Sir Edvard Hawley

Piskaro's most powerful villain is Sir Edvard Hawley, a spectral serial killer.

Sir Edvard Hawley

For the past thirteen years, Madchapel—a borough of impoverished slums mostly inhabited by destitute immigrants—has been the site of a series of brutal murders that are believed to have occult significance due to the ritualistic nature of the slayings. Sir Edvard Hawley, a minor noble and fraudulent “gentleman surgeon” with an interest in black magic, was suspected by the Rooks as being the Madchapel Slasher, but those conjectures ended with Hawley’s death five years ago.

The truth is that Edvard Hawley was the killer all along and continues to stalk the residents of Madchapel after death as a murderous wraith. He prowls by night, sometimes driven in a spectral black coach lit by baleful green lanterns, to hunt for victims. Anyone slain by Sir Edvard Hawley’s ghostly postmortem knife rises from the grave as an unquiet spirit under his control.

    • Appearance: Edvard Hawley appears as a grinning spectral man wearing a long overcoat and a top hat.

    • Personality: He does not even attempt to repress his murderous impulses.

    • Motive: He plans on branching out from Madchapel, adding unfortunate souls to his army of ghosts, until all of Krevborna is a spectral empire under his rule.

    • Flaw: Sir Edvard Hawley relishes the thought of possessing a body to continue his murders in the flesh.

Treacle & Crouch's Pie Shop and the Wormwood Star

Two more adventure locations in Piskaro! One is my obvious Sweeney Todd riff, the other was inspired by my study of French Decadent literature.

Treacle & Crouch’s Pie Shop

Treacle & Crouch’s Pie Shop is an eatery serving meat-stuffed pasties in Piskaro. It is frequented by the working class because the meals on offer are both cheap and filling. 

    • Some residents of the city suspect that Lovetta Treacle and Bartram Crouch, the shop’s joint proprietors, supplement the filling in their pies with rat meat, but the truth of the matter is much worse: both are serial killers who commit murder and use the flesh of their victims to make the pies they sell in their shop.

    • Bartram and Lovetta are former sailors who sought the aid of a demonic force to help them escape the barren island they had been shipwrecked on once they ran out of the corpses of their fellow mariners to eat. 

    • The demon lord Baal promised to save their lives and usher them into prosperity—if they would make a pact with it and pledged themselves to furthering the practice of cannibalism through nefarious means. 

      

The Wormwood Star

Operating out of a defiled and defaced chapel of the Holy Blood Church, the Wormwood Star is a salon catering to Piskaro’s decadent dandies. 

    • The Wormwood Star openly sells a number of exotic stimulants—both those imported from foreign shores and those alchemically concocted by the Skarabasca.

    • The intoxicant that has brought a measure of infamy to the Wormwood Star is a special absinthe made on site.

    • Some patrons of the Wormwood Star experience an uncanny visitation while in the grips of the absinthe served on the premises: they hallucinate a vision of the Green Fairy.

    • The Green Fairy is a capricious fey being who is as apt to offer startling delirium and artistic inspiration as she is to send the imbiber on an ill-fated quest. 

Karnstein Castle and Our Lady of the Drowned

Two more adventure locations in Piskaro. 

Karnstein Castle is a naked attempt to shoehorn Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla into the setting. Look, if you have the opportunity to include lesbian vampire shenanigans, you leap at it. Also, I've included an in-joke here with Carmilla's origins being "in Styria." That's true to Le Fanu's fiction, but I've also noticed that fantasy novels have a strange proclivity for including Styria among the made-up place names. Why not have a Styria in the world of Krevborna too?

Our Lady of the Drowned exists because I love the idea of creepy nautical rites and monstrous sea goddesses. A lot of this bit of the setting was inspired by the film version of Dagon, but big chunks of it were also inspired by an actual Krevborna campaign that focused the cult's rise.

