The Theater Diabolique
The Theater Diabolique is a playhouse specializing in gory productions that dramatize crimes, murders, and supernatural terrors as ghastly spectacles for stout-stomached crowds.
• The artists of the Theater Diabolique are infamous for their mastery of theatrical artifice; they have pioneered techniques for creating fake blood, steaming entrails, and dismembered corpses that seem all too real.
• The gruesome plays performed at the theater are also supported by a few gore-obsessed illusionists who use their magic to enhance the Diabolique’s phantasmagoria of slaughter and carnage.
• A deformed masked madman named Erik Bercilan lives in the ancient tunnels beneath the playhouse; he is liable to abduct any starlet performing at the Theater Diabolique that catches his eye.
Villa Kazmark
Villa Kazmark is an abandoned manor house in Hemlock Hollow with a sinister reputation. It was once rented by a circle of Romantic poets as a place of collaboration—and some say for drunken orgies as well—but their tenancy ended in a bloody suicidal pact.
• Villa Kazmark is secretly used as a place of worship for Hemlock Hollow’s remaining Church of Holy Blood adherents now that their faith has been driven underground.
• Secret chambers in the basement of Villa Kazmark are used to store outlawed religious tracts and contraband copies of the Holy Blood Bible.
• Villa Kazmark features a number of “priest holes”—hiding places for clerics and other members of the faith who are being hunted by the witches of the Graymalk clan and their satanic servants.
• The manor house is also haunted; at night, the poets who met their demise within its walls reenact the violent scenes of their deaths.
• In recent years, the ghosts inhabiting Villa Kazmark have become more active and agitated; soon they will seek to possess those who worship clandestinely within the house.
