Forgotten Realms

Hidden beneath the soot-streaked tenements of the Lower City, the Crimson Root Sanctum is the Church of Bhaal’s primary stronghold within Baldur’s Gate—a subterranean shrine steeped in blood-soaked doctrine and illusion. Officially erased from all civic records, it is accessed through a butcher's cellar whose floor conceals a glyph-locked spiral stair. Here, the Deathbringers weave murder into prophecy, offering blood on black altars to honor their Lord of Murder. Rituals are timed to align with city unrest, ensuring each kill sends ripples of fear through the city’s veins. In Baldur’s Gate—a place of secrets, shifting power, and decaying virtue—Bhaal’s followers thrive in chaos, subtly directing assassinations and discord through dreams and daggers. The Bhaalspawn, rare and revered, are anointed within the Sanctum as living avatars of divine bloodshed, setting their blades against rival cults, corrupt Watch officers, and rival gods' faithful.

Beneath the city's bustling filth and festering commerce lies the Sanctum, its entrance nothing more than a cracked meat cellar behind a blood-slicked butcher’s block. The stone beneath gives way to ancient red shale stairs, worn slick by centuries of passage. Descending through torchless dark, a miasma of iron, mildew, and rot thickens the air. At the sanctum’s heart sprawls a vaulted cavern lit by guttering crimson lanterns—glass globes filled with enchanted oil and a drop of blood, ever burning. The walls are etched with spiraling prayer sigils and Bhaal’s symbol, carved deep into the stone like wounds. The altar—a wide slab of black basalt—gleams with ritual stains, its edges ringed in jagged rust-colored rootwork that pulses faintly with necrotic energy. Pillars fashioned from entwined skeletal remains form a grim nave, while the floor is inset with a mosaic of a skull weeping blood—so precise and polished that it glows faintly when names are whispered into it.