Dark Jack

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

What are you all working on right now? I presume you're piecing together your characters, and I'd love to hear who they are going to be, even just as broad concepts yet.

Maybe @Bartimaeus and @Ashgan would like to discuss how we're going to start off the story for your finished characters?

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I'm honestly starting to get a little concerned with how thoroughly this (currently theoretical) weapon is being examined and designed, but I'll play along a little longer and consider these new iterations as well.

Lighting the stake on fire... eh. Might set the beast on fire, but given the way combustibles generally work it wouldn't exactly "burn them from the inside"; rather, the part of the stake ending up inside the beast - and most likely any part poking out of a potential exit-wound as well - would likely be extinguished due to being suffocated by the beast's flesh (since fire requires oxygen). It still might ignite the exterior of the beast or at least burn it some, which I suppose might panic it, but probably wouldn't be hugely effective at hurting it. You would also effectively be burning your stake every time you fired it (unless the stake was made by something fire-resistant but covered in something combustible, I suppose, though this would raise questions of just what this material would be), which would make it even more expensive to use since every stake would only last one shot.

Adding an explosive to the missile presents a slightly bigger problem than lighting it on fire, partly because you are still destroying the stake with every shot, but it also raises the question of how you'd actually manage to make it explode, and if you could do that, how to time the explosion right. Most things in Bloodborne detonate on impact, with the one exception being the delayed molotov, which works on a timer. I suppose one could set a timer on the stake-explosive, but then you would have to either set a timer on a case-to-case basis based on how long you think it needs to wait or, more likely, stick with a pre-determined timer that you just have to hope fits.
How to actually cause the explosion is a much bigger problem. The only things in Bloodborne that really explode are cannon balls and (for reasons unknown) the stake driver and boom hammer, and considering that cannons fire using quicksilver I'd theorize that their explosive power actually comes from the innate arcane power released by the union of blood and mercury, and who really knows what goes on with stake driver and boom hammer that lets them explode over and over again. Then there are a bunch of arcane explosions from "spells" and, finally, molotovs.
Here we run into a very important problem: Bloodborne does not depict fire as fire. All fire in Bloodborne, as opposed to the real world, cause an instant burst of damage with no lingering effect, modelled as an explosion. I don't think it should be like that in the RP. Molotovs work like that in game for gameplay reasons, but in reality it is fire. Looking at molotovs in isolation I would be willing to concede that they are merely mislabelled and should explode, but their interaction with oil urns makes it clear that it is fire, not an explosion.
So basically, we would need to introduce something new to the world to act as the explosive for the stake... because nothing currently in Bloodborne (aside from "because Powder Kegs are crazy") explodes.
EDIT: You could just use gunpowder, of course. That's... yeah. Somehow I didn't think of that before reading "Powder Kegs" at the end there, simply because gunpowder isn't really used in the game.

By the way, if anyone needs help with their characters, feel free to ask.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Yeah, all of my reasoning was based on a presumption that the stake actually stuck in the beast it hit; if the stakes were to pierce all the way through and leave the target with nothing but a hole, it would be next to useless, little more than a large spear you could use at a distance, but only once. As I pointed out the merit of the weapon would be disable, cripple or immobilize beasts.

And I agree, if anyone would be willing to see this weapon made, it would probably be the Powder Kegs - they were the ones behind the mounted machine gun, after all - though if it had been them, I'd almost have expected them to tie an explosive to the stake or something. That said, while there's a lot we don't know about the Powder Kegs, we do know that most of them supposedly died or turned into beasts trying to purge Old Yharnam before they set the entire thing on fire, and that the remainder joined Djura in trying to protect the beasts instead of killing them, making themselves an enemy of the Healing Church. Considering that the player-Hunter (going by "highest rate of completion") killed Djura and a few other Hunters in Old Yharnam, and the only other place I recall seeing Powder Kegs weapons being the Hunter's Nightmare - where all Hunters are dead - I'd say that if the Powder Kegs still exist, I doubt they have the resources or opportunity to be making much of anything.
The only way I could really imagine the weapon existing is for the Powder Kegs to have built it (or mostly built it) before the Night of the Blood Moon, and that someone else found and/or completed it after, perhaps during the effort to rebuilt Yharnam.

