in recent years, I'm reminded how that game very kindly doesn't have a super-hard "wall" at the beginning of the game. For some reason Dark Souls I and III and Bloodborne really give you this barrier to entry at the start, and even as a veteran player, dealing with, like, those two full-on werewolves on the bridge in Central Yharnam is really tough (the fact that we can't level up until we either face Cleric Beast or Gascoigne or find that one Madman's Knowledge in the region also makes it pretty rough).

Unlike my previous two playthroughs, thankfully, I made sure to talk to Eileen the moment she showed up to the Cathedral Ward, and then immediately went down to help her fight Henryk. Doing so ensures that I get to complete her quest, and fight the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst instead of her later on in the game. (Reward-wise, I don't know if there's a distinction. Maybe you don't get her covenant rune?) The Bloody Crow is probably the hardest NPC duel in the game, but I love Eileen as a character, and really prefer us to be allies to the end. Just the most badass old (I assume?) lady.

I've now cleared Hemwick (my record of never dying to the Witches is unbroken, though having gotten hit twice by a brain-sucker, I only had one Insight, from my entrance into the fight, so it was at minimum difficulty). I can't recall if you can do Hypogean Gaol yet - I'm sort of tempted to just try to do everything I can before pushing to the Midnight phase of the game, but I suspect that Vicar Amelia is getting impatient with me.

Watching Duskbloods is Making Me Crave Bloodborne II

 I think it's actually a violation of the terms of service for the Duskblood Network Test, but there are some videos of footage from the game on YouTube. Is that ethical to watch? Eh, I don't think it's that bad. This is more like a closed beta test, and that's not something you intentionally release to random players without some expectation that stuff is going to get shown around. Honestly, it's not that much more enlightening than the official footage that the various reviewers were using in compliance with FromSoft's stuff.

Also, hey, I wasn't the one who uploaded it.

But ethical issues aside, I find myself reminded that while I'm incredibly curious about the lore of the game and very impressed with its aesthetics and gameplay systems, I just don't think this is the one for me: these sorts of time-limited match multiplayer games don't really appeal to me. And while the Network Test is only previewing one of the game's multiple (I think 3 at launch) maps and only some of its playable Bloodsworn characters, but it's clear that any sense of story progression is going to take place largely outside of the main game (I assume in a similar manner to Nightreign).

I have few doubts that those stories will be fascinating, and, I mean, look, I'm a total sicko for FromSoft's vague and evocative storytelling style, with its surreal imagery and reframing of established tropes to create something truly new and unexpected.

But all of this is basically making me lament that Bloodborne never got a sequel.

Naturally, there are comparisons to be drawn between The Duskbloods and Bloodborne (including, you know, having Blood in both names,) both having a broadly Gothic aesthetic. Now, I am also curious to see if the Duskbloods is quite as (classically) gothic as we're led to believe: the map in the Network Test isn't totally like Yharnam, but has a similar architectural style - the kind of high stone buildings that vampires might perch upon. I'd argue it's not quite the same - I think the city map in the test looks a bit more late-19th-century or even early 20th in vibes, including a very Big Ben-like clocktower (though I think I learned somewhere that Big Ben is actually the bell in said clocktower, and that the actual tower is just "The Clocktower," later named Elizabeth Tower in 2012). Meanwhile, Yharnam in Bloodborne was likely inspired more by Edinburgh, Scotland, and given the tricorne hats that are so iconic to the Hunter's Attire, I've always thought of it as taking place slightly earlier, kind of Regency period (then again, the alternate Hunter's cap is a top hat, and I'm no fashion historian. Actually, one of my best friends sort of is, so I should ask him).

Still, if Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring all fit in that broad "medieval fantasy" aesthetic with plate armor, shields, and big weapons, The Duskbloods seems to share a lot more DNA with Bloodborne as a revisit about a decade later to this Gothic vibe.

Bloodborne was intentionally designed to encourage a faster pace of combat, including using the Rally mechanic to make players a little less worried if they wind up taking a hit so that they'd keep up the assault. We've seen with Nightreign and with Duskbloods that From is very much experimenting with faster movement speeds, slowly dialing up the pace of combat since the laborious days of Dark Souls. Indeed, I even think that just giving everyone such high starting Stamina in Elden Ring was in part to let people swing their weapons around more.

The high speed of Nightreign and Duskbloods character, though, also makes sense in a game where there's limited time to accomplish your goals. Duskbloods has you racing other players to gather the most Virtue (gained by doing various things across the map) to avoid being Culled from the competition. Given that you'll be racing to the various sources of Virtue, it makes sense that you can move at such high speeds and jump an insane number of times in the air (I believe it's a quadruple jump that can be followed by an air-dash, and also your initial jump can be charged, so it's way easier for you to overcome vertical obstacles).

I wonder if such abilities would be used in a future single-player game.

Now, look, it has only been two years since The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC came out, and while that was DLC for a game that itself was two years old at the time, it was a massive amount of content, one that would have felt like a whole game if the original hadn't been even more massive.

In other words, I don't want to get greedy. Bethesda seems to only finally be moving toward getting Elder Scrolls VI out a full fifteen years after Skyrim came out (and I'd guess we'll be waiting at the very least until 2027). FromSoft did have its crazy 2014-2016 run of Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III, but especially if they're developing new IPs that won't allow quite as many development-saving measures (that said, there are for sure some Pthumerians among the foes you fight in Duskbloods) I can be patient.

The main thing, though, is that I'd really love to get a game that looks like The Duskbloods but has a fully fleshed-out single player experience.

I'm fine with - even encourage - them to futz with the formula a bit. FromSoft invented the Souls-like genre, and I think one of the reasonable criticisms of properties like Bloodborne and Elden Ring is that they do borrow a lot from earlier games by the studio. But I think the saving grace is that those two are two of my favorite video games of all time, and the iteration on the existing concepts feels more like refinement than laziness.

Anyway, if it were somehow revealed that The Duskbloods takes place in the same universe as Bloodborne, I wouldn't find it tremendously shocking on a storytelling level. It's the licensing and exclusivity that makes that unlikely. Bloodborne was a PS4 exclusive (and kind of the reason I got a PS4 in the first place) and The Duskbloods is a Switch 2 exclusive - a console I still haven't gotten, though given that I've had every Nintendo home console from the SNES forward, I expect I will eventually.

But I do think that the exclusivity might be a big part of why there is no Bloodborne II. Like Demon's Souls (which was a PS3 exclusive,) FromSoft instead created a new and similar franchise to keep refining the formula. (Actually, funnily enough, a cut voice line from Bloodborne seemed to imply that it took place in the Demon's Souls universe, though it might have just been a cheeky reference).

So, I could just go back and play Bloodborne again. It's tempting. But I've also played so much of that game. I don't think I've actually beaten everything on all of these characters, but I think I've gotten, like, through most of the game and the DLC on something like six characters. Bloodborne, of course, doesn't have quite the same build variety that Dark Souls or Elden Ring do (indeed, while you might make an effective character that blends Strength and Skill, for the most part, the builds for Bloodborne are just "put more into your main damage stat, and maybe ensure you have, like, decent Health and Stamina"). Sure, one of my Strength-focused characters uses the Whirligig Saw and another uses the Boom Hammer, but it's not much of a distinction.

My real hope here is that, after two games in a row with iconic characters whose entire kit is determined by their pre-determined personality, that From has cultivated a lot of new ideas for powers and abilities that a future game can let us build around. Having a game where we get to choose to invest in stats that enhance, say, the weird rocket attack that Zork in the Duskbloods uses, or going for more conventional Dexterity to wield rapiers and scimitars, or blending them some way to create something really weird - I'd love that.

But also, man, I'm a sucker for the Gothic aesthetic. In a way, I worry that because Duskbloods exists, it's less likely we'll get a single-player successor to Bloodborne from them (whether part of that franchise or no).

Medical Metaphor and Plot Versus Meaning

 I've been watching the videos of "Charred Thermos," a YouTube channel that focuses on lore from Bloodborne, and focuses on a particular argument: that Bloodborne is an extensive metaphor for the development of medical science in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The videos are interesting, and make a very thorough and careful argument (if I have a critique, it's that they recap their previous arguments perhaps too often, though in today's attention-lacking culture, perhaps this is a feature rather than a bug).

It's actually quite fascinating, as the author connects Yharnam with the history of medical research in Edinburgh, Scotland, and explores the way in which the elements of the story and its world each connect to various aspects of medical research, with Hunters acting as doctors, beasts representing patients and cadavers, and rituals being cadaver dissection.

While not every argument the channel makes fully convinces me, there's quite a decent amount of evidence to suggest that this metaphor was, indeed, at the center of the inspiration for the game.

Indeed, I might elaborate on some of his metaphorical observations with my own: that the game's metaphorical horror is largely how medical science, for all its benefits to humanity, also requires a kind of dehumanization of the human body, so that a doctor may engage with the visceral in a manner that we are instinctively disinclined to do.

And, indeed, the malpractices and crimes of the medical field tend to come about when doctors (and health insurers, though I don't think they're part of the game's metaphorical structure) dehumanize their patients, thinking them "naught but beasts."

Still, it does raise an interesting question:

The games of FromSoft are famously vague - giving you very little explicit explanation for what is going on or what motivates people, but with a deep and rich hidden story that is revealed (though never fully settled) when you dig into the subtle details.

But I do find myself wondering: to what extent should we interpret this as a story in its own right, or purely as a metaphor?

I remember watching a lengthy (I want to say like six or eight hours) video analyzing Twin Peaks, and making the argument that the entire show was a metaphor for the state of television, breaking down nearly every element of the show as part of that metaphor.

