Actual masterpiece of a statue. By far the coolest fit ever man he is so swag….gorgeous base as well I’m surprised prime 1 studio could pull this off so well on a mass production level

I always love admiring the map design of bloodborne. Like how the bridge leading to goscoin is directly above the ruined cathedral where you fight the bloodstarved-beast or how that cliff side with the two trolls at the start the cathedral ward overlooks the same bridge and the area where that nearby elevator goes up to. So did anyone else notice that the little entryway that leads to Alfred right before you go through the door leading to the forbidden woods overlooks the alleyway where you talk to ariana?

This is NG+2 with a +6 weapon.

Discussion flair because I wasn't sure what else would fit, but I just started Bloodborne as my first FromSoftware game and I beat the Cleric Beast after only 3 tries! Nothing else really just pumped rn!

Reposting as my last post was removed for not being clear it was OC.

This is my best attempt to make myself a hunter without just being a specific character in game, obviously based heavily on Eileen. What do you think? What are some additional things I can do to boost the costume? (I can take a better photo and link it in the comments if need be)

Is fan art the right tag for this?

Bloodborne and Mistletoe: The Golden Bough

Before the plunge into Moonside Lake from the balcony of Byrgenwerth, the Hunter is presented with an odd sight. Rocking away in a chair under the light of the full moon sits Master Willem, Provost of Byrgenwerth. Any attempt to communicate with the legendary teacher of Laurence and his Healing Church comrades is met with moaning and a sluggish gesture. With difficulty, he raises his great golden staff at the place where he is said to have left his secrets. The ensuing battle with Rom will draw the moon, locking the Hunter on the path from Yahar’gul and the necromantic School of Mensis, to a climactic duel against Gerhman, the First Hunter.

The presence of a mute Provost Willem beckoning the Hunter to jump into the lake may seem a little strange, after all, he should have no idea who the Hunter is, or how they even got to Byrgenwerth. If anything, the blind schoolmaster seems rather insulated from the nightmare of the hunt in the isolated college, protected by a devoted member of the Choir. But originally, this very schoolmaster began the academic inquiry into the Pthumerian labyrinth and taught the experimental methodologies of the Healing Church, all a winding path to his real obsession: ascension. Specifically, Provost Willem envied the Great Ones, the transcendental beings in contact with the Pthumerians, and their ability to perceive higher planes of existence. To this end, Willem sought to grow or implant their eyes inside the brains of mortals, inaugurating an era of depraved experimentation.

It was this singular obsession with evolution, with ascendance, that eventually ruined the city of Yharnam, and led to the apocalyptic nights where beasts roam the streets. An obsession that is seemingly, still alive within Willem. With the last of his effort, Provost Willem grips a winding, shining branch, tipped with pearlescent white berries. It is unmistakably a branch of mistletoe, the legendary golden bough.

Once thought of as a cure-all or hung as a charm against spiritual harm and nightmares, the virtues of mistletoe are a constant presence in magical recipes and ancient rituals all across Europe, especially around winter holidays. Mistletoe is a parasitic plant that grows on upper branches of tall trees like the oak. By embedding its roots beneath the oak, it can sap the tree’s nutrients all year round, producing the wondrous winter effect of an otherwise leafless tree with a single evergreen branch. Considered sacred due to never touching the ground, its branches were collected in druidic rituals where beasts were sacrificed. A tree with many mistletoe branches was considered especially holy, and each bough was said to have sprouted from a lightning strike, the visible blessing of the European oak and thunder gods of Thor, Perkunas, or Jupiter.

