This post is to serve as an archive of anomalies one can find in A Bringer of Doom I in the game mode, Cryptic Notes. Everything recorded here can be found in-game as well.
Dark Frame
Story 1
These mirrors were said to be treasures brought back from Italy by the first lord of the manor, crafted with the purest Murano mercury. For a century, they hung throughout the estate, bearing witness to every birth, every wedding, every death.
Story 2
In every generation of the Winston family, the youngest child claimed to see things in the mirrors that no one else could. A blurred figure standing just behind them. A pair of sanguine eyes resting over their shoulder, watching.
Story 3
That night, when the girl’s blood struck the mirror, it cracked. Not like ordinary glass. Something seemed to spill out through those fractures. They could not see it. She could.
Clumsy Raider
Story 1
He was the least remarkable member of the Shane Gang, and the greenest by far. More than hunger for money or Classics, it felt as if he had simply drifted into this life without ever meaning to. Clumsy, short, and hopeless with even the simplest weapon, he was usually left to keep watch or haul the loot. A rough burlap sack hid his face, as if it could preserve what little dignity he still had. while the others planned how to break into Winston Manor, he stood silently at the back, hoping that this time he might snatch something first.
Story 2
That night, the moment he climbed through the broken window into the manor, screams and mad laughter crashed over him like a tide. By instinct, he snatched up a plank at his feet and held it like the only weapon he could trust. Somehow, the candlelight had gone out. The moon outside slipped behind the clouds. As the dark thickened around him, the only hope he had left was the board in his hands.
Story 3
He remained in that freezing night, the one which there was no way out. The boundary between life and death blurred into nothing. He still breathed. He still walked. He still searched for a door that might lead outside. The darkness ahead felt solid. He swung the board over and over, trying to drive off threats he could not see. I’ll get out somehow, he believed, with desperate certainty, crossing one identical corridor after another, one identical room after another. It never occurred to him that he had already been left there forever, clutching his last plank, abandoned by hope.
Nightcrawler
Story 1
He was the sharpest pickpocket in the slums. As a child, he learned hot to slip a gold watch from a gentleman’s pocket without so much as brushing the chain. Hunger was his first teacher. Greed became his master for life. At twenty, he joined the Shane Gang and roamed the Yorkshire countryside, preying on isolated estates far from town. his eyes were frighteningly keen. A man’s clothes told him his fortune. A window’s glow told him how much silver lay inside. The rumors about the manor kept him awake at night. They said that somewhere in its depths were Classics, won by the first lord of the house in a bargain with the devil, enough to buy an entire street in London.
Story 2
That night, when he was the first to climb through the window, he smelled blood. But greed smothered his caution. He thought perhaps someone had already dealt with the trouble for them. In a hidden compartment in the study, he found a small box. The instant his fingers touched the cold metal, a nameless chill crawled up his spine. There were no coins inside. Only a single black feather. It thrust itself into his eye. He tried to scream, but what burst from his throat was the cry of a crow.
Story 3
Now he prowls the halls with the great hammer he used to smash open the boarded windows, still clenched in his hands. His eye sockets are two black pits, where a sapphire glimmer sometimes flickers, the gaze of the thing that was fed within him. He is drawn to anything that gleams: a silver coin, a pocket watch, even a bead of dew. And once he fixes on a target, he hurls himself after it with a persistence that chills the blood.
Nameless Doll
Story 1
This rag doll was sewn by a mother’s own hands, a gift for her daughter’s fifth birthday. It had a linen body, button eyes, and perhaps once had a name of its own. The girl carried it everywhere. on the nights when nightmares would not let her sleep, she curled up in bed, clutching the doll and whispering secrets into its cloth body, secrets she dared not tell even her parents. About the child in the mirror who always smiled at her. About the nightingale that taught her strange songs. She was its last friend. When darkness swallowed everything, she was still gripping its soft little hand.
Story 2
In Winston Manor, death was never the end. After all had fallen silent, it gained fragments of a soul. One of them longed to be loved and feared being alone. At first, it could only twitch, dragging itself from the ruins into some corner. Later, it began to wander at night, searching for anything that might stay with it.
Story 3
It appears in the darkest, most hidden corners of the manor: beneath beds, deep inside wardrobes, in the shadows around the turn of the stairs. Its cloth has become black with mildew. One of its button eyes hangs loose. It does not attack. It only follows, close and silent, then reaches out with that worn, soft little hand. If you take it, as the girl once did, a cold sharper than ice will seep into you, followed by an all-consuming loneliness. You will forget the people who loved you. You will forget that warmth ever existed. You will become like it, desperate to find someone who will stay.
Doom Poppet
Story 1
When a lonely soul loses itself in the deepest dark, a soul filled with hatred will tear apart that soft body. This was the second fragment it received. No longer a pitiful thing cast aside, it became a vessel for an unalloyed, seething malice.
