Bloodlings and the blood mist

The fundamental point of playing in Ravenland, I think, is the blood mist. A fantasy land with a bit of a twist was hit by an apocalypse, but now the apocalypse is over, and those of you brave enough can venture outside their villages and work out what to do with the world. A post-post-apocalyptic fantasy world? Sign me up!

The explanation of the blood mist is also typical of the Forbidden Lands approach: scattered over multiple books, details of what happened are either deliberately inconsistent to encourage GM creativity (the Watsonian theory of the unreliable narrator), or the result of fuzzy thinking or translation errors (the Doylist theory of roleplaying books needing an editor).

One thing is clear, though: the blood mist persisted for centuries until Merigall got annoyed and got rid of it.

This is almost certainly the least likely of all the explanations.

Why did the bloodlings attack?

In fairness, nobody was expecting the blood mist. But still, most of the theories of even what happened, let alone why or how, are at best incomplete. The description of who the bloodlings attacked (GM’s Guide, pp. 33-35) claims that nothing changed in 260 years, but that’s problematic. The best way to understand the bloodlings is if you decide that the blood mist learns.

Who the blood mist attacked until a few years ago

Until the blood mist suddenly vanished (apart from rare pockets), bloodlings could come out at night and attack anyone not safely inside their village home. Exceptions, we are told, fell into three categories: (1) simple and innocent creatures like animals and children, (2) people who felt they belonged in the wilderness (wolfkin, travellers, and eventually Rust Brothers), and (3) people who lived in places the blood mist didn’t go (dwarves and elves).

This was karma happening to humanity, many other Kin would like to gloat. You trashed your previous home, so you had to leave and come over here asking to be allowed a second chance. We gave you half of the land, only for you to then turn around and decide that actually the rest of the land that you weren’t given was yours by right anyway. You messed with the dead, and then demons, waging war against everyone else, including yourselves, and then when the dust settled it turned out there were these other demons who you couldn’t control, and you had to stay in your villages for 260 years terrified that they’d eat you.

And why did the bloodlings go after humans in particular? Because the humans knew in their hearts of hearts that they’d been bad, that they’d made catastrophically poor decisions, that they’d tried to impose themselves on a land where they didn’t belong. Bloodlings sensed the guilt of humanity and used it as a weapon against them, over and over, for countless generations.

The problem with this seductive interpretation, unfortunately, is that the very power of its moral case against humanity undermines its explanatory power.

It’s precisely because humans dismissed the other Kin and strove to impose themselves on the entire land, that early bloodlings would have been unable to detect any guilt or doubt in the human population left standing after the four Alder Wars. The short human life span, and the corresponding weakness of their social institutions, which would see any societal memory of the original humility of the first human settlers completely and utterly vanish over the course of terrifyingly-short generations, was what protected humans, merely hundreds of years later, from the consequences of their actions.

These days, humans fear bloodlings in the wilderness, so when they venture into the wilderness the bloodlings latch onto that fear and kill them. Sure. This is neatly self-fulfilling. But that elegance works against you when you need to explain how it all started. Why would bloodlings, who we are told seek out fear and weakness, attack perfectly-healthy humans who had no reason to fear them?

What are bloodlings for, in the world they come from?

“In their own world, the bloodlings attack and remove sick creatures or those who are unhappy in life.” (GM’s Guide, p. 34.) That feels like a good, or at least necessary function? Bloodlings sound more like the T cells of an immune system, seeking out diseased or malfunctioning individuals; or maybe a supposedly-kind disease, like how pneumonia was said to be the friend of the aged; at worst a type of predator that would focus on the weak and the old, sparing the hale and healthy.

If demons are conglomerations of many, many different demon parts, then you can easily imagine that if a demon part went bad or was deemed unfit for purpose, and its host body spat it out, you could end up with a mouse-sized blob of random red flesh stuff on the floor, and then suddenly small bloodlings would coalesce out of thin air and render it into a fine mist. That’s not much different from dust mites and other tiny scavengers in our world, who feed on all of the eyelashes and skin cells that flake off us without us even noticing; let alone the mice and rats who feed on our rubbish tips.

As to how the bloodlings got so big in Ravenland: remember that fourth Alder War we talked about earlier?

The bloodlings came to Ravenland and learned the wrong lesson

The blood mist that bloodlings coalesce out of and back into has been suffusing through the Ravenlands for a while already, when huge pitched battles happen, with Zygofer’s demons and Misgrown on one side, and Alderland’s humans on the other.

Obviously the bloodlings need to clean up the broken demon parts, but there’s a problem: some of them are glued with mog onto non-demon parts. And this is where I think the bloodlings, still new to the land and not in their full power, make a mistake: they assume they need to clean up the humans too.

Injured or dying Misgrown on the battlefield? They obviously need the final grace that the bloodlings are here to administer. Other humans on the same battlefield? The difference is only one of degrees, and the bloodlings don’t really understand this world, so sure, them too.

This may well be the clue to understanding the most puzzling thing about the early bloodlings: “Oddly enough, the residents of any given area were never attacked at home, while a stranger could be killed if in even the smallest trace of mist.” (GM’s Guide, p. 34.) This is very much not what we would have expected to happen by the mid-1100s: you’d expect anyone who travelled to another village to be perfectly safe at night. (If nothing else, if everybody had to stay in their home village their entire life, the remaining humans would be so inbred that barely any villages would still be viable.)

But suppose you’re early bloodlings, and you know that some humans need to be cleaned up. Possibly you’ve over-learned a lesson from the battlefields and decided that humans are actually inherently diseased: because those Misgrown don’t look right at all, so maybe it’s the weird human tissue that’s the problem. You have a problem, though, which is that there are thousands of humans and still very few of you. So you have to triage.

By this time the blood mist network has spread far enough that you have awareness of many humans and the places they live, so having decided that the problem is when humans start spreading, you start to tag (1) humans and (2) the places they live most of the time. If the two match, the human isn’t a threat / you can deal with them later. Humans who move about? Those we can and should kill.

Eventually humans realise that bloodlings exist and will kill you violently if you’re not safely at home, and that scares them to bits, so the bloodlings can ditch that early heuristic and revert to their preferred “if someone is unhappy, let’s help them not be unhappy” behaviour, and we have the neatly circular logic from earlier. My guess, based on how long it took between the blood mist appearing and the first Rust Brother managing to brave the wilderness through sheer force of will (ibid., p. 34), is about 50 years.

The bloodlings must have attacked all humanoids, not just humans

There’s actually no reason to stop at humans. For the entire country to have been crippled by the blood mist, which the setting demands, the bloodlings need to have been attacking everyone at first. Not animals, because those are clearly different; and not children, because those are clearly healthy (they’re still growing, after all). But otherwise everyone is fair game. This is necessary so (1) everybody fears the blood mist, and (2) no kin gets an unfair advantage for the next 260 years.

Goblins were at first seriously disadvantaged by the blood mist (can’t find the page reference, annoyingly), but after 50-odd years they’ll start to be ignored, as will wolfkin in their forests, and any kind of traveller or nomad. And you can decide that elves are so arrogant that it doesn’t take them long to emit similar “I belong here” vibes, but everywhere. Thats not normally a problem: wolfkin aren’t happy outside forests, elves deliberately keep their numbers low anyway, nomadism happens because the land can’t support huge numbers, etc.

But if you let halflings+goblins, orcs or dwarves not worry about the blood mist, you’re going to wake up 260 years later to find them everywhere. Goblins are already happy at night, and if the halflings realise they don’t have to stay inside either, they’ll start looking for new places to found villages, if only so they don’t have to hear aunt Ethel go on about about the time they spilled beer on the baby. Orcs’ ferocious rate of reproduction is well known, and the famously-competitive dwarf clans’ numbers will increase almost as fast as humans’, if they can find enough space aboveground to grow crops.

If you want to say that the world basically stopped, like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, the blood mist has to have happened to everyone that matters. So that means all humanoids.

How do bloodlings and the blood mist work?

