The Church of Holy Blood
The Church of Holy Blood is the predominant religion in Krevborna. The Church wields tremendous power throughout the land, weaving itself into the daily lives of the populace and ruling many areas of Krevborna, such as Chancel, as a theocracy.
The Church preaches the virtues of spiritual devotion and self-denial; its many prohibitions, commandments, and strictures are considered necessary restraints that keep society from plunging into a state of anarchy and unrepentant sin.
Although Krevborna’s Church is united in the broad outlines of the faith, it is internally riven by disagreements regarding doctrinal and liturgical matters that threaten an eventual schism. In his role as the High Dogmatist, the head of Krevborna’s Church is currently Father Anjelus Navarre, though his spiritual leadership offers little in the way of stability; he is contested by rivals within both the mainline of the Church and among its dissenting branches.
The Word and the Light
Central to the Church’s beliefs is a scriptural account of the cosmic war between the Word and the Light, the god who created the Mortal World, and a coterie of angels who rebelled against the deity’s divine rule.
According to the testament found in the Holy Blood Bible, the forces comprised of the Word and the Light and His loyal angels were ultimately victorious, though the Word and the Light was hideously wounded by the upstarts during the conflict.
In lieu of direct intercession, the Word and the Light sent His only daughter, the sacred Jesa Khristosa, to redeem the world from sin. When Jesa Khristosa was slain by unbelievers who refused the salvation she offered, the Word and the Light withdrew His influence from the world while He healed from the War in Heaven.
The Wounded God and Saintly Icons
After the Word and the Light withdrew its influence, dominion over the spiritual life of the Mortal World was transferred to the Church’s saints, who number in the thousands. The faithful pray to the saints as intercessors. They do not pray directly to the Word and the Light; as the Wounded God, the Word and the Light exists beyond the Mortal World and cannot offer succor. Instead, they view the saints as the inheritor of their God’s mantle and believe that they must follow the example set by their saints—they must oppose sin in the world and attempt to emulate saintly virtues. The faithful often feel an especial connection to a particular patron saint.
The saints are meant to guide and shepherd mankind until the Word and the Light recovers and is able to initiate the Second Coming of the Khristosa.
The Rites of the Church
The Church of Holy Blood’s sacraments focus on imbibing sanctified blood and bathing in holy blood poured from baptismal fonts. The blood used in these rites is the literal blood of the martyred saints, created through miracles of transordination. The Church’s rites are usually performed in High Evangian, the sacred language used by the Word and the Light to usher in all creation.
The Origins of Supernatural Evil
Two distinct categories of supernatural evil were created as the inadvertent fallout of battles between the angelic hosts loyal to the Word and the Light and the rebel angels who initiated the War in Heaven. When Lucerius, chief of the usurping angels, was metaphysically cleaved in twain by the Archangel Mikaelos, Lucerius’s spirit became the first demon to fall into Hell and his material body became the first vampire to walk the Mortal World.
In the years that followed, these two entities adopted new names—this event birthed both the devil Damophet and the vampire king Zorin Malistrad. Damophet and Malistrad rule over the others of their damned kind, but as forcibly separated halves of the same being they crave wholeness. However, they are doomed to oppose each other. Such is their enduring curse.
Dragons, Drakoi, and Sin
In the Holy Blood Bible, dragons are referred to as the Beasts of Man’s Sin. Theological texts theorize that the first transgressions committed by mankind against the Word and the Light’s commandments coalesced into the form of a dragon meant to punish human frailty. Great sins, whether personal or communal, continue to birth dragons in the world.
The existence of the drakoi, rare dragon-like men and women, adds further conjecture to the supposed role that sin plays in the creation of dragons. Those who have transformed into drakoi are usually shunned, but some attempt redemption in hopes of regaining their original, “pure” forms.
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Religious Horrors
The Church of Holy Blood in Krevborna is based on the representations of Catholicism found in early Gothic fiction and the notion of viewing the Eastern Orthodox faith through a Gothic lens. As many of the most influential Gothic novels were written by British Protestants in an age where religious and national schisms were still potent forces in European politics, depictions of the Catholic Church in works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, and especially Matthew Lewis’s The Monk tend to emphasize its seductive aesthetics, semi-macabre rituals, and moral hypocrisies. Krevborna follows in that tradition by presenting the Church of Holy Blood as a corrupt institution that wields temporal power even though it claims to only be concerned with spiritual salvation.
Of course, there are other inspirations for the Church of Holy Blood whose outlines can be discerned in the detail in this chapter. There are elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s critique of Puritanism in the description of the Church, as well as a bit of the monstrous Calvinism that takes center stage in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Similarly, depictions of Eastern Orthodoxy, such as Nikolai Gogol's Viy and other Slavic horror tales, have made their influence felt here.
Generally, the role of invented religions in fantasy role-playing games is often veiled in manufactured polytheism so as not to trouble the sensitivities of the players or to challenge any of their deeply held beliefs. Krevborna provides no such luxuries. It is entirely possible for someone of religious faith to find great offense in the description of the Church of Holy Blood, as is their right. Feel free to replace it, if it sours you on the setting as a whole. Any number of generic pantheons could be inserted into the setting—though I do tend to think that they weaken the overall themes of the setting as a site where all manner of abuses of power are shown in their most monstrous forms.
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