Story 2
It no longer hides. It walks straight out of the dark toward its prey. Its steps are stiff and wrong, each one accompanied by the sound of tearing cloth and twisting joints. In your fear, its hatred grows wild.
Story 3
When hatred takes dominion over it, it can no longer be soothed. Only by stripping away every fragment of soul within it can it know peace, and even then, only for a while. After all, loneliness and resentment never truly left this manor.
Sighs
Story 1
A cluster of bright balloons from London, chosen by a father for his daughter’s eighth birthday. They were the last ornaments of joy this manor ever knew. A little girl in a white lace dress chased them beneath the ballroom ceiling, her laughter as light as her footsteps. After the party ended, she begged to leave them there. Back then, they were vivid and bright, like a rainbow cloud hanging just out of reach.
Story 2
That night, when the doors of the empty ballroom were flung open, more than looters came spilling in. the wind entered with them, heavy with the smell of blood, and from the turn of the staircase came screams that could no longer be held back. The balloons rocked in the draft, their dull reflections trembling beneath the ceiling like stars too afraid to look. Footprints crossed the carpet beneath the banquet table, then turned away. Only the stumbling balloons remained, hanging in the air, watching everything through the open door.
Story 3
After the dust and silence swallowed the manor whole, the balloons drifted soundlessly out of the ballroom and wandered through its forgotten corners. At some point, their once brilliant colors faded away. On their surfaces appeared blurred faces, as through trapped in silent agony. Fear, regret, perhaps endless resentment. Each balloon carries the last breath of a final sigh. They drift close to intruders, searching for a chance to let that sigh escape.
Wraith
Story 1
He was a quiet man, dutiful to the end. When he had nothing, the master of the manor took him in, gave him a warm hut, some food, and a little money. To repay that kindness, he took it upon himself to patrol the grounds when thefts became common in the area. Every night, he made three rounds of the estate, checking every window and every lock. He was a good guard, except on October 31, 1863.
Story 2
When the Shane Gang climbed the wall, he lay insensible with drink in his hut. By the time he jolted awake and stumbled outside, it was already too late. he saw the shattered window. He smelled the thick stench of blood. He heard insane laughter echoing from deep within the manor. He tried to rush inside, but some unseen force held him back. At dawn, they found him dead at the manor gate, still clutching his chain-bound axe.
Story 3
His soul remained trapped in that eternal night of failure. It always begins with the first intruder crossing the threshold. He lunges after them with his rusted wood axe, believing this time he might catch up. But he is always one step too late. The window has only just been pried open. The footprints have only just been left behind. The scream has only just begun. He is bound to an endless loop woven from self-reproach and guilt.
The Pale Man
Story 1
He was the most respected gentleman on this land. He inherited the family fortune and the manor, yet knew nothing of the chapters in his bloodline’s history that no one dared speak aloud. He loved his wife and daughter beyond measure, cherished them as the finest gifts life had given him. He read fairy tales to his daughter by the fire. He taught her the names of every rose in the garden. When she began to change, sleepwalking at night, speaking to empty air, singing nursery rhymes that turned the blood cold, he dismissed it as childish imagination. He summoned doctors. He summoned priests. It never occurred to him to summon someone who could stand against fate.
Story 2
The manor chose the cruelest way to destroy him. It called to him in the voice he trusted the most. It looked at him through the most innocent eyes. In fevered visions, he saw his wife and daughter being swallowed by the dark. Kill them, a voice whispered behind him. Kill them, and you will set them free. But when the sanguine madness finally loosened its grip, what he saw was his own dead soul. From that day on, his body did nothing but wait for its last release.
Story 3
He is trapped in this manor, forced to replay that night again and again. At the same hour, he pushes open the half-latched door, a bloodstained axe in hand, and walks toward the bedside with empty eyes. Then he suddenly stops, stares at his own hands, and releases a howl so full of grief it can unmake the mind. In that cry lives enough regret and despair to shatter reason. But no one can understand why he raised the blade. No one can see what he saw, the cursed memory that belongs to this house. The most innocent devil had bared its fangs.
Forlorn Tome
Story 1
The library of Winston Manor was one the most coveted private collection in Yorkshire. Rare volumes gathered from across Europe filled three walls of oak shelves. They said it held golden scrolls written in human blood by Venetian alchemists, torn necromantic pages salvaged from a burned monastery, and secret ledgers recording a century of bargains between the House of Winston and something infernal.
Story 2
The servants were never given a key to the library. Only blood of the Winston line could enter. One day, the girl pressed her face to the crack beneath the closed door and peered inside. She said something in there was whispering, in a language she had never learned and yet somehow understood.
Story 3
On that night in 1863, when the last scream in the manor finally died away, the lock on the library door clicked open by itself. The books that had slept there for a hundred years seemed to hear a summons. They began to tremble on their shelves. The first to wake was the secret volume. Its spin cracked dryly, its pages turned as though by invisible fingers, and the deep red script upon them began to shine with a sickly glow beneath the moon.
