NPC Spotlight: Bolsh Vect and The Bloody People

Today I'd like to share with you one of the alien species present in Gathox - The Sluurgal, also known as The Bloody People, who eek out a life of quiet ritual beneath the streets of Berchan Favela.

A Bloody person, not currently bleeding.

A People: The Sluurgal

The least gang-like of the Favela’s ruling social groups, the Bloody People are entirely organized around the fact that they’re a separate and ancient species, apart from the rest of the city. They call themselves Sluurgal and dwell below ground in colony apartments called Mujim. Other denizens of Gathox call them The Bloody People for their habit of bleeding on objects to claim them. A Sluurgal will go to great lengths to retrieve an item upon which they’ve bled, and rich Sluurgal are easily distinguishable by their preponderance of scars.

The staying power and economic success of the Bloody People relies on a complex mixture of ritual marriage and reproduction, ritual thievery, and ritual infrastructure repair. Most citizens of Gathox consider them a tolerable necessity, and so the Bloody People maintain steady and quiet lives below ground. Their greatest desire, and the one least likely to be expressed in mixed company, is to rid the city of all other sentient species. Some say their colonies reach far beyond the confines of the Favela, although no one claims to have extensively explored them.

A Place: Biria Mujim

This collection of ossified underground apartments comprises the largest community of the Bloody People anywhere in the Favela. The Sluurgal maintain a variety of public works, including a 70-bed hospital, temples to each of the five major godlings, a silent market, and periodic alcoves dedicated to bleeding on possessions (called Milking Stations). At the eastern end of Biria lies the Phlebotic Chambers of Communal Acquiescence to Time, where a petty prince named Bolsh Vect administers the countless rituals of his people.

A Boss: Bolsh Vect - (Sluurgal Prince and Tiresome Tyrant)

Quite the charmer.

Cues: Monotone speech patterns with an intolerable frog in the throat, covered head to toe in scars of wealth, mumbles phrases of ritual when daydreaming.

Biria Mujim always needs a leader; not for inspiration, not to advance the interests of the Bloody People, and not to maintain stability for the isolated community, but because rituals must be remembered properly to be executed properly. For the last 117 years, no Sluurgal could remember the rituals as thoroughly and categorically as Bolsh Vect.

Vect recalls a childhood of fastidious study and observation, back when the Sluurgal still shared a library (before a cunning X’Xul bled on every book and effectively stole their collective knowledge). Vect does not speak fondly of those times, for he speaks fondly of nothing. When every action requires a ritual, and his fellow Sluurgal grow lazy and forgetful, only the tyrannical application of his memories as manifested through imperious action can right the wrongs which grow before him.

Bolsh Vect anticipates and enjoys the enforcement of punishments for infractions against and amongst his people. His punishment is as swift as the Ritual of Confirmation of the Contents of the Governmental Hourglass, as certain as the Ritual of Confidence in the Certitude of Tri-Dimensionality, and as severe as the Ritual for the Cessation of Childlike Stubbornness in the Face of Reasonable Requests.