I was recently thinking about the Death Bells.

I was recently thinking about the Death Bells.

I was recently thinking about the Death Bells.

Wouldn’t they ring like.. all the time in a Major City?

It is not entirely clear how big the City is but considering Gang Wars, Ghosts, Depression and harsh working Conditions there should be at least a couple of Deaths each day. On a Major Gang War you should be deafened by the Sound of the Bell.

Does anyone consider that?

22 thoughts on “I was recently thinking about the Death Bells.”

  1. I haven’t considered it before, but that sounds like a likely occurrence. The Spirit Wardens are probably constantly needed and considering the training required for one, possibly under-staffed. Either way, this also explains why duckwall is allowed to get as haunted as it does.

  2. My freshman year of college I lived so close to the church bells that I could spit on them. They rang every 15 minutes during the daytime hours. After about 2 weeks, I just tuned them out completely, and stopped noticing them.

    I would imagine that the citizens do the same; which is probably a neat commentary on how they view death, morality, and hope….

  5. Even without terrifically harsh conditions, a large enough city would have deaths pretty frequently. Just old age, disease, and accidents, all perfectly natural, would count for plenty.

    That did strike me as odd in some cases during the Rollplay Blades game (“The bells rung! Something awful must have happened!”), whereas in others it’s still very effective (e.g. spectators of a specific skirmish waiting to hear the bells).

    Of course, the fiction is king here. If you can make the narrative cool and compelling, then most other things can be handwaved 🙂

  6. Yeah, I was wondering about this. I’m thinking of changing it for the Death Bell to only ring in cases of death other than old age, sickness, disease. I’m also thinking that in those cases, there won’t be a ghost? But I’m not sure how that would impact the overall cosmology.

    On the other hand, I think that could open up some interesting possibilities for people who commit suicide or pay for their own murder or something in cases where they’re quite aged or ill, specifically so that a ghost will be left behind in the hope that they can find a hollow or a hull is waiting or whatever.

  8. There could be regional bells, maybe? Each bell only covers a chunk of the city, and there’s a small (cramped, understaffed) office of Spirit Wardens assigned to each bell?

    Could be some good possibilities for messing with Spirit Warden office assignments, pretending to be the new guy rotated in, and all that.

  9. Maybe when someone is nearing death, an acolyte of the Church of Ecstasy of the Flesh comes to wait on them. The acolyte is accompanied by a crow, and carries a little tiny chime. When the person dies, the chime rings instead. This way the family and friends don’t have to hear the awful sound of the crematorium bells.

    Such a chime would be very highly regulated to prevent assassins from getting ahold of one and using it to obscure their crimes. It’s probably a major score to acquire such a chime.

  10. In our game, you can only hear the bells if you are close enough to the death site, as their tolling is supernatural. Btw, assuming a one million city with a death rate just slightly below the current Earth-wide average, we end up with about one departure per hour. Handy!

  11. Will Scott That’s fantastic and I’m stealing it for my games right now. At least for the wealthy and elite, there’s no need to sully a nice neighborhood with Spirit Wardens following some crow.

    In general, though, the bells will be ringing frequently, but not awfully so. Per the NYC government office, someone dies in one of the five Burroughs every 9.1 minutes. I don’t think Duskwall has 8.5 million people, so even with the deplorable living conditions, I doubt the bells would ring more than three times an hour.

  12. “That’s fantastic and I’m stealing it for my games right now. At least for the wealthy and elite, there’s no need to sully a nice neighborhood with Spirit Wardens following some crow.”

    I 100% agree. Mine!

    In our Doskvol the Spirit Bells are only heard in the ghost field, and much louder than they otherwise should be. Their tone rings dissonant and warbles into silence. It’s an unnerving sound when first heard. If one attunes they can hear the ringing, but otherwise the city only knows a person has died if they’re watching for a deathseeker to take flight

    The masks of the Spirit Wardens are attuned to the bells, but the sound is muted and just enough for them to hear it, the sound less jarring. Once rung, the apiarists dispatch Wardens to follow the appropriate crow.

    It’s also an incredibly guarded secret, known only to the highest Wardens, that each time the bells are rung, the lesser Bellweather wards are sometimes disrupted across the Black Wall. Since they have no way of predicting when the bells will toll, the most crucial wards are constantly tended to by runecrafter Wardens. If an enterprising crew were to learn of this it could be used in a myriad of nefarious ways. (This last bit’s not a given yet, but I’ve been tossing around the idea.)

  16. Might want to compare a bit tougher and deadlier place than NYC. For instance: “El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the world with a projected rate of 92 deaths per 100,000 for 2015”. If we take that as a guideline and assume that Duskvol population is a million then we are talking a bit over 900 murders a year (2-3 a day). El Salvador’s overall crude death rate (including murders and other deaths) for 2014 was 6.79 per 1000, which is a bit under world avg (7.75). For Duskvol pop 1mil that would mean 18.6 deaths per day.

    citations:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/09/violent-deaths-in-brazil-surge-to-peak-of-58000-amid-olympic-safety-fears

    http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN

  17. Granted everything above is today. In 1960 world crude death rate was 17.75 per 1000. But we really need to look at Industrial Age London: “The overall death-rate in Manchester and Liverpool was significantly higher than the national average (1 in 32.72, 1 in 31.90 and even 1 in 29.90, compared with 1 in 45 or 46)”.

    Translated to a Duskvol population of 1mil that would be 88-95 deaths per day!

    Another interesting quote: “An interesting example shows the increase in the overall death-rates in the industrial town of Carlisle where before the introduction of mills (1779–87), 4,408 out of 10,000 children died before reaching the age of five, and after their introduction the figure rose to 4,738. Before the introduction of mills, 1,006 out of 10,000 adults died before reaching 39 years old, and after their introduction the death rate rose to 1,261 out of 10,000.”

    en.wikipedia.org – The Condition of the Working Class in England – Wikipedia

  18. I always imagined that you only hear the bells near the site of the death, as Dmitry Gerasimov said. But this is definitely an element of the setting that is meant for your own interpretation! Lots of great ideas here.

  19. I doubt there would be as many deaths as you think. Duskwall is a sealed city (more or less) the gangs know they can’t skip town if the body rate gets too high so while they may break a lot of bones, most will avoid killing if they can. Even personal rivalries would not necessarily result in death, the killer would not like the extra heat or the possibility of a ghost returning for revenge.

    Even some diseases look to have been magically neutralised, surely you would expect something like dysentery or cholera to have decimated Duskwall by now but the histories only talk about potent, magically diseases.

    So I think that the fear of dying and what that does to a soul is going to keep a lot of murders in check and ordinary citizens who get ill will either get themselves or get a family member to take them to the crematorium just before death if possible.

  20. Michael Hill considering that one of the crew types is an Assassins crew, methinks there might be a whole lot more murders and death then you are assuming. Of course, YGMV (Your Game My Vary) but when I ran it death was a fairly regular occasion.

    And yes maybe magick has limited diseases but it doesn’t do much for people that can’t afford the coin to pay for said magick. Also it doesn’t do much to shield from accidents such as overdoses on all the drugs floating around or workplace accidents as there are quite a number of dangerous occupations in Duskvol.

  21. Colin Fahrion Oh without a doubt assassins and cults who sacrifice humans exist, I just believe they are rare. Just looking at the current existing factions, I can’t really say who would be “assassins” most of them look like “bravos” to me. But as you said YGMV

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