Bloodborne: The Old Hunters Story Explained

The Old Hunters is Bloodborne's only expansion, released by FromSoftware in November 2015. It adds a new area, the Hunter's Nightmare, that the hunter can enter partway through the main game, and its story answers the question the base game keeps circling: why the hunters, and the people who made them, are cursed. It's short and dense, and almost all of it is told through a few characters and item text. This page covers the whole plot in order, with full spoilers, and keeps what the game says apart from what fans have worked out. For the main game, read Bloodborne's story explained. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Before the story begins#

The base game already hints at the Old Hunters' world. Item text says hunters who go drunk with blood are taken by the Nightmare, and that one day the hunters disappeared and Yharnamites began to whisper of the hunters' sin. Laurence, the first vicar of the Healing Church, became the first cleric beast. Gehrman, the first hunter, mutters in his sleep for Laurence and Master Willem to unshackle him. (Bloodborne; Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Once the hunter has killed Vicar Amelia in the Grand Cathedral, a messenger in the Hunter's Dream offers the Eye of a Blood-drunk Hunter. A note explains that it beckons hunters to the Nightmare, and that a deformed creature will whisk you away outside Oedon Chapel. Holding it, the hunter is snatched by a giant hand and wakes somewhere else. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The Hunter's Nightmare#

The Nightmare looks like Yharnam's Cathedral Ward pulled out of shape, half sunk in rock, with a river of blood running through it under a strange, bloodied moon. It's full of hunters who have lost their minds and keep hunting anything that moves. The Eye's description is blunt about why they're there: a blood-drunk hunter is destined to wander forever in an endless hunt, a fate no hunter can escape. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Simon the Harrowed, a blindfolded hunter of the Church, meets the newcomer early. He explains that the Nightmare is where hunters end up when drunk with blood, and that the newcomer, still sane, must have taken a wrong turn. If the hunter shows interest in the Nightmare's secrets, Simon says they have the spirit of Byrgenwerth in them, and warns that some secrets do not wish to be uncovered. Later he goes further: the Nightmare draws hunters because it sprouted from their misdeeds, and it's high time someone exposed the whole charade. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Ludwig, the Holy Blade#

The first great secret lies below the Nightmare's church, in the Underground Corpse Pile, a cavern of heaped bodies where Ludwig is fought. A voice in the Nightmare begs for mercy, because Ludwig the Accursed is coming. Ludwig was the first hunter of the Church. His Holy Blade's description says the Healing Church workshop began with him, and moved on from Gehrman's methods to fight more terrifying beasts, "and perhaps things still worse". (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Now he's a huge, horse-like beast. Partway through the fight he finds his sword, the Holy Moonlight Sword, and recognises it as his true mentor and his guiding moonlight. Beaten, his head is still talking. He asks whether his Church hunters were the honourable Spartans he hoped for. Tell him yes and he dies at peace. Tell him no and he despairs that he was a beast-possessed degenerate after all. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Simon calls Ludwig a tragic figure and a true hero who died with his ideals untarnished. The Holy Moonlight Sword's own text says whatever guidance it offers seems to be very private, and the Guidance rune says Ludwig saw tiny dancing beings of light whenever he closed his eyes. What that light really was, the game never says. Ludwig himself says he never wanted to know. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Laurence, the first vicar#

The Nightmare has its own Grand Cathedral. On its altar lies a burning cleric beast clutching the Eye Pendant, the key to the Church's private Research Hall. Taking it does not wake the beast. Later, below the surgery altar in the Research Hall, the hunter finds Laurence's Skull, a human skull that, its description says, exists only in the Nightmare. It's a symbol of what Laurence failed to protect, and even if he found it, it could never restore his memories. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Bringing the skull back to the cathedral wakes the beast for an optional fight. The trophy names it outright as the beast that was once Laurence, the First Vicar. His rune, Beast's Embrace, came from the Church's experiments in controlling the scourge, a failed technique that still became a foundation of the Healing Church. This is the founder of the Church, burning in his own cathedral, and the game leaves the irony there for the player to notice. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The Research Hall#

