Factions
Bloodsabers
Innoruuk-aligned evil cult of Qeynos. The opposing force to Knights of Thunder.
Bloodsabers is the Bertoxxulous-cult evil clerical order operating beneath Qeynos — a hidden priesthood entrenched in the city's catacombs, sewers, and aqueducts. Where Qeynos's surface presents a clean, Marr-aligned face, the Bloodsabers are the rot underneath, recruited from disaffected humans, half-elves, and the rare evil-aligned outsider who finds their way into the catacomb shrines.
The Bloodsabers' open enemies are the Knights of Truth' Qeynos counterparts (the Knights of Thunder paladin order) and the city-aligned Temple of Life. Within the canon they are simultaneously a public health menace (the Bertoxxulous priesthood seeds plague), a political threat to Antonius Bayle's rule, and a hard-coded faction barrier for any character who wants to walk freely through the Qeynos catacomb tier without aggro.
Lore
The Bloodsabers' origins trace to the gradual corruption of Qeynos's underbelly during the human kingdom's expansion. Bertoxxulous's priesthood found fertile ground among Antonican poor and disenfranchised, and the cult learned early to operate through misdirection — surface contacts in legitimate Qeynos guilds, hidden shrines below the city, and a strict cell structure that limits what any single member knows. The cult has been operating beneath Qeynos for long enough that the catacomb shrines are formally constructed rather than improvised, with dedicated priesthood quarters, training tiers, and ritual spaces carved into the bedrock.
In the canonical era Bloodsabers control most of the lower Qeynos catacombs and run the Innoruuk-adjacent operations Bertoxxulous tolerates as long as they advance the disease-god's agenda. They are the religious mirror of Dismal Rage in Freeport — same theological tradition, different city, same project of eroding good-aligned civic power from within. The two cults coordinate informally through shared messengers and occasional joint operations, but they remain organizationally separate by design — a Bloodsaber high priest does not answer to the Dismal Rage chain of command, and the cells in each city are deliberately walled off from each other.
For canonical Qeynos-trained necromancers and shadow knights of evil races who slipped past city guards, the Bloodsabers are home faction. The cult equips its initiates with cult robes, faction-gated quest rewards, and access to the deeper catacomb tiers where most early evil-cleric and necromancer task chains live. The relationship with Antonius Bayle's surface government is one of constant low-grade conflict: the city periodically attempts crackdowns through the Knights of Thunder, the cult absorbs the losses, and the standing situation reverts to baseline within a generation.
Why grind it
Hitting positive Bloodsabers standing opens the deeper Qeynos catacomb tiers without aggro and unlocks the evil-cleric/necromancer task chains that originate there. These chains are how an evil-aligned caster gets their early non-newbie spells and their first set of cult robes inside the human capital — content that simply isn't reachable for a hostile character. Without the standing, the catacomb shrines and the high priest contacts read as flat-hostile, and the cult's deeper tier is closed off behind aggro and respawning patrols.
The faction is also load-bearing for any roleplay or hub access where the player wants to remain functional inside Qeynos territory while running plague-cult content. On the back end, Bloodsabers standing affects how several Befallen NPCs treat the player, and the cult is a touch-point for cross-city evil networking with Dismal Rage and the Indigo Brotherhood. Hand-ins along the cult chain often double-flag with Befallen-tier faction lines, so the catacomb grind and the Befallen grind are partly the same grind for an evil cleric working both lines simultaneously.
Notable NPCs
- High Priest Venenium Drelyx — the cult's senior priest figure in the Qeynos catacomb shrines, contact for the upper-tier cult task chains
- Manaar — Bloodsaber-aligned NPC handling several mid-tier cult hand-ins
- Cult initiates — populating the lower catacomb training tier; faction-positive interactions begin here for new cult contacts
- Shrine guardians — armed Bloodsaber militants protecting the inner sanctum tiers
Faction path
+faction
- Completing Bloodsabers initiate quest chains in the Qeynos catacombs
- Killing Temple of Life clerics in the catacombs (also tanks Knights of Thunder, Qeynos Guards, and citizen factions)
- Turning in cult-tied items to Bloodsabers contacts at the catacomb shrines
- Specific Befallen-tier hand-ins to Bertoxxulous-aligned NPCs
-faction
- Killing Bloodsabers cult members anywhere they spawn
- Turning in items to Knights of Thunder or Temple of Life contacts
- Completing Qeynos guard hand-ins that flag as anti-cult work
Killing Qeynos guards lowers Knights of Thunder, Qeynos Citizens, and Guards faction — it does not raise Bloodsabers. The two faction lines are separate.
The Last Camp any-race-class adjustments
The Last Camp's any-race-any-class doctrine means a Wood Elf Necromancer or an Iksar Cleric can pursue Bloodsabers standing and take the same cult robe rewards a canonical-evil-human cleric would. Faction math is unchanged from era — the cult's check is faction standing, not race or class — so any character who wants the catacomb tier and the cult chains can grind them. Race-flagged dialog from canonical Bloodsabers NPCs is flavor only and does not block the underlying mechanic.