[Baalz]

Bootstrapping a blood economy with no blood mages is definitely an uphill battle, and no, it is seldom efficient to have your pretender blood hunt. Not sure what you meant by turmoil, but there are a few magic sites which produce blood slaves, though they're few enough that you certainly can't count on them, and you're never gonna get too many slaves that way even if you're lucky.

The good news is, you can always start bloodhunting with any nation and never need to get your pretender involved. The great thing is that with traditionally blood nations you're not really reliant on blood for your bread and butter - you can just let your blood slaves stockpile for awhile to be used every now and then for something shiny.

There are three ways to do it. 1) Find an indie blood mage you can recruit (these are fairly rare, but keep your eyes open, the ones who can get a blood random are not nearly as rare) 2) If you're in a MP game trade somebody for 50 blood slaves to empower your first blood hunter (try to get them to throw in a sanguine dowsing rod). 3) The hard way: stick about 10 scouts in a province with more than 5000 pop and have them blood hunt for about 10 turns until you've scraped up 50 slaves.