Did someone say Halloween maps? Did someone say... vampire Austria vs. werewolf Prussia?
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte broke open the seal of a tomb in Egypt and inadvertently unleashed the forces of the supernatural back into the world at the cost of his own life. Among the first beneficiaries of this were the nearby Ottoman Empire, who embarked upon a campaign of aggression with the help of their new djinn allies. This in turn seems to have sparked the resurrection of the Ottomans' ancient enemy: none other than Vlad Dracula, first and greatest of the vampires.
Dracula quickly seized power over Wallachia and Moldavia to wage their rebellion against the Ottomans, but even his diabolical powers could not withstand their greater numbers, and so he embarked upon his great plan. First, he resurrected three women as bloodthirsty as him to serve as his vampiric brides: Elizabeth Bathory, Lucrezia Borgia, and Bloody Mary Tudor (the Rogue Bride, who rejected him and fled to the Americas). Then he paid a visit to Klemens von Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, with an offer: the Romanian principalities would swear allegiance to Austria in exchange for help against the Ottomans. At least, that was the official deal. Dracula’s true offer was of the gift of unlife and all the powers that come with it. Metternich, ever eager for ways to preserve the dominance of the ancien regime and hold back the threat of revolution, agreed, and became the first of the Turned.
Metternich spread the gift to his aristocratic allies and so more and more of Austria’s nobility became Turned as the vampiric conspiracy grew. This did not go unnoticed - conspiracy theories warning against the threat of being reduced to chattel for a bloodthirsty ruling elite spread, and eventually the people rose up against their fate. But the would-be revolution of 1848 was choked on its own blood, the mask of mortality was finally thrown off, and even the Emperor himself finally accepted the gift of unlife (or more specifically the new emperor Franz Joseph did; his uncle Ferdinand the Benign proved reticent and sadly had to be drunk) as Austria became an open vampirocracy where Franz Joseph and his undead empress Sisi reign, but Metternich and Dracula rule.
Nor did it go unnoticed in Austria’s rival to the north, the Kingdom of Prussia, the “army with a state”. Even before 1848, it became apparent to Prussian leaders that they were facing a supernatural threat. And from the dark forests of Germany and the Baltic, a supernatural answer emerged: the curse, or blessing, of lycanthropy. Feral werewolves were little more than beasts, but with Prussian ingenuity they could be tamed and trained. At first only the most elite soldiers and secret police were turned, but as in Austria the mask came off in 1848 - in this case when the would-be revolutionaries were publicly devoured by rampaging giant wolf-men.
In the following decade larger and larger sections of the officer corps and the Junker class became werewolves, but the soft-hearted King Frederick William was reluctant to fully embrace the bold new frontier of lycanthropy. When he died of natural causes (decapitation) in 1858, power officially fell to his brother Wilhelm, but in reality it was seized by his ambitious chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who set about officially reorganizing the army--and therefore the state--into a hierarchical system of werewolf packs with himself as alpha, and laying the groundwork for Prussia’s expansion with blood and iron, and claws and teeth. Now, with the incomprehensibly complicated Schleswig-Holstein question as a pretext, the werewolf kingdom and vampire empire stand ready to finally go to war...
-----
Standing against the monsters of the ancien regime are the Illuminati, a secret society of radicals and arcanists dedicated to fighting injustice and superstition, both of which Europe has in abundance. Like their supernatural rivals they abandoned secretly at least partially in 1848 and seized control of their homeland Bavaria, reorganizing it into a radical republic to serve as a home base for their system of secret cells extending across Europe. And despite their secrecy, the deeds of legendary Illuminati monster-hunters like the Brothers Grimm and Karl Marx have become legend as they battle the many spectres haunting Europe.
Jewish communities have also found themselves drawn into the supernatural - after the unexpected reawakening of the Golem of Prague, rebbes and kabbalists across Europe found themselves with the new ability to create golems of their own - and a newfound need to, as a protection against all the strange new monsters lurking in the night. Since golems, as unliving automatons of clay, are immune to most monsters and magic, this has proven quite effective and Jewish communities in Austria and Prussia essentially have a truce with the vampires and werewolves and effective exemption from being hunted. Of course, this greater degree of protection has earned the resentment of their gentile neighbors, which in turn only increases the Jews’ own need for self-defense...
But the gentiles have their own answer to the Jews’ golems of clay: golems of flesh, more often known as Frankenstein creatures or simply Frankensteins after the scientist who invented the process of reanimating dead tissue. The practice of digging up corpses, stitching them together, and electrocuting them until they rise as shambling minions is naturally controversial, and condemned by the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations, but that has not stopped the march of progress, with scientists constantly seeking out new military and industrial applications for Frankensteins (somehow it never occurs to many scientists to look for *medical* applications for the process) and Frankensteins becoming an increasingly common sight across Germany.
One step forward, two steps back: witch trials have also made a resurgence across Germany and much of Central Europe, though most of their victims are totally innocent, and of course only a small minority of real witches practice black magic in thrall to Satan while the majority are simply village healing women who found that their prescriptions suddenly started to work a lot better. Of course, it’s the white witches that burn in their hundreds while the black witches have the ruthlessness to escape detection - and indeed, in Austria the vampires particularly seek out white magic practitioners like the Benandanti and Kresniks for destruction, seeing them as a threat and inciting persecution against them to that end.