Frankly, the video kind of pissed me off, in part because the video's author, who appeared as a talking head in much of it (for some reason I tend to prefer a faceless voiceover, but this isn't a hard and fast rule) seemed so smug about it, but also because it reduced the human story of the show to something purely in service of the metaphor.

Ironic, especially, because I think a large part of the motivation behind Twin Peaks was humanizing its central murder victim, Laura Palmer - and that I think David Lynch was deeply humanist in his worldview, even if his works were so dreamlike.

Still, though, if the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki and David Lynch both share a refusal to explain themselves explicitly, I'd say that the thing that the former lacks, or perhaps to be less judgmental, simply chooses not to focus on, it's that FromSoft games tend not to get you terribly invested in them on a human level.

Perhaps that's unfair: after all, Solaire from Dark Souls, Warrior Jar Alexander from Elden Ring, and others have become beloved by the games' fandom. But I'd argue that each of these games encourages an almost Brechtian detachment in its audience/players.

Consider this: in the weeks since finishing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I've found myself kind of agonizing over which of the endings I chose, with the larger part of the internet fanbase seeming to agree that I chose the "bad" ending. COE33 is very much about connecting with the characters on an emotional level - indeed, the reveals and secrets of the game make the entire conceit something quite deeply personal to some of its characters. And so, I'm left really questioning my choice, even if I felt that there was a sound moral and ethical argument in its favor.

With FromSoft games, while there's similarly some ambiguity over which of, say, Elden Ring's endings is the "good" one (though I feel like the one we can probably rule out is the Lord of Frenzied Flame one - that's got to be bad, right?) I think it feels much more like a philosophical and cerebral question than an emotional one.

Perhaps that's in part due to the fact that our player character is something of a blank slate for us (I haven't played Sekiro, the only one of their games with a set protagonist).

Charred Thermos suggests, for example, that the Great Ones we discover in Bloodborne are not eldritch gods, but are actually representations of organs within the body, for example Ebrietas being the lungs and larynx, and the Brain of Mensis obviously being the Brain, and while he doesn't make this argument, most likely Oedon being the blood (formless because it's a liquid).

So, what I find myself wondering is: should we even engage with the surface-level narrative at all, then? Are we meant to ignore it and only pursue the grand metaphor?

I think there's a certain fun to finding out the hidden truths behind a story, and certainly literary analysis (of which this kind of video game analysis is a closely-related cousin) focuses a lot on this exploration of the deeper hidden meaning and themes.

But I also think that there's a danger in pursuing this kind of analytical understanding of art. A work of art that exists purely to convey some kind of lesson can become propagandistic.

I studied screenwriting in college, intending to go out to Hollywood and write movies. While I'm still sort of hoping to make a living writing fiction, I remember in the earlier days attending a screenwriting seminar here in LA, where we'd read and comment on each others' screenplays. I remember one in which a person had a scene from their screenplay or teleplay that had two characters sitting on a bench, and the way it read was essentially that one had perfect wisdom that they were just conveying to the other.

No real dramatic stakes - it was really just a scene to convey what I presumed to be the writer's worldview spoken through the voice of an authoritative character.

Now, there is a philosophical tradition dating back to Ancient Greece, where a Socratic Dialogue is essentially a philosophical essay written not as the author speaking directly to the reader, but as two characters who are discussing a topic, as if it's a little stage play.

But I think that it would be an error to mistake one of these dialogues for a play, even if the line between the two media is blurry. (After all, you can have a compelling story that is just people arguing. Consider 12 Angry Men.)

Anyway, FromSoft's works are naturally works of art - even if the story were pure metaphor and we were meant to see past the surface-level narratives, the video game medium still has artistry in its gameplay and mechanics (if Editing is the unique aspect of film as a medium, gameplay is the unique aspect of video games).

I don't mean to accuse Charred Thermos or any authors who look into the symbolic meanings of these games (another favorite being Tarnished Archaeologist) of reducing the games purely to metaphor. The metaphor is the underlying bedrock of these stories.

But I do think it's interesting that, given how obscure FromSoft's storytelling style is, that these underlying metaphors take perhaps an outsized place within our understanding of their stories.

Elden Ring, Alan Wake, and the Trick of Getting Players to Care About Lore

 Because I remain obsessed with the game, I recently listened to/watched an interview with Sam Lake discussing the making of Alan Wake II. In it, he made a really interesting point about the delivery of exposition and lore in games - namely, that if you present characters with a lot of deep lore in some grand compendium, players will often ignore it. But if you hide that lore, making it a puzzle to piece together, you inspire players to seek it out.

I was talking with my best friend about the games of From Software, likely specifically Elden Ring. We were talking about game story, and he argued that From's games don't really have much of a story, while I thought they had a deep and interesting story that demanded to be unpacked and explored. Ultimately, we came to a compromise in positions: that we could separate the idea of "story" and "lore," and say that the story of Elden Ring is, while not non-existent, at least deeply enigmatic and arguably thin, while the lore behind that story was every bit as rich as someone who watches the Tarnished Archaeologist, Smough Town, Quelaag, and VaatiVidya would know it to be (Oh, and Ziostorm).

Remedy's games are, I think, present more of a true story in this sense, but there's a similar use of obfuscated lore to draw the player in.

In a sense, I think that the experience of From Soft's lore is almost an out-of-game experience. That game, so to speak, is played watching YouTube videos and, well, writing blog posts (I'm too lazy to be a YouTuber). From Soft's games also happen to be extremely satisfying to play in the moment-to-moment - I think the precision of control (and yes, the difficulty that requires mastery of that precision) makes it easy to come back to these games over and over (I think I've beaten Elden Ring on something like seven or eight characters, though the eighth admittedly hit a point where I didn't really have any new builds I was excited to try). But I think I've relied a great deal on the online community to piece together the world of that game - even if practically ever assertion becomes a matter of interpretation (for example, that the Omens are really just an expression of the wild nature from the Crucible Era).

I think Remedy comes from a place of being a little more accessible. While I think they like there to be some ambiguities in their lore, I think for the most part they want you to have the basic idea of what is going on simply by playing the game.

But, more broadly speaking, I think that Lake's assertion that hidden lore gets players' attention better is correct.

It has been over a decade since I finished the Mass Effect trilogy, but I remember that their approach to the game's lore involved a large compendium one could access in the pause menu. I actually thought this was a pretty successful technique, but perhaps only because that setting was such a detailed, well-thought-out science fiction universe. There were certainly some elements that were open to interpretation - for example, some believing that Shepherd, at the end, has become Indoctrinated by the Reapers (which I don't really believe,) but the setting was one of a technologically-advanced, highly interconnected galaxy where it made sense for this information to be easy to come by.

Still, the information in the compendium was simply there for people who were curious to read/listen to it, outside of the primary gameplay.

Final Fantasy XVI did something interesting, which was its "Active Time Lore," a cheeky riff on its old Active Time Battle system (a term that, frankly, they've re-used to mean different things - the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy has characters build up "ATB charges," despite being a totally different combat system from the original game). Anyway, XVI builds up a Game of Thrones-inspired complex political landscape with many different factions warring against each other in a world with dwindling resources (it's the first Final Fantasy game I've played without one singular world-spanning empire to contend with - there is an empire, but it's just one of several factions). During any cutscene, you can pause and get little one-or-two-paragraph descriptions of the characters, the location, and any major topics that the characters are discussing, and you can also access more of this stuff via a friendly NPC.

But I think in both of these games, complex as those worlds are, I really don't find myself drawn into meticulously unpacking every element of the lore the same way I do with Remedy's Alan Wake and Control games, or From Soft's Bloodborne and Elden Ring (ironically, the Dark Souls series that put From on the map is one I've never been quite as interested in).

I'd also suggest that part of what makes Remedy's lore tidbits so exciting is the fact that they're in-universe sources. While there's a certain unreliability to the narrator of From Soft's item descriptions, there's not really any particular author of these descriptions whose motivations and biases we can investigate. Remedy's most common collectable lore bits are things like Alan Wake's manuscript pages or the various memos found in Control's Oldest House.

In the former case, we're often learning more about characters from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator - but that narrator is also the eponymous writer, and we know because we're playing as him (or at least half the time as him in the second game) that he sure as hell isn't omniscient, and doesn't even remember writing these pages. Indeed, most of the time we're playing as Alan, we're really playing as the version of him that he is writing at the time, and that version of him is as ignorant as the player is.

Personally, though, I think it's the latter case where this style of lore development works best (I think Alan Wake II is the - as of yet - crowning achievement for Remedy as a studio, but even if I think AW2 is arguably the "better" game, I think I might like Control more. In fact, I might even say that I think Alan Wake II is the better work of art while Control is the better game - but we're comparing two monumental achievements here, so I don't make this comparison to make either sound bad). In part, Control's various memos and files hold a lot of different perspectives. We have, for example, the various Dead Letters, which serve as one-page creepypastas but also mysteries to interpret. Which are genuine and which are just people writing about nonsense (one heartbreaking Dead Letter is a woman who thinks that her neighbor's kid has somehow hacked reality to make her husband die, and is hoping that if the world's a simulation, someone could just fix it. In-universe, probably not actually true, but you can feel the desperate hope that has led her to thinking that just maybe it could be fixed. And, on a meta level, it is kind of true.)

The files, recordings, and other bits of information you can collect in Control can serve to give you some straightforward exposition (such as from most of the Doctor Darling videos) while others create a whole mystery to unpack. The entirety of the "Blessed Organization" is introduced through files and recordings that are not explicitly linked to one another, but when you find all of them and think about it, you start to realize the possibility that there's this grand conspiracy that could be a major threat to the FBC (and, I maintain, helped Alice Wake regain her memories and return to the Dark Place).

