Gonna put on my TV critic’s hat here and do a “recap/review,” since I want to see how much I have right.
“There’s an Anglophone city somewhere in Europe called Yarnham, which was built on top of, or with access to, a system of demiplanar unerground labyrinths referred to as the Tomb of the Gods. A college was formed, Byrgenworth, with an interest in exploring and plundering the tombs. They harvested a bunch chalices, which allowed them to access the labyrinths through ritual teleportation, which is neat.
Eventually the body of an actual God is found (Great One, if you must), and, European scholars being European scholars, someone gets the bright idea to shoot it into their own body. This feels great and gives them Wolverine-type healing powers. It becomes the trend around the quad for the boys to give each other blood transfusions until everyone’s DNA is reconfigured and they’re pumping out the good stuff.
Provost Willem, who runs the church, has the novel thought that maybe this is bad, and wants the kids to do normal college stuff instead (carving runes into their brains, continuing to hunt eldritch fuckers in the underworld, etc). One of his students, defying him, sets up shop in Yarnham and established a Healing Church, spreading the good word of the Holy Juice through the town. Many rare diseases are cured and Yarnham becomes a prosperous haven for medicine and weirdo religion. Just as the Gothic architecture craze hits this part of Europe, the city massively expands beyond the confines of the original town, and the church builds a big Grand Cathedral. There’s a little cottage industry in selling your funky-smelling blood. People inject their blood into dogs and then inject themselves with the dogs’ blood. Life is good for a while, like the first half of Boogie Nights.
It becomes apparent during Stage Four clinical trials that the miracle drug does in fact have side effects in a small minority of cases. The first stage is violent psychosis and the second stage is turning into some sort of monster—usually but not necessarily in the general region of a werewolf. This is bad PR for the Church and bad for the economy, so they hire a hunter, by the name of Gehrman, to isolate and kill the infected. Gehrman is a real-deal badass—not only a great mower-down of baddies but an inventor and tinkerer, a wizard, and a tomb prospector. For the church he sets up a workshop and develops a series of tools, trick weapons, and ideologies to streamline the hunting of beasts. He attracts the attention of a group of good- or neutral-aligned funky li’l multiversal gremlins, known as the Messengers. At some point he has some sort of encounter with a Great One and uses his mojo to create a demiplanar secondary workshop and animates a doll to keep him company. He retires, either immediately or afterwards.
Gehrman and his methods have imitators, and Hunting soon becomes another cottage industry with its own customs and factions. The Church institutionalizes the “Night of the Hunt” where everyone fucks off to their homes and everyone left wandering around is fair game for all the goths running around. Because the hunters are also using blood, some of them are having adverse events and there’s a secondary institution of Hunters of Hunters. A perfect system!
Nonetheless, things get out of hand. Historic Old Yarnham, which has been doing the blood thing for longer than the newer parts of town, hits a point-of-no-return with regards to beastliness. The Church and the hunters have the place burned down and sealed off.[2] This isn’t really effective; the Old Yarnhamites survive with their own Chalice and their own sources of blood.
With the blood-ministration-based economy obviously heading for a collapse, the Healing Church has two reformation movements, both based on the idea of seeking relief from the Beastly Plague through communion with the living Old Ones, particularly an entity called “Kos” who seems to be the creator of or an incarnation of the universe[3]. The first, The Choir, uses church resources to establish an “Orphanage,” engineering children with altered brains to commune with the old ones. This seems to succeed, and they summon Ebrietas, a child of Kos, and stash her away in the Altar of Despair beneath the Grand Cathedral.
A second splinter group, less successful but more dangerous, is the Mensis Scholars. These nerds, led at least in part by a powerful mage-scholar named Micolash, separate themselves from the ordinary Church, first by shutting themselves up in a walled-off part of the city they call “Ya’hargal, the Unseen Village,” and later by, I believe the technical term is, “wrapping themselves up in tin toil all nice and toasty and getting into the microwave and blowing themselves tae fuck.” From then on they split their operations between Ya’hargal, where they moved in a bunch of big Eldritch heavies and manipulated events in town, and the extraplanar “Nightmare” Realm, where they worked on a ritual to sidestep the beast problem by transcending humanity altogether. The Mensis people were fixated on the moon and on fertility[4] and wanted to physically impregnate a woman with a new child of Kos.