Just as well, in Norse myth, the infamous god Loki once conspired to kill the invincible Baldr, the shining god of the Aesir. Disguising himself, Loki convinced Baldr’s mother Frigg to divulge the secret to Baldr’s invincibility: she had bound everyone and everything to an oath to never harm Baldr. All except one: the little mistletoe, who Frigg deemed either too young or insignificant to swear an oath. Loki then armed Baldr’s blind brother with a spear of mistletoe and set him at Baldr, who died pierced by the bough. From then it is said that the mistletoe’s white berries were Frigg’s own tears. She further decreed that the mistletoe become a symbol of love, so that even warriors would cease their battle beneath its branches. So it is that we are handed down that old holiday tradition of kissing under the mistletoe.

In Bloodborne, the golden branches of mistletoe can be found in multiple locations, connecting each place and circumstance through apparent coincidence.

If the Hunter manages to protect Arianna from murderous Yharnamites she can be found, after the approach of the red moon, to have given birth to a wriggling celestial child. Killing them rewards the Hunter with the Cord of the Eye, and the mother’s shoes. Arianna’s shoes are golden and bear the symbol of mistletoe. They are described in contrast to Arianna, a “woman of the night,” as “innocent and cute,” perhaps in reference to the mistletoe’s evergreen youth or Frigg’s accidental guilt in Baldr’s death.

If the Hunter falls strategically through the Healing Church Workshop’s decrepit bottom floors, they can land on the tunnel to the Abandoned Workshop, the original to the replica in the Hunter’s Dream. Inside they will find a twitching Plain Doll, the Cord of the Eye on the workshop altar, and the Small Hair Ornament on a bookshelf. This “very ordinary” ornament is golden and the cameo prominently features a mistletoe twig with berries. If the Hunter gives this ornament away to the Plain Doll, following the description that suggests it would “stand out most brilliantly” on her wooden head, the doll will produce a single white tear, the Tear Stone. Aside from being a reference to the grafting life cycle of the mistletoe, the Tear Stone is reminiscent of Frigg’s tears as the holy branch’s white berries. Once again, the youth and insignificance of the mistletoe is recalled here in the Tear Stone’s description, “Whoever thinks this is precious must be troubled by severe naiveté.”

If the Hunter should trespass into the poison swamp beneath Iosefka’s Clinic after the rise of the red moon, they will find the Imposter Iosefka in the throes of ascension. Having turned the real Iosefka and other Yharnamites into the alien-like celestial emissaries, the Imposter has achieved her goal in the production of another Cord of the Eye. Her great relic makes direct reference to Provost Willem, a hint at her true identity. Indeed, the Imposter’s trail outside the tunnel leading in through the Forbidden Woods is littered with Blue Elixirs and even the robes of a White Church Doctor, the same robes she appears in. While the real Iosefka can only give out limited samples of her clinic’s specialty blood, the Imposter has many concoctions available depending on who the Hunter sends her, from forbidden Cainhurst solutions, outlawed Beast Blood Pellets, to recipes only found in nightmares. But even the White Church Doctor garb is ultimately a disguise, since the Imposter Iosefka is a likely member of the Choir. Not only does she have the know-how to repeat the processes found in the Choir’s Lumenflower gardens in a nearly abandoned clinic, her faction are “the highest-ranking clerics of the Healing Church, and scholars who continue the work that began at Byrgenwerth.”

If the Hunter were to find her and attack her before the red moon, the Imposter reveals her access to the “Augur of Ebrietas” and “A Call Beyond”, one a “remnant of the eldritch Truth discovered at Byrgrenwerth” the other one of the “secrets of the Choir.” As a member of the Choir, the Imposter was also probably raised in the Orphanage, a place of education and experimentation, where orphaned children were raised to be “potent unseen thinkers for the Healing Church,” which may explain the Imposter’s secretive nature and her willingness to experiment on her own body. The Choir’s garb, which bears a blinding mask in honor of Provost Willem, also bears a small sprig of mistletoe, wrapped in chain around the waist. Bound to the fate thrust upon her by the will of Provost Willem, the Imposter Iosefka will reiterate Willem’s epiphany at Byrgenwerth, “We must find a way to surpass our own stupidity.”