EDIT: As for church giants being able to wield the weapon... eh. They don't strike me as particularly accurate or dexterous fellows. I have my doubts they would be able to wield it very effectively, even if they could reasonably haul it around and shoot it.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I mean, there is some leniency with weapons in this setting since, for one, the people wielding them are generally superhuman (a lot of the weapons from the game are certainly not exactly suited for use by normal humans - can you imagine trying to swing a kirkhammer in real life?) and that magic-not-called-magic is a thing to an extent, but I'd prefer if there was some measure of logic to the weapons.
As I said, a giant stake-launcher might actually have a practical application... though I wonder if anyone would dedicate the resources to design and make the weapon given how narrow the possible uses are.

(I also privately wonder whether naming it "Vlad" would make sense in context. It makes sense to us because of Vlad the Impaler, but I don't remember Bloodborne even once making reference to any kind of myth or historical events/figures (or country, or much of anything, really) that would have come from our Earth aside from using our languages.)

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Eh, there would be a lot of problems associated with a weapon like that. For one, it would probably need to be quite firmly mounted somewhere rather than being any kind of portable. Not only would a weapon (and, it sounds like, the projectile) be very heavy to lug around unless it was based on some kind of arcane propellant, you'd also run into problems like the good old "the harder you push something, the harder that thing pushes back"; in other words, the recoil of something firing a huge projectile long distances with high force would probably send the wielder flying in the opposite direction (or squish them into the ground if they aimed at an upward angle).
Another reason that it probably wouldn't be a thing, even in a stationary version, would be that it would only really work as a support weapon in the context of Bloodborne. Keep in mind that creatures in Bloodborne can regenerate from pretty much anything as long as they have the lifeforce to do so; they can be cut to ribbons, have organs or pieces of brain yanked out of them and worse, and just get right back up and fight on. Shooting a beast with a giant stake might temporarily cripple it or, if you're lucky, pin it to the ground, but it'd be pretty unlikely to actually kill it in one shot. Then you would need to have Hunters move in on the immobilized beast or keep multiple giant stakes lying around to sustain fire and inflict enough damage for it to actually outpace the beast's regeneration, with reloading of the mechanism with each shot... I imagine it'd be wildly impractical.

So I guess my conclusion is that, if it was mounted somewhere with unusually good sight-lines across Yharnam, was incredibly accurate and was used as a means to disable large targets for Hunters on foot to finish off, it might have some merit. Which would make it something definitely not suited for the Fire Dancers, who can't exactly be too stationary or they'd be taken out by the Healing Church.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Certainly! We're still recruiting and haven't even gotten the actual IC story going yet, so you're more than welcome.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Hmm yes, everything seems to be in order, as we discussed in PMs. Character accepted.

Speaking of gear, I should probably make mention of the known new additions I've made to the selection of trick weapons thus far:

Shining Wing - Unique
Shortly after the fragmentation of the Healing Church and the subsequent rise of Dietrich as the lead Hunter of the white church, the man reputedly found himself wanting to forge a legacy to rival that of his predecessors. Being especially enamored with the first champion of the Healing Church, Ludwig, the Holy Blade, Dietrich decided to have a new weapon designed specifically for himself, that he might one day attain the same reverence.
This weapon, named Shining Wing, is a two-handed sword heavily inspired by Ludwig's Holy Blade, yet with some cosmetic and functional differences. For one the blade is narrower and lighter than the scabbard-blade of the Holy Blade, and rather than being decorated with intricate carvings, Shining Wing is perfectly smooth and known to gleam like polished silver. Functionally the difference is simple: rather than detaching the entire hilt of the weapon from the scabbard-blade to separate the smaller sword inside it, Shining Wing instead sheathes the small sword into just the upper half of the handle, meaning that even when one draws the inner sword, the scabbard-blade still has a small hilt left suited for one-handed use.
While Dietrich has proven time and again that Shining Wing is a versatile and fearsome weapon, wielding the greater sword in one hand is extremely hard and requires immense strength, meaning that every one-handed swing with it requires a significant boost of power from the beast blood.

Impaler
Some time after the Night of the Blood Moon, after the fragmentation of the Healing Church, the black church started reexamining some of the older, formerly rejected trick weapon designs from workshops such as the Powder Kegs. One such weapon was the stake driver, which, though initially discarded as being generally unsuited for hunting beasts, eventually caught their attention due to its mechanical design.
Wondering why the Powder Kegs only used this mechanism for such a compact weapon, the Black Healing Church set to replicating the mechanism in a new weapon, called the impaler. Rather than a clumsy fist-weapon, the impaler was fashioned as a spear that, by retracting the outmost third of the shaft of the spear through the mechanism and into the hollow core of the base, could be primed to explosively release stored energy and propel nearly two feet of spear forward with enough force to punch through almost anything.
The design did not prove very popular, however, as the black church discovered why the Powder Kegs had kept it so small: the impaler, due to both the mechanism and the reinforcements necessary to ensure the durability of the weapon, made the impaler very heavy and cumbersome to use. Due to its weight and the general difficulty of using piercing weapons against regenerating enemies, the impaler was simply a too difficult weapon to use and too expensive to make. Only a handful were ever made, and most of those are merely gathering dust.

