A part of Bloodborne’s lore is that there is a group who call themselves the Tomb Prospectors, who explore the game’s dungeons on behalf of the Healing Church. Several months after the game’s release, some players formed the idea that there should be some real life Tomb Prospectors. They all hope to find something no one is even sure that is a part of the game. One of the prominent members of the real life Tomb Prospectors is Connor Therrien.
“What we’re looking for [includes] rare wandering bosses, rare enemies, rare boss spawns or unusual rooms,” Therrien said.
The initial idea behind the real life Tomb Prospectors was concocted by “founder” Fred Riley. Riley cosplayed as one of the Tomb Prospectors from the game’s lore and invited other players to join them. Hundreds of people have joined Riley and Therrien, especially with the help of Moros Nyx who operates the Tomb Prospector’s online community.
The main objective of the Tomb Prospectors is to dig around the “root” dungeons, which generate randomly, similarly to the dungeons in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. Those root dungeons can be created via the game’s glyph feature, which allows all members of the Tomb Prospectors to share the dungeons they’ve created for all of the members to explore. The dungeons that the Tomb Prospectors make are supposed to be very difficult, adding to the toughness of Bloodborne itself.
The prizes of finishing dungeons aren’t just gold and upgraded gear; they’ve managed to find one of the rarest creatures in the game: the Labyrinth Mole Rat. Most players are lucky to find one, but they’ve found two of them in one dungeon before.
The Tomb Prospectors also fight the wandering bosses, who are the strongest enemies in the game.
“They deal just as much damage as their boss counterparts,” Therrien said. “The only difference is they have less health and can be avoided, unlike [Chalice bosses] which you must fight to progress.”
Their holy grail is the item called Revered Great One Coldblood. The lore states that the item can be found in depth 5 root Chalice Dungeons, but it has yet to be encountered.
“There is nothing to support its nonexistence, but at the same time very little to support its existence,” Therrien said. “So we prospect in hopes that potentially it may appear someday, and [we will] forever immortalize the lucky hunter who finds it in gaming history.”
Therrien said he has created approximately 200 Chalice Dungeons with the purpose of finding the item but to no avail. Other players are known to prospect every day, so it’s likely that they have explored thousands of Chalice Dungeons.