Control, of course, lives in that corkboard-and-red-yarn world (a trope I feel the need to point out pre-dated that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode) and I actually think that this style of worldbuilding kind of activates whatever pleasure centers in the brain that addict the conspiracy theorist, but knowing it's all a work of fiction makes it feel fun and safe to explore. I've long felt that conspiracy theorists are seeking a feeling of esoteric revelation - to know something grand and exciting that others do not. (Such a drive is also part of mystical practices, and things like esoteric alchemy.) And I'll confess that if Control 2 or any other future Remedy title comes out and the Blessed Organization proves to be a major part of the plot, I'll feel a certain glee at being one of the few people who actually knows about it.

Even at this stage, while I think every lore-review of Alan Wake II I've seen is convinced that the "organization" that helped Alice Wake recover her memories was the FBC, there's a little smug nerd in me that feels... a bit superior, I guess, for knowing (not that I do know, as I could totally be wrong) that they've been mislead, and that they'd ignored the clues that I was able to piece together that suggest it was Blessed, not the FBC, that she worked with.

But the point of all of this, even the fact that it's showing a part of my personality that I'm not terribly proud of (I grew up in a very intellectual, academic household, and so I unconsciously developed something of a deep need to be the smartest person in the room - which is something I've been working with a therapist to unpack,) is that by making the discovery of the deep and complex lore of these games a game in and of itself, you get the player to actually care about it.

...And Now an Arcane Playthrough

 I've now gotten pretty far into my Strength build playthrough of Bloodborne - beating Micolash means that I'm practically at the end of the main game, though I haven't taken down Ebrietas, and none of the bosses of the Old Hunters have gone down. I suspect that if you do pretty much anything after Eileen the Crow tells you about fighting Henrik in the Tomb of Oedon, she'll lose the fight. On this character I had to take her down instead of the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst, and it was sad to see the hands-down most badass character in Bloodborne ranting and raving about how she needed to kill all the Hunters. Apparently losing to Henrik really messed with her mind. Killing her gave me the Crow Hunter Badge, but I did not get the Hunter rune, which sucks because that's one of the best faction runes (giving you increased Stamina regen).

So, while I'm not abandoning that playthrough entirely, I went ahead and made a new character, named after my original D&D character (a Great Old One Warlock - appropriate for Bloodborne) and went full Arcane. I actually discovered that it's easier than even previously believed to get into the "cummmfpk" dungeon, as I didn't need to even go into the initial Pthumeru chalice. I even wonder if you need a chalice at all, or if you can go in the moment you get access to the Hunter's Dream. Perhaps if I make a Skill character to round things out I'll see (though of course you'll need to get an Insight before you can make use of the absurd number of runes. There is a Madman's Knowledge in the sewers if you want to get super-powered before you even fight the Cleric Beast).

Anyway, Arcane is really cool, but requires you get gems to give you something for your weapons to scale on, and elemental gems are not easy to come by. There's one you can get in Cathedral Ward that gives you fire scaling, but it's a Waning gem, and as far as I can tell any weapon you can get before Vicar Amelia has to be at +6 to open up a Waning gem. So, instead, I plunged into the labyrinth and finished the initial Phtumeru layer one dungeon, whose final boss drops a nice 8% fire gem. Slotting into my Ludwig's Holy Blade, I've got a little more to work with.

But while I've been putting off taking down Vicar Amelia (I even did two more chalice dungeons on the hopes that they'd drop some elemental gems) I think I really just need to suck it up and go in with my only partially enhanced weapon (the second gem slot I have a Tempered one, which is mostly useless but has a little bonus reduction in stamina costs. Better than nothing, I guess).

And, of course, prior to Vicar Amelia I think the only Hunter's Tool you can get is the Old Hunter Bone, which is fine but also doesn't actually do damage, so my 50 Arcane I've already got from... well, cheating isn't really doing anything for that. I do have the Flamesprayer, which is ok.

Actually, it occurs to me that while I don't have the Tonsil Stone just yet (this requires Amelia to be dead) nothing is preventing my from going to the path toward the Amygdala that takes you to the Lecture Building, and I think there are some wandering nightmares or whatever the crystal lizard equivalent are, and as I only need four more twin bloodstone shards to get my sword to +6, that might be the right call.

I think my intent is ultimately to maintain a Fire weapon, a Bolt weapon, and an Arcane weapon - while this latter doesn't do much for you in the main game, I might actually try to do more of the Chalice Dungeons on this character, both because that seems the best place to farm gems and also because it's something I haven't really done before, and while I think the main game is obviously the far better aspect of Bloodborne, it might be a fun "I feel like playing some Bloodborne" activity to come back to periodically (also, I've never fought Queen Yharnam).

As a Righteous weapon, I think I might make my Ludwig sword the Arcane one. Then, I'm tempted to make a fiery Whirligig Saw just because I love that weapon so much, though we'll see - I might just do something simple like the Saw Spear. For Bolt, well... we'll see. Of course, the challenge here is that you only get one Blood Rock on your first playthrough. Though I noted that in New Game Plus you can actually purchase one for Insight - it just costs a massive amount. But you can always make more Chalice Dungeons and just blast through a depth one dungeon if you want to farm it for Insight.

Given it's an 8 year old game, I have to remind myself that, unlike Elden Ring, there's no new content to look forward to here, and so the kind of "prepare for more progression" side of the game is confined only to the for-me-unexplored Chalice Dungeons. I've got several character in Elden Ring who are sitting in Roundtable Hold waiting for the DLC to come out, but there's little to fear being missed if I take Bloodborne characters into New Game Plus.

The Glory of the Accidentally Rudely Named Chalice Dungeon

 So, Bloodborne is eight years old, and I beat every boss in it on multiple characters. So I don't have any qualms about something that is nearly an exploit.

This is old news - perhaps over a year old - but a player discovered a Chalice Dungeon that, with nearly zero effort on the part of the player, yields about 80k Blood Echoes.

It took me a while to figure it out (I actually succeeded but ran past the place where the echoes drop too quickly) so here's a step-by-step set of instructions.

First: this is not going to be available from the very start. You'll still need to clear the game through the Blood-Starved Beast. But given that this is usually the third-fought boss, it's not too bad (there's no easing of the difficulty of that initial trip through Central Yharnam. Bless Elden Ring for having an actual tutorial and easy areas before sending you into the meat grinder).

Now, you're going to have to clear two of the three layers of your very first Chalice Dungeon, the Pthumeru Chalice (this is why you need to take down Blood-Starved Beast). After defeating the second boss in that one (a trio of giants, who are pretty easy - though the undead giant who is the first boss will be a little tough as he hits hard). These three drop the Pthumeru Root Chalice, and now you're qualified to enter the... sigh... "Cum Dungeon."

The reason for this gross name is that the Glyph Password for the dungeon is CUMMMFPK. Open up this Chalice in your next slot (do the "search by glyph" option and enter this code) and walk in. Now, before you even get to the Layer One lamp, simply step into the very first alcove beyond the lantern that you zone in on and walk up to the first metallic panel on your left - literally the first notable object in the first room past the lantern - and watch. You should see a health bar taking something like 717 damage from multiple hits, and then they die. And you get 80k Blood Echoes.

At this stage of the game, likely before you even get to Hemwick (the path from Hemwick Charnel Lane to Witch's Abode after the second shortcut is opened has historically been my early-game farming route, especially because if you can parry the executioners consistently you also farm a bunch of blood vials along the way) this is an absurd number of Echoes. My Strength-based character was a little farther into the game - I'd gotten past Vicar Amelia and into the Forbidden Woods, (and frustratingly either got the sequence of Eileen's quest wrong or it's bugged because while she did tell me about Henrik, when I go to the Tomb of Oedon she isn't there) and the first time I did this, I got enough Echoes to level up six times. In short order, I hit level 98 - at a stage when I only had a +6 weapon. That was only two shy of the unwisely-hybridized Skill/Bloodtinge character I'd gotten up to Laurence and Orphan of Kos. With ease, I traipsed through the Nightmare Frontier and Castle Cainhurst (though Martyr Logarius still managed to kill me once) and I zoomed through the first part of the Hunter's Nightmare to get my hands on the Whirligig Saw.

This character is meant to more or less replace my original character, because there's some bug in the transfer from the PS4 to the PS5 where my old characters can't play online, and so the Whirligig Saw is my main weapon (as a note, I was very hesitant to use its L2 Transformed ability before and going through Castle Cainhurst with it, I regret not being more liberal with the buzz-saw shredding that it's capable of. Utterly absurd and over the top. (As a note, I think I'd like to homebrew all, or at least most of, the Trick Weapons to be used in D&D.)

Going back to the Chikage-wielding character, I used the dungeon to correct his error (to an extent) by grinding it out to get his Bloodtinge to 50 (though I'd still wish I could reinvest the points I put in Skill into Vitality and Endurance - that said, having a bit of skill is nice to make Visceral Attacks more effective). I was able to take down Laurence after a few attempts (I want to say three - though that was just today, and I'd tried a couple times prior) but Orphan of Kos is... well, Orphan of Kos is a hard fight.

Given the Chikage's S-scaling with Bloodtinge I'm curious to see if it has less punishing diminishing returns past 50. Ironically, I have put a bit into Skill on my Strength character (up to 25) but in this case, there is actually some benefit to it (beyond visceral attacks) because physical damage does actually scale with both stats (though this was when I was primarily using the Hunter's Axe, which has more spread-out scaling, whereas the Whirligig Saw is much more definitively a Strength weapon, with poorer Skill scaling - but still some).

