Below are two locations in the city of Chancel in Krevborna. Both of these locations have a basis in actual play, in one way of another.
The Midnight Cabaret's Yulia Karminova was loosely inspired by Anne's character Traviata. Traviata is a consumptive former opera star, but she never met a tragic end as Yulia Karminova did--essentially, Yulia is me imagining how things could have gone horribly wrong for someone in Traviata's position.
Over on my gaming Discord, we have a healthy interest in "fungal horror." From Andrew F. Sullivan's The Marigold to D&D's Zuggtmoy, we're into it. The Children of the Rotmaiden is Krevborna's humble contribution to the subgenre. The cult featured as the ultimate Big Bad of one of the Krevborna campaigns I ran; the Children of the Rotmaiden had set up shop on the bone moon to bombard the Earth with fungal munitions. Luckily, their nefarious plan was thwarted.
The Midnight Cabaret
The Midnight Cabaret is a shabby music hall on a disreputable lane in Chancel that caters to riffraff and slumming swells.
• The venue is haunted by the ghost of Yulia Karminova, a former opera star whose career was derailed by scandal. Rejected by society, she was forced to perform at a lowly cabaret to earn her daily bread.
• Yulia’s health suffered amid the grime of the Midnight Cabaret; the flecks of blood that began to decorate her lace handkerchiefs when she coughed indicated that she her days were numbered.
• Unable to endure her fall from grace or face a slow, painful death from consumption, Yulia hung herself from the rafters of the Midnight Cabaret.
• Embittered by her tragic end, Yulia’s spirit lingers within the music hall, attacking any performers who seem poised on the brink of greater success.
• Her true name is now long-forgotten, but her legend lives on under a ghastly sobriquet: “the Blood-Soaked Diva.”
• Performers at the Midnight Cabaret have spotted a spectral figure clad in a white opera gown soaked through with blood; they fear hearing the sound of a ghostly aria—the telltale sign that the Blood-Soaked Diva has crept near.
Waldenraub Manor
Waldenraub Manor, a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of Chancel, is secretly the compound of the Children of the Rotmaiden—a cult devoted to an eldritch entity associated with decay, ruin, and the dissolution of the individual self.
• The cult’s desire to ravage the land with fungal horrors is the promise of vengeance against a world that has wronged them; typical members of the cult include formerly oppressed serfs, the impoverished, and mistreated children.
• The Children of the Rotmaiden are led by Dahlia Medlozka, a hardened woman who views the cult not as an extension of an evil agenda, but rather as a tool of liberation.
• She hopes that the cult’s efforts can usher in a better world in which all become equal as the Rotmaiden weaves together the consciousness of every living being into a biological tapestry devoid of individual will.