Karnstein Castle

On the outskirts of Piskaro sits Karnstein Castle, the abode of an ancient vampire posing as a foreign noblewoman who retired to the city for the healthful benefits of its fresh sea air.

    • Carmilla Karnstein purchased the castle to use as her lair; she claims to be a noblewoman from a far-off land known as Styria—though no one has ever heard of such a place.

    • Carmilla plays the part of an invalid stricken with a strange and incurable malady, but this merely disguises the fact that she is a bloodthirsty vampire.

    • As a woman of status and means, Carmilla Karnstein often holds balls, dances, and masquerades to which the well-to-do and aristocratic are always invited.

    • If Carmilla takes an interest in a young woman at one of her parties, the girl is invited to become her companion. 

    • When these companions return to their homes after a stint with Carmilla, they are always curiously anemic, listless, and sometimes lovelorn. 

    • Some of Carmilla’s lady companions are never heard from again.

Our Lady of the Drowned

Our Lady of the Drowned is a grand church in Piskaro dedicated to Scylla, a morbid goddess of the sea, who is in actuality a primordial monster of the depths feared for her bloodlust and fecundity. 

    • The church was built from the remains of ships that capsized, foundered on Krevborna’s shores, or otherwise became less than seaworthy. 

    • The church’s altar is constructed from driftwood and carved figureheads recovered from sunken ships. 

    • The faithful come to Our Lady of the Drowned to pray for the souls of those lost at sea and to petition Scylla for safe passage before undertaking ocean voyages. 

    • The church is presided over by Belle Silvra, the high priestess of the cult of the Lady of the Drowned in Piskaro.

    • Belle Silvra always appears in public wearing a veil that obscures her face.

    • The effective proselytizers for the cult are the Daughters of the Eel, strange “nuns” trained at the Nightsea Priory in the nearby town of Lachryma.

The Hook and Lamb's Boarding House

Two more adventure locations in Piskaro! The Hook is based on an obscure bottle of booze called "Incredible Hook" that my friend Ken produced during a weekend-long D&D fest. The world hasn't been the same since. There's obviously a Lovecraft element to it as well, but that's fitting as Ken is something of a Lovecraft scholar. (But not the terrible apologist kind.) Consider it a tribute from one DM to another. Lamb's Boarding House was inspired by Black Sunday, one of my all-time favorite Euro-Gothic movies. Mario Bava was the absolute master. I'll fight you if you disagree. There's a little Ringu to Lamb's as well.

The Hook

The Hook is a rough sailors’ tavern in Piskaro. It is primarily frequented by folk possessing “the Piskaran look,” an affliction that manifests as pronounced alopecia, bulging eyes, small ears, the complete lack of a nose, and wide, thick lips.

    • In truth, the sailors who drink at the Hook are the children of men and women who have fornicated with the fish-like humanoid creatures who live in the underwater city of Fathom’s Reach.

    • The degenerates descended from the people of Fathom’s Reach drink a special brew served only at the Hook—an algae-green concoction that sickens any human men and women who dare to quaff it.

    • Although other members of Piskaro’s populace are welcome to drink at the Hook, they are expected to ignore the unnerving and inhuman idols carved from black, oily stone that decorate the interior of the pub.

Lamb’s Boarding House

Generations ago, Piskaro went through a particularly pious period that resulted in witch hunts and persecutions. When it was discovered that Anya Lamb—a boarding house owner in Piskaro—was a sea witch, she was executed by her “friends” and neighbors. 

    • Before her death, a demonic iron mask was nailed over her face to mark her status as a condemned sorceress and she was thrown unceremoniously into the well behind her boarding house. 

    • However, when a worker at the recently reopened boarding house cut himself on one of the well’s sharp stone edges, his blood dripped onto Anya’s forgotten remains where they lay at the bottom of the well.

    • The boy’s blood awakened Anya Lamb as a undead witch. 

    • She now stalks the streets of Piskaro, emerging from her well by night to hunt the descendants of the people who cheered at her execution. 

