Dark Jack

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Quick new weapon

Beastflayer
An innovation based on the threaded cane, and to a lesser extent the beast cutter, beastflayers work on the same principle as especially the cane, having a normally straight, rigid body that splits into small, sharp segments connected by flexible wires. The difference between the threaded cane and beastflayer, then, is that whereas the cane is a mere 70 cm (28") long and blunt when not in its whip-form, beastflayers are an intimidating 180 cm (71") long and end in a 20 cm (8") long leaf-shaped blade. In short, a beastflayer is a glaive that transforms into a whip of comparable reach to that of a transformed beastcutter, ending in a larger blade. It can be used by doing minor damage with its barbed length, or greater damage with the heavier blade at its tip, allowing it to be used as a flail as well as a whip.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

The door was locked, of course, preventing Marcus from opening it however much he tried. Its thick wooden frame was heavy and strong, and there was no keyhole on the inside; it had been locked from outside and would take effort to break through.
A single Messenger emerged from the floor in front of it, leaning its tiny body against the woodwork and hitting weakly, soundlessly and desperately with its little fists. It let out a small, pathetic whimper.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Well, yes and no. Yes, his experience would make him valuable (and probably a major factor in the church being willing to take him back), but you'd also have to wonder just how much experience actually counts for with Hunters. A lot of Hunters were also soldiers (like Victor and Moira), bandits or huntsmen before becoming Hunters, meaning that they aren't exactly new at fighting and killing, though they may be so at facing beasts, superhuman opponents and being superhuman themselves. I imagine Raine would be much more likely to identify weaknesses than most, though.
It's also worth noting that in Bloodborne, the deadliest of all Hunters (usually) ends up being the player character, besting even hundred-year veterans like Gehrman... and that the player character has been a Hunter for only one night. Sure, they might have died a lot learning those things, but they were able to keep at it no matter how much they died until they learned. Compared to Raine, who only has one life, that's a much more intense way of learning.
In other words, I wouldn't expect Moira (a former Paleblood Hunter) to be impressed.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Eastern Yharnam, relatively near the Hunter's clinic, bottom of the elevator

Victor shrugged and sighed. It was to be expected for Adelicia to be naive with regards to things like this – though for her to claim that the giant was anything like them was outstandingly stupid – but he was a bit disappointed that even a grizzled veteran and former murderer from the Harrow would opt for misplaced mercy. Still, Victor did not care too much either way, and they had places to be and probably wanted to get there as soon as possible, so he saw no point in discussing it. He did consider killing the giant anyway just to spite them, but figured that they – especially Adelicia – would probably get angry and make a fuss about it.
“Fine,” he drawled, quickly checking both of the others' eyes before turning to take the last couple of steps into the elevator. “Just remember this decision when we come back and find that the brute woke up and murdered some random Yharnamite walking by.” He gestured to the others to follow. “Last person in steps on the button. Let's go.”

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Victor is a relatively new Hunter, yes, but then so are most Hunters in Yharnam; in fact I'd say a majority are even newer than Victor, as the church has been trying to replenish their Hunters from losses not only to the scourge of beasts, but also to other factions, who kill or convert their Hunters.
Even the ones counted as the absolute elite, like Dietrich and Moira, have only been Hunters for about four years; remember, nearly all the Hunters of Yharnam were killed during the Night of the Blood Moon. Hunters like Raine from before then are extremely rare.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

What Ashgan said; I prefer to manage them in the OOC tab, but you can put them in the Characters tab if you want. The reason for this, by the way, is that players tend to come and go in RPs that go on for a long time. With CSs posted in the OOC and linked in the OP, I can simply change the OP to either mark a character as inactive or remove it from the list if that happens, as I have full control over the OP. If a player leaves with their character in the Characters tab, however, I can't do anything about that. That player's character will remain there forever unless the player themselves decide to mark it as inactive, potentially confusing people.
It's a relatively small inconvenience - I will still keep the list in the OP, after all - but it's just a small measure to avoid potential confusion. If you do keep more than one CS, by the way, please do tell which one you want linked in the OP.

As for Victor, he has been a Hunter for about two years.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Always good to hear! I'm looking forward it.

It was Ashgan who brought it up, I'm pretty sure, though I have to admit that I was familiar with it already from listening to a bunch of Aviators' songs (I think I was introduced to him through one of his Dark Souls-songs). He's made some pretty nice songs, and No one will save you now is one of my mainstays I listen to while writing. I'm also a huge fan of Remains and a few others, but those two in particular feel like they fit the Bloodborne-theme really well. (I would say that No one will save you now would obviously fit the game since it was directly inspired by it, but Wake me when its over and Here come the ravens are both Bloodborne-inspired as well, yet I would never associate the mood in them with Bloodborne).
EDIT: May be wrong, actually... have searched the thread, and it seems the song hasn't been mentioned at all...?

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Humans become wolf-like? What about bloodlickers? Brick trolls? Rotted corpses? And of course, the already IC relevant church giants and servants? These are all humans corrupted by the scourge of beasts, yet none of them are particularly wolf-like.

Point being, the scourge of beasts can have many and varied ways of manifesting itself; lycantrophy just so happens to be the most common for humans. For animals, all signs point to them defaulting to gigantism by becoming unusually large and bulky.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I'm going to play devil's advocate here if you'll indulge me, as I cannot really overcome my bias against blood echoes. The first point I want to make is that Rom's defeat is a game state trigger for a metric ton of things. The Doll's voice line being just one of them, I don't know that we can necessarily say that it is directly aimed at making commentary on Rom's blood echoes. It's easily imaginable that the designers figured "Okay, it's the halfway point in the game, player probably has a bunch of blood echoes by now. Seems appropriate to put the line in here", and they used Rom's death as the trigger to make it appear. In other words, the Doll doesn't so much say it in response to Rom's death as she does to the passage of time that has elapsed so far. To support my point, I would also point toward how killing Gascoigne makes the sun descend, and how killing Amelia turns dusk into night. Surely nobody would argue that it is their deaths that caused this, but simply a gameplay contrivance to advance the time of day in relation to the player's progress in the game. In a similar vein, I think Rom's death is simply the trigger for a bunch of new things in the game. Maybe I'm selling From short but for all their genius in world building, I think they frequently do make gameplay concessions; Souls titles are not story-driven games, so I feel that much of the things we are presented with have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Ashgan

I will start out by saying that, in theorizing about Bloodborne (and a lot of other games, for that matter), I try to avoid the meta-angle as much as possible due to how insanely difficult it makes theorizing. If I were to comment on the meta-reality of blood echoes, yes, I fully agree that their presence in Bloodborne is most likely just to mimic souls from Dark Souls mechanically (which, in turn, mimicked souls from Demon's Souls; I'd argue that if we get technical, souls (aside from Lord Souls and the like, which actually do have lore significance) didn't make sense contextually in Dark Souls either and most likely only were there because they were in Demon's Souls and still sort of made sense thematically in Dark Souls).
In isolation I would probably dismiss blood echoes in a heartbeat, but they don't exist in isolation, and dismissing them would create a problematic precedence. If blood echoes aren't real, but just there for the sake of mechanical gameplay, what else can we just discard on that basis? Parrying in Bloodborne, I'd say, is probably something added solely for the sake of gameplay. The follow-up visceral attack (that is also doable in other, non-parry situations) might have/most likely has lore implications, but parrying with guns is almost certainly just for gameplay. Bloodtinge, too, probably just exists to have a stat for blood-damage to mechanically scale with. Arcane? Doesn't make a lick of sense.
And once we start, where do we stop? People have spent huge amounts of time pouring over the details of visual design of so many things in the game, down to particular similarities in design and recurrence of certain colors, trying to find meaning in it all. Who says it means anything, though? Could just be to clue in the player of certain behaviors and strengths/weaknesses, or just to make things look cool/scary/disturbing. Everything but specifically written-down lore comes into question and different theorists can pretty much just pick and choose what they want to take into consideration, because anything can be there solely for gameplay or aesthetic reasons.
Considering things I know are most likely there just for the game rather than being "true canon" is a choice, yes, but not one I've made idly. It's a matter of framing one's assumptions, because if you alter the frame for one particular thing, you have to alter it for everything... that, or you pretty much make the lore-equivalent to invoking deus ex machina to resolve narrative problems you don't know what to do with. To me it's everything or nothing.
Likewise, saying "killing Rom is the trigger for lots of things, so they probably just did it because it felt like a convenient time" is the same sort of selective reasoning, hand-waving the situation because... well, honestly it's probably true, at least partially. But once again, once we start, when do we stop?
There's also just the matter of Rom's death generally just being that much more significant an event than anything else in the game up to that point. With Gascoigne and Amelia, yes, I fully agree, the changing of the time of day was almost certainly just as a convenient demonstration/reminder of the passage of time. What happens after killing Rom, however, I just can't accept as being nothing but it getting a bit later in the night. Too many things happen too suddenly and too unnaturally. Besides, we pretty much witness the blood moon being called after the fight; it doesn't happen on its own, but is actively being caused by someone or something.

I also wonder what the line is like in the original Japanese script, and whether it would have a different implication.

Ashgan

I undertook the search for this and actually managed to find a quite interesting compilation of retranslations from the game. Here is the translation of the Doll's equivalent line in Japanese:

"Hunter-sama... I feel *familiarity coming from you... It's because Hunters are inheritors of the old **wills as I expected..."
"*懐かしさ doesn't translate well. It's a fondness for something in the past, like nostalgia.
**意志 - ishi - Oddly enough, this isn't the same ishi used to describe blood echoes. This form of ishi is used to describe volition, will, etc."

The Doll (Japanese)

So it does actually seem to reference something else than blood echoes, but also reinforces my assumption that there is something more at play here. "Inheritors of the old wills"... Ah, can mean many things. I would have said that it could be the will of past Hunters, but she seems to reference that Hunters collectively are inheritors of these old wills, so I don't know... It still feels like it references some kind of originator or progenitor. Interesting.

As for dogs and crows (and animals in general, I guess), no, they almost certainly haven't received blood treatment... but it's probably not too outlandish to figure that they could have gotten Old Blood, and possibly associated blood echoes, from feeding on corpses.
Will think on it some more, but generally take the details of my prior theory with a grain of salt; it was pretty much a flow of consciousness-kind of thing. I practically made it up as I went. I'll most likely change my mind about some things as well in time, it was just what I thought of in the moment.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

You know, I was just going about my business after writing that quick snippet for the clinic-scene, but for whatever reason something kept nagging me and I kept thinking about Bloodborne. The (false) Paleblood Hunters reminded me of the Hunter's Dream and the Doll, and something that really stood out to me from the Doll's dialogue when I heard it on my recent playthrough of the game came back to me:

Good hunter... Your presence somehow soothes... I sense the ancient echoes, they course your veins...

The Doll

This was remarkable because I wondered at the time what had triggered her to say this, as I realized that she had made no such comment after me killing Amygdala, despite it being undeniably ancient. So I looked it up, and the trigger for this line is apparently to have killed Rom.
But that doesn't make sense; Rom is explicitly referenced as a Byrgenwerth scholar, which would make her, at most, a human lifetime older than the Healing Church, if she happened to be basically about to die of old age when she ascended. There is very little means of determining how long ago it was, but Redgrave (author of The Paleblood Hunt) estimated that Gehrman had been held in the Hunter's Dream for about a hundred years. We also know that Master Willem was alive at the time of her ascension, and that he remains so at the time of the game; Willem (despite surprisingly having more HP than most of the huntsmen found in the game) also seems to be almost entirely human (aside from a bit of weirdness on the back of his neck), and he seems both very weak and very old. His research/Rom might have extended Willem's life past its natural span, but still, it sort of sets some parameters on how old Rom might reasonably be.

Now, even if I'm super generous with this and presume Rom to be in excess of two hundred years old (which would make Willem... surprisingly youthful for his age), it's still somewhat arguable whether this would make her "ancient". Still, it probably wouldn't be wrong to label her as such... but then I considered that Rom is the only one to elicit this response. Bypassing her, it is possible to kill Amygdala, Ebrietas and Queen Yharnam, not to mention various other, obviously and undeniably ancient creatures in the old labyrinth; all of which are are definitely much older than Rom. (Not to mention that you can literally kill Rom in the old labyrinth before encountering her in the lake, and still not get that dialogue.)
But even if we disregard the old labyrinth for being extra optional, and Amygdala for being optional as well - if we consider only the things one needs to kill before getting to Rom - we still encounter a problem: the Shadows of Yharnam. Even these guys, being Pthumerians, are much older than Rom, and the player needs to kill them to reach Rom.
So... how does that line make sense? It could just be that Rom possesses and passes on the blood echoes of Kos, but even that brings up new questions, like why Rom would have Kos' blood echoes (unless Rom killed Kos?) and why Kos is apparently more ancient than Amygdala?

So I looked up the lore on blood echoes yet again, one of the things that has always sort of been that throwaway, manga-esque bit that was just an excuse to have "souls, but in Bloodborne". It confirmed what I remembered (and wrote for the OP):

Blood Echoes are the echo of someone's will. Like a ghost is the lingering image of a person, Blood Echoes are the lingering presence of their will that stays long after the person has passed away.

Bloodborne Fandom Wiki

But then I read on, looking specifically for something that would explain Rom triggering that dialogue, and I read a trivia line about them that I have read before, but which now hit me a whole lot harder:

In the Japanese version, it is called "Dying Wishes of the Blood".

Bloodborne Fandom Wiki

Not just "dying wish" or "dying will", as I remembered, but specifically the dying wishes "of the Blood". Then I read it all again. And again.
"Blood Echoes are the echo of someone's will. Like a ghost is the lingering image of a person, Blood Echoes are the lingering presence of their will that stays long after the person has passed away."
Nowhere in that does it say that the dying will passed on is that of the creature slain in that moment, nor does it say that it is echoes of those slain by that creature. It occurred to be that with the Orphan of Kos, the player actually witness the orphan being born before the battle; it only became active once approached by the player, and has thus not killed anyone to accumulate blood echoes from... yet one receives a substantial amount of them for slaying it.

My theory, then, is this: all blood echoes, from the measly amount received from huntsmen and crows to those from the strongest bosses, are echoes of the Great Ones; specifically, given their name in Japanese, dead Great Ones. The fact that the Doll only sense the soothing "ancient echoes" after killing Rom, then, is not because Rom's blood echoes were especially ancient, but rather because killing her has lowered the barrier separating the waking world from the Great Ones.
In other words, it is not that the player comes into possession of new echoes that are ancient, but that something ancient now echoes strongly and palpably inside of the player... perhaps the same thing that seems to drive everyone else mad after killing Rom? Something now echoing strongly in their blood? And if so... it is very interesting that something that drives everyone else (except the especially powerful, namely Hunters and Queen Annalise) mad is "soothing" to the Doll.