here is a recap of the state of affairs when it comes to the chalice dungeons: byrgenwerth scholars discovered the pthumerian underground labyrinth, wherein they discovered the holy medium ritual blood and the pthumerian labyrinth chalice (currently being worshiped in old yharnam). by combining these items at an altar surrounded by candles, a process called “communion”, (a play on both the catholic act of eating the body and blood of christ and the healing church’s attempts to communicate with great ones) they were able to enter deeper parts of the labyrinth via the same sort of teleportation used by hunters to get to and fro, by passing through the nightmare. that black garbage below is nightmare mist. there’s a few more times it shows up later where it continues to establish itself as the substance the nightmare is made out of.

by receiving communion ( from the labyrinth (not “taking”, specifically the language used across translations makes it clear that the act of communion is bestowed) hunters and prospectors for the church could explore more dungeons and could stock up on the rare materials for more communion which meant growing closer and closer to the great ones. the healing church doles out blood so that hunters can continue to explore the dungeons and open deeper seals in the labyrinth: “blood ministration is, of course, the pursuit of communion”. of course [leans over to you] _{what the fuck is he talking about}

after being temporarily sidelined by beasts in central pthumeru, the church rallied and carved through the remaining layers. more chalices and labyrinths were discovered including the hintertomb, a peripheral dungeon of lesser, more informal graves. the hintertomb and the “entrance” (like the collapsed cave in cainhurst) in the forbidden woods near byrgenwerth was flooded with a toxic sludge by-product of decomposing great ones.¹ that’s the most exciting thing about the hintertomb. awful place.

hunters with interest in the arcane passed through the lower pthumerian labyrinth and left one of their tools behind. ² upon reaching the third (and usually final) layer of the dungeon, the tomb prospectors ran into one of the most inconvenient lore discoveries of all time: rom the vacuous spider. if we’re following my chalice dungeon progression theory, rom would be the first kin they encountered with a corpse that didn’t teleport back to space after it dies. don’t worry about what a kin is for now. the loosest explanation is that it’s a mid-step between human and great one. we will get deep in the (milk) weeds of this later.

we should talk about what little we know about rom here because i think it might be relevant to the current point in the timeline. i’m not going to pretend like i understand rom though. she³ is one of the least comprehensible aspects of the story by a wide margin.

—

we’ll start with a view of what you see when you run into this weird lump in the chalice dungeons rather than the base game. she’s the big weird lump covered in shit. the little white faces around her are her nasty little romlings (“children of rom” officially”) whose special power is doing 10000000000 damage per hit. the hunter shrugs off the huge meteors rom summons out of the sky to crush you but when a bug touches them they die instantly. same, i guess.

no one likes that rom exists in the chalice dungeons, me included. not only because she’s an absolute slog to fight (made worse by the fact that the fight takes place in a broom closet with pillars that block your swings) but like, why is she even here. she’s in the game later as a (equally annoying) non-optional boss battle that drops the game into its third act and ends up probably one of the most consequential encounters in the entire game. her narrative purpose makes it weird to think there might be more than one vacuous spider named rom.

my suggestions on how to rectify this perceived inconsistency is pure cope but if it works, it works:

technique one – rom and ebrietas are no different from the beasts and are merely different species of kin. a rom. an ebrietas. however…this is kind of a big perspective shift in general as to how great ones are perceived. the wording on various items that reference these specific great ones would be rendered too awkward and the item description wording is usually deliberately precise to the point of being almost comedically literal. but rom and ebrietas ARE kin and not REALLY great ones, so its not nuts to suggest there might be more than one that was “made”.

technique two – there’s nothing that indicates that the chalice dungeons are a nightmare/dream/time travel or that the great ones have a separate “consciousness” that exists only in the tombs (wtf lol). but perhaps the purpose of the repeat fights is a more direct and unsubtle part of the process of retracing the historical journey taken by the first tomb prospectors. as a result of time constraints/choices, they shifted focus away from boss fight challenges⁴ and more original bosses to instead try to establish where base game monsters originate. rom came from pthumeru. this is the information the game is trying to deliver and here is how its going to do it. inelegant, but we’ve had worse reasons for fights in fromsoft games.

i greatly dislike the explanations people come up with for the chalice dungeons involving “consciousness” or “different planes of reality” or whatever. its more intellectually honest just to say that that they were subject to the treatment given to all games during the fromsoft dev cycle than it is to just invent a new plot mechanic out of thin air. in the end, what we should be extrapolating from this stupid encounter is that rom, or knowledge of how to “make” rom if there’s more than one, came from the pthumerian labyrinth.

okay, let’s ACTUALLY talk about rom. we can get into the details and the nitty gritty here so we have way less to cover by the time we actually reach her in yharnam.

—

ok now let’s get a close up.

hmmm. yuck.

most of rom doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and what little i can discern doesn’t really elucidate things any more. her tail (left) has a superficial resemblance to the fiddlehead ferns⁵ found around yharnam. i do not know what the plants are growing out of her body and do not think it appears anywhere else in the game. the plant-y bits glow with an eerie white light. the rest of her is dead, cracked, grey, and shriveled. there are deep holes in her body on her flanks and her legs are tiny, ant-like. at a certain point her body becomes segmented, and those segments are peppered with dark eyes that continue to dapple her calcified, pale, helmet-esque head.

her eyes are dark (but pupils can be discerned!) and her mouth is perpetually gaping and open. her nose, while askew, can be discerned with careful observation.

she drops “kin coldblood” upon defeat, . her little romlings drop “madman’s knowledge“. they are truly less vacuous, i suppose.

here’s the canon on rom: she is NOT!!!!! a byrgenwerth scholar! this is an early theory that everyone ran with for years until very recently when it was pointed out that literally nothing says or implies this. if anything, given her location in the pthumerian dungeons and her facial features, more evidence points to her being of pthumerian origin.

rom is kin. officially. i’m putting my trust in the brave soldiers of the bloodborne-wiki who are willing to crunch the numbers⁷ that i really do not want to. however, rom has an unusual quality for a kin: most kin bleed a smokey grey color (pale? not pale enough…). rom bleeds grey from her head…but her body bleeds red! this is, curiously, a quality not unique to rom. but it’s very rare for a kin.

she is “vacuous” meaning stupid, not empty. this might seem like a weird distinction but in other languages she is something like “rom the idiot spider”. this matters i guess. why are they so mean to her…..consider this: rom’s eyes are on the outside. she probably does not have eyes on the inside. vacuous indeed…

you will find a corpse/statue later in the game that resembles rom. that corpse is NOT rom!!! it has a full set of much larger legs!! we can compare her to one of her romlings and see that she’s missing her legs and her sickle arms. i assume they took them to keep her from wandering too far.

the holes on her body are NOT where her legs used to be!!! the romlings have them as well and their big legs are attached to their underside!⁶ the holes were probably eyes harvested for byrgenwerth research. that would make rom and her kids have an appearance similar to brains lined with eyes…no?

maybe. there’s a common theory that rom and the romlings are cocoons (they could be both eye gardens AND cocoons!) to facilitate the transformation of others. there’s no proof to support it…but there’s NO proof to NOT support it. there’s plenty of references to the concept of metamorphosis, including two runes named after the concept. keep it in mind for the next page i guess.

—

rom has an (latent?) ability that is not expanded upon well at all during the game and the execution of which was so baffling it left people confused as to what even happened. she hides rituals(?) by obfuscating evidence of them occurring. two different notes in yharnam describe the byrgenwerth spider of “hiding all manner of rituals”. information so nice, you repeat it twice…how she does this is a complete fucking mystery. illusions are not well understood and are utilized in the stupidest ways possible. in the base game, there’s a ritual actively being hidden, explaining her presence. but underground there’s nothing going on. she’s just the final boss of lower pthumeru.

hold on, why is there another layer in this dungeon. don’t they stop at 3??

wh-

WAUGH

AAAH

^{1. the slow-poison causing goo in the forbidden woods is odd and has a milky appearance, but i can’t tell if that’s just fromsoft water texture quality lol. the poison pool colors in other places are inconsistent: isz and the nightmare frontier are opaque navy blue, inside the hintertomb its just kind of mud colored, pthumeru has oil? who knows. thanks for reading this note about goo. oh, also the forbidden woods goo that’s the likely the entrance to the hintertomb contains arcane, “nourishing” and rapid poison inducing blood gems}

^{2. it’s an awl for some reason. your guess is as good as mine as to how this one works. cow tools.}

^{3. confirmed by miyazaki in an interview.}

^{4. this incredible lance macdonald vid shows off the cut content for the chalice dungeon bosses, including a cut boss rush mode….don’t even get me started on how mad i am this didn’t make it in. they really want me to do ALL the chalice dungeons AGAIN to fight yharnam?! there’s some wild shit in here but focus on the amount of cut shit instead of the contents for now.}

^{5. the ferns were at one point going to be of some importance. they can be seen in some environments, such as yahar’gul. means jack shit to me though. some enemies in the chalice dungeons have a hysterical animation where they eat grass and heal though. its VERY rare and VERY stupid looking. hold on i need to eat this honeysuckle to restore my whimsy}

^{6. trying to get a clear picture was impossible so you’re going to have to “trust me bro” with this fucking blurry ass screencap}

^{7. kinhunter blood gems have become the definitive standard on what is or isn’t kin. if it takes bonus damage, its kin.}

these are things i’m not going to argue about, im not going to fold into my theories, or are just concepts that have been mistakenly passed around as fact. READERS BEWARE!!!!: i am a hater. if i trash something you believe its its only because you are an evil person who is bad. just kidding…..looks away mysteriously.

this section is much more informal than the history parts, which are heavily cited. sources: trust me bro

explaining the fromsoft game design ethos and the perils of taking shit too seriously

if you’re reading this hopefully you know the basics: in nearly every soulsborne fromsoft game you play a no-name nobody of no consequence who gets dropped into the world after watching a single cut-scene that only kind of make sense. by the time you arrive the world is dying, but you don’t know that (yet). the game mechanic of starting over from the last checkpoint is baked into the fiction with an in-universe explanation. you glean information about the world from the item descriptions, which will describe the purpose of the item within the fiction as well as its purpose to you, the player. the descriptions will drop references to people and concepts that mean nothing to you but must be commonplace knowledge in-universe. then you run around and do a bunch of things that don’t seem to have much if any connection to each other and watch some even more confusing cut-scenes. then it ends and you don’t know what happened until you think about it in hindsight and decide to start a new game plus (NG+). there is a guy with a big arm. these are the core elements of the fromsoft playbook.

the joy comes from slowly untangling information from more than just descriptions. there are environmental clues, audio references, hidden details in nearly every facet of the world they carve out. you can draw out a pretty good understanding of what exactly made everything so fucked up if you care (a.k.a. if you are insane). i swear to you there IS information to be gleaned!! its real and its out there!!

HOWEVER!!! YOU MUST ALSO BEWARE THE BASTARDLY TRICKS OF FROMSOFT!!!!

my first fromsoft experience was dark souls 1, not demon souls, so here’s the trick i was exposed to: during character creation you choose one “starting gift”. the descriptions are so vague as to be near useless, so if its your first time playing and you don’t want to look it up, you would have to intuit the importance of these items on your own. i think we all agree that most games would offer something of equal use or value for all gifts. dark souls does not do this.

the goddess’ blessing, black firebomb, and twin humanities (description: Tiny sprite called humanity. Sometimes found on carcasses. this means nothing to you) turn out to be very common consumables. the binoculars offered on the gift screen are the same as an in game pick-up near the hub area about 15 mins into the game. these are worthless, or at least options with a really limited lifespan. the tiny being ring at least gives you an actual semi-permanent health boost even if its is truly pathetically tiny. its also useless because it mostly just takes up one of your ring slots.

which leaves the old witch’s ring, the pendant, and the master key. the master key rips but its only really useful on new game plus or for experienced players who already know what doors it opens and what to do with those open doors. the ring (with a description that reads simply, “Gift from a witch. Ancient ring with no obvious effect“) allows you to talk to a character about 40 hours into the game and literally nothing else. you get nothing for it but dialog, and its not even especially revelatory.

which leaves the pendant, which fromsoft game director and foot quality inspector hidetaka miyazaki stated he would choose at the start of the game. it has the description:

A simple pendant with no effect.

Even so, pleasant memories are crucial to survival on arduous journeys.

it does nothing. sometimes it can be an item drop under certain circumstances but they aren’t remarkable and aren’t any less revelatory.

people have datamined the game to hell and back looking for what secrets the pendant might be influencing within the game code. people would tell the most outrageous, 1999-video-game-era lies about it unlocking a new ending or that you had to play until “the final BG+”, which is not a thing but it is a hilarious time waster. when miyazaki had to come out and say he was pranking everyone and we all got owned, then the community turned to trying to come up with tortured lore explanation of why the pendant was actually SECRETLY SIGNIFICANT. for a period of time it seemed unthinkable and impossible that the item’s purpose to simply to impart that fact things were once good in lordran and now they are bad. no!!! every single thing is the most important thing or else they wouldn’t have included it!!!! the pendant was velka’s and she used it to make solaire forget he was gwyn’s first born and priscilla’s father!!! the pendant is the dark soul!!! the pendant will solve the game and all the problems in my life!!! aaah!!

how do we know what information to value? how do we determine the line that differentiates realities of the medium (re-use of assets or use of stock images) from an intended message (re-using assets to establish a relationship between two spaces)? obviously without interrogating the entire dev team over every single byte of information in the game, we are never going to get an “official”, objective explanation. and we don’t need, want, or deserve one. the ambiguity is the charm point. the fun is in trying to peel the layers back and doing the archeology yourself. when investigating, its your own responsibility to not get so caught up in the weeds that you lose sight of what the point of your exploration is: what information is trying to be conveyed to me, and what does it mean?

we are all overthinking this, of course. there is no way that the dev team purposefully accounted for every plot extrapolation now treated as common knowledge in the community. whats been cobbled together is a tightly bundled collection of intent, happy accidents, and a willing suspension of disbelief on behalf of the player base to overlook contradictions or obvious last minute edits to the entire plot and game structure. bloodborne is not a complete story and any attempts at objectivity is an exercise in frustration. what i’m writing here is my best guess at an explanation using primary resources (item descriptions and information within the universe to draw conclusions), datamines, and community guides where more patient people than i have recorded the raw gameplay numbers. i will also try to concede places where what happens is obviously just a product of being a video game lol.

my overthinking is based on 2 things: the content of the game primarily and cut content second. cut content is examined in the context of how it may have influenced the game and what that means for the story that remains. as i edit this thing i will try to correct myself away from using cut content entirely as the basis of a theory, VERY special circumstances excluded. i am trying to keep my speculation limited to the most objective information. otherwise, i’m just writing fanfiction, right?

thank you very much for a-read my post,

–mario bea

around this time, some jag-off named logarius and a band of “executioners” (a faction you can join in game) traveled to cainhurst castle and slaughtered the inhabitants, the dreaded royal vilebloods of cainhurst. the inciting incident (or so says alfred, a heavily biased source as hes the only executioner in the game, uh, with lines anyway) was an unknown scholar who “betrayed his fellows at Byrgenwerth and brought forbidden blood back with him to Cainhurst Castle“. the blood “threaten[s] the purity of the Church’s blood healing” although it’s not explained how or what the fuck they’re talking about. according to alfred, logarius stayed behind to prevent the undying and unkillable queen from regaining power and corrupting all the blood with her stank.

if its eldritch and true:

its pale and blue

if the blood is red,

its a beast ahead.

 

-shakespeare

in order to make sense of the world of bloodborne, one must first make sense of the from software company “house style” or, at the very least, make an attempt to recognize the recurring themes present in their catalog of RPG titles. each addition has helped refine the central messages core to the ethos of the dev team through repetition. this makes the act of playing fromsoft games sound like a monotonous experience; fromsoft sometimes iterates in expected and annoying ways: there will always be a poison swamp, there will always be a shoeless babe, there will always be a guy waiting to kick you into a hole. but their means of obfuscating or re-framing these ideas are imaginative. a transformation into a plant has different implications and intentions depending on the setting; in bloodborne, it’s a desirable outcome caused on purpose to push human evolution beyond its bounds. in dark souls 3, it’s involuntary as part of a means of returning the world to its primordial form. if i told you that dark souls, bloodborne, and sekiro all had the same plot, you’d tell me to shut the hell up and then push me into a ravine. and yet, these games all share one very specific message that acts as the base point for the cruel, dying worlds we explore: if we could re-spawn like in a video game, it would be fucked up or what? bloodborne is no exception.

fromsoft’s creation process involves folding in real-life history and cultural knowledge that i think is lost on the majority of the western player base. i’m not sure how much of what they reference is common knowledge to japanese players, but i do feel confident in saying that bloodborne leans on these references harder than most fromsoft’s games. for example, i can reasonably argue that the history of yharnam began with a meteorite not dissimilar to one that fell in japan that was used to make legendary swords(not unlike the a select few in the game) comprised of meteoric, magnetic iron or siderite. and with the arrival of the cosmos came the discovery of the arcane.

untold eons ago, a humanoid race known as the pthumerians served slumbering mysterious, otherworldly beings, known as the great ones, “beings that might be described as gods“. the great ones spoke in “inhuman utterings” to those capable or worthy of hearing their speech. those blessed would become stronger and imbued with strange powers. at least one of these voices was successfully transcribed during the course of pthumerian history, as it appears on gravestones, altars, and as decor: “hunter“, a blood rune.

as the proliferance of the rune might suggest, pthumeru was a society revolving around the collection of blood. either as a consequence of living underground or due to becoming exposed to the deliberately vague notion of “the eldritch truth” as a consequence of their proximity to the great ones, they developed a unique and startling appearance: pallid skin, black eyes, and slacking jaws. they are very tall and gaunt with unsettling proportions. they vary in size and shape to one another, but all but the most diminutive tower over the average human.

over time, the pthumerians settled a capital city, pthumeru, and elected a leader who took the name yharnam, pthumerian queen.¹ this ruler was given a ring imbued with special meaning by the great ones demonstrating her commitment to bear their child. this child would be known as a “child of blood” (the ramifications or meaning of this are not known). she still wears the ring today and waits at a bloodstained altar for the ceremony to commence. all that’s massing, it seems, is a groom.

what little we know of pthumerian culture we must glean from what we find in the chalice dungeons ourselves. their aristocracy wears red, they have the ability to spontaneously generate controllable flames, and their weapons are based on the real life meteoric iron swords from indonesia, the kris. fire paper is a pthumerian invention (obtainable by the player only after they obtain a badge for tomb prospectors) that allows the user to create a flame from nothing. the only enemies that drop this item are pthumerian labyrinth watchers who use flaming weapons themselves.

the serpentine shape of the weapons might be more than mere aesthetics: there are a scant few references to snakes (one of the fromsoft dev teams favorite creatures to fixate on) in a religious or elevated context in pthumerian culture.a “pilgrim” who traverses the remains of pthumeru in the modern day carries a rosary with a caduceus in place of a crucifix.