Bulwark
With Hunters being in short supply after the Night of the Blood Moon and numbers being stretched even more thinly by skirmishes with the other factions, the White Healing Church sought to innovate trick weapons and create a tool that could be used effectively for slaying beasts as well as protecting the wielder. In spite of the derision for shields that had been pervasive among Hunters since the days of Gehrman, they sought about to create a weaponized shield for hunting.
The result of this pursuit was the bulwark: a silver double-edged broadsword with a two-handed grip that, when transformed, dislodges its edges and reveals that another four small blades - two on either side - are stored inside the main blade, extending outward to effectively quadruple the width of the sword. Each of the small inner blades rapidly shoots out to fit their inner edge against the outer edge of the blade before them, and can - somewhat more slowly and with more effort - be retracted back inside the broadsword again.
While the intended use of the bulwark was as a sword that could also act as a shield, it did not take long for Hunters to discover a happy side-effect of the transformation of the weapon: stabbing something with bulwark and then deploying the shield while still embedded proved extremely effective at wounding beasts.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I suppose it would depend on whether it was one of his good or bad days. On a good day sure, I figure he would probably have had major concerns about pretty much buying children that he would have been liable to see his own daughters in, but on a day when his mind was slipping and he could barely remember his own name, much less that he had a family?
That's one of the main reasons I enjoy Gascoigne so much: he's a family man with a wife and two children, and is even (unconfirmed but strongly implied) partnered and friends with his father-in-law and fellow Hunter, but with a sickness of the mind that makes him forget all of that, leaving him with nothing but emptiness and bloodlust. It's so impactful when you realize the significance of his reaction to the music box, how the memory of what he's done pains him to the point of him desperately trying to forget.
But yeah, Father Gascoigne was probably never all that interested in the Healing Church as anything but a failed means to treat his deteriorating mind. I also realize on a second perusal that Adelicia is supposed to have been bought after the Night of the Blood Moon and the schism in the church, so it couldn't possibly have been him since he was dead by then.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Challenging indeed. I see no reason to deny you that bit of masochism, though, so the character is accepted.

I privately wonder if the "tall, grim-faced man in black clothes, around whose shoulders was wrapped a dingy grey shawl" is supposed to refer to just some generic figure from the Healing Church, or if it's supposed to be Father Gascoigne? (Gascoigne was probably one of my favorite characters from the game, actually. So regrettable that he had to die so early on in the story.)

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

The room was large for this kind of clinic, especially with how far from the city center it was, and was generally furnished in a way that was puzzlingly different from what one might expect from such a place. A hundred feet wide and seventy feet long, by far most of the room was occupied by nothing but rows of simple cots arranged in an obviously deliberate manner, head to foot and side by side, with just enough room between each cot for an attendee to fit through the space. Several small chandeliers hang from the ceiling to assist the sconces mounted on the walls, numerous enough that the room would likely have been quite well-lit normally, yet the room was beginning to dim as candles burned out, leaving some flames flickering and others gone, forming islands of shadow around some of the cots.
On one of the two longest sides of the room, nestled against the wall, was a series of small tables, blackboards and apparatus; clearly the equipment of the blood minister running the clinic. But there was also a couple of wooden barrels standing in the corner that seemed anything but meant for a man of the church, as they were full of instruments of death rather than healing; swords, axes, and spears stuck out of the top of them in a selection that was remarkably mundane considering the clients currently occupying it. Weapons for normal people, not Hunters.
Opposite of the healer's equipment, in the middle of that wall, was the single entrance and exit out of the room: a sturdy wooden door, closed shut against the world outside.

