Hi there

Hi there

Hi there,

I got a question that’s possibly been discussed a few times already and also I know that by playing BitD we will create our own version of Duskwall, so there’s no right or wrong … but the whole leviathan blood / electroplasm / spirit essence / corpse dissolving action by the spirit wardens confuses me a little bit.

In my understanding (and I also read this blog article about lightning oil on https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/leviathan-blood-lightning-oil-and-electroplasm/) it looks like this:

Leviathan gets hunted and drained -> leviathan blood (still alive) gets refined and in the process sucks electroplasm (or just spirit energy?) out of its surroundings -> then it becomes lightning oil / fuel … which is also called just plasm (?)

The spirit wardens take the corpses and burn them but they also use something to dissolve the electroplasm (or spirit essence? or the ghost within the body that consists out of electroplasm?) into spirit essence … or I’m not sure? I think I remember a passage in the book or in this group that said they use leviathan blood to suck the electroplasm out of the body, so it’s kind of like the refining process and has fuel as an outcome …?

When I look at all these questionmarks I have to say it looks like the opposite of understanding 😀

So, please tell me how do you depict this aspect of the gameworld in your version of Duskwall? 🙂

5 thoughts on “Hi there”

  1. The way I understand it, the city runs off of distilled life energy. When humans died, their ghost is composed the left over energy that formerly resided in a body. Certain people in the way-back-days of the setting figured out how to use this life energy to power machinery. A cute trick at the time, but nothing capable of powering the lighting wall.

    It wasn’t until a demon was drained of its blood, and that blood properly distilled, was the industrial uses come to fruition. Demons were loaded with life energy, and leviathans- those demons that “…consume and befoul the life energy of their world, condensing it…”-have blood thick with impossibly potent life energy. With so much power from a single gallon of the stuff, it became possible to power any machine the mad scientists could dream of. The industry was born.

    Spirit wardens, as far as I know, have no direct interaction with leviathan blood. They are trained spark craft technicians, but restrict most of their operations to ghosts. They use the life energy drawn from ghosts to power any devices, resulting in the device to be either very efficient or good for only a few uses.

    …to increase the creepy factor, replace “life energy” with “souls”.

  3. Nope. Spirit Wardens are suppose to be followers of the spectrology school of thought, in so far as page 296 says the Wardens have “the most Advanced spectrological and spark-craft equipment, including several spirit-hunter Hulls.” This heavily implies that the Wardens use methods pioneered by the Sparkwrights to wrangle ghosts. At least, that is what everyone says they do…

    So, the Spirit Wardens do not mess with the blood of demons during normal daily operations.

    It seems that every living thing has this spiritual energy in them, with the strength of said energy varying on creature type (animals: very little; demons: a whole lot). When this energy is forcefully removed from the body (death, blood draw, etc), this left over energy is free to be harvested. The actual process is easier- for me at least- to keep wholly separate. The Spirit Wardens deal with ghosts, the Leviathan hunters deal with leviathans, and ordinary demons…run amok.

  4. It’s probably worth nothing that while the linked article is excellent, it’s also a couple of years old, and the phrase “lightning oil” doesn’t appear anywhere in the final edition of the game text (it’s a holdover from Dishonored).

    It’s also worth noting the obvious, that electroplasm is a play on ectoplasm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectoplasm_(paranormal)), which is spiritual energy made material – think of Slimer in ghostbusters. In Blades in the Dark, ectoplasm can be used as an electric fuel source – hence electroplasm.

    It’s electric ghost-slime that materializes around psychic trauma (i.e. sites of death). The nature of leviathans means that they have crazy condensed ghost-blood; electric death-trauma slime just runs through their veins.

    I would say it’s:

    > Take Leviathan blood (a still-living, toxic product rich in electroplasm/soul-slime)

    > “kill” the blood (refine it), leaving just electroplasm

    > condense the electroplasm into a stable fuel source.

    The book does say that Bellweather Crematorium uses electroplasmic furnaces. The metaphor here for me is like regular cremation – once a human body is on fire it becomes a fuel source in itself, but you need an intense external source of fire to actually start and finish the cremation.

    Refined leviathan blood (electroplasm) fuels the crematorium, so that it can burn human body and soul, and in so doing the dead body releases more electroplasm (but probably not as much as it consumes in the process).

    Is that any clearer?

    The obvious story hook here is – what if burning bodies at the crematorium is, in fact, a net gain fuel source? We know an electroplasm shortage is looming because of trouble leviathan hunting – if dead human bodies can be burned to power the lightning barriers, maybe the city council needs a whole lot of fresh dead bodies in a hurry…

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