Meanwhile back in Byrgenworth, Provost Willem got a whiff of all this happening. He didn’t have the power to take these people on, but he was able to instrumentalize the remaining students of Byrgenworth for a ritual to summon a kind of counter-Old One, “Rom, the Vacuous Spider,” and tie it up in a pocket plane within the lake by Byrgenworth. The presence of Rom served to act as a sort of jammer and spoof the communications between the Church apostates and their respective gods. Old Ones already in Yarnham became physically invisible to humans. This ritual had the consequence of completely obliterating hte brainly of everyone in Byrgenworth—the students who participated in the ritual turned into mindless goop and sank into an otherworld adjunct to the Mensis Nightmare, and Willem himself suffered from sudden-onset dementia and spent the rest of his life sitting around vaguely pleased with himself, staring at the lake.
All well and good. Enter the detested Napoleon Bonaparte, whose grasping ambitions turn all of Europe in to a battlefield. British intelligence, hearing reports that the French have sent agents to Yarnham in search of something called “Paleblood,” dispatch their own most trusted agent. Stephen Maturin is a naval surgeon, a canny spy, deadly with sword and pistol, a regrettable Catholic, and an habitual user of narcotic substances for his health (although he has nothing in the way of an addictive personality), and is therefore the perfect agent to send into Yarnham.[5]
Stephen is at first unable to contact the Healing Church, especially since he has arrived on the Night of the Hunt (although the game suggests that the “night” of the hunt has gone on longer than expected, as we know from experience is often the way of quarantines with a non-compliant population). He is instead reduced to receiving a blood transfusion from a shady back alley surgeon at Iosefka’s Clinic. As soon as he receives the transfusion, he attracts the attention of the Messengers, who spirit him away to the Hunter’s Dream and outfit him with the tools and clothes of a Hunter. Here he meets the retired Gehrman, who encourages him to “go out and hunt some beasties.” Never one to turn down a particularly valuable connection, Stephen returns to Yarnham and shoots/hacks/whips his way through a randy crowd of beasts and plague-addled faux-hunters who confuse his reptilian Irish countenance for beasthood.
Stephen, in his methodical way, gathers a network of connections around Yarnham. In the church of Oedon he meets a weird little gremlin-looking guy who offers him sanctuary. Stephen mistrusts this man but does not believe him to be French-aligned and takes him up on the offer. To the church he brings two women: a sick old woman who comes to believe him to be her son and who is able to supply him his favorite tincture of laudanum (mixed with blood, as these things go—but Stephen is already a heavy user of blood, enjoying its effects); and Arianna, a sex worker who keeps him supplies with her special, sexual blood, and who reminds him of his dear Diana. He also wins the confidence of the doll by finding her original doll-body in Gehrman’s abandoned workshop and giving her back an old piece of jewelry, and he runs some errands for Gehrman, descending on his advice into Old Yarnham and retrieving a lost Chalice. Incidentally he meets a man named Alfred, who is an obvious French plant and tries to sell him a completely unsubstantiated story about a haunted castle.
After a successful bout of hunting, with a dalliance in the Hunting of Hunters, Stephen is favored by the Messengers with the emblem of the Chief of Hunters, which allows him to feign the end of the Hunt and gain access to the sealed Cathedral Ward. He also attracts the attention of the Mensis people, who knock him over the head and lock him up in Ya’hargal—although they later decide to let him go. Various parties prod Stephen in the direction of Byrgenworth, where he dives into the lake and kills the spider Rom. This reveals the Great Ones currently active in Yarnham and allows Mensis and the Choir to continue their work.
Stephen, somewhat abashed, takes on a new role as a hunter of Great Ones. He raids the Choir, destroys their orphanage, and kills Ebrietas. Then he tears his way through Ya’hargal, accesses the Nightmare of Mensis, kills Micolash and destroys the giant Great One brain that they have chained up. He is too late to prevent the prophecised birth of a new Great One, but he defeats the ambiguous Eldritch entity that serves as its wet nurse. When he goes to retrieve or kill the baby, it’s gone. Stephen returns to the Dream and is told by Gehrman that his job is done and he can sacrifice his life and his memories of Yarnham to return to his life. This is unacceptable to Stephen, who has gained exciting new addictions and valuable intelligence to be used against the French. When he refuses, Gehrman turns aggressive, and Stephen flees to Yarnham.
Stephen returns to Yarnham to find that Arianna has been impregnated and given birth to the child of Oedon. Stephen kills both Arianna and the child, then kills the gremlin-looking guy and the old woman for good measure. Adopting the methods of the Church, and realizing that nearly everyone in Yarnham has died over the course of his adventures, he finishes the job, killiing the French agent, his patron hunters, and the Hunters of Hunters. The only person whom he does not judge to either be a potential carrier for the beast-plague or a threat to his person is empty-brained Provost Willem, who seemed like a good guy in his day. He spares himself, knowing that he doesn’t have an addictive personality and will never succumb to beasthood, and in fact eats a stitched-together umbilical cord before confronting Gehrman, feeling like he could do with some eldritch Insight to return to his British handlers.
