Editing Darkest Dungeon (section)

==The Story==
You are the last scion of a fallen noble family, one brought to ruin by a hedonistic ancestor who squandered the family fortune pursuing decadence and ultimately turned to dark pursuits in search of forbidden pleasures. This resulted in your family estate becoming the site of a sprawling excavation project filled with horrible monsters, while the surrounding lands are similarly corrupted, populated by nightmares of the Ancestor's own creation. The only (mostly) safe place is the Hamlet, which acts as the hub area of the game. Using the last of your family's money, you have returned to the estate to begin hiring [[adventurer]]s to try to and clear out the dark things lurking in the dungeon, gathering the riches that lie beneath to finance further and further expeditions beneath.

After all, not all of your explorers will return alive, or even sane...

The quote at the top of the page is something of an understatement in regards to the background of the game. His failings are as follows (so far):
* In his youth, the Ancestor enjoyed the debauchery and general ''120 Days Of Sodom'' (don't look it up if you don't know it already) behavior of the nobility of the estate. One day an attractive woman appeared and fluidly navigated the assembled nobles...so the Ancestor tried to kill her. She revealed herself as a vampire but he succeeded at killing her. He then promptly did what any sane, rational being would do and hung her upside-down to drain out all her cursed blood, mixed it with a prized vintage of wine, and threw a party. After enjoying his new "Really Bloody Mary" invention, the attending nobles and servants all became vampires and tore their own bodies to pieces while the Ancestor, who had only drunk a single drop of blood, gained a vision of the Eldritch horrors that lay beneath his mansion and began his obsession with them. As the mosquitos were lured by the blood, the wine, and the bloody wine, the Ancestor sealed the '''Courtyard''' away where it has since sunk back into the swamp and contained the now mosquito/vampire hybrid court (oh and speaking of which, the vampires of this setting turn into mosquitos rather than bats in a fashion that would be fit for [[Nurgle]]. Just so you know). 
** Unlike the other areas of the game, this place poses a persistent threat - once the Courtyard is opened up, the Estate's other regions will slowly become infested with the fucking bugs, ultimately requiring you to send heroes to eliminate one of the original members of the court to send them skittering back into the swamps. Ignoring them results in vampirism spreading, called the Crimson Curse, which has very little effect on heroes other than making them constantly need blood to avoid stacking debuffs and irrational behavior plus eventually death if unsated. Well, that and a zealot called the Fanatic who your Ancestor was aware of and is obsessed with purging the Curse by attacking any party with at least one cursed individual.
** Oh, and that vampire-lady your Ancestor killed? ''She's not dead'', and is rather emphatically pissed off at you and your heroes over the Ancestor mugging her before she could mug him. She's now the Countess, and she commands the Crimson Court alongside the Baron and Viscount. The good news is that killing her will allow your Sanitarium to cook up a cure to the Crimson Curse like any other disease; the bad news is that she's a tough bitch in her own right, and you need to chop your way through the other horrors of the court to get at her. Seriously, it's a dungeon marathon that takes days of game time even if you have the perfect walkthrough.
* As a child a small homeless girl had a crush on the Ancestor while he played in the town, which was nice when he was a kid but as a young man he found her irritating. So when he needed money to fund his newfound Eldritch fascination he cut a deal with the fishmen (not fish''er''men, Kuo-Toa style humanoid fish) who lived on the coast. He lured the girl to the pier and shackled her to an idol, both of which were the Ancestor's end of the deal in exchange for gems to fund his ambition. The girl was transformed into the likeness of the fishmen while destroying the human portion of her mind, and acts as their queen, mother, and slave. She occupies the '''Cove'''. 
* Starting his journey into madness began with the purchase of rare books, which drew the attention of a young woman skilled in the arts of herbalism and magic (read: a witch). While he enjoyed her company early on, she was just as obsessed with the creatures beneath the manor as he was and her path of study was in experimentation with edibles. Her body was twisted by the concoctions and he no longer found her physically attractive, banishing her to the '''Weald''' to dwell with the beasts. She's now a cannibal, by the way (although there's some implication she'd always been one), and has been preying on your villagers.
* As he became more skilled in magic he obsessed over prolonging his life. After making a dead rat's leg twitch, he invited experts in life and death from foreign nations to share knowledge with him, using his newly-acquired expertise of alchemy to make them trust him. After learning everything he could he killed each one in their beds and raised their corpses from the dead with their knowledge intact. Said undead Necromancers proceeded to raise more corpses, and so on creating a growing empire of the undead with no end, which now occupy the '''Ruins''' of the estate itself. The Ancestor considered this a massive success, then disregarded the fact that there's a growing army of the undead literally right outside his door. 
* As his skill in magic improved, the Ancestor moved on from animating bones with a human mind to summoning creatures from beyond into flesh using blood rituals. He found that pigs were useful for rituals due to their flesh being similar to that of humans, and managed to summon a gigantic "Great Thing" into one pig, causing it to grow to gigantic size. The thing required a massive amount of meat to survive, which the Ancestor is heavily implied to have solved by feeding Hamlet-dwellers to it. Now the Great Thing and the lesser summonsed demons, all in the form of semi-anthropomorphic pigs, now occupy the '''Warrens''' and prey on the Hamlet alongside various carrion-feeding vermin and ghouls.
* Eventually an old man arrived in the town telling prophesies to the locals about what would happen and riling them up against your family. The Ancestor threw him in the stockades, attempted to drown him, and literally covered the prophet's back in daggers but each time the old man returned and warned the peasants about the end of the world. Having given up, the Ancestor simply showed the prophet the Great Thing and explained what he planned to do. As a result, the poor bastard tore out his own eyes and fled to the Ruins, where a cult has gathered under his leadership and now works against your attempts to reverse your Ancestor's doings. 
