Where can I find out more about leviathans? Do the Leviathan hunters kill them? Do they bring the corpses back for blood harvesting or do it in situ?
Do Leviathans breed? Do they lay eggs or have young? How intelligent are leviathans?
Where can I find out more about leviathans?
Where can I find out more about leviathans?
My understanding is that they are FAR too large to be hauled anywhere. When a crew spots one fo the creatures, they harpoon it and lash the ship to it, then they climb over and begin drilling into its flesh. They harvest as much of the blood as they can before the beast rouses itself and attempts to shake them off. Leave too quickly and you’re safe, but you give up on the opportunity to get just a little more blood. Leave too late, and the thing could decide to roll over (or worse, DIVE), taking the ship and the crew with it into the depths.
These questions are basically not answered. Blades provides you with a framework for you to attach your own ideas to; there aren’t many hard and fast facts about the minutia in the text. Everyone’s Blades setting is their own, different in many small ways. What Ben Morgan described is one cool interpretation.
I’ve also seen one suggestion that Leviathan Blood doesn’t sink or mix with the sea; it floats on the surface and after wounding a leviathan the ship/crew scoops up as much as they can before it notices them. The other questions – breeding, eggs, intelligence – these questions are very specifically not answered and I’ve seen basically every answer to them you can imagine used by GMs.
They’re also big weird demons nobody understands very much – so chances are even if you do cook up answers to those very specific questions, how in the world does anyone in Doskvol know that they lay eggs at the deepest depths of the black sea?
In my version, every single one is extremely unique, such that hunter ships are specifically designed to hunt a single leviathan. The blood is siphoned off in a variety of ways, depending on the ship.
In an early episode of my Ghost Echoes series of BitD games we saw a leaviathan hunter ship dubbed “The Crested Lance” which essentially just has a durable ramming prow it uses to lance a leviathan, siphon it’s blood, and presumably scoot away before the quarry can notice.
If anything, hunter ships in my version of the setting act like parasites.
Adrian Wills I guess I am partly looking to copy good ideas from others. So thank you. The floating blood is interesting.
The reason I am looking at a Leviathan egg is around a smuggler plot. The idea that the cargo may hatch (a clock). And one noble’s (really stupid) scheme to “farm” a Leviathan (which will inevitably backfire if the PCs don’t intervene)
I mean, you’re right about how you even find such a thing. I’m dabbling with Deep-sea Hulls or ritual bound ghosts.
I’m not locked on the plot but I am a bit of a high stakes, high fantasy GM