Father Anjelus

After my players killed off the pontiff of the Holy Blood Church in one of my campaigns, I was faced with the prospect of creating a new villain for Chancel. Here's who/what I came up with, clearly inspired by the mythology around Rasputin:

Father Anjelus 

Anjelus Navarre governs Chancel and is the current pontiff of the Church. Anjelus is widely feared, even by the most pious members of the Church’s inner circle. Father Anjelus exudes an aura of palpable menace; when his penetrating gaze falls upon you, it feels as though he bores into your most deeply guarded secrets.

In actuality, he is a fallen angel who uses his position to sate his unchaste desires. Father Anjelus reserves his personal tutelage for a select group of followers drawn from the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. He preaches that in order to deserve heavenly forgiveness, aspirants must first experience the depths of sin. To that end, he secretly encourages them to pursue their vices so that they might more fully experience the grace of repentance.

    • Appearance: In his mortal guise, Father Anjelus has a wild mane of hair and the grizzled, unkempt beard of a mystic. He dresses in shabby robes to emphasize a humbleness he does not truly possess. 

    • Personality: His every word is cloaked in pious dissemblance.

    • Motive: He wishes to become the Church's central figure of veneration, eclipsing even the saints.

    • Flaw: If it were discovered how many people he has sent to their deaths, his position would be jeopardized.

The Midnight Cabaret and Waldenraub Manor

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. 

The Ashfire Club and the Cathedral of the Three Anguishes

Two locations in the city of Chancel in Krevborna:

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.

The Cathedral of the Three Anguishes

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.