* The byproducts of his experiments (which weren't stable enough to remain pigmen and/or pig demi-gods) began to stack up, and when the excavation of the place beneath the estate broke through into a system of ancient tunnels and aqueducts he shoved all the various twitching semi-dead fleshy things down into them and promptly forgot about it. Unfortunately for him, the abominations (mostly) survived and ended up all fusing together in the Warrens. Now the giant chunk of random organs and flesh threatens not only lives of the Hamlet, but the very sanity of anyone who sees it. 
* In order to enforce order on the town once the folk and local guards turned against him, the Ancestor employed bandits using a massive cannon. Calling them his militia, they slaughtered many of the townsfolk and became the secret police through which he ruled. By the time you arrive, they've returned to being mere bandits, living by raiding the town from their base in the Weald. They are the very first threat you encounter, trying to stop you from even reaching the Hamlet in the first place. Their attacks on the Hamlet will continue even after your arrival, making even the '''Hamlet''' a potentially deadly battlefield from time to time.
* When bandit raids and the delicate nature of his shipments became too unsafe for the main roads, the Ancestor employed pirates to bring him his evil goods via a small section of the coast inaccessible save by a stairway leading to the estate. Eventually they increased their prices knowing they obviously had the market cornered - unfortunately for them, the Ancestor did not take kindly to their perceived extortion and used his magic to curse their anchor to drag them to the bottom of the sea. Unfortunately for ''you'', they came back as a bunch of angry ghosts inhabiting the Cove, and will need to be busted before your supply shipments can resume in full.
* Some time ago, the Ancestor "helped" a local Miller whose farm provided food for the Hamlet's commoners. The farm was struck with blight, but rather than fixing the problem, the Ancestor set up magical slabs engraved with esoteric designs around the farm as bait for the things from beyond the stars. An answer came in the form of an alien comet, striking the farm's windmill, warping the land into a wasteland of crystals that distort space-time. The poor Miller and his workforce were reduced to crystal-ridden husks trapped within the '''Farmstead''', while the Ancestor sat back and reaped the rewards. Oh, and it turns out the alien comet is but an infant form of the same creature behind the Darkest Dungeon. 
* In the end your Ancestor broke through to an ancient underground site of Eldritch horror. He sent you a letter which would draw you to the Hamlet, and seemingly committed suicide, not out of shame but because the peasants had formed a mob of angry torch-wielders at the gates of the mansion and his only other option was a public execution. The manor has since fallen apart and the creatures from below have overtaken it, which makes it the hardest area in the game, literally the titular '''Darkest Dungeon''' which your Ancestor liked to end his sentences referencing. First you must clear out the ruins (which lay within the Ruins making the last level technically just outside the first) before cleansing the ever-shifting architecture in the tunnels below. 
* Finally (as far as we know, which extends in every DLC) the Ancestor left one last “fuck you” to the player character yourself. Should you conquer the Darkest Dungeon and kill the final boss you get his final message, which (spoiler, but not really if you’ve read anything Lovecraft or Lovecraft-inspired) is that everything he worked for was to awaken the ancient unknowable terror that birthed humanity itself, with the entire world as its (either metaphorical or literal) egg. He lets you know that it’s now your job and eventually the job of your descendants to forever keep the thing he helped create at bay. So his last message to you actually taunts you with the fact he made this mess, and its your job to manage it since it can never be cleaned up. With a suggestion you should just follow in his footsteps. There is also an interpretation his messages are not for you, but all of humanity given his references to the “human family”, which is even darker (but shifts some responsibility off you at least).
* By the end of the game, the player character himself is traumatized by the knowledge he has gained. The final boss, [[Old Man Henderson|unless you one-shot him with a crazy hobo clown riffing a magical guitar across the cosmos, after becoming high on space crystal meth, given steroid enemas by two Plague Doctors and being shouted at by a Man-At-Arms]], manage to defeat him using only two (kudos for keeping Dismas and Reynauld alive until this point) or one (Highwayman can do it), requires you to kill off two of your characters, so at the very least you have probably sacrificed two people for your goals, but you’re almost certainly responsible for more. You’ve left a trail of broken individuals scrambling away from the Hamlet, and the horrors your Ancestor unleashed continue to spread, or are at best contained temporarily, despite you having dealt with the origin of each problem. You begin to hallucinate, seeing the landscape twist into tentacles from darkness below into red light from above (or, as Ancestor implies and in classical Lovecraftian fashion, you're starting to see the world ''as it really is''). Your Ancestor himself may not have been dead, as your mercenaries encountered an abomination in his form (although it could also have been a madness-wrought delusion or a creature in his form), and according to the Ancestor-thing’s words the result of his actions are an ongoing curse on your lineage. The player is left wondering if their future is to repeat the Ancestor’s mistakes (as you’re now essentially in the same state he was after sealing the Courtyard, albeit far less sadistic) or to spend your days keeping the evil at bay using an unending supply of the poor unfortunates who come to the town (in other words, keep playing and buy future DLC).
* The Ancestor ''does'', however, sound '''utterly''' '''''amazing'''''. The voice actor, Wayne June, had a copious amount of fitting experience for the role via narrating the likes of audiobook adaptations of Lovecraft and most would agree that the game would not be the same at all if his dramatic, flowery narration had not existed for it.