Stephen kills Gehrman and then encounters a Great One, which seems to be the newly-born “Mergo,” rescued from the care of Gernham [6]. Mergo takes Stephen to be his father, and only turns aggressive when Stephen rejects his affections. After killing Mergo, Stephen achieves the enlightenment denies to his predecessor and sloughs off his mortal Irish-Catalan body, incarnating as a tiny worm in the care of the Doll.[7]”
Great game. I like it even better than Dark Souls—the combat’s a bit cleaner, the worldbuilding is more evocative, and the evocation of the larger series is much better handled than Dark Souls’ hamfisted use of Jack Aubrey.
[1] Going off of the Umbilical Cord in the original workshop, which seems suggestive.
[2]Chronology is fuzzy here.
[3] This is all interpretive, but between the name “Kosm,” the title “Daughter of the Cosmos,” and the attribution of Rom’s powers to Kos, it all seems to track.
[4]Hence the on-the-nose name “Mensus.”
[5]It’s all kept a bit hazy—I think the O’Brian estate didn’t want FromSoft stepping on any toes—but what clues we are given suggest that the game is set between “The Mauritius Command” and “Desolation Island.” Stephen is unmarried, has reasons to avoid showing his face in France, and his particular friend Jack Aubrey is ashore for the occasion of the birth of his son George.
[6] I’ve done enough shameful Wiki diving to know that this isn’t canon, but internal to my playthrough it’s definitely what happened. Mensis attempted to summon the moon, a child is born, the child winds up missing while you have your fight with the Wet Nurse which pointedly takes place in darkness. It’s clear that Gehrman snuck in, took the baby back to the Dream, and wanted to raise it as his father.
[7] How Stephen manages to escape this jam and return to his humble room at the Grapes in time for the start of “Desolation Island,” and the unsettling news which sets him on the road to his fateful reunion with Diana in the United States, is left up to the reader. But we know that Stephen has a strong constitution and has survived worse setbacks, like when he tripped and knocked his head against the cannon and needed to be trepanned.
“There’s an Anglophone city somewhere in Europe called Yarnham, which was built on top of, or with access to, a system of demiplanar unerground labyrinths referred to as the Tomb of the Gods. A college was formed, Byrgenworth, with an interest in exploring and plundering the tombs. They harvested a bunch chalices, which allowed them to access the labyrinths through ritual teleportation, which is neat.
Eventually the body of an actual God is found (Great One, if you must), and, European scholars being European scholars, someone gets the bright idea to shoot it into their own body. This feels great and gives them Wolverine-type healing powers. It becomes the trend around the quad for the boys to give each other blood transfusions until everyone’s DNA is reconfigured and they’re pumping out the good stuff.
Provost Willem, who runs the church, has the novel thought that maybe this is bad, and wants the kids to do normal college stuff instead (carving runes into their brains, continuing to hunt eldritch fuckers in the underworld, etc). One of his students, defying him, sets up shop in Yarnham and established a Healing Church, spreading the good word of the Holy Juice through the town. Many rare diseases are cured and Yarnham becomes a prosperous haven for medicine and weirdo religion. Just as the Gothic architecture craze hits this part of Europe, the city massively expands beyond the confines of the original town, and the church builds a big Grand Cathedral. There’s a little cottage industry in selling your funky-smelling blood. People inject their blood into dogs and then inject themselves with the dogs’ blood. Life is good for a while, like the first half of Boogie Nights.
It becomes apparent during Stage Four clinical trials that the miracle drug does in fact have side effects in a small minority of cases. The first stage is violent psychosis and the second stage is turning into some sort of monster—usually but not necessarily in the general region of a werewolf. This is bad PR for the Church and bad for the economy, so they hire a hunter, by the name of Gehrman, to isolate and kill the infected. Gehrman is a real-deal badass—not only a great mower-down of baddies but an inventor and tinkerer, a wizard, and a tomb prospector. For the church he sets up a workshop and develops a series of tools, trick weapons, and ideologies to streamline the hunting of beasts. He attracts the attention of a group of good- or neutral-aligned funky li’l multiversal gremlins, known as the Messengers. At some point he has some sort of encounter with a Great One and uses his mojo to create a demiplanar secondary workshop and animates a doll to keep him company. He retires, either immediately or afterwards.
