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[vvampyre]

CHARACTERS In the soot-streaked aftermath of the Black Crusade, where cold winds howl through hollow halls and kingdoms lie broken beneath ash and bone, the last embers of humanity flicker in those who remain. They were the backbone of a world that no longer stands. The armorer, the blacksmith, the bowyer, the butcher — men who once worked the flame and blade to clothe kings in steel or carve meat for tables now rotting. Now, they fashion weapons for the desperate, or wield them themselves. The clergyman still mutters sermons to a God who does not answer, and the cook stirs thin stews from whatever can be foraged or filched. The executioner, once the hand of justice, swings his blade now only for mercy or survival. The farmer, once steward of earth and seed, sows in poisoned soil and prays the dead stay buried. There are those who came from marble halls and candlelit rooms: the handmaiden, the princess, the knight. Their silks are moth-bitten, their titles ash. Yet they walk among the rest, stripped of station, surviving as any other must. The prostitute, long fluent in the art of barter and broken men, survives with cunning and steel. The sellsword fights for coin if coin remains, for shelter if it doesn't. The shipwright dreams of waters now too dark to sail. And still, the young remain — boys who should have grown in safety. The squire with rusted hope clutched in his shaking hand, the stableboy who speaks more to horses than men. Too young to have lost so much, yet too old now to forget it. Together, they form a new kind of order — not noble, not holy, not ordained by crown or creed. Just people, fractured and fraying, bound by hunger, blood, and the quiet promise that tomorrow might still come. In their hearts, a stubborn ember burns—not of glory, but of grit. Not of triumph, but of endurance. MISCELLANEOUS In a land not quite remembered by time, where the wind still weeps through broken abbeys and shattered battlements, the world lies in ruin, fifteen years since the Black Crusade first unfurled its banner of death. Born of rats and rot, the plague swept across the kingdoms with a fevered hand, devouring the living and summoning them back with hollow eyes and hungering limbs. What once was chivalry now lies buried beneath bone-piled streets, its banners tattered and trampled by the restless dead. The old world has crumbled, its parchments burned, its crowns rusted. In its place, only survivors remain, shaping fiefdoms of fear and fragile hope. They hold fast to crumbling castles and lost laws, rewriting their own codes in blood and desperation. Here, among the haunted ruins of feudal grace, the living are often more dangerous than the dead, and mercy is as scarce as firelight in a winter siege. SETTING England VERSE Set in a fictionalized version of the Middle Ages, shaped by the echoes of real history and steeped in the dread of a dying world, Black Crusade tells the story of a land ravaged by a devastating, mutated strain of the Bubonic Plague — a pestilence first carried on the backs of rats, whose bite did not merely bring death, but defied it. The Black Death does not rest. It reclaims its victims, pulling them from their shallow graves with clouded eyes and clawing hands, to stalk the living in a cruel mockery of life. Those who lived to tell the tale are scattered now, clutching at survival in a landscape ruled by ruin, haunted by the groans of the dead and the silence of forgotten prayers. With the collapse of medieval civilization and the fall of its centuries-old hierarchy, the old order has been reduced to dust and legend. In its place, rise the desperate and the ruthless — human factions forged from fire, famine, and fear, who now carve their own empires into the bones of kingdoms past. They take up residence in crumbling castles and sacred halls long abandoned, establishing new laws, new morals, and new dominions amid the ashes. In this world, the line between man and monster grows thin, and survival often demands a cruelty to rival the plague itself. INSPIRATION Army of Darkness by Sam Raimi A Plague Tale by Asobo Studio Black Death by Christopher Smith Blight: Survival by Haenir Studio Knight of the Dead by Mark Atkins