The Church of Holy Blood

This post is the first in a series about religion in Krevborna.

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.

***

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.

Operation Incisor

The gang helped me playtest the latest version of my AG3NTS OF CRVCIBLE rpg--it's about secret agents sent into the subconscious mind on surreal missions. The game is shaping up niceky; just a couple more tweaks and maybe I'll put this together as something other people can play.

Events

As they came into consciousness, the agents heard the following resounding in their heads: "The Hypnos Protocol is now complete. Agents, proceed with Operation Incisor. Investigate within the hospital and cut out the infection." Unfortunately, they each faded into the mission in different places, with different burdens thrust upon them.

Agent Nowhere awoke inside cold, confining darkness. She figured out that she was inside a hospital morgue and managed to free herself. However, as she dressed in spare scrubs, she discovered that the corpses housed in the morgue were not resting quietly; they began to bang on the doors to their "cells." When one was released, it bit Agent Nowhere's leg, but she managed to fend it off with a Liston knife and make a run for the elevator.

Agent Frownie found herself holding a coffee mug that read Fiefdom Biomedical Industries in a hospital break room, wearing scrubs. As she tried to leave, she was grabbed by a nurse and told that she was needed in surgery right away. In an operating theater (overlooked by three men in sharp suits who took notes on clipboards), Agent Frownie was asked to remove an ambulatory thing that was squirming beneath the patient's skin. Using a surgical implement of alien design, she was able to cut out a calcified ball of wriggling hair--a living bezoar. When she looked at the patient's face, she saw that it had been replaced with a two-dimensional black rectangle. 

Agent Merlot found himself pushing a janitorial cart. A nurse stopped him in the hallway and told him he needed to go clean up a mess in the maternity ward. When he found the offending spill, he saw that is was a mass of blood, meat, bone shards, and adult teeth. As he began to clean, a strange man leaned in the doorway and offered to help "clean up." When Agent Merlot didn't bite, the man offered to trade him a pack of cigarettes for the opportunity. Agent Merlot quickly discovered that the man's "help" consisting of him dropping to the floor to eat the bodily destruction; he crunched on teeth as if they were popcorn. Once done, Agent Merlot proceeded down the hall.

Agent Peach-Glad was in a car, being driven by her granddaughter to the Quantum Hospital for an operation on her hand. Strangely, as she examined her own hand, she didn't see any reason why she would need an operation on it. She felt no pain or discomfort. At the hospital, she was placed in a wheelchair and taken away by an orderly as her granddaughter stayed behind to fill out some paperwork. Agent Peach-Glad attempted to get some information out of the orderly, but when he tried to clamp a chloroform-laced cloth over her mouth she sprang from the wheelchair and knocked the man unconscious. 

The agents were able to reconvene; they hid the orderly in Agent Merlot's cleaning cart and took him to an empty room. After rousing the orderly, he admitted to being Agent Hartwick, someone working for a rival agency. Their interrogation was interrupted by the revival of the Redaction Man--a hulking "man" in the uniform of a Soviet commandant, his face a featureless black rectangle. Fighting the Redaction Man proved fruitless--he wounded a couple of the agents--so they ran for it.

As they ran, they noticed that the walls of the hospital were now marred by patches of "infection."

Back in the operating theater, they encountered the three men who had watched Agent Frownie remove the bezoar from the faceless patient. They learned quite a bit from these men--most importantly that the walking dead in the morgue were "dangerous ideas" that they felt needed to be purged from the American subconscious. While they were talking, Agent Frownie slipped the bezoar into the carafe of water; when the three men drank from their glasses, they promptly melted into viscous goo.

The bezoar was retrieved from the carafe and used to facilitate the end of their mission. After breaching a computer terminal in the executive level of the Quantum Hospital, the agents knew that the "subversive idea" zombies were being fed into the hospital's incinerator. They took the bezoar to the incinerator--which seemed to end in a fiery, living gullet--and dropped it inside. They ran from the impending explosion, and then--they awoke from sedation in a CRVCIBLE compound. Their commanding officer, a war-torn looking man in a uniform, welcomed them to the revolution. 