Gehrman and his methods have imitators, and Hunting soon becomes another cottage industry with its own customs and factions. The Church institutionalizes the “Night of the Hunt” where everyone fucks off to their homes and everyone left wandering around is fair game for all the goths running around. Because the hunters are also using blood, some of them are having adverse events and there’s a secondary institution of Hunters of Hunters. A perfect system!
Nonetheless, things get out of hand. Historic Old Yarnham, which has been doing the blood thing for longer than the newer parts of town, hits a point-of-no-return with regards to beastliness. The Church and the hunters have the place burned down and sealed off.[2] This isn’t really effective; the Old Yarnhamites survive with their own Chalice and their own sources of blood.
With the blood-ministration-based economy obviously heading for a collapse, the Healing Church has two reformation movements, both based on the idea of seeking relief from the Beastly Plague through communion with the living Old Ones, particularly an entity called “Kos” who seems to be the creator of or an incarnation of the universe[3]. The first, The Choir, uses church resources to establish an “Orphanage,” engineering children with altered brains to commune with the old ones. This seems to succeed, and they summon Ebrietas, a child of Kos, and stash her away in the Altar of Despair beneath the Grand Cathedral.
A second splinter group, less successful but more dangerous, is the Mensis Scholars. These nerds, led at least in part by a powerful mage-scholar named Micolash, separate themselves from the ordinary Church, first by shutting themselves up in a walled-off part of the city they call “Ya’hargal, the Unseen Village,” and later by, I believe the technical term is, “wrapping themselves up in tin toil all nice and toasty and getting into the microwave and blowing themselves tae fuck.” From then on they split their operations between Ya’hargal, where they moved in a bunch of big Eldritch heavies and manipulated events in town, and the extraplanar “Nightmare” Realm, where they worked on a ritual to sidestep the beast problem by transcending humanity altogether. The Mensis people were fixated on the moon and on fertility[4] and wanted to physically impregnate a woman with a new child of Kos.
Meanwhile back in Byrgenworth, Provost Willem got a whiff of all this happening. He didn’t have the power to take these people on, but he was able to instrumentalize the remaining students of Byrgenworth for a ritual to summon a kind of counter-Old One, “Rom, the Vacuous Spider,” and tie it up in a pocket plane within the lake by Byrgenworth. The presence of Rom served to act as a sort of jammer and spoof the communications between the Church apostates and their respective gods. Old Ones already in Yarnham became physically invisible to humans. This ritual had the consequence of completely obliterating hte brainly of everyone in Byrgenworth—the students who participated in the ritual turned into mindless goop and sank into an otherworld adjunct to the Mensis Nightmare, and Willem himself suffered from sudden-onset dementia and spent the rest of his life sitting around vaguely pleased with himself, staring at the lake.
All well and good. Enter the detested Napoleon Bonaparte, whose grasping ambitions turn all of Europe in to a battlefield. British intelligence, hearing reports that the French have sent agents to Yarnham in search of something called “Paleblood,” dispatch their own most trusted agent. Stephen Maturin is a naval surgeon, a canny spy, deadly with sword and pistol, a regrettable Catholic, and an habitual user of narcotic substances for his health (although he has nothing in the way of an addictive personality), and is therefore the perfect agent to send into Yarnham.[5]
Stephen is at first unable to contact the Healing Church, especially since he has arrived on the Night of the Hunt (although the game suggests that the “night” of the hunt has gone on longer than expected, as we know from experience is often the way of quarantines with a non-compliant population). He is instead reduced to receiving a blood transfusion from a shady back alley surgeon at Iosefka’s Clinic. As soon as he receives the transfusion, he attracts the attention of the Messengers, who spirit him away to the Hunter’s Dream and outfit him with the tools and clothes of a Hunter. Here he meets the retired Gehrman, who encourages him to “go out and hunt some beasties.” Never one to turn down a particularly valuable connection, Stephen returns to Yarnham and shoots/hacks/whips his way through a randy crowd of beasts and plague-addled faux-hunters who confuse his reptilian Irish countenance for beasthood.