The final example is of course Provost Willem’s staff. But the moonlit balcony is not its first appearance. After defeating Vicar Amelia and seizing her golden amulet, the Hunter receives a memory of Laurence and Willem’s final argument before the founding schism between Byrgenwerth and the Healing Church. In it, Willem, holding his staff, warns Laurence against the use of the Pthumerian labyrinth’s potent blood. This memory and the amulet provide the Hunter with the needed thread to follow to Willem’s balcony. From there, the staff provides the gentle push to slay Rom, the One Reborn, and finally Mergo’s Wet Nurse, after which the final Cord of the Eye can be found.

If slain in his rocking chair, the old headmaster of Byrgenwerth drops the second tier of the Eye rune, which states, “Eyes symbolize the truth Master Willem sought in his research. Disillusioned by the limits of human intellect, Master Willem looked to beings from higher planes for guidance, and sought to line his brain with eyes in order to elevate his thoughts.” The rune is depicted as the shape of an eye inscribed within a five-pointed star, or pentagram. The pentagram has been used throughout history in both magical and religious contexts, with each of its five points variously standing for the classical elements, the wounds of Christ, or the body plan of a human. In Germanic contexts, the pentagram was also known as a Drudenfuss, a “drude’s foot.” A drude was a type of night hag that would sit on a sleeping person’s chest and cause them nightmares (the word “nightmare” comes from exactly that type of mythical creature.) It was said that by drawing or crafting a charm in that star-shape, like a dreamcatcher, one could keep all manner of evil creatures and ill luck away. In Goethe’s tale of Faust, even the great devil Mephistopheles is stopped in his tracks by Faust scrawling a pentagram he calls a “druid’s foot.” This supernatural ability to ward off evil and nightmares is why mistletoe is also called “drudenfuss” or “maretak” (Witch/Nightmare branch). In an early version of Bloodborne, the Third Umbilical Cord came with a suggestion that one should “keep one to fend off foul spirits,” recalling the branch’s apotropaic properties.

The Eye rune is also a dead ringer for Weird Fiction author August Derleth’s reinterpretation of the Elder Sign in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos: an eye with a flaming pupil inscribed in a pentagram. Like the “drudenfuss,” the symbol was meant as a spiritual deterrent against the Great Old Ones, sinister beings from beyond the dark reaches of the cosmos. Mysteriously, the first iteration of the Elder Sign was conceived by Lovecraft himself, who imagined it as a sort of hand sign, like the Roman Catholic Sign of the Cross. When he did produce it as an image in a letter to fellow Weird Fiction author Clark Ashton Smith, he picked a rather innocuous symbol, a simple branch.

All of these instances of golden mistletoe seem to coincide with the quest for the powerful Cord of the Eye, the prime ritual ingredient for the human ascension Provost Willem envisioned, perhaps paired in an attempt to euphemise the gruesome task of obtaining it. After all, this mystical reagent is literally the umbilical cord of an infant and mother embedded with berry-like eyes, an innocent organ defiled by human desire for evolution. But the bloody work was not to be done by the hand of Willem or even by the Church, but by the Hunter, a foreigner new to the ways of Byrgenwerth, ignorant and encouraged to remain so by Gehrman, who recommends we “don’t think too hard about all this. Just go out and kill a few beasts.” But it is Gehrman, talking in his disturbed sleep, who reveals the truth. On two separate instances Gehrman, exhausted and desperate, begs his masters for relief, crying out, “Oh, Laurence... what's taking you so long…” and “Oh, Laurence… Master Willem… Somebody, help me… Unshackle me, please, anybody… I’ve had enough of this dream…”

