The Ashfire Club Grotto
The Ashfire Club is an exclusive social club for “persons of quality”; its members are drawn from the ranks of Chancel’s aristocratic families, the wealthy, and the socially well-positioned. Many assume that the club is merely a contrivance that obscures its members’ drunken escapades, experiments with unusual vices, and ribald sexual adventures, but rumors have always circulated that the club serves a darker design.
• The Ashfire Club maintains a secret grotto that is used to host raucous celebrations and unholy rites in a secluded setting safe from the prying eyes of the general public.
• The grotto’s chambers are decorated with statues that depict various members of the Ashfire Club as nymphs, satyrs, succubi, and incubi possessing a virile, energetic beauty they often do not evidence in their mortal forms.
• Sir Francis Lowood, the club’s founder and de facto president, promotes an indecent atmosphere of carousing within the grotto, employing a number of prostitutes and entertainers as retainers at his beck and call.
• Within the grotto's deepest chambers, he introduces his compatriots to the worship of a multitude of devils.
• To maintain their wealth, the members of the Ashfire Club secretly engage in the underground slave trade. Their captives are kept within cells in the grotto until they can be transported elsewhere under the cover of night.
Dominating Chancel’s skyline, the Cathedral of the Three Anguishes is the most magnificent place of worship in Krevborna.
• A towering edifice of black stone and ornate stained glass, the Cathedral of the Three Anguishes is the seat of the Church of Holy Blood’s power.
• It is rumored that the Church of Holy Blood maintains an archive of forbidden books within the cathedral and that its deepest cellars house cells where inquisitors perform vile tortures upon those they regard as heretics, apostates, and enemies of the faith.