Dark Jack

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

If anyone else wants in on the Adelicia-going-to-receive-the-first-ever-batch-of-mass-produced-Hunters-who-are-also-Paleblood-Hunters, I think it would be a quite easy way to start the story for anyone in the Healing Church. They would certainly want to make an effort to avoid losing their precious experiments, along with the actual Paleblood Hunters, even if that "loss" might only be in a metaphysical sense in that they might die and discover the Hunter's Dream before the church has properly imprinted on the.

And for anyone having trouble coming up with interesting backgrounds for their characters, keep two things in mind:
I'm not actually asking for or requiring that your characters even have a background, especially if they are one of the prospective (false) Paleblood Hunters. It's not uncommon for humans undergoing metamorphosis to experience memory loss to varying extents, as seen with the player in Bloodborne (who forgets nearly everything), so they might not even know who they are or why they are there.
And by far most of the population of Yharnam is currently "outsiders"; people from beyond the lands associated with the city that moved there to partake in blood healing. There aren't a whole lot of people there who have been around for more than five years, since the Night of the Blood Moon killed a ton, turned another ton into beasts and nearly all of the rest mad. I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't make a native of Yharnam, only that it would probably give you a lot of freedom and play well into the lore to say that your character is from somewhere else.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Adelicia making her way to the Paleblood Hunters would both make sense and be quite handy as far as storytelling goes, and avoid splitting the story into too many parts. I had already started planning a separate scene for her, but this works much better. I have just the NPC to start her off with, who was also supposed to be making their way to them.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

I mean "Yharnamite" as in "person who has received blood treatment"; I primarily use Yharnamite as a descriptor for a particular state of existence rather than to refer to simply a person living in Yharnam (which is also why, in the OP, "Yharnamite" is listed under "race" separately from "human"). And yes, Gilbert was definitely a foreigner of some kind, I'd say. Whether he had an association with the Healing Church is a bit more open to interpretation, but yeah, Flamesprayer does suggest that he had been involved with them somehow. Maybe he was a low level cleric of some kind, since there were apparently a lot of things that the church never deigned to tell him? Or maybe Gilbert knew, but didn't want to betray the church by telling the player?

So much is open to interpretation in Bloodborne... it's great.

Night of the Hunt - a Bloodborne RP

Well, though I'm honestly happy and relieved that someone has expressed interest in playing a Paleblood Hunter, there are two main points that might be problematic with the scenario you're considering here, @Habibi359. The first problem would be whether it would even be feasibly possible to become a false Paleblood Hunter while also qualifying as a Fire Dancer. Hmm...

Theorizing...

The problem is that the Fire Dancers were supposed to be a gang made up by Hunters, and not only haven't the church tried using false Paleblood on existing Hunters (and have in fact only just begun their first trial run with human subjects), I also sincerely doubt that such a thing would even work. The very reason people with Paleblood come to Yharnam is to be cured of Paleblood, and indeed becoming a Hunter in all observed cases seems to cure the disease, leaving only whatever other alterations the Paleblood made to the Hunter before being purged. Hunters are immensely resilient and barely affected even by otherwise fatal maladies, as seen with Ashen Blood, the plague that most likely resulted in the eventual loss of the entirety of Old Yharnam, but which only weakens a Hunter's regenerative abilities for a matter of seconds before being naturally purged. As a matter of fact, in the entirety of Bloodborne, the only thing the Hunter-blood couldn't cure was the degenerative condition afflicting Gascoigne. It stands to reason, then, that a Hunter would most likely purge false Paleblood immediately after contracting it, and it is anybody's guess - including the Healing Church - whether it would remain in their system for long enough to qualify as false Paleblood Hunters.

One way to solve this could be to expand the membership pool of the Fire Dancers to include Yharnamites in addition to Hunters. Yharnamites are proven to be lesser than Hunters in a lot of ways in the game and lore, most importantly in this context in that they are not as resilient. It is theorized that Ashen Blood was spread by the Healing Church during its early days as a means to incentivize the inhabitants to receive blood ministration, since the antidote alone was not enough to cure it, and Yharnamites have generally received blood ministration in order to be healed or cured of something, so Yharnamites are probably more resistant to illness than normal humans. They are, however, provably more susceptible than Hunters. The beast patients that can be found throughout Old Yharnam, which were all almost certainly Yharnamites before becoming so, remain afflicted with Ashen Blood even long after receiving blood ministration. More interesting yet is the fact that Gilbert - the very first NPC encountered by the player in the game - is ill and grows progressively worse over the course of the game, until he is eventually claimed by the scourge of beasts and breaks out of his house to be slain by the player. This tells us that Gilbert was definitely a Yharnamite (he turned into a beast and immediately recognizes the player as a Hunter), but that he also suffers from something beyond normal blood ministration (he makes reference that "what inflicted [him] was incurable"). We further never hear about Paleblood Yharnamites - the only ones to reference the Hunter's Dream are other Hunters - so it is probably not a stretch that the blood ministration applied to Yharnamites is insufficient to cure Paleblood.

Finally, the game never makes reference that it is possible for a Yharnamite to become a Hunter - to have the treatment going from human to Yharnamite overwritten by treatment to become a Hunter - but it doesn't state that it's impossible either. So one might assume that it would be possible to inflict a Yharnamite with false Paleblood and then give them treatment to turn them into a Hunter, resulting in a false Paleblood Hunter.

Short version: it might be possible if the character was a Yharnamite before, not a Hunter.

The other problem is simple: why in the world would the Healing Church risk an experiment that might turn a known enemy of the church into a practically immortal super-soldier? I'm not entirely sure how to explain my way out of that one... The character would have to have made a pretty convincing gesture to justify the church to want to risk turning them into a false Paleblood Hunter.

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.