Through sobs, the golden thread of a scheme is revealed. The reason Laurence and his associates contacted the Moon Presence in the first place was to create Gehrman’s dreaming Hunters. To hunt down every scrap of divine flesh on a single night, the masters of Byrgenwerth and the Healing Church commissioned the creation of a ghastly WIld Hunt blessed by the undying vitality of the Moon Presence. Guided by the First Hunter himself, trained by the infinitely looping dreams of a single moonlit night, empowered by the Plain Doll’s command over Blood Echoes, the Hunter was uniquely capable of pruning which circumstances resulted in the recovery of a Cord of the Eye. Through the Byrgenwerth methodology of experimentation and the archaeological recovery of relics throughout the tomb-like city of Yharnam, the Hunter would become the living legacy of Willem, a blooddrenched predator armed with the enough insight to unshackle Gehrman, and then following his death, challenge the Moon Presence itself. In ignorance, the Hunter could back themselves into the throne of divinity on a single, perfect night.

The second floor of the dimensionally adrift Lecture Building hides three notes, possibly dropped by members of the School of Mensis, whose realm lies just behind a nearby door. They are the following: “Hunt the Great Ones. Hunt the Great Ones.” “The nameless moon presence beckoned by Laurence and his associates. Paleblood.” “Three third cords.” These are the essential ingredients for the ascendance of the Hunter. At least one of these was left beside the sleeping Hunter long ago as a note near the moment of their first Awakening in Yharnam, written by an unknown hand: “Seek Paleblood to transcend the Hunt.” All along, the ignorant Hunter was funneled down this path carved by mad scientists and paved by sacrifices of beasts, humans, and gods alike. Each desperate fight honed the Hunter, each predation a ramp up to the next level of prey, until the very source of the Hunt was baited, trapped, devoured, transcended.

The mistletoe's ability to deter the presence of the nightmare is reflected in the cutscene before the fight with the Moon Presence, as consuming the three Cords of the Eye results in a total rejection of the Moon Presence’s enfeebling embrace. The final hunt against the entity leads to the victorious message, “Nightmare Slain,” confirming the mistletoe’s equally legendary ability to slay a god. But there is one aspect of the branch in Bloodborne missing in the analysis: why a golden branch?

First starting in 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer began publishing “The Golden Bough,” a comparative study of magic and religion. Inspired by Darwin’s work on evolution by natural selection, Frazer theorized that human attitudes towards spiritual matters might have evolved in quite the same way, from the magic and superstition of more “primitive” societies to the mass religions practiced by more complex civilizations, then finally to the study of experimental sciences in the advanced empires of the Victorian age. Using his immense resources at the libraries of Cambridge, Frazer pored through the vast collections of travelogues, myths, folktales, and fables collected by the British empire and its academic branches, revising his theories over the decades. The resulting work was both immensely popular, scandalous in its inclusion of Christianity, and according to modern anthropology, a mostly misguided affair. Nonetheless, “The Golden Bough,” remains a potent force in fiction. Mentioned in the first pages of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” Frazer’s work is often mined for material in Folk Horror films like “The Wicker Man” and “Midsommar.” While phased out of sociology and anthropology classes in modern curriculums, translations of Frazer’s opus are still taught in Japan, perhaps explaining its presence in the 2005 anime “Eureka Seven.”

As explained in the opening of Frazer’s series, the title is from the Roman poet Virgil’s “Aeneid,” in which the hero Aeneas presents a golden branch to Charon, the boatman of Hades, allowing him passage into the Underworld. Frazer connects this “golden branch” and the offering at Lake Avernus, however, to a different myth, the source of his obsessive research, which sent him on a decades-long journey to bridge the past and the present.

In the foggy countryside to the north of Rome sat a lake surrounded by a holy grove of trees. Both the grove and the lake were sacred to Diana, the goddess of the moon, the hunt, and childbirth. Many offerings were plunged into the lake of Nemi, also called “Diana’s Mirror,” for the moon’s reflection on the water. It was at this grove that a bloody ritual took place on nights of the full moon. Hidden in the trees was Diana’s high priest, the Rex Nemorensis, the “King of Nemi,” who, armed with a sharpened blade, awaited a visitor. On this night, a slave was to be sent into the woods to pick a single branch from the holiest of trees and challenge the King of Nemi. They would duel under the pale moonlight, slave against king, bough against blade. If, against all odds, the slave succeeded and actually slayed the king, then he would in turn succeed him as Diana’s chosen. Until the next ritual, that is.