The room was quiet aside from occasional whimpers, as the people lying on the cots – men and women who had been given blood treatment and were undergoing the metamorphosis from human to Hunter – squirmed and thrashed in the throes of the nightmares haunting them, of beasts that could not reach them, and Messengers who eagerly did. But it was not deserted, actually; someone was watching.
From the inky blackness pooling in one corner of the room stepped a lone figure, silent as the darkness itself, and surveyed the room. The figure wore the typical uniform of a Hunter, the so-called Hunter's garb, only with the top of the head wrapped in cloth under their cap, which in combination with their mask completely obfuscated their appearance. Their motions had the fluency of someone both confident and nimble, and one might be tempted to think that the quiet nature of their footfalls came not from effort to make them so, but from habit.
The Hunter turned their head slowly, letting their eyes take in the sight of the many cots and their occupants in front of them. This was... very strange. Since the Night of the Blood Moon the Healing Church had been very protective of their Paleblood Hunters and had turned them all at the upper Cathedral Ward, at the very heart of their domain, yet these Paleblood Hunters were being turned as far away from there as possible without leaving Yharnam. And there were so many of them! The Hunter had never seen anything quite like this.

While examining the people gathered before them, the Hunter abruptly stopped turning their head, fixing their attention on one cot in particular, situated in the far right corner of the room compared to the exit. The room was crawling with Messengers, naturally – how could it not be with so many Paleblood Hunters in one place? – but they were absolutely swarming that particular cot, crowding around it eagerly to have their turn at climbing atop of it, shoving one another as they tried to reach the person hidden underneath the layers of otherworldly creatures. They were pushing, pulling and shaking the person, clearly agitated.
With no other sound than a faint rustle of their coat the Hunter crossed the room with long, steady strides to investigate this phenomenon more closely. They dispersed the swarming Messengers with a wave of a gloved hand, revealing the object of their fascination: a man with a somewhat foreign look, probably hailing from far from Yharnam. The most unusual thing about this man was his complexion, which was white as a ghost but with veins that stood out as black against the white skin, along with black eyelids and -sockets. His lips were light-blue and his cheeks were sunken, making him look incredibly ill.
The Hunter cocked their head curiously, gently running the fingertips of one hand along the man's face. He was dead. He had been given blood treatment, but had still died? But... the thing inside him... it felt like Paleblood. Why had he died?
Carefully brushing the man's hair away from his eyes, the Hunter raised their head to survey the room in its entirety once more, only now looking for something specific. Indeed, randomly distributed across the room were another three cots with Messengers clamoring to get to the people lying on them. Four dead? Very strange indeed.

The Hunter moved slowly towards the center of the room, taking a moment as they went to look at and caress the face of every transforming Paleblood on their way, wanting nothing more than to assure these people that even if the Healing Church saw them as nothing but tools, they had the Hunter's sympathy. Outside, where the sky had was turning crimson with the setting of the sun, howling could be heard in the distance. Somewhere else, much closer to the clinic, more howls answered the first. A Night of the Hunt, as marked by the tolling of the bells... ah, but the Healing Church had no idea. The Hunter could tell, though: this would not be a normal Night of the Hunt. This night could take days, weeks, months or even years. This was going to be a hunt to remember.

At the middle of the room the Hunter was met by four Messengers on the floor, waving their arms to gain their attention. The Hunter paused expectantly, and one of the Messengers held up one of its thin, bony arms high above its head and closed its fingers around something invisible, clearly miming that it was holding up a lamp. The Hunter shook their head and made a shooing gesture with its hand, and the four Messengers sullenly retreated back into the floor, disappearing into wherever Messengers went. The gatekeepers would find a different place to raise their marker. Not here. Having it here would be too easy.
The Hunter turned their head to the door and cocked their head once again, as if staring at it intently. The door was locked, likely in an effort to keep out the beasts that would be coming soon. It was durable... but not indestructible. Getting through would be quite possible, even if it was going to take a little while. And if these Palebloods could not find it in themselves to conquer the door, the beasts outside doubtlessly would.

Shrugging, the Hunter reached their right hand into one of the pockets of their coat and produced a human skull. They held the skull up high over their head before clenching their fingers into a fist, crushing the object in their grasp and unleashing a fine mist of whitish dust, strewn with specks of light that glittered like stars. Then the Hunter themselves abruptly lost opacity, rapidly turning transparent before, in a heartbeat, they were gone. Had it not been for the gently spreading dust of the skull, one might have been tempted to believe that the Hunter had been naught but a dream.

All that remained in the room was the Palebloods, and the host of Messengers doting on their sleeping masters. Howls echoed once more through the city of Yharnam, curdling the blood of many a Yharnamite who could do nothing but huddle closer to their censers, hoping against hope that they had enough incense to make it through the night.
Not Hunters, though, and most certainly not Paleblood Hunters... even false ones. A Hunter must hunt.
It was time to awaken.