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte broke open the seal of a tomb in Egypt and inadvertently unleashed the forces of the supernatural back into the world at the cost of his own life. Among the first beneficiaries of this were the nearby Ottoman Empire, who embarked upon a campaign of aggression with the help of their new djinn allies. This in turn seems to have sparked the resurrection of the Ottomans' ancient enemy: none other than Vlad Dracula, first and greatest of the vampires.
Dracula quickly seized power over Wallachia and Moldavia to wage their rebellion against the Ottomans, but even his diabolical powers could not withstand their greater numbers, and so he embarked upon his great plan. First, he resurrected three women as bloodthirsty as him to serve as his vampiric brides: Elizabeth Bathory, Lucrezia Borgia, and Bloody Mary Tudor (the Rogue Bride, who rejected him and fled to the Americas). Then he paid a visit to Klemens von Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, with an offer: the Romanian principalities would swear allegiance to Austria in exchange for help against the Ottomans. At least, that was the official deal. Dracula’s true offer was of the gift of unlife and all the powers that come with it. Metternich, ever eager for ways to preserve the dominance of the ancien regime and hold back the threat of revolution, agreed, and became the first of the Turned.
Metternich spread the gift to his aristocratic allies and so more and more of Austria’s nobility became Turned as the vampiric conspiracy grew. This did not go unnoticed - conspiracy theories warning against the threat of being reduced to chattel for a bloodthirsty ruling elite spread, and eventually the people rose up against their fate. But the would-be revolution of 1848 was choked on its own blood, the mask of mortality was finally thrown off, and even the Emperor himself finally accepted the gift of unlife (or more specifically the new emperor Franz Joseph did; his uncle Ferdinand the Benign proved reticent and sadly had to be drunk) as Austria became an open vampirocracy where Franz Joseph and his undead empress Sisi reign, but Metternich and Dracula rule.
Nor did it go unnoticed in Austria’s rival to the north, the Kingdom of Prussia, the “army with a state”. Even before 1848, it became apparent to Prussian leaders that they were facing a supernatural threat. And from the dark forests of Germany and the Baltic, a supernatural answer emerged: the curse, or blessing, of lycanthropy. Feral werewolves were little more than beasts, but with Prussian ingenuity they could be tamed and trained. At first only the most elite soldiers and secret police were turned, but as in Austria the mask came off in 1848 - in this case when the would-be revolutionaries were publicly devoured by rampaging giant wolf-men.
In the following decade larger and larger sections of the officer corps and the Junker class became werewolves, but the soft-hearted King Frederick William was reluctant to fully embrace the bold new frontier of lycanthropy. When he died of natural causes (decapitation) in 1858, power officially fell to his brother Wilhelm, but in reality it was seized by his ambitious chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who set about officially reorganizing the army--and therefore the state--into a hierarchical system of werewolf packs with himself as alpha, and laying the groundwork for Prussia’s expansion with blood and iron, and claws and teeth. Now, with the incomprehensibly complicated Schleswig-Holstein question as a pretext, the werewolf kingdom and vampire empire stand ready to finally go to war...
-----
Standing against the monsters of the ancien regime are the Illuminati, a secret society of radicals and arcanists dedicated to fighting injustice and superstition, both of which Europe has in abundance. Like their supernatural rivals they abandoned secretly at least partially in 1848 and seized control of their homeland Bavaria, reorganizing it into a radical republic to serve as a home base for their system of secret cells extending across Europe. And despite their secrecy, the deeds of legendary Illuminati monster-hunters like the Brothers Grimm and Karl Marx have become legend as they battle the many spectres haunting Europe.
Jewish communities have also found themselves drawn into the supernatural - after the unexpected reawakening of the Golem of Prague, rebbes and kabbalists across Europe found themselves with the new ability to create golems of their own - and a newfound need to, as a protection against all the strange new monsters lurking in the night. Since golems, as unliving automatons of clay, are immune to most monsters and magic, this has proven quite effective and Jewish communities in Austria and Prussia essentially have a truce with the vampires and werewolves and effective exemption from being hunted. Of course, this greater degree of protection has earned the resentment of their gentile neighbors, which in turn only increases the Jews’ own need for self-defense...
But the gentiles have their own answer to the Jews’ golems of clay: golems of flesh, more often known as Frankenstein creatures or simply Frankensteins after the scientist who invented the process of reanimating dead tissue. The practice of digging up corpses, stitching them together, and electrocuting them until they rise as shambling minions is naturally controversial, and condemned by the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations, but that has not stopped the march of progress, with scientists constantly seeking out new military and industrial applications for Frankensteins (somehow it never occurs to many scientists to look for *medical* applications for the process) and Frankensteins becoming an increasingly common sight across Germany.
One step forward, two steps back: witch trials have also made a resurgence across Germany and much of Central Europe, though most of their victims are totally innocent, and of course only a small minority of real witches practice black magic in thrall to Satan while the majority are simply village healing women who found that their prescriptions suddenly started to work a lot better. Of course, it’s the white witches that burn in their hundreds while the black witches have the ruthlessness to escape detection - and indeed, in Austria the vampires particularly seek out white magic practitioners like the Benandanti and Kresniks for destruction, seeing them as a threat and inciting persecution against them to that end.
