The Home Counties

In the mid-19th century, London ran into a problem. The city had grown exponentially, and more people were living and dying in London than ever before. This last proved to be an issue, as London's cemeteries were overflowing, the land so thick with the dead that after a heavy a rain one had bones sticking out of rugby fields. The solution, so thought the London Necropolis Company, was to build a new cemetery outside the city, large enough to accommodate all of London's dead, and connect it via its own special train line to bring mourners and coffins outside. So was built the Necropolis Line and Brookwood Cemetery, some fifty kilometers southwest of London. It never proved quite as successful as its builders hoped. Conditions of the trains, and of the organized burials verge upon disgraceful, the company is mismanaged, and the for many of the interred, their markers do not reflect the truth of the residents. Still, Brookwood Cemetery is the largest burial ground in Western Europe, with a quarter-million interments.

Understandably, Brookwood is absolutely infested with ghosts. Ghosts are the single most common supernatural creature in the mortal world, there are thousands of them in Brookwood. Most are just harmless apparitions, wandering cold spots or glowing orbs, but there are some specters with both the desire and the ability to cause a great deal of bloody mayhem. And yet, the ghosts of Brookwood are not unthinking monsters, however densely concentrated. On the contrary, they are disciplined, organized, and directed by some unseen force. Visitors are observed, and troublemakers soon run into one of Brookwood's more violent post-mortem residents. Just who is running the show is something no one has yet managed to find out.

The Ghosts of the Isles

Britain’s ghosts exist in vast numbers. The nation’s legacy of invasion and war, poverty, overpopulation and social strife has left behind more unfinished business than could possibly be imagined. The ghosts are everywhere.

Every night, the shadow plays of this land’s history are enacted. Long-dead Cavaliers and Roundheads return each year to Edgehill. The Romans still make their camp by Offa’s Dyke. The dead of Culloden still march and spectral thieves still loot the casualties at the Pass of Killiecrankie. The women of Merthyr wail for Dic Penderyn nearly a century after the fact. The dead play cards in Glamis Castle and football in Birmingham. Beheaded queens walk through the Tower of London. Hanged murderers wait outside the gates of Dartmoor Prison. The ghosts of Britain haunt theaters and new suburban homes, guildhalls and rubbish dumps. Sawney Bean, the cannibal patriarch, still waits in his cave, hankering for new food. They’re everywhere.

Few of them are dangerous to the living. Most simply go about the business of replaying the same actions, night after night. Some simply appear, silently. Grief and regret are more common motivations for these ghosts than anger. The few who are dangerous, however, are the vengeful dead, the poltergeists and possessing specters that ruin lives and strew their home with new corpses.

There are rules governing the interactions of the living and the restless dead. But the laws of the dead in Britain are no more easily navigated than the laws that govern the living — the dead never had a constitution. Precedent and tradition governs them. Some can only communicate with the living, or harm them or take them away, never to be seen again, if certain conditions are fulfilled, certain words said, certain places stood upon.

The heart of Anglican Christianity and the home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Canterbury is a town of some sixty-thousand people on the southeastern coast of England, about fifty miles outside of London. St. Augustine founded the first episcopal see in England in 597 AD, and the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 made it a pilgrimage site for Christians around the world. Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales about pilgrims to city in the 14th century. These days, the city is a tourist attraction of global renown, with the famed Canterbury Cathedral and some very well preserved medieval structures, including a Norman castle, the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey, and the oldest school in Britain.

Mirroring the situation in the mortal world, the Shadow Archbishop of Canterbury, Francis Rose, is the leader of the Sanctified in the British Isles. Unfortunately for him, Francis Rose's authority is more theoretical than actual. The Catholic-inspired Sanctified of Glasgow and Belfast ignore him, and Solomon Birch in London pays lip service at best to Francis Rose's leadership. Rose himself is an elder vampire over seven centuries in age, a monk's catamite embraced at the height of the Black Plague, and his vampiric monks and nuns are among the foremost scholars of Theban Sorcery in the world... but Birch has about three times as many vampires under his leadership, and what they lack in sorcery they make up in willingness to break heads. The two dioceses are currently pretending to be all smiles while Rose and Birch try to slip as many daggers into each other as possible.

Founded in Saxon times, Oxford is a small town some sixty miles northwest of London. It's known primarily for Oxford University, the second oldest still operational university in the world (only the University of Bologna is older), with teaching going on back in the 11th century, even if the university didn't get its charter till the 13th century. Comprised of a number of constituent Colleges, most famously Christ Church, All Souls, and Trinity, Oxford is also among the best universities in the world, producing Prime Ministers and Nobel Prize Winners in equal measure. The town is also well known for its architecture, termed the "city of dreaming spires" by the poet Matthew Arnold -- there's an example of every kind of English architecture at Oxford, from the Saxons right on down.

Understandably, Oxford breeds secret societies like flies. The combination of enormous wealth and privilege, students arrogant in their youth, professors old enough to know better, and some of the British Isles' most impressive libraries means that occult orders, dark cults, and mystical brotherhoods are all over the place. Most of these groups are short-lived, imploding within half a decade, and many have only the most rudimentary knowledge of the supernatural. A few, however, are more stable, with deep roots in the professoriat. There's the Oxford Mysterium, a cult of knowledge comprised of mortal sorcerers and Awakened wizards in equal order, which is ferocious in maintaining their independence from London. There's the Keirecheires, the 'Devouring Hand', a demonic pleasure-cult that's somehow managed to avoid implosion for over a century, despite near-constant internal violence. And recently, there's the Trinity Academy, centered in the college of the same name, a group of Ordo Dracul vampires who fled Cambridge following 'The Event' in the 1880s, and now have settled into their great rival. They aren't nearly as morally upright as the London Dragons, preferring to treat the constant flows of students as fodder for a great many experiments in the Kindred condition. After all, the Colleges have been covering up the excesses of the Mysterium and Keirecheires for decades, why not the Trinity Academy as well?