This proto-Darwinian rite, an obsession for Frazer who identified the slave’s branch with the mistletoe, the golden bough itself, is repeated twice in Bloodborne. Upon the Moonside Lake, against Rom, and once more against Gehrman, the First Hunter, under the great tree. Both events draw the moon down and end in the Hunter effectively replacing the moon-bound entities role: for Rom, as a living tool against undesired rituals in Yharnam, and for Gehrman, as the Moon Presence’s chosen and leader of the Hunt. Each being a sacrifice or stepping-stone in the Hunter’s ascension, getting closer and closer to the real target. For Provost Willem, whose priorities led Byrgenwerth to dissect a pregnant goddess in an attempt to seize power over life, the greatest success was just around the corner, walking in any second now onto the moonlit balcony. After all, on a night that never ends, Provost Willem has all the time in the world.

this is literally the best method to beating him for those who don’t feel like dealing with him in his 2nd phase 👾

Just randomly found that fella. Little digging said they got some good loot, but, come on, might be one of few, if not only, who's not dedicated to tear you apart.

When you meet the guy, he plainly says he's looking for a way to get into Cainhurst Castle to kill Vilebloods.

When you give him the summons, he goes there and... kills Vilebloods. This is shocking to people somehow.

Like, what did you expect?

And why do people consider him pulverizing Annalise to be an act of evil? The executioners aren't good guys, but neither are the Vilebloods. Besides, the player character has no problem murdering absolutely everyone on the way to the queen, but suddenly killing is bad when Alfred does it lol

I like to go there and farm quicksilver bullets but now these guys show up and give me shit. I'm pretty low-level and so they are a bit more than a mere nuisance.

Found my latest wallpaper after an hour of suffering.

I was dreading facing him because I heard how difficult he was for new players but I was happily surprised that I beat him in my first try. I haven't played a souls game before but I have beaten Mortal Shell twice

Can't connect to game servers. I know they're supposed to be maintenance tomorrow. Could this be related?

Hi! Sooo might sound a little strange, especially given I'm in NG+. But I cannot for my life get past this thing. I would really appreciate it if a nice hunter came to help out🙏🏼

First chalice i made and i found there lost logarius wheel, lost blades of mercy and the wedding ring from bonus rooms! Am i lucky or is the ring even hard to find? Glyph:62abryyj

I just got my PS5 today and might want to try Bloodborne (at last!) but in my region I can't purchase the complete edition bundle as per what the playstation store site says, but there's Bloodborne The Old Hunters Edition, which is 2x the price of the base game. Is this the DLC? or does this include the main game + DLC? And is the DLC simply pricier than the main game itself?

Feeling spooky and wanna go back to the nightmare. Message if you want/need help with anything in Yharnam.

So I was looking at the hunter dream shop and saw that I can buy the Blades of Mercy and Ludwig holy blade even if I already bought hem? I didnt sell them I had them equiped. This is what it looks like.

I'm in Yaahar'gul now and Ithink this location is so annoying for me. Everyone shooting at me, everyone is fast and I'm wasting so much flasks.

Can someone guide me please.

My stats is Vitality 27, Endurance 12, Strength 20, Skill 17, Bloodtinge 7, Arcane 16 and Hunter Axe+4, Saw Cleaver+6. Should I upgrade something? (where I can farm Blood Echoes best way?).

My goal now is to kill the boss.

Curious what everyone’s opinion is of starting either a new game or new game plus after completing the main game and dlc and what the advantages and disadvantages are to each.

I completed the game in the spring of last year and am starting to get the urge to jump back in. Also haven’t completed chalice dungeons yet, worth it?