Stephen, in his methodical way, gathers a network of connections around Yarnham. In the church of Oedon he meets a weird little gremlin-looking guy who offers him sanctuary. Stephen mistrusts this man but does not believe him to be French-aligned and takes him up on the offer. To the church he brings two women: a sick old woman who comes to believe him to be her son and who is able to supply him his favorite tincture of laudanum (mixed with blood, as these things go—but Stephen is already a heavy user of blood, enjoying its effects); and Arianna, a sex worker who keeps him supplies with her special, sexual blood, and who reminds him of his dear Diana. He also wins the confidence of the doll by finding her original doll-body in Gehrman’s abandoned workshop and giving her back an old piece of jewelry, and he runs some errands for Gehrman, descending on his advice into Old Yarnham and retrieving a lost Chalice. Incidentally he meets a man named Alfred, who is an obvious French plant and tries to sell him a completely unsubstantiated story about a haunted castle.
After a successful bout of hunting, with a dalliance in the Hunting of Hunters, Stephen is favored by the Messengers with the emblem of the Chief of Hunters, which allows him to feign the end of the Hunt and gain access to the sealed Cathedral Ward. He also attracts the attention of the Mensis people, who knock him over the head and lock him up in Ya’hargal—although they later decide to let him go. Various parties prod Stephen in the direction of Byrgenworth, where he dives into the lake and kills the spider Rom. This reveals the Great Ones currently active in Yarnham and allows Mensis and the Choir to continue their work.
Stephen, somewhat abashed, takes on a new role as a hunter of Great Ones. He raids the Choir, destroys their orphanage, and kills Ebrietas. Then he tears his way through Ya’hargal, accesses the Nightmare of Mensis, kills Micolash and destroys the giant Great One brain that they have chained up. He is too late to prevent the prophecised birth of a new Great One, but he defeats the ambiguous Eldritch entity that serves as its wet nurse. When he goes to retrieve or kill the baby, it’s gone. Stephen returns to the Dream and is told by Gehrman that his job is done and he can sacrifice his life and his memories of Yarnham to return to his life. This is unacceptable to Stephen, who has gained exciting new addictions and valuable intelligence to be used against the French. When he refuses, Gehrman turns aggressive, and Stephen flees to Yarnham.
Stephen returns to Yarnham to find that Arianna has been impregnated and given birth to the child of Oedon. Stephen kills both Arianna and the child, then kills the gremlin-looking guy and the old woman for good measure. Adopting the methods of the Church, and realizing that nearly everyone in Yarnham has died over the course of his adventures, he finishes the job, killiing the French agent, his patron hunters, and the Hunters of Hunters. The only person whom he does not judge to either be a potential carrier for the beast-plague or a threat to his person is empty-brained Provost Willem, who seemed like a good guy in his day. He spares himself, knowing that he doesn’t have an addictive personality and will never succumb to beasthood, and in fact eats a stitched-together umbilical cord before confronting Gehrman, feeling like he could do with some eldritch Insight to return to his British handlers.
Stephen kills Gehrman and then encounters a Great One, which seems to be the newly-born “Mergo,” rescued from the care of Gernham [6]. Mergo takes Stephen to be his father, and only turns aggressive when Stephen rejects his affections. After killing Mergo, Stephen achieves the enlightenment denies to his predecessor and sloughs off his mortal Irish-Catalan body, incarnating as a tiny worm in the care of the Doll.[7]”
Great game. I like it even better than Dark Souls—the combat’s a bit cleaner, the worldbuilding is more evocative, and the evocation of the larger series is much better handled than Dark Souls’ hamfisted use of Jack Aubrey.
[1] Going off of the Umbilical Cord in the original workshop, which seems suggestive.
[2]Chronology is fuzzy here.
[3] This is all interpretive, but between the name “Kosm,” the title “Daughter of the Cosmos,” and the attribution of Rom’s powers to Kos, it all seems to track.
[4]Hence the on-the-nose name “Mensus.”
[5]It’s all kept a bit hazy—I think the O’Brian estate didn’t want FromSoft stepping on any toes—but what clues we are given suggest that the game is set between “The Mauritius Command” and “Desolation Island.” Stephen is unmarried, has reasons to avoid showing his face in France, and his particular friend Jack Aubrey is ashore for the occasion of the birth of his son George.
[6] I’ve done enough shameful Wiki diving to know that this isn’t canon, but internal to my playthrough it’s definitely what happened. Mensis attempted to summon the moon, a child is born, the child winds up missing while you have your fight with the Wet Nurse which pointedly takes place in darkness. It’s clear that Gehrman snuck in, took the baby back to the Dream, and wanted to raise it as his father.
[7] How Stephen manages to escape this jam and return to his humble room at the Grapes in time for the start of “Desolation Island,” and the unsettling news which sets him on the road to his fateful reunion with Diana in the United States, is left up to the reader. But we know that Stephen has a strong constitution and has survived worse setbacks, like when he tripped and knocked his head against the cannon and needed to be trepanned.