I’m guessing I speak for most Witcher 3 players in admitting I barely skimmed most of the in-game documents. No-one’s playing an action RPG for the experience of scrolling slowly through umpteen paragraphs of text multiple times a mission, especially when so few of them add much to the worldbuilding or narrative. Which is a shame, because it makes it that much easier to miss the few that do.
Basically, if you never stopped to read the collectable docs from your trip through Tesham Mutna with Regis in Blood & Wine, you have missed out on some wild shit. Like, vampire sex slaves level of wild. I’m not even kidding.
Let’s start with that gloriously-gothic armour suit you can pick up, complete with matching mask ‒ the one that made me go, “wait, is this, like, an armour set for a vampire’s pet human? Are they kitting out humans for ritual combat? OMG, that’s magnificent!”
Well, there’s this one scroll you can pick up containing what seems to be a poem, or maybe an oath of sorts, which might elaborate a little on just who was meant to wear that ridiculous armour.
Champion of Tesham Mutna
I am he who serves the Tribe.
Exalted above men, I renounce human weakness.
Uplifted above men, I become Keeper of my Flock.
Filled with Strength, I turn my sword against the enemies of the Tribe.
I am Master and Slave.
I am executor of the Will of the Tribe.
I accept this sword and this armor so I may serve the Tribe.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s the sort of glorious nonsense I am 100% here for. And there is so much more.
Other gems are buried a bit more deeply. You can learn a lot about what those cells in the basement were used for from a little book called ‘Human Husbandry and Care’* (which has some pretty nasty implications about the minimum effort that can be safely dedicated to prisoner upkeep) ‒ and you can get a prisoner’s view on the same from ‘Notes of a Tesham Mutna prisoner‘ (which would seem to suggest the vampires involved haven’t quite nailed the ‘sustainable captive breeding’ stage just yet). But it’s the bit at the end of ‘Human Husbandry’ where things take a turn for the psychological.
You can read the whole thing on the wiki ‒ but for current purposes, have an extract (emphasis mine).
Human Husbandry and Care
It is worth mentioning here that there is a school of thought that suggests treating human livestock with greater freedom and care [...]. This allegedly ensures a greater amount of favorable elements in the blood and makes it tastier, however [...] this method of husbandry is much more difficult and requires emotional bonding techniques, which will be discussed in the following chapters.
‘Emotional bonding techniques’, huh? What’s that about? Those ‘following chapters’ aren’t included, but you can pick up another document a little later which picks up the same theme.
Battery-Cage vs. Free-Range Humans
Free-range, on the other hand, involves leaving the flock in its natural habitat [...] and then making the herd psychologically or physically dependent on its owner. The most effective method for making a human individual dependent is guaranteeing it safety and permanent access to high quality feed. It is worth adding that a human that trusts its owner does not feel fear and does not defend itself when having its blood drunk, which limits the production of noradrenaline and cortisol, which have a negative impact on the taste of the blood.
Woof. Sounds like everything Orianna was up to with her orphanage was oh-so-subtly foreshadowed loooooong in advance of where you can actually encounter it in the story. (Have I mentioned how much I love that whole reveal, in all its messy, moral ambiguity? Dilemmas like this are so much of what the Witcher series does best.)
But ‘Battery-Cage vs. Free Range Humans’ goes even further than that:
Furthermore, it may happen that a domesticated free-range human may feel a certain pleasure when its owner drinks its blood (most likely associated with sexual tension), which causes an intensification in the blood's flavor.
Hot damn. We’ve moved into a whole other genre of horror here.
So, to summarise: being bitten by a Witcher-verse vampire can officially be sexually arousing. Moreover, sexual arousal makes the blood taste even better to the vampire. Oh boy, they went there.
Does this really match up with how the whole sexy-vampire thing is tackled in the books, where Regis is quick to assure the rest of the party that the whole ‘blood-drinking = sex’ thing is all based on hang-ups about oral sex and other Freudian nonsense? Arguably not. But I suppose you could always argue that we’ve only got Regis’ word for that, and even he stops short of telling us there’s never anything sexual about the drinking of blood (and he’s certainly a plenty-sexual being otherwise ‒ poor Regis, it must be hard being a sexy vampire when you’ve had to give up drinking blood completely for health reasons).
And then there’s that whole bit from the first Witcher game, where you can visit an entire brothel full of sexy, sexy vampires ‒ so it’s not like the franchise hasn’t gone there before.
You could debate how much of that first game is still really ‘canon’ at this point, given how later games pick up the story. But if you were wondering if all the implications of that vampire-brothel business still count as of the third game, well... just maybe they are.
The last document you can pick up in Tesham Mutna, “Transcript of a Conversation with a Lower Being“, is comparatively a bit of a let-down that casts the vampires as far too ‘beep-boop-what-are-human-emotions?’ to be very convincing.
But I’d be remiss not to at least mention that outside Tesham Mutna, the writers have also snuck a twisted little lesbian vampire love story into some documents from an Olive Grove bruxa battle you can stumble into.
Pick up the diary and letter you’ll find before and after the fight, and you’ll discover there’s at least one woman in Toussaint who very much seems to have been enjoying the attentions of one particular vampire.
None of this is what I’d exactly call ‘important’ Witcher-vampire-canon. As much as I 100% encourage the writing of gloriously melodramatic fanfic about the Champion of Tesham Mutna, all this stuff is so well buried it’s more of an easter egg for the attentive. But I still dig how shamelessly tropey all this vampire nonsense is ‒ and how well some of it ties in with a few minor plot points you’ll actually hear commented on in-game. If you’ve really got to fill your game with text documents, this is how you make them worth the reading. ;)
* For the record, this actually wasn’t an inspiration behind that one deliberately twisted Geralt/Regis fic I posted a while back ‒ by the time I got around to reading this particular in-game document properly, that fic was already mostly plotted. But it's still very obviously responsible for the title