So we’ve got a blood mist and occasional ultra-violent bloodlings. How does all of that fit together?

Bloodlings and the blood mist are one

Blood mist has been pouring into the Ravenlands ever since, so we can assume that the bloodling network eventually got as strong as it was on the other side of the rift. This especially holds if we decide that it only stretched as far as it needed to, i.e. until it met really big mountains, or the ocean. Thinking of it as a network rather than meteorological mist also explains why it didn’t all fall into a deep hole or into the sea, or why you can still get killed by bloodlings in human villages at a higher altitude than Alderstone. As to why it doesn’t venture into the dwarven lands, that’s also simple: it needs regular sunlight for something (probably energy).

As for “a network of what?”, my inclination is towards something simple and self-organising like a slime mould.

At its most basic, the blood mist is a latticework of invisible strands that spreads across Ravenland. When something triggers an alert, one or bloodlings coalesce out of the mist, and from that point onwards they have an awareness, memory, and increasingly a sense of self. This typically doesn’t last long – until the trigger stops, or the sun comes up – but they can leave e.g. peculiar red inscriptions in the bark of trees or cave walls, which are notes to the blood mist as a whole, and which future bloodlings can build upon. I suspect that the initial lessons learned of “maybe humans are bad?” and “let’s start by triaging them, and leave the ones who stay out alone” were decisions that the blood mist network learned as a whole, and later reconsidered.

What happens if bloodlings don’t bamf back into the mist?

Over the years, I think it’s possible that some bloodlings might have stayed around for longer, for whichever reason. While capable of surprisingly-complex emergent behaviour at scale, something like a slime mould is simple at heart, so if you can think of a robot getting in an endless loop because of conflicting programming, maybe a bloodling could too.

Maybe a prepper cult leader had a moment of despair and decided that everyone should commit suicide and drink poison, but something went wrong, and the cult leader is now mostly brain-dead, mumbling nonsensical gibberish, and the rest of the cultists are ghosts hanging on his very word. A bloodling wandered in to cull the unhappy cult leader, but then realised that many ghosts would be unhappy, so has decided to help the ghosts keep the body alive by feeding it a hideous gruel of stockpiled grain and honestly not that many mice and grubs.

Or, you know, maybe a bloodling fell down a hole or something.

Either way, suppose you think of bloodlings like fungi: temporary fruiting bodies compared to the blood mist’s mycelium; charismatic, attention-drawing but inherently disposable, and ultimately not as important as the year-round network that predates them and outlives them.

These ones are different. There’s plenty of information stored in the blood mist network, the result of previous bloodlings’ experiences and conjectures, but that’s not the same as proper memories, or the thoughts of someone who’s been alive for hours or even days, and achieved something that most bloodlings never do: a sense of self.

Individualist bloodlings: the sort of thing that should never happen

This is the sort of thing that should feel utterly alien and wrong to any bloodling. If any of these individualist bloodlings wander into the blood mist, they’ll immediately trigger a surge of new bloodlings desperate to rid the world of this terrible mistake.

Numbers ought to prevail, and they usually do; but occasionally an individualist bloodling will prove too strong, possibly because of the lessons they’ve learned while instantiated. What happens here is that the individualist bloodling fights off the weaker attackers, and maybe absorbs them, but certainly weakens the blood mist network in the immediate area. If you think of the blood mist network as an intricate web of interconnected strands, it’s difficult to take an area and sever all of its connections to the wider network, but not impossible; especially if killing bloodling attackers weakens the strands they emerged from. An individualist bloodling might then effectively steal the local part of the network and bend it to its will.

In a human body we call this sort of event “cancer”, and the outcome isn’t good for either party. But the blood mist is a simpler organism, so it seems likely that you could occasionally find a bloodling strong and lucky enough to be able to take a part of the blood mist for its own. It’ll hide away from the sunlight during the day, in caves or very sheltered parts of the forest, then at night tap into its tame blood mist network for energy and information.

And if one, why not others? Eventually, over the years, you might end up with multiple individualist bloodlings carving out their own fiefs. Maybe even some of them could meet, and form villages.