The Leading Ladies of Hammer Horror

If you're into Hammer horror--and if you aren't, why are you here?--the following clip of interviews with some of Hammer's leading ladies will be of interest to you:

Total Skull: March, 2026

Things that brought me delight in March, 2026:

Rob Zombie, The Great Satan

Rob Zombie's solo albums are, for the most part, pretty reliable; the only really question they pose is "What elements of the familiar formula will be pushed to the forefront on this outing?" On The Great Satan, it's the heaviness that comes to fore. All the spookshow influences are present and accounted for, but The Great Satan just plain hits harder than the average Rob Zombie record. Perhaps that comes at the expense of the catchy earworms of The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy, but it's nice to get an aggressive slab this late in the game. The big unexpected move here is the closing track, "Grave Discontent," which sounds exactly like a dope-ass giallo title theme.

Catriona Ward, Nowhere Burning

Nowhere Burning has a great set up: it's a bit like "Children of the Corn," with a group of semi-feral kids living in the ruins of a mountain compound once owned by a famous actor who was up to some pretty bad stuff; the kids are nearly legendary in their own right because they are suspected of  kidnapping people to steal their blood. (The weirdest bit: while kidnapped, they feed their captives baby formula.) If you've read any of Catriona Ward's other books, you know that she loves a twisty plot; the way she lays all the pieces out in front of you and then makes something surprising out of them is truly extraordinary. I won't say more--you need to experience how the strange kids, the film makers trying to make a documentary about them, and the actor and his lover all fit into the picture for yourself.

Earth Tongue, Dungeon Vision

I don't know about your friend group, but mine was chomping at the bit for the next Earth Tongue record and Dungeon Vision definitely does not disappoint. Earth Tongue deals in heavy psychedelic rock, but don't let the calming color tones on the cover lull you into a false sense of security; the music on Dungeon Vision is positively subterranean--this is a bad acid trip while playing D&D with freaks in the steam tunnels beneath a second-rate college in the 70s.

Mayfair Witches, Season One

Mayfair Witches would be a guilty pleasure watch if I was capable of feeling guilt over pleasure. Sure, maybe I wouldn't have enjoyed it so much if I felt more beholden to the purity of vision in the novels, which I read decades ago, but as a bit of sit-down turn-off-your-brain Gothic soap opera I had a great time with this. Rowan Mayfair, unlikely neurosurgeon, discovers that she's a witch and the heir to a supernatural legacy that takes the form of a slimily grinning spirit named Lasher. Look, this is really just a show about pretty women doing witchy stuff in New Orleans--that's a formula that works. In addition, I have to say that Mayfair Witches' horniness is often more compelling that the rancid dead bedroom energy leaching off the scenes with Louis and Armand in the comparable (and a little overhyped) Interview with the Vampire show.

Die Spitz, Something to Consume

Every time a new band arrives on the scene and is heralded as the one who will "save rock," it turns out they only have one song--a song that they play ten to twelves times over the course of an album we're destined to forget. This is not the case with Die Spitz, whose debut album Something to Consume shows a wide, varied sonic palette. Witness that thrashy riff and skull-squeezing gruff vocals of "Throw Yourself to the Sword," get lost in the depressive, dreamlike, nearly shoegaze-y tones of "Punk Pop Anthem," and the snide, grinding punkiness of "Down On It." Amazing first record--where do they do from here?

The Housemaid

It sometimes feels like the mid-budget thriller is a "lost genre"; the 80s and 90s were filthy with classic examples of films that mixed plot-twisting drama, murder, and often a hefty dose of eroticism. The Housemaid shows that there's still some gas left in the tank and perhaps hints that the genre is due for a big comeback. 

