Long Is The Night
This is a wiki for the Long is the Night campaign setting, a world of Gothic horror and romance set in the year 1788. It is not meant to be a public reference, and may differ from any historical source it draws upon.
Introduction
Long is the Night is a setting of candlelight, powdered wigs, opera houses, plague pits, and the long shadow of an ancien régime on the eve of revolution. Beneath the gilt and the chamber music, something older drinks. The dead do not rest. The living do not love simply. Letters are sealed in wax and carried by trembling hands; carriages clatter down rain-slick cobblestones; a violin plays in a window that has been shuttered for forty years.
The setting takes place across a fictional Continental Europe — its courts, its convents, its forests, its forgotten provinces — in the autumn before the world remakes itself.
Themes and Tone
Long is the Night is a setting of gothic horror and romance. Its themes include:
- The persistence of the past — old houses, old bloodlines, old curses, old debts. Nothing buried stays buried.
- Forbidden love — across station, across the grave, across the line that divides predator from prey.
- Decadence and decay — beauty that is half-rot; aristocrats whose veneer of civility hides centuries of appetite.
- Faith under siege — the Church is powerful but cracking, and what walks the night is older than the cross.
- Music as memory — every great house has a song; every haunting begins with a melody half-remembered.
- The long night — winters that come early, dawns that come late, and the dread that the sun may not return at all.