    • Still wearing the hideous iron mask that was forced upon her, she brings a bloody vengeance in her wake.

Drathmoor Asylum and Esperhaus

Below are two adventure locations in the city of Piskaro. It just wouldn't be a Gothic fantasy setting without a horrible asylum to either infiltrate or break out of, would it? Similarly, you can never have enough venues for terrifying, empowered children. Krevborna trivia: the twin sisters in charge of Esperhaus are named after former members of the band Rasputina.

Drathmoor Asylum

Drathmoor Asylum is an infamous place of incarceration for inebriates and the mad. 

    • The asylum gives some lip-service to the notion of being an institution where the afflicted find solace, but the treatments provided there are seldom better than torture.

    • Rumors circulate that some of the procedures pioneered at the asylum have horrifying origins—serving the doctors’ desire to know the inner workings of the mind, rather than tending to their patients’ recovery and treatment. 

    • It is also suspected by many that Drathmoor is used to get unwanted and inconvenient relations out of the way.

Esperhaus

Esperhaus is a sprawling orphanage and foundling hospital in Piskaro that hides a dark secret.

    • The avowed mission of Esperhaus is to clothe, feed, and educate orphans and unwanted children according to a modern, progressive plan.

    • However, the educators of Esperhaus clandestinely test their charges for psychic potential.

    • When they discover a child with latent psychic powers, the boy or girl is subjected to experiments designed to enhance and unlock their extraordinary abilities.

    • Esperhaus is run by Carpella and Agnieszka Parvoska, twin sisters who are both scientists who have been driven to madness by their own psionic powers.

    • Carpella Parvoska is a proficient telepath able to prize secrets from even the most well-guarded mind.

    • Agnieszka Parvoska is a wild-eyed pyrokinetic who can barely contain her violent power.

Piskaro

We're moving from the Karthax Mountains down to Krevborna's coast, stopping for a while in Piskaro--Krevborna's second-largest city and busiest port. Piskaro is the gateway for nautical horrors in the setting, but it also has variety of other Gothic nonsense going on.

Piskaro

A Dangerous Seaport Fallen From Grace

Piskaro is a densely populated port city of teetering buildings crowded together like crooked teeth atop canals at the mouth of the River Krev. Piskaro is a center of thriving maritime trade and a haven for pirates. Its wharves bustle with the lading and unloading of full-rigged ships, prison hulks are moored offshore, and dangerous quayside taverns are frequented by cutthroats and whalers who call exotic ports home. 

Piskaro is governed by whichever pirate captain has recently intimidated the others into submission. The exercise of law and order in Piskaro falls on parish beadles and constables. Piskaro's authorities turn a blind eye to the activities of the buccaneers operating out of its wharves, but the city’s pirates do make examples of those they consider traitors—as the number of gibbeted skeletons hanging wharfside attest.

Perhaps because of its proximity to the strange and unknowable sea, life in Piskaro is subject to persistent oddities. Those who sleep in Piskaro often find their slumber disturbed by hallucinatory nightmares, prophetic dreams, and foreboding omens. The deformed and reeking remains of unnatural aberrations occasionally wash up on shore. Sigils and runes are scrawled onto the sides of buildings with chalk to ward off violent crime. Also, it is obvious to all that some of Piskaro’s native population possess bulging eyes, a marked lack of hair, and fish-like visages that hint at an inhuman heritage.

Hallmarks

The following elements and aesthetic notes define Piskaro:

    • Piskaro, Krevborna’s largest port, is controlled by pirate captains and their crews.

    • The city sits atop a labyrinth of canals, bridges, and islands at the mouth of the River Krev.

    • The city smells of the briny deep and the sea’s unfathomable secrets.

    • Many of the seafaring folk of Piskaro place their faith in the Lady of the Drowned, a cruel sea goddess regarded as a grim heresy by the Church of Holy Blood.

 • The taverns near Piskaro’s wharves are notoriously violent.