I binge-watched Mind Hunter this week and it got me thinking of what a successful serial killer in Doskvol would look like.
This would be a man who had an amazing grasp of the factions at play in the city and the turfs they control. They’d excel at finding people in the cracks between factions, people without friends or allies in any faction with the time and resources to chase down their loss.
For a while they’d have a field day with Skov refugees but now there is a critical mass, enough Skovs that they are forming factions of their own.
Their bread and butter would be Tier 0 gangs right on the brink if total dissolution, people about to be subsumed and eaten by the scoundrel’s grind, who wouldn’t be missed by anyone as their crew imploded due to heat and stress.
They’d the occult and/or technical expertise to deal with the deathseeker crows (like the Assassin’s Crow’s Veil special ability) and the occult and/or technical expertise to dispose of ghosts.
I’m thinking a Leech who does dentistry over here and bone-setting over there and a few house-calls hither and yon. An independent operator who does some work for factions but isn’t a member anywhere, in a position to see where gang wars are going and who is losing. Maybe they got caught for something and found out and are now in a pit in Ironhook, used by the warden as a Hannibal Lecter-style consultant.
More foggy fell daydreams headed down Doskvol’s bloody cobblestone streets welcome.
I think for successful (meaning they stack a lot of numbers) this is probably true. Nobody would notice amidst the gang violence, and when they did, there wouldn’t be much pressure to clean it up (on the other hand I have no idea why this fits a profile … maybe a dexter type?)
If I ran this I would probably go down a different vein. Probably someone tied to a forgotten god who shields them from the crows. Get a bit more of a creepy S1 true detective vibe. Particularly if the cult connects to powerful people, and those murders are of lower class folks who won’t be missed in the grand scheme (and spread out over time.
But it’s just a personal preference (also I like creepy things)
PS. I think this would actually be a kinda rad Spirit Wardens plot…
This is kind of fun timing for me, as I have a serial killer coming out of retirement in the current Doskvol novel in a plot that also involves the Spirit Wardens.https://www.patreon.com/andrewshields
I had a player who managed to find a loophole with the bells where they don’t ring if the victim was already hollowed. He used this for a steady stream of bodies to experiment on.
Maybe someone with a high ranking patron who’s convinced that the killing/the killer is a higher being with a (holy?) purpose --> see Kevin from Frank Miller’s Sin City