The different opinions of bloodlings

It’s when you start to get multiple individualist bloodlings that you realise that there are a number of possible schools of bloodling thought.

If humans think of bloodlings as immune cells, diseases, or predators, then it should follow that the bloodlings who live alongside them and occasionally kill them should also use those metaphors. This shouldn’t make much difference for those in the disease camp, and those who think of themselves as predators might even become more violent.

But I think bloodlings who consider themselves to be immune cells should be horrified. They were just trying to help, do the thankless clean-up job nobody else wants to do but without which society would collapse. And now it turns out that they’ve condemned generations to live in isolation, afraid, and the total population has plummeted as a result? These bloodlings are mortified!

How the blood mist ends

Nobody knew about the blood mist until it gained critical mass: helped by the Fourth Alder War, yes, but that was probably just a catalyst. Eventually bloodlings would have reached sufficient numbers to impose themselves on the Ravenlands some other way.

It follows that network effects should also have been behind the end of the blood mist. Chances are there were many factors involved in taking the blood mist down: none of them sufficient by themselves, especially not at first, but devastating in cumulative combination.

The weakness of the “Merigall did it” theory of the end of the bloodlings

Received wisdom is that Merigall was bored, went and found a bunch of bloodlings, talked to them until “With beautiful words infused with magic, the demon managed to plant a seed of homesickness in the bloodlings, so they began devouring each other. Such was their killer instinct that they could not refrain from cannibalism. The mist slowly disappeared over the next few years as Merigall’s songs spread through the land.” (GM’s Guide, pp. 34-35.)

The history mentions this as happening in 1160: 260 years after the Blood Mist stopped everyone from travelling, and 210 years after the Rust Brothers realised they could walk abroad. In that context, it saying “Merigall […] soon tired of the wet blanket the Blood Mist left over the Forbidden Lands” (ibid., p. 34, emphasis mine) makes the fun-seeking demon uncharacteristically patient. And even if you grant that what Merigall did was make bloodlings almost suicidally sad, triggering attacks from the rest of them who weren’t yet quite as incapacitated by grief, it seems like by definition a good number of bloodlings (the attackers, you’d have thought) would survive the process. Two armies neatly cancelling each other out is the sort of thing that happens in stories all the time, but in practice one of them soon gains an edge and most of the dead are from the losing side.

Instead, the official history assumes that not only do the bloodlings kill each other perfectly, but then the song spreads somehow and takes all of the other bloodlings out as well, without Merigall having to do much more.

It’s quite possible that Merigall did manage to find a few bloodlings and sing sweet songs of homesickness to them. But I’d wager that this happened soon after the blood mist established itself, rather than 200 years afterwards, and only got rid of bloodlings in a few limited areas. This clearly contributed to the collapse of the blood mist, but Merigall doesn’t get all the credit.

Non-human natural scientists and shocked individualist bloodlings

If the passage of time pretty much guarantees that individualist bloodlings should eventually emerge, and some of them should feel ashamed about what they’d done to the humans through ignorance, then you’d expect elves and/or dwarves to find them.

(My bet is on “and”. Even if you decide that dwarves only build things out of stone, from the bottom up, and elves only descend from the sky and plant trees on everything they find, there can still be areas where elves and dwarves would collaborate. The truth behind the story of Neyd’s staff of erosion is that there probably are dwarf biologists, and elf geologists. They’d naturally work together, especially if there are also Elvenspring biologists and geologists who can take over when the elf’s ennui-o-meter reaches critical levels.)

If bloodlings with permanence, individuality and regret start appearing, that seems like the sort of thing that will get everyone’s attention. Entire forest groves might get a lot quieter as ents decide that squishy bodies are Good, Actually. This is something new and exciting, and we can probably blame it on the humans. What’s not to like?

Given how bloodlings will attack Elvenspring, dwarves above ground, as well as ogres and the more subtle dwarf-human hybrids, it’s in the interest of the dwarves and elves to encourage the apologetic individualist bloodlings, and helping them to expand their territory. Especially if the bloodlings killed an elf or two in the early decades, and one of the permanent bloodlings has somehow incorporated an elf ruby into their body. (As far as other elves can tell, (a) it has the memories of the dead elf, (b) plausibly could be the dead elf in some way, and certainly (c) says that it’s an interesting experience. This is something that needs to be studied and protected!)