The initial plot is simple: a down-and-out ex-con in need of a job gets the gig of a lifetime as the housemaid for a wealthy family, but of course the household harbors a horrible, dangerous secret and all is not what it seems. I enjoyed The Housemaid way more than I would have guessed; the twist is fun and the movie has some pretty gruesome violence that goes far beyond a lot of what you might in mainstream horror. Apparently, a sequel has already been greenlit? If so, I'll be there.

Ponte del Diavolo, De Venom Natura

Ponte del Diavolo's previous release, Fire Blades from the Tomb, was my favorite record of the year it was released, so I awaited the new De Venom Natura with sky-high expectations--and I was not let down. The band's thrilling combination of black metal, doom, and gothic rock remains in place, but they still have the power to surprise; who saw that horns on "Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment" coming? All that and a Bauhaus cover to round things out on the back end.

Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

I read Joe Abercrombie The First Law trilogy last year and found that it definitely earned its reputation as a certifiable grimdark classic, so it was an exciting prospect to delve into that world again with the stand-alone novel Best Served Cold. Best Served Cold is the tale of Monza Murcatto, a mercenary captain out for revenge against the people who wronged her. Along the way, she enlists the services of a Northern barbarian, two poisoners, an ex-con, and a torturer. This novel is fantastic; its mix of grappling with the nature of vengeance, comedic elements, and stone-cold violence is a real treat. I think I might have liked Best Served Cold even better than the prior trilogy.

Perfect Blue

I got another does of thriller action, albeit in anime form, in March with Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue. In Perfect Blue, a singing idol attempts to make the transition to serious actress, seemingly triggering an obsessive fan to begin stalking her in deadly earnest. Coupled with the fact that her newfound role is systemically exploitative, her mind begins to crack under the strain. When a body count starts racking up with the people in her orbit--well, has our idol got blood on her hands or is something more sinister at play? Possessing an almost giallo-level of intensity at times, Perfect Blue deserves to be in the canon of great thrillers.

Mark Lawrence, Book of the Ancestor trilogy

I read, and quite enjoyed, Mark Lawrence's The Broken Empire trilogy last year, so this year I tackled his Book of the Ancestor trilogy. This series features some great worldbuilding: the planet only has a narrow band of habitable land at the equator; the ice's progress is only kept in check by the focused light of a "moon" (really a mirror in space) as the planet's sun dies. The plot is a long-running set of intrigues as power and control shifts and things grow dire at the end of the world. Thrown into the mix is a young nun trained in combat, the use of poison, and "magic"; imagine if Harry Potter was a sci fi/fantasy series about battle nuns and was actually interesting--that will put you on the right track.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and They Will Kill You

It's kind of wild that in March there were two movies with the premise "estranged sisters team up to fight back against the rich Satanists trying to kill them" playing in theaters at the same time, but life is strange like that. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and They Will Kill You really are quite similar, though I think they each excel in specific areas. Ready or Not 2 did a better job of giving the villains distinct identities; it was also, on balance, the funnier movie. They Will Kill You, on the other hand, had such fantastic set piece brawls and interesting cinematography that I'll be thinking about how it was composed for a long time to come. If you only have room in your life for one of these, I say go with They Will Kill You.

Ivy Grimes, The Cellar Below the Cellar

I'm not really sure that the "Folk Horror" designation on the cover is an accurate description of this novella, but admittedly The Cellar Below the Cellar is a tough book to shelve. It's certainly "folksy," in line with Ivy Grimes's usual style, but "horror" feels like a stretch, and anyway how do you really encompass the novella being a light apocalyptic fantasy that reworks Slavic folklore in a way that I genuinely think no one else could have? I guess we leave it like this: The Cellar Below the Cellar is idiosyncratically great.

Asphalt

Another month, another mixtape for my homies dropped on the TotGaD discord. This pal remarked, "God this is so 90s dirtbag." So put this on, and come smoke in front of the Burger King with me.