People of the Long Night

The peoples of Long is the Night are, on the surface, simply the peoples of late-eighteenth-century Europe — but every nation, faith, and bloodline has its hidden current.

Nations and Cultures

Name	Description
Valluvians	Inhabitants of the heartland kingdom of Valluvia — courtly, devout, obsessed with lineage and propriety. Powdered wigs, gilded chapels, and dueling at dawn.
Mornavians	A mountainous principality of pine forests and snow-locked villages. Folk-Catholic, deeply superstitious, and the part of the world where vampires are not a metaphor.
Iberians	A southern kingdom of cathedrals and inquisitors. The Church here is at its most militant — and its most haunted.
The Free Cantons	A loose confederation of merchant cities. Wealthy, skeptical, and full of printers, salons, and Enