Rynling R&D

HUNTER'S MARK: A Bloodborne Anniversary Zine
https://huntersmarkzine.carrd.co/

Hunter’s Mark is a free, digital, open-call fanzine celebrating Bloodborne, announced publicly on the tenth anniversary of the main game and to be released for free on the tenth anniversary of the Old Hunters DLC.

It seems like there are no applications for this project; you just sign up and tell the mods what you're submitting. Sounds good to me!

I've actually been looking for an excuse to write about Rom the Vacuous Spider. Before she was a giant horrible creature, Rom was a scholar at Byrgenwerth College, and I'd like to take a shot at telling her story. My idea is that Rom desired a longer life and deeper insight for the sake of scholarship, and that she was obsessed with the "publish or perish" cult of academic productivity. If nothing else, I've been keeping a running list of fake book titles that might appear in Bloodborne, and this would be a fun opportunity to share my delusions. I'll call my story "Progeny," because... Idk, a swarm of spiders is as good of an analogy for academic publishing as anything.

I really enjoyed Nosferatu. This is as it should be, seeing as how the movie was created for me specifically. I'd have to watch it again to be sure, but I'm fairly certain that some of the dialogue and a few of the mis-en-scene frames were directly lifted from Bloodborne. Honestly, Nosferatu is Bloodborne if Bloodborne were overtly horny.

You may be shaking your head and thinking that not every Gothic story set in Germany is Bloodborne. Maybe, you might suggest, Bloodborne was in fact inspired by the original 1922 Nosferatu movie. This is incorrect. Not a lot of people know this, but many European Gothic Revival artists and architects cite Hidetaka Miyazaki as a direct source of inspiration. (source)

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Bloodborne Plot Notes
http://soulslore.wikidot.com/bb-plot

I found an amazing summary of Bloodborne's story that can be read like a novel. The writer agrees with me that Rom was once human. Which is neat. All things considered, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be a giant moss-covered spider living in a beautiful lake surrounded by dense forest.

Anyway, it took me a week, but I finally figured out how to kill her.

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I understand that many people experience a sense of accomplishment after defeating such a difficult boss, but I don't feel that it's really necessary for Rom to be as hard as she is. Most of what it took for me to defeat her was level grinding, and I had to do several hours of it. Ah well. Moving on.

On the other side of the hillbilly-infested snake forest is Byrgenwerth. This is what I thought would be "the haunted university," but really it's just someone's lake house. It's a very aristocratic lake house, to be sure! But it's only a single building. At this lake house are about a dozen people whose heads are lotus seedpods filled with eyes, a giant centipede with a vertically slit mouth filled with teeth, and an old man staring at the lake.

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Based on bits and pieces of lore I've picked up, I assume that Rom used to be one of the scholars who hung out at Byrgenwerth. Again, as Byrgenwerth is someone's country estate, there must be a large university elsewhere. Willem, the old guy who hangs out on the balcony overlooking the lake, was apparently a professor who brought a bunch of grad students on a field trip to study forbidden knowledge. One of his students, Laurence, became obsessed with the blood of the Great Ones and went on to establish the Healing Church. Rom was probably another student. I guess she got obsessed with the eyes of the Great Ones and, in an experiment she performed on herself, unfortunately turned into a giant spider. Rom originally being human is just a theory, but grad students do be like that.

In case you'd like a visual reference for Vicar Amelia...

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...who is the goodest girl.

Yarn Town
https://www.freegameplanet.com/yarntown-download-game/
https://maxatrillionator.itch.io/yarntown

Created by Max Mraz in the rather impressive Solarus engine, Yarntown is a homage to FromSoftware’s 2015 Bloodborne game, which recreates the entirety of the Central Yharnam area in a Zelda inspired top-down style. It’s a lot easier than Bloodborne and the Zelda-esque combat is fairly simple, but it’s nice to return to Central Yarnham and wander those gothic streets from a top-down perspective.

You know that Junji Ito "this is my hole" meme? Listen. This hole was made just for me.

Yarn Town is the debut project of the person who went on to create the Nintendo Switch game Ocean's Heart (which I love). As far as I can tell, they developed their GBA style engine, Solarus, just to make this Bloodborne fangame. I have built a small shrine for them in my heart.

So I’ve seen a lot of theories about the identity of the "runesmith of Byrgenwerth"
https://skelayton-lord.tumblr.com/post/167523600216

I'm not sure this post is going to make much sense to anyone who hasn't played Bloodborne. It doesn't make much sense to me, to be honest. I found it by googling "what does the Memory Altar do," and obviously this isn't an answer to my basic gameplay question, but it's as good a place as any to start looking for lore.

What I'm picking up on is that whatever happened in Yharnam is the end result of the studies of a group of scholars at a university called Byrgenwerth. Among other things (that I am still trying to piece together), these scholars decided that it was a good idea to literally open people's heads via craniectomy and carve runes into the inside of their skulls. Or something of that nature:

She heard the utterances of the great ones and had their runes literally burnt into her skull, just as we learned that Willem's goal of lining brains with eyes was in no way metaphorical. She heard these arcane utterances, and it literally left marks in her skull. Same with the hunter's mark - it is actually in the head of our hunter.

As far as academia goes, that sounds about right to be honest.

After fighting and defeating Father Gascoigne, Cherry gained access to the Cathedral Ward. This area is patrolled by tall, creepy men who look like how I imagine American Puritans (here’s an image, cw for horror), but the inside of one of the chapels is a haven where you can send NPCs. Questlines in Souls games tend to end in terrible deaths, so I’m going to have to google this before I make any decisions.

If you go into the basement of this chapel, and then into the sub-basement, and then into the sub-sub-basement, you can pass through an unmarked side door and emerge into another section of the city called Old Yharnam. This neighborhood is less fancy than Central Yharnam, but trees and grass actually grow here, which is nice. Cherry was enjoying the scenery and minding his own business when he got mowed down by gunfire. Some asshole mounted a gatling gun onto the railing of the clocktower, and he’s made it his business to make your life miserable.

It was annoying to die, of course, but I was highly amused. I always love when you have a fantasy setting with swords and magic, and then someone shows up with a machine gun. Like, good for him.

The sewer section of Central Yharnam is relatively small, which is a shame, HOWEVER. One of the tunnels has a pig! A giant sewer pig!! Of course it’s in an advanced stage of rot, and its skin is sloughing off in a very unsettling way, but what a joyful thing to find in the sewers.

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To test the extent of the change in world state, I had Cherry go back and talk to all of the people hiding in their houses. The game apparently assumes that I’ve defeated the Cleric Beast, because the guy who sounds super sick apologizes that the gate at the end of the bridge is closed. He tells Cherry that he might be able to go a place called the Cathedral Ward through the aqueduct.

This was music to my ears. A sewer level? So early in the game?? Just for me????

I’m so happy! Now all I have to do is find the entrance.