The Eye Pendant opens the surgery altar, a lift down into the Research Hall. Here the Church kept its "cerebral patients". In the early days of the Church, the Great Ones were linked to the ocean, so patients drank water and listened for the howl of the sea, and their brains began to grow what the game calls the initial makings of internal eyes. Their heads swelled. Most of the patients the hunter meets wander, whimper or beg for help. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Adeline, strapped to a chair with a vial in her arm, mistakes the hunter for Lady Maria. She was one of the Blood Saints the Church raised for their blood, and one of the few whose treatment worked. Bring her brain fluid and she gives her blood, and in time the Milkweed rune, which she envisioned. A key description says Maria gave Adeline the balcony key so she could feel a breeze and smell the flowers, but that Adeline never understood why. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Out in the Lumenwood Garden, the hunter fights the Living Failures, which the trophy calls the failed attempts to become Great Ones. They drop the key to the Astral Clocktower. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower#

Lady Maria sits slumped in a chair below the great clock. Her clothes say she was among the first hunters, all students of Gehrman, a distant relative of Cainhurst's queen, and that she admired Gehrman, unaware of his curious mania. Her sword, the Rakuyo, came from the same country as the Cainhurst Chikage, but Maria frowned on blood blades. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

When the hunter approaches she stands. She says a corpse should be left well alone, that she knows how sweetly secrets beckon, and that only an honest death will cure the hunter's curiosity. After she falls, she leaves the Celestial Dial, which wakes the Astral Clock and opens a door to whatever is behind it. Back in the dream, the Doll says she felt a liberation from heavy shackles, and doesn't understand why. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The game never says outright that the Doll was made in Maria's image. The Doll looks very like her, the Doll accepts the Small Hair Ornament, whose colour would suit grey hair, and the doll clothing shows a love that borders on mania. Most players connect these, but it's an inference. (Bloodborne; Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

The Fishing Hamlet#

Through the clock lies the Fishing Hamlet, a rotting village on a grey sea. Its people have become fish-like, and they mutter as the hunter passes: mother is dead, her baby taken, the grief of Kos. On the shore lies the carcass of Kos, a huge, pale Great One washed up on the sand. Her body, the game says, was teeming with tiny parasites unlike any found in humans when it washed up. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Here the secret is finally laid bare. A villager's skull, the Accursed Brew, was forcibly searched for eyes and covered in scratches, and the hamlet's priest, who wanders near the entrance muttering a prayer, curses Byrgenwerth by name: blasphemous murderers and blood-crazed fiends. He begs for the curse of blood to fall on them, their children and their children's children for evermore. A hunter wearing the Milkweed rune gets a different chant, and the Accursed Brew itself, from him. The Rakuyo lies at the bottom of the hamlet's well, which is how we know Maria was there. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Simon is found in the Lighthouse Hut, at the hamlet's edge, dying. He says the beast-hide assassin is after him, again and again. The Church assassin Brador wears a cleric beast's hide and works with a soundless bell meant to keep the Church's secrets, so that assassin is almost certainly him. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

Kos's curse and the Orphan#

On the beach beside its mother waits the Orphan of Kos, a skeletal, human-like child that screams and fights with its own placenta. Midway through, it calls lightning down from the sky. When it dies, its spirit stays by Kos's body, and once that is ended too the game reports the nightmare slain. The priest gives thanks: the sweet child of Kos has returned to the ocean. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

What the game states: Byrgenwerth's hunters massacred the village and searched its people for eyes. The priest called down the curse of blood on them and their descendants. Simon says the Nightmare grew from the hunters' misdeeds. Killing the Orphan ends the Nightmare. (Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

What it probably means: the most common reading is that Kos, or her grief, made the Hunter's Nightmare as a prison for those who violated her and her child, and for every hunter who carried their blood-lust onward. Freeing the child frees them. Why the hunters went to the hamlet is also inferred. Willem wanted eyes, and the Third Umbilical Cord is called the "Cord of the Eye", so many players believe the raid took cords from Kos's child. The game never says what was taken. (Bloodborne; Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)

What it changes in the main game#

The Old Hunters leaves the endings alone, but it changes how they read. After the Orphan dies, the Doll says she can hear Gehrman sleeping, calm for once, as if something has eased his suffering. Most players take this as proof that Gehrman was part of the raid, though it's never stated. It also adds weight to the Third Umbilical Cord, the relic its own text ties to the encounter with the pale moon, usually read as the Moon Presence, and to every line about hunters and their sins. For how the backstory fits together, see the Bloodborne timeline, and for the final choice, Bloodborne's endings explained. (Bloodborne; Bloodborne: The Old Hunters)