This also won’t reach critical mass, though, because of the remaining strength of the blood mist in Marga, the home of the Rust Brothers.

The Rust Brothers’s protection racket motivates them to maintain the blood mist

Villages in areas controlled by the Rust Brothers are pressured to contribute food and sacrifices (Raven’s Purge, p. 162), in exchange for a blessing of their crops for the next year (ibid., p. 163), which is actually a tamping down of the “religious effigies” they place in their villages, which are demons in disguise and will destroy their crops if not placated.

This is a pretty obvious protection racket – “nice village you’ve got; shame if something were to happen to it” – and it’s particularly effective because not only do the Rust Brothers have an army, they can bring it all to bear on one particular village, without fear of being attacked elsewhere. The villagers can’t band together and start their own army, because if they go outside their village, bloodlings will eat them.

The last thing the Rust Brothers want is anything that would even the odds, like e.g. a small number of enterprising villagers, bold, charismatic and with a complementary mixture of skills, who could set up a hidden base in the woods. Why, a small band like this could occasionally attack merchants, sabotage military convoys, assassinate Rust Brothers and then melt away into the woods. At other times they might be sheltered by the grateful villagers, some of which might occasionally join them on their more daring raids. There aren’t that many Rust Brothers: there are about 100 fighters at Haggler’s House during the annual harvest feast (ibid., pp. 162-167), and you’d have thought that nearly all Rust Brothers would want to be there, even if some would be needed to stay at their posts elsewhere. Guerrilla attacks could soon start taking sizeable chunks out of that number.

The Rust Brothers aren’t going to give up the blood mist, which gives them both a military and a religious advantage, without a fight.

What if Krasylla flipped the bloodlings?

Krasylla has three big things working for them, and one great weakness. A demon warlord of great power, respected by demons across the land, they’re camped out by the nexus in Vond, where they can intercept any demons coming through. They’re also in the process of becoming sarmog, but that means they’re stuck there until the process completes (Raven’s Purge, p. 37).

This immobility is a problem, because it means they can’t travel to other parts of the land and find out what people are saying about them. To defend themselves against plots by other demons, or humans with an Arrow of the Fire Wyrm with Krasylla’s name written on it, they need a way of finding out information without moving from Vond.

Krasylla certainly has an existing cadre of friendly demons dotted about Ravenland, but their numbers are small and getting messages to and from them is haphazard. The blood mist, in contrast, spans the entire country; having observed it coming through the nexus for hundreds of years, Krasylla is in an ideal position to use it for their own purposes, especially if Merigall tells them that some bloodlings have found a way to become more permanent, and therefore more intelligent.

By definition these individualist bloodlings have carved out their own blood mist network, separate from the main one, so Krasylla can’t talk to them. But knowing how enough individuals think can give you a pretty good understanding of how the body as a whole will behave. (Human pollsters do this with focus groups all the time.)

The message to the part of the blood mist most aligned with the T-cell faction is the simplest: oops, turns out you were wrong, so maybe just stop attacking people? To the disease faction: you still need to look out for weakness, so maybe you can tell me what you see? As for the wolf faction: from time to time I need people to be killed, and maybe you could help?

Merigall and Krasylla don’t often work together: they may both be demons from Churmog, and ostentatiously work for Zytera, but they are very different people, with significantly-different interests. But in this case their interests are aligned: (1) let people move around again, in exchange for Krasylla knowing what they’re up to, and (2) significantly annoy Katorda.

So Merigall goes to Krasylla, with news of how there are some strange bloodlings; Krasylla adds to that what they’ve learned from decades of listening in on the messages on the blood mist; Merigall develops a convincing message, and Krasylla sends it to all of the remaining bloodlings in Ravenland.

“You don’t have to kill anybody who goes outside at night any more”, it says. “You have a new task now.”