With this available to me, I'm tempted to re-make my Arcane character, which is honestly I think my favorite build for Bloodborne, though the game (at least outside of the Chalice Dungeons) is pretty stingy with the elemental gems that really make the build work.

Again, I'd love to see a Bloodborne II that adopts some of the elements of Elden Ring (and, honestly, even Dark Souls) that make hybrid builds perfectly viable if you have the right things to enable them. Bloodborne obviously has more simplified stats, without needing to worry about weight, for example (though Elden Ring making the Stamina stat and the Carry Weight stat the same thing was very welcome). I'd also like to see a system where there's either a stat that increases Quicksliver Bullets carried or that we get something like a Focus meter to power Hunter's Tools and special Trick Weapon abilities, much as we saw with Weapon Arts and Ashes of War. That was, of course, an innovation of DSIII (well, an innovation relative to the series - Mana Bars long-predate this entire genre), which came out a year after Bloodborne.

In essence, I'd be so excited to see FromSoft revisit Bloodborne with all the game design lessons they've learned in the last eight years.

Nearing the Orphan of Kos and Laurence, and Wishing I Could Respec

 So, Bloodborne is built on an assumption: that you're going to level up pretty much just one of the four "throughput" abilities - Strength, Skill, Arcane, and Bloodtinge. But at some point, I decided that as fun as the Chikage is (basically, once you get over the fear of the constantly-draining health, it's a really powerful weapon) I wanted to try to be viable with other weapons. But I realize now that I could have either Skill or Bloodtinge up at 70 or so at this level, but instead have one in the 40s and the other in the 30s.

That said, while I struggled with Ludwig, I've been making pretty steady progress through the Old Hunters after I took him down.

Indeed, really it's the first phase of Ludwig that is the wall. I only got him to his second phase twice, securing the kill on the second time (this was not the case when I first played the game in 2016 or whenever - I also didn't know you could skip the mid-fight cutscene, so it was kind of agonizing). But so far, I think the only real "walls" I've hit have been Martyr Logarius and Ludwig - and I suspect that if I weren't champing at the bit to get my hands on the Chikage I might have held off on Logarius and leveled up some more before taking him on again.

Thankfully, I found that even going into the Paleblood phase of the game, I was still able to give Alfred the invitation to Cainhurst and get his Wheel Hunter badge.

Anyway, I believe that Logarius and Ludwig are the only bosses so far that I've needed more than two attempts on (embarrassingly, I died to the Living Failures when I got greedy for staggers and visceral attacks, but I only took two attempts for Lady Maria, which felt pretty good - I just parried her a lot, and got better about dodging at the right time - though on the last phase, I'd parry her attacks but still get hit by the fire and thus be unable to get off my visceral attacks).

Once again, I'm really finding myself wishing the game were a little more open to experimentation the way that Elden Ring, and even Dark Souls III have been - you only get two Blood Rocks the whole playthrough (the item needed to upgrade a weapon to +10) so you basically need to really commit to it, and without being able to respec, your only options to correct your build are to either grind a ton or start a new character.

If I find myself starting another character after this (which I figure will happen eventually) I do think Arcane will be the way I go - it just feels the most fun, with all the different elemental gems and Hunter's Tools, though like the Bloodtinge build, you don't have a lot of support for it through maybe half the game.

I've now got the elevator to go see the Orphan of Kos, and of course I already have Laurence's Skull, so I've really got very little left to do (though I can't seem to remember how to get the Blood Rock in the Fishing Hamlet). With Skill and Bloodtinge as my high stats, I'm thinking Simon's Bowblade will be my other maxed-out weapon.

I am, of course, only playing this while I'm using some serious cleaning chemicals in my room and can't play Baldur's Gate 3. I still haven't caught up to where I was in Early Access, but it's nice that I'm accumulating XP after having hit level 5. Can't wait to get Aura of Protection!

Yharnam as a Domain of Dread

 As recent blog posts have reinforced, I adore Bloodborne, FromSoft's Gothic/Cosmic Horror reimagining of their Demon's Souls/Dark Souls gameplay formula, which released in 2015 and is considered, I think to be one of their masterpieces (I'm personally of the opinion that, when combining gameplay and story, Elden Ring is their current crowning achievement, but it is obviously standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak).

The Ravenloft setting for D&D is very different than others. While Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance are all worlds with fantastical histories, they're still basically "real" worlds, which are bound by the logic and order of a realistic world that happens to also have magic.

The Domains of Dread, which is where Ravenloft takes place, are not.

While Ravenloft pre-dates the Shadowfell as a concept in D&D, it's never been in the Prime Material Plane (which is basically "reality a mortal is typically familiar with,") and was sort of afloat in the Ethereal Plane. Even under current lore, the Domains of Dread are a part of the Shadowfell that is separate from the main version of that plane (though as the most popular part of the Shadowfell, you don't often hear much about the rest of the Shadowfell in 5E materials). This is not our baseline reality, but it's also not the realm of the gods like the Outer Planes or the elements like the, well, elemental planes.

The Shadowfell is sort of a dark mirror of the Feywild. Both are realms that have their potential for horror - a spooky, gnarled wood that is home to curse-crafting hags could very well be part of the Feywild - but the way I see it is that the Feywild is full of supercharged emotion, while the Shadowfell is cold and drained, where motivation is sapped to become more compulsive and numb.

The Domains of Dread are specifically created by the Dark Powers - mysterious entities that could be some sinister cabal or might be unknowable eldritch beings from beyond - who pluck particularly evil people from the multiverse and create ironic prisons that are a reflection of their primary prisoners. Each domain has a Darklord, who is both the ruler of the domain and its primary prisoner, and is endlessly tormented as they seek to get their heart's desire but find those attempts thwarted. But it's not only the wicked who are tormented in these realms - the living people who inhabit the Domains, either born there or brought there through the Mists, which can reach into other planes and snatch you up, are forced to contend with these nightmare realms.

 In its initial form in the early '90s, Ravenloft actually had something of a "world"-like landmass - a continent called The Core that placed all the domains of dread in geographical relation to one another. 5E's Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft gets rid of this idea, instead putting the individual domains adrift in the Mists as separate little nightmare realms. This, incidentally, is something I really prefer, and whenever I hear people complaining that the book somehow "ruined" Ravenloft, I cannot take them seriously, because I hate the idea of The Core with a passion. /End Rant.

Now, each domain is stuck in an endless cycle. The domains won't let the Darklords die, perpetuating their torment. Sometimes, a group of adventurers will have to kill a Darklord in order to escape the domain, because each Darklord has a way to "close" the Mists surrounding their domain (something I interpret as not even necessarily being a conscious choice on their part). But they will always reappear after time, and continue to perpetuate the horror within their realm.

So let's look at Yharnam.

The notion of a cycle in Yharnam is certainly right there in the story: Hunters are sent to slay Beasts in the city, but those hunters then become infected with the Curse of the Beast, becoming the next threat that needs to be hunted.

This being FromSoft, you never know all the details completely, but my basic understanding of the "modern" history of the city of Yharnam is as follows:

Scholars at the old College of Byrgenwerth discovered an ancient labyrinth underground, which held the remnants of a pre-human (or proto-human) civilization called the Pthumerians. Within the "Tomb," they found a source of blood that could be used to heal any injury or illness. What that source is remains vague - I think you could possibly imagine that it involves the unborn child of Queen Yharnam, the Pthumerians' leader, who is probably called Mergo, and is likely the child of a Great One - an eldritch being from beyond familiar reality.

Discovery of that tomb led the scholars to try to contact and learn about the Great Ones, attempting to bring about an evolution of humanity - either culturally or even physiologically. Master Willem, the head of Byrgenwerth, wanted to learn more about the cosmos and the Great Ones, but to do so in a cautious and careful way (which still involved, like, adding eyes to the inside of their skulls).

But it was Laurence, one of Willem's students, who saw the potential in the Great Ones for a different path: to use the healing blood to found a religion, worshipping the Great Ones as gods and bringing fabulous prosperity to the city through the business of "blood ministration," healing sicknesses via the blood.

The biggest question, I think, if you wanted to adapt Bloodborne as a Domain of Dread, is who the Darklord would be. FromSoft sometimes makes some undeniably evil characters, but usually its primary antagonists are misguided more than evil (at least depending on your interpretation). Ravenloft's Darklords are all explicitly irredeemably evil (though as with anything D&D, DMs are free to change those rules as the story demands). I think that, given his central role, an argument could be made for Gehrman, but I think you could also argue that if he is a Darklord, it's of a different, related Domain - the Hunter's Nightmare. The evil he committed was probably the killing of Kos (if she didn't just wash up on the beach dead) or the massacre of the Fishing Hamlet. Kos and the Fishing Hamlet's role in the larger story is also pretty vague - I think the current read on it that I'd consider is that Gehrman's attack on the Fishing Hamlet probably led to Byrgenwerth's discovery of the Pthumerian Tomb - maybe finding out that Kos was a thing spurred forth the research into the Great Ones. (Was Byrgenwerth built on the ruins of the Fishing Hamlet?) Clearly, if Gehrman was the first Hunter, the Hunter's Nightmare was the fish-peoples' curse on them for his deeds. But I think it's likely this is a side-story.

Laurence, thus, to me, feels like the more obvious Darklord. The entire city feels like it's suffering because of his actions, and while he's in the Hunter's Nightmare, obviously From wasn't working step-by-step to make it all fit with Ravenloft's conventions.

We're talking about adaptation here, and so we'll need to be a little more concrete and clear in terms of how Yharnam becomes a Domain of Dread.

Laurence as the Darklord needs an act of unmitigated evil to draw him into the Mists (sometimes this act also draws the character's realm with them, or sometimes it creates a mirror of a real realm, or even a wholly new realm. In fact, the original Darklord's domain, Barovia, might well exist in a non-nightmarish form on some Prime Material World, with the OG Ravenloft setting possibly being a nightmarish facsimile of the real thing).

I think there are two potential moments to draw from here.

If we interpret that the "Holy Medium" the Byrgenwerth scholars discovered in the ancient Labyrinth was, in fact, the unborn child, Mergo, and that the healing blood was harvested from Queen Yharnam's womb (it would make sense that some body fluid nourishing a growing demigod fetus could have extraordinary healing properties). Laurence's decision to do this, robbing Yharnam of her child very much against her will and perhaps prolonging its life via the Nightmare of Mensis to keep drawing the healing blood off of it would be a profoundly evil act. (The fact that the blood also warps those who use it into werewolf-like beasts can also be explained by the fact that it was never meant to heal humans.)

However, it was this blood that allowed the Healing Church to be established in the first place. And while you could imagine the whole church only really coming about in the Domain of Dread, I don't know if I love that version of it.

Another possibility is the burning of Old Yharnam.

So, Old Yharnam - which was probably a small town or village before the big city grew around it - is, currently, filled with Beasts - there's just two humans left who have decided to guard it against other humans, reasoning that the Beasts here are just innocents who were turned and don't deserve to be shredded by Hunters.

But the history here is that a plague ravaged the town, and the Healing Church arrived to intervene, and I believe this was the first place they administered blood healing on a mass scale. No coincidence, then, that this was also where the Curse of the Beast first emerged (something the Church also tried to cover up). The thing is, the "plague" as it was called, was also treatable via Antitdotes - pills that cured poison, not infections. The plague was thus probably an intentional poisoning of the populace. And that poisoning was probably committed by the nascent Healing Church in order to give them an excuse to experiment on the people of Old Yharnam.

When the Beast Plague began to spread, they wound up burning Old Yharnam, killing tons of people, but also conveniently covering up the Church's crimes.

I think Laurence ordered the burning of Old Yharnam. And I think the fact that, in the Hunter's Nightmare, he is now rendered as an ever-burning Cleric Beast. This massacre of the Beasts of Old Yharnam is what started off the endless cycle of Hunts. And I think that this could be Laurence's point of no return. Up until this point, he's maybe done things for the Greater Good, but when confronted with the utter failure of his visions of miraculous healing and respect via piety, when it became clear that there was nothing but madness and horror to come from his Healing Church, he decided to murder hundreds of people so that he could keep going.

What is his torment, then?

Well, I think Laurence, being a Byrgenwerth scholar, wanted to pursue humanity's evolution, and thought the Healing Blood was the way to do this - to kind of hijack the Pthumerians' communion with a Great One (which one I think being open to interpretation - the Moon Presence? Oedon?) - but every effort to move forward and push humanity further has led instead to devolution, with people turning into beasts, not higher forms.

Practically speaking, I think Laurence is constantly losing his grasp on his lofty ambitions, but in being transformed into a beast, he's dangerous because of his raw, physical strength.

And if we look at the rest of the setting, we can see the way that the other dangers are reflections of Laurence. The Hunters are the embodiment of his violent sins, the Scholars embodiments of his unrestrained ambitions, the Clerics embodiments of his need for control.

While I think you could even spin it such that the Great Ones were actually the Dark Powers all along, I actually like that in Bloodborne, the Great Ones are actually benevolent in spirit - they're just so alien that their mere presence warps things in horrific ways (perhaps even when they "try to help.")

I don't think you'd have to do much to run a Ravenloft campaign in Yharnam - much as Barovia has a lot of different elements that aren't obviously tied to Strahd, but ultimately are, you can do likewise with Yharnam.

The timeline of Bloodborne is a little vague - you could certainly interpret the existence of Cainhurst Castle as pre-dating the Healing Church, for example, which is thought to be less than a century old, while Cainhurst is supposed to be a few hundred years. But time is also very weird in the Domains of Dread, and so I could imagine that people in Yharnam proper treat Laurence as a current ruling figure, but that the stolen blood that created the Cainhurst Vilebloods was stolen from the Church (and I don't know if that's even directly contradicted by the game).

In Ravenloft, you don't need to make your Darklord the "final boss" of your campaign - indeed, a lot of them have very unimpressive stat blocks that a low-level party would have an easy time defeating. Laurence would probably be tough in his beast form - I'd probably homebrew some changes to the Loup-Garou to give it fire abilities - but you could easily have a campaign focusing on taking down the School of Mensis or the Choir or dealing with some eldritch monstrosity (like Ebrietas).

The key would be to hit the notes of Gothic Horror (werewolves, ghosts, maybe vampires from Cainhurst if you want to retcon the massacre by the Executioners, witches in Hemwick, and grim inquisitors) as well as cosmic horror (all the alien monsters in the later parts of the game, the transformed scholars, and the weird shifting realities).

One thing I'd really encourage as a sort of "special system" to use in this domain is Insight. Obviously, you might not want to call it that specifically, given that that has a very specific and different meaning in D&D, but something like "Sight" or "Truth" or "Eldritch Truth" or "Awareness." I think there would be a positive and a negative associated with Insight, and probably have it be something players are gaining at different rates. Something like a successful Intelligence check could give you a point of "Awareness."

The main way I'd want it to work is that, as you gain Awareness, you can hit points where you'll see things others can't - starting with small things like hidden runes or clues - maybe you need 3 Awareness to see a button that can be used to open a treasure chest. And then, at higher levels, you start to see the sources of certain enemy's powers - like the runic items on some of the new Giants out of Bigby's. But then, for each point of Awareness (or maybe every few points,) you get penalties as well - say, to Wisdom saving throws (maybe all Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saving throws?)

Ooh, and maybe there are magic items that you can't use (or don't work at full power) if you don't have enough Awareness. So, for example, your Arcane Saw Cleaver, which could be a re-skinned Battleaxe, does an extra 1d8 force damage if you have at least 5 Awareness. But maybe at 5 you'd also be taking a -2 to Wisdom saving throws.

I like the idea that delving deeper into the Eldritch Truth makes you more vulnerable but also more powerful. I can tell you my Great Old One Warlock would be happy to amass as much as possible!

Anyway, I think this could be a lot of fun, and almost want to run a limited campaign in it.

Not Counting Chalice Dungeons and Final Bosses, I've Just Got the DLC

 So, I screwed up, I think: I beat Rom before I gave Alfred the invitation to Cainhurst Castle, and as such I don't think I can send him there and get the Executioner's Badge - while my Bloodtinge/Skill build is hardly going to be able to make use of Logarius' Wheel, I'm a little sad that this will prevent the acquisition of the silly cone hat, though I should double-check to ensure there's no chance I can continue this quest.

Currently the ranking "most deaths" enemy has got to be the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst, the NPC-fight in the Grand Cathedral at the end of Eileen the Crow's quest. After struggling a lot on that (and having to farm blood vials - something I really hope any Bloodborne II would drop as a mechanic) I continued on through the game a little farther and leveled up some and came back and took him down.

So far, in this playthrough, I've one-shot and two-shot most bosses. I believe this is the attempt count:

Cleric Beast: 3

Father Gascoigne: 1

Blood-Starved Beast: 1

Witch of Hemwick: 1

Vicar Amelia: 1

Martyr Logarius: 4 or 5

Amygdala: 1

Shadows of Yharnam: 1

Rom, the Vacuous Spider: 2

The One Reborn: 2

Micolash, Host of the Nightmare: 2

Celestial Emissary: 1

Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos: 1

    This last one I was surprised by. In previous playthroughs I'd come to Ebrietas after doing most of the DLC, and so I assumed I was far over-leveled, but while I had gotten well into the Nightmare of Mensis (I think possibly up to Mergo's Wet Nurse, though I haven't fought it yet) I hadn't done any of the DLC this time and had a pretty easy time of it. Granted, I did summon the Mensis allied Hunter, who kind of tanked her for me. Still, with these games I consider any assistance the game is willing to give you as perfectly reasonable - I'm not here to do some "dodge-free" run, and the game's plenty difficult even with help.

    Logarius might not have been so difficult if I wasn't really pushing to get him down as soon as I could, given that my Bloodtinge build is pretty focused 

Anyway, I haven't done a whole lot of farming this run, though when dealing with the Blood Crow I did do my old farming route of the stretch between Micolash's boss room and the top of Mergo's Loft (which I guess is a fitting place to get lots of XP given that it's really the last area of the game - prior to DLC, you'd just fight Mergo's Wet Nurse and then, depending on the ending you're going for, finish the game or fight Gehrman and then possibly the Moon Presence).

I'm not getting utterly annihilated by the Old Hunters at the start of the DLC the way I usually do if I come there earlier in a playthrough, but they're still a challenge. I'm expecting Ludwig will be pretty tough regardless, but perhaps the DLC in general will be easier with pretty much the whole main game under my belt.

I have not touched the Chalice Dungeons. I think on one of my earlier characters (maybe my first Arcane build? Which, incidentally, is probably my favorite playstyle in this game) did a lot of those, but they're just too repetitive for my tastes. If there's ever a Bloodborne II (and 8 years later, I'm skeptical) I think they could probably cut them and I wouldn't miss them.

But yeah, maybe it's Elden Ring's enormous size that is throwing me for a loop, but it does feel like Bloodborne is surprisingly quick. Consider, for example, that if you divide the game into three acts (Evening, Night, and Paleblood Sky) going from Vicar Amelia (who starts Act II) to Rom (who starts Act III) only requires a single boss between them. Yes, you can go off and do side areas like Cainhurst Castle and the Nightmare Frontier (and Hemwick if you're some kind of bizarre freak who fought Vicar Amelia before doing Hemwick) but basically you just need to clear through the Forbidden Woods and Byrgenwerth (the latter of which is hardly an "region" and more just a little circle around a building).

Anyway, still a fantastic game. I guess it just leaves me wanting more.

Bloodborne is Kind of Short for a Soulsborne Game

 Today I took down Amygdala, the Shadows of Yharnam, Rom the Vacuous Spider, and The One Reborn.

The first two, I one-shot (I think they're also bosses that I one-shot on my very first playthrough. While I think, like the Witch of Hemwick, I've never died on the Shadows of Yharnam, the previous times I'd always summoned an ally, and this time I truly solo'd it, which meant having to deal with their snake abilities more). Rom took me two attempts - the first simply because I got greedy and tried to slash at her while her spider minions were still around (I know some people just go right for the kill, but I find the fight is much easier if you're diligent about taking out all the adds). The One Reborn I think I got an honest death from, simply by failing to dodge out of the... er... rain of limbs it summons sometimes.

While I think Elden Ring is the easier game, I do think that enemies telegraph their attacks more in Bloodborne - which makes sense, as your only options are to dodge or shoot them right at the perfect moment to "parry" them. As such, I've had an easier time avoiding damage on most bosses.

I think in previous playthroughs I headed to the Hunter's Nightmare earlier than this point, but I think that it's really tuned to be an endgame area (certainly by the time I've finished it in previous playthroughs, the remaining bosses were trivial). This time, I'm really trying to mostly finish off what's there in the main game before heading into the DLC, which hasn't been too bad, and also will hopefully mean that Ludwig won't utterly annihilate me over and over.

While I wouldn't want the game to just fully embrace the whole medieval fantasy aesthetic of Dark Souls or Elden Ring, I do think, now, with those games under my belt, I wish there were more build options in Bloodborne. I don't know if it was intentionally made a smaller game than Dark Souls (certainly the development time was remarkably fast - Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III all came out one year after the other, which is something you expected from contemporary Ubisoft making Assassin's Creed games, but pretty amazing given that Bloodborne is considered by many a masterpiece, and Dark Souls III is also pretty beloved (DSII I think has gotten a critical redemption, though it's still not held up with the same respect as the original).

Elden Ring took three years from announcement to release, and there's a vast wealth of potential builds for your character (I only wish the final boss were not immune to all conditions, as it really takes a fun bleed-focused build and makes it suffer).

If we ever get a Bloodborne II, I'd love to see it given the scope of... well, it might be a lot to ask for it to be as big as Elden Ring (and arguably off-theme - a claustrophobic city is a good setting for a horror game) but I'd love to see the character options fleshed out.

One thing I'd probably do is make a distinction between the more mechanical Hunter's Tools and the more otherworldly ones, and perhaps having some kind of "Ingenuity" stat to govern the former, with Arcane or some similar notion governing the latter. Giving the player an FP-like meter to fuel stuff like special Trick Weapon abilities (similar to the Ashes of War or Weapon Arts) along with Hunter's Tools and... oh, we'll call them "Eldritch Invocations" to borrow a phrase.

It doesn't seem like From likes doing physical-damage ranged damage builds (though I am noticing that my current Bloodtinge-focused character hits pretty decently with his Evelyn pistol).

Naturally, there are tons of quality-of-life improvements that have come in subsequent games, like being able to re-spec, being able to sell "XP items" for their proper value, having the XP you need to level up shown on your Status screen, and being able to warp directly from checkpoint to checkpoint (hell, in Elden Ring, there's no reason to need a Homeward Bone or Bold Hunter's Mark equivalent because you can just warp anyway). Actually, also, just being able to rest at a lantern instead of warping back to the Hunter's Dream would also be great.

Now, I don't know how inclined From would be to revisit Bloodborne's lore and setting. Dark Souls is really the only exception so far, among the Soulsborne games, to have any direct sequels, and you could even read the plot of Dark Souls III in a meta way as a criticism of the very concept of sequels (a world that has been forced to continue on existing past its intended age is collapsing under its own weight).

But while Elden Ring is probably, ultimately, my favorite of FromSoft's games so far, I also liked how Bloodborne took the formula and explored a new genre (even if basically all of them have some Cosmic Horror elements).

Still, given all they've learned in the eight years since Bloodborne came out, I'd love to return to the gothic nightmare and gear up with my trick weapons to fight some beasts again.

My Witch of Hemwick Record is Safe

 Returning several years after I first played it, I've now taken down the Witch(es) of Hemwick, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief, as I downed the boss without dying (actually, that makes this playthrough pretty darn good - I've only died to Cleric Beast, having taken down Gascoigne and Blood-Starved Beast in one go each. I'm not counting on that streak continuing, especially as I get ready to take down Amelia).

I had remembered that the route from Hemwick Charnel Lane to the Witch's Abode was one of my best early-game Blood Echo-farming routes, and I now see why: the executioners that patrol near the Witch's house are worth something like 2300 echoes, at a level when I need about 5-6k to level up and everything else is dropping like 2-3 hundred.

I also think I was extremely stingy with using Coldblood Dew and the other "echo items." Sadly, unlike in Elden Ring, where you can sell the equivalent items to the blacksmith (or any vendor) for an equal value, here you get significantly more if you actually use the item, so you can't just dump them en masse in the same way (I think Dark Souls III also let you sell them for their equal value).

So, essentially, I'm still in the game's Act One, but with little to do other than fight Vicar Amelia (I suppose in theory I could let the Snatchers take me to the Hypogean Gaol - and then fight Darkbeast Paarl? I think that might be the way to get Djura to act non-hostile to you, but I may have screwed that up by already going up his tower and fighting with him).

I do find myself really wishing that we could get a Bloodborne II, largely to see how some of the gameplay enhancements that have come in DSIII and Elden Ring could be applied here.

I will say that I think the way Blood Vials work in this encourage you to be a little more liberal with them than your Crimson Tears/Estus Flask, because so many enemies drop them. It's still easy to run a deficit, especially when you hit a difficult boss, but I think it's meant to keep you going even when you've had a lot of battles and taken some hits. Again, though, I think Elden Ring's (and I think, more rarely, Dark Souls III's) ability to grant you a refreshed charge on your healing item when you defeat some groups of enemies might be more elegant.

Then again, the excess with which you slam alien blood-goo into your leg over and over during the course of the game is kind of thematic (the detail how there was a superstition about how the Curse of the Beast crept up the right leg, and so people would tie a belt around it, is kind of brilliant: obviously, it's really that you're injecting all this alien blood into your right leg, but you could imagine that the Church suppressed that truth to keep people enforcing their status quo).

I do wonder what the Witch of Hemwick fight is like on New Game Plus, if you have a very high Insight. While I still one-shot the encounter, I did get one hairy moment when three Mad Ones surrounded me, and that was when I came into the fight with only 1 Insight (though obviously I got another for seeing the boss).

Reentering the Nightmare: Coming back to Bloodborne

 Perhaps inspired by tomorrow's release of Lies of P (though given that it's also the day that the full Mac version of Baldur's Gate 3 comes out, I'll probably be playing that instead - thoug I do find myself oddly drawn to the "Steampunk Pinnochio game) I found myself drawn back to the Gothic/Cosmic Horror masterpiece that is Bloodborne.

Having now put many full (more or less - the game is enormous) clears of Elden Ring behind me, I thought I'd return to this first Souls game I ever beat.

Despite my experience, the early part of Bloodborne is still crushingly difficult. I died many times exploring Central Yharnam, and while I did eventually come across a couple of Madman's Knowledge items there, I'd already gotten to the Cleric Beast and had two halfway decent attempts at it before I went and got the full Hunter's outfit for better protection and then upgraded my Saw Spear to +2 and put a few levels into Vitality and Endurance, and I was able to take down the Cleric Beast with about half my Blood Vials remaining, which I count as a win.

I actually managed to one-shot Father Gascoigne and the Blood-Starved Beast (the latter taking advantage of Alfred's assistance - I think this playthrough I'm going to be way less precious with things like Insight - I think I never even used any of the Madman's Knowledge or Great One's Wisdom in previous runs. I also played offline before, and I'll be curious to see if I'm able to assist anyone on bosses this go around.

There are a couple things I don't love about the game, to be fair. Farming Blood Vials and Quicksilver Bullets isn't all that fun (I'm sort of shocked that I seem to perpetually be out of the latter) and sometimes I feel like I should put all my boss Echoes into simply replenishing these stores.

The tuning is also very different from Elden Ring. I think perhaps because Elden Ring, like Dark Souls, allows for more defensive playstyles, in this, the bosses have pretty hefty stores of HP, which requires you constantly whittle away at them, even while their attacks are (at least at this stage of the game) not the hardest to avoid. I also think it was a fantastic idea to have all players start with a huge Stamina bar in Elden Ring, as I really feel energy-starved at this stage of the game.

Also, there's just no support for Arcane or Bloodtinge builds in the early game. My intent is to ultimately go with the latter for this character, but until I can get my hands on a weapon that uses it, I'll be basically playing like a Skill build that focuses a lot on Vitality and Endurance.

But I love this game, and that love remains strong. There are definitely things I've forgotten - like how to make Djura non-hostile (I might have approached him prematurely... maybe I need to beat Darkbeast Paarl first?)

I don't know if we can ever expect to get a Bloodborne II. I'd love to see one. While I adore Elden Ring (and, frankly, prefer its aesthetic and world over that of Dark Souls) and expect that, given its success, that will be the one more likely to get a direct sequel, I'd love for FromSoft to return to this Gothic setting.

Though admittedly, it'd also be really cool to see them make a Souls-like in a new setting with a new aesthetic. I'd love a futuristic sci-fi Souls-like (and no, Armored Core VI is not that).

I'd also love to see a version of Bloodborne with the quality-of-life improvements we got in Elden Ring. You know, like a Jump button.

The Games That Have Stuck With Me In Recent Years

 Now halfway through September, we're getting into spooky season. I'll be honest - I've always had a love of Halloween that makes it feel a little disappointing that we so swiftly move on to Thanksgiving and Christmas (and other winter holidays - while I'm half-Jewish, the fact that we also celebrated Christmas always allowed us to treat Hannukah as the minor holiday that it actually is).

And as often happens, my thoughts turn back to Bloodborne.

Bloodborne wasn't my first Soulsborne game - I'd gotten Dark Souls for the Xbox 360 prior to playing it, but between getting stuck on Ornstein & Smough and getting frustrated by the fact that you lost both Souls and Humanity (also, getting cursed multiple times when trying to explore the depths of the Great Tree and having to go through the whole pain of getting back to the New Londo Ruins to cleanse it) left me sort of done with that one (given how many Souls games I have under my belt now, especially with like six or seven full clears of Elden Ring, I wonder if I should go back to it). But Bloodborne, which was not really any easier at least in terms of moment-to-moment combat challenges, but there were little things, like the fact that Insight (the rough equivalent to Humanity) could only be lost if a specific kind of enemy landed its insight-draining attack on you, that helped with quality of life (also, the stat system was far simpler, which made it easier to figure out where to spend your levels - though after Elden Ring I really wonder if I'd have been better off investing more in HP in those games).

While Bloodborne is seen these days as among the best, if not the very peak of FromSoft's achievements, there were some complaints when it was new. First, there were the Chalice Dungeons, which I actually agree were too repetitive and dull, and so I've never plumbed their depths and defeated Queen Yharnam herself. Next, there were complaints that the lore and NPCs were not as complex as that of Dark Souls. Truthfully, that also might be fair. I think at this stage Elden Ring has maybe surpassed the sheer volume of lore that was found in the original Dark Souls if only because it has such a larger world in which to present that lore.

To be clear, Elden Ring is probably also going to be one of these games totally sticking in my mind, but I've played it recently enough that it still feels pretty "current," and only came out a year and a half ago.

Another game, this one being one that I came to years after it was first released, but that's utterly stuck with me, is Control.

Control is not as grand in scope, though interestingly it does incorporate some Souls-like mechanics. But I think it really spoke to my aesthetic tastes in a way that few pieces of media had done previously. For example, back in 2015 when I first got into D&D, I came up with my first character, a Warlock with a Great Old One patron, and the look and feel of the patron I came up with was far closer to the bizarre upside-down pyramid in the Astral Plane that is Control's "The Board" (or at least that is The Board's means of communicating with humanity) than any of the squishy, slimy alien beings of Lovecraft's fiction.

I have an obsession with stories that blend science-fiction and fantasy, and Control's portrayal of scientists investigating "paranatural" phenomena that would simply be magic if it were not approached in the rigorous and methodical way the FBC researchers do (invoking the corollary to Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology) is 100% my kind of thing.

It didn't hurt that Control has really satisfying gameplay. I remain, however, utterly infuriated that the game doesn't allow you to simply create a new save file without overwriting the old one, or letting you replay chapters of it without losing the progress you've made (I unlocked a lot of things after beating the primary story, and my understanding is that if I go back to the "Endgame" chapter, it simply puts you back at the point you were when you beat the main story).

Control actually sent me down the rabbit-hole of the Remedy game universe, and I went back to play Alan Wake - a game I'd been intrigued by when it came out in 2010 but didn't get around to until much later. While Alan Wake is also cool, it didn't quite grab me as effectively as Control. There was something refreshing about the fact that Alan Wake had no "progression system," some of which weighed down Control, but it also left the game feeling very on-rails. You went through the story and situation and levels as dictated by the game's designers to see the story as they wanted to tell it. I think it was just a product of its era - today's games tend to really value giving players a more open world, while this was a bit more like Uncharted (the first of which came out three years prior) in that it kept you on rails to guarantee the cinematic moments and set-pieces it wanted to show you.

I guess one thing that Bloodborne and Control have in common is their rewarding of attempts to peel back the layers of lore. Bloodborne, for example, has an option (and somewhat hidden) area called Castle Cainhurst, which ties in its strange version of vampires to the plot. In typical FromSoft fashion, recognizing certain styles of dress and certain weapons will allow you to suss out that two NPCs - one of which is a boss in the DLC - have a hereditary connection to this castle.

Similarly, in Control, if you're diligent about reading the memos found around the Oldest House and listening to the various recordings, you can discover an entire conspiracy by the "Blessed" organization that seems to be waging some kind of secret war against the FBC, while having nothing to do with the current crisis with The Hiss.

I do adore this kind of deep lore-building. Even if I largely come by the lore thanks to the greater online community, mostly via YouTube channels like VattiVidya, it really enhances my enjoyment of the game as a perfect complement to the satisfying combat.

Control, Dark Souls, and Deep Lore in Games

 The games of FromSoft, particularly those in the "Souls-like" genre, which include Demon's Souls, Dark Souls I-III, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring, take an unusual but fascinating approach to storytelling.

If you want to go back a long ways, games would tend to tell their stories up-front and fairly simplistically - Super Mario games tended to let you know in the manual that Bowser has kidnapped Princess Toadstool (later called Peach in the U.S. - I actually think she always had that name in Japan) and you had to go rescue her. As the medium evolved, and technology improved, games began to have cinematic cutscenes that would play out like movies to situate you in a level or other phase of the game.

Now, there's always been some environmental storytelling as well - this could be as simple as the intro to Super Metroid, where you show up and all the scientists on Ceres Station are dead, and the glass cylinder where the baby Metroid was being kept has been shattered, which... gives you a pretty strong impression that someone broke in and violently stole it. That's confirmed in the next room when you find Ridley with the baby Metroid in hand.

But in the early days of video games, the story still tended to be simple. You can spend many hours exploring Planet Zebes in Super Metroid, but among the lore and story in the game you get, there's not a ton you can really confirm. Again, environmental storytelling gives you some intriguing hints - like, why is there a dead body in armor not entirely dissimilar to Samus' near the entrance to Kraid's boss room? And why are there weird jellyfish monsters who look a lot like Metroids in Maridia? But without going fully outside the game into supplementary materials, you won't be able to answer those things.

The Souls games (here referring to the list above, and not only Demon's Souls and Dark Souls) popularized a new approach to this. Every item and spell in these games has a description, and while some of it is fairly functional, e.g., "consume this to restore HP," they almost always come with some additional information about the world and setting, usually finding an in-world justification for the gameplay functionality of an item.

This then becomes a way to flesh out the world beyond what's revealed in cutscenes and dialogue.

Now, the Souls games take this to an extreme level. These games often give you some goal that is not exactly clear. In Bloodborne, you are told (and only by a missable note evidently written in your own hand) to "Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt." That's not, you know, super clear. And in fact, even after you have played through the game and overcome its final challenges, you might sit back and say "hold on, did I actually find this Paleblood?"

The Souls games treat both their primary narrative and their grand narrative (I'm avoiding using the term "metanarrative" because this could be confused with a fourth-wall-breaking story about the making of the narrative) as obscure archaeological finds, hoping you will engage in what is almost a second gameplay system - the communal effort to dig up and examine the obscure lore that paints a broader picture of what is going on. Even the "main story" leaves a lot of open ambiguities. Which ending to Dark Souls is the "good" one? Or, in Elden Ring, is Marika the benevolent queen who needs our help to rescue her from the husband/persona that has come to dominate her domain, or is she the tyrant who inflicted the world with chaos for her own nebulous purposes? Indeed, I think the aim in a lot of FromSoft games is to dispense with clear good and evil options, and instead embrace the idea that any philosophy comes with negative consequences, and your choice in the end is simply to decide which direction going forward outweighs its ramifications. (To borrow D&D's alignment system, it's like there's not really any clear good or evil, so you're left to choose between lawful and chaotic.)

Now, Control, which is a game that I kinda liked, then loved, and now am sort of obsessed with, does things a little differently.

Control's primary narrative is simpler than the Souls games, and far more straightforward. Jesse shows up to find her brother (notably, having a set protagonist rather than a character-designed avatar does allow for a more directly personal story) and goes on a simultaneous journey of discovery about the outlandish Federal Bureau of Control and its otherworldly headquarters, the Oldest House, while also battling an invasion by the sinister infectious mind-controlling resonance known as The Hiss.

This conflict against The Hiss is the basis of the primary narrative in the main game as well as the two DLCs (while both involve other elements, neither conflict would have occurred in not for the Hiss invasion).

But Control's grander narrative is primarily not about the Hiss, because the Hiss invasion is a recent phenomenon when you show up. It's implied that it may have started hours or even minutes before you arrived at the Oldest House, and while we never leave the building (not counting other planes of existence or the caverns beneath the building) and thus can't get a sense of precisely how long the events of the game are supposed to take, there's very little the Hiss have done there before the events of the game. You arrive in the early moments of a massive crisis, and notably, the FBC doesn't even have a name for the invading force until Jesse coins the term (comparing it to the hiss of a broken gas pipe, subtly poisoning the air).

Control is not an item-rich game, or rather, its items are not generally accessed in a menu and equipped the way they are in a Souls game. Your single weapon has multiple forms, but that merely reflects its metamorphic nature, and there's no separate "lore" for Grip or Spin or Charge, because these are all just different forms for the weapon called The Service Weapon to take - the lore being the same for each. The closest thing to "items" you get over the course of the game are Objects of Power, which imbue you with various abilities. When you bind the Floppy Disk, you get the Launch ability, but you don't pull this disk out and wave it around when you use this ability.

But that's fine, because the deep lore media in Control simply exists as its own thing. Unlike in Souls games, most of these documents exist purely for lore reasons, and a player who doesn't care about any of this and just wants to enjoy the game for its fun combat can ignore them (though I think such a person is a little dead inside). Control gives us memos, documentation, letters, and videos, which amount to an actually quite substantial amount of material.

What these do is contextualize the world of the FBC. And through them, we get tantalizing hints of mysteries that might be uncovered.

As an example, many references are made to the "Blessed" organization, which seems to be some kind of group that is using paranatural (read supernatural) objects and phenomena to inflict death and destruction upon random people, and may in fact be targeting the FBC itself, such as when they mail a fondue pot that incinerates the producer of the radio show America Overnight, which is secretly run by the FBC to influence the public. Furthermore, there's some potential implication that the Blessed organization is actually being supported by the Board, the enigmatic entity (or entities) that supports the FBC from the Astral Plane.

While the Foundation DLC's primary narrative does explicitly raise the possibility that the Board is sinister and hostile, and not to be trusted, it does not go so far as to imply that the Board would be moving against the FBC itself, which it has had a strong influence over ever since Director Northmoor moved the bureau into the Oldest House.

At no point in Control do you come in direct conflict with the Board, and the narrative of the Foundation DLC is still primarily about fixing the problems down there that ultimately trace their cause back to the Hiss invasion. But digging deeper, new possibilities of what is really going on crop up.

In a lot of ways, I think that this form of Deep Lore scratches the same itch that fuels conspiracy theorists in the real world. Control, and the New Weird genre in general, often likes to tell stories about conspiracy theories (and explore a fictional world in which the most outlandish of them are real,) and I think that is because the conspiracy theory is the latest manifestation of a very human desire for Revelation.

But while earnestly-believed conspiracy theories can become dangerous - such as when antipathy toward a politician leads you to believe that he could not have legitimately won the election that he did and you violently try to overthrow the government in favor of your own preferred candidate - the refuge of fiction is the ability to compartmentalize and experience these feelings safely, under containment in the conceit that none of this is actually real.

Like conspiracy theories, Deep Lore in games (and other artistic media) encourages a community to spring up around it. I've spent hours on YouTube watching videos discussing the lore of Souls games, World of Warcraft, and Control, the act of collecting and analyzing this lore becomes a collaborative form of gameplay that sits outside of the PS5 controller or whatever you're using to play these games.

The desire for Revelation - to see a hidden truth - is rooted deeply and firmly in human psychology and could almost be described as drug-like. I've been reading Carl Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and while I'm still pretty early in the book (it starts off dry, and there are some archaic assumptions made about cultures and gender roles, but it gets pretty juicy pretty quickly) one thing he identifies is the notion that, in a growingly irreligious era, people yearn to feel religious awe. That's maybe putting too strong an emphasis on it, but I think it gets at what makes this sort of storytelling so compelling: somewhere hardwired into our brain is a desire to connect new information.

And the utility of this is fairly obvious: our curiosity has allowed us to develop our intelligence, and grow the collective knowledge base of humanity. Thus, I think, the appeal of this kind of Deep Lore is a way to exercise our ability to do so and challenge ourselves to find deeper, hidden truths - the more obscure, the more we have proven our communal intellectual prowess.

This got a little more profound than I intended it (if I do say so myself,) but I wonder if the development of this kind of storytelling in games will become more widespread over time.

Yharnam as a Ravenloft Setting

The Soulsborne games have, of course, managed to be a big influence on me even though I only started playing them a couple years ago. While I understand why people adore Dark Souls, I, myself, prefer Bloodborne (though I wish Bloodborne was as big as Dark Souls III.) Both series' worldbuilding and aesthetics are incredible (and incredibly bleak) but maybe it's just because I've actually managed to beat Bloodborne (in DSIII I still have Nameless King, Darkeater Midir, and Slave Knight Gael, and of course Soul of Cinder evading me) but that one has a special place in my heart.

Anyway, it just occurred to me that Bloodborne could work really well as a Ravenloft setting.

(Similarly, I think Dark Souls could easily take place in the Shadowfell, which I could and probably will dedicate another post to.)

But let's talk specifically about the Ravenloft setting.

Ravenloft is a D&D setting that is built around Gothic Horror. But while gothic horror literature is typically set in our own world, and you can certainly have plenty of gothic horror tropes in the various worlds of the material plane in D&D, the Ravenloft setting places characters in the Demiplanes of Dread - a special, extra-planar region outside of mundane reality.

The Demiplanes of Dread pre-date the Shadowfell (which was introduced in either 3rd or 4th Edition, I think) and so, while they're connected to the Shadowfell in 5th Edition, they're also kind of separate. Essentially, think of the Demiplanes as being bubbles in the border between the Shadowfell and the Material Plane. While the Shadowfell, like the manic-to-its-depressive counterpart the Feywild, is a parallel world with equivalent features and locations, the Demiplanes are pieces of the material plane that have been swallowed by the Mists, and become their own little pocket universes, connected to one another, but also isolated.

There are mysterious figures - godlike but not gods - called the Dark Powers, who choose which people and which lands are taken. Each demiplane has its own Dark Lord, who is simultaneously the most powerful being in that demiplane and sort of its ruler, but also its prisoner, bound to the world and to a cycle of repeating their crimes in a limbo-like state of perpetual self-torment.

Most famous of these, and effectively the namesake of the setting, is Barovia, where the vampire Strahd von Zarovich rules from his home, Castle Ravenloft. The 5th Edition module Curse of Strahd is the updated version of the original adventure that spawned the Ravenloft setting.

While Barovia is by far the best-known part of the setting, the basic premise allows for all sorts of Dark Lords, each generally conforming to a classic horror trope, though these can go into somewhat less gothic territories like Mummy Lords and even infamous pirates. The setting does also sometimes contain some cosmic horror tropes as well - after all, Lovecraft's work was a sort of blending of Edgar Allen Poe's fixation on madness and psychological horror with the fear of alien beings such as from H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

Bloodborne, of course, is a story that blends the aesthetics of gothic horror - the gothic architecture, the notion of men becoming beasts - with cosmic horror - the alien hidden beneath it all, the notion of knowledge as a dangerous thing that could lead to madness - as well as some of Hidetaka Miyazaki's penchant for disturbing visuals.

But something occurred to me - the actual mechanics of Bloodborne actually bear some resemblance to that of Ravenloft.

Both are about cycles. The Dark Lord, win or lose, will generally find themselves repeating their cycle over and over. It's extremely rare for the Dark Powers to actually permit a Dark Lord to leave Ravenloft (in a questionably canonical episode, the ur-Death Knight, Lord Soth, had no illusions about his own crimes, and so the Dark Powers basically figured "you know what, ironic punishment isn't really working on this guy. He's far too self-aware.")

Who, then, is the Dark Lord of Yharnam?

I'd say it's Gehrman, the First Hunter.

Bloodborne is a little odd, and distinct from the Souls games in that the final boss changes depending on which of the three endings you go for. There is an ending in which you allow Gehrman to behead you within the Hunter's Dream - the sort of peaceful respite that you return to when you die, or when you wish to take refuge from the dangers of the night. Doing so severs your connection to the Dream, and you're allowed to wake up and presumably leave Yharnam, with all the nightmarish memories of what came before forgotten. This leaves the final boss of the game Mergo's Wet Nurse, a very clearly monstrous (though not necessarily evil) thing within a conjured nightmare created by the evil College of Mensis (or, something. You never really know with these Soulsborne games.)

But if you refuse to let him do so, Gehrman fights you. What's interesting is that your refusal to leave the dream could either be a sign of your bloodlust taking over you, or maybe a more altruistic desire to keep the city safe. Either way, Gehrman's motivations seem to be pretty noble - he wants to put you down, either because you've become a blodd-crazed beast or because he's trying to spare you from what he knows will happen if you stay.

Gehrman, it's implied, fought beasts to protect the city of Yharnam, and while he did not succumb to the Curse of Beasts like so many other hunters - who became werewolf-like (or far worse, such as in the case of Ludwig) monsters - he must have committed some terrible crimes (likely involving the being Kos, whose corpse is seen in the final boss arena of the Old Hunters DLC) and made some kind of deal with the Moon Presence - one of the Great Ones - where he'd oversee other hunters.

If Barovia is indicative of other Ravenloft settings, the only way to escape the demiplane is to slay its Dark Lord (or be Vistani.) This does allow for a final triumph, and a happy ending one can earn by surviving up to that fight.

But one could imagine Yharnam as a kind of exception to that rule. Gehrman might need some task performed - the destruction of some horrifying monster that counts as the official final boss of the adventure, and he'll free you by severing your conneciton to that demiplane. But players who see the anguish that he's in, the horror that he's forced to endure, might choose the "good" ending and refuse to leave him - only to trigger this final fight.

And, true to the bleakness of the story of Bloodborne, the reward for defeating him is, yes, saving him from this eternal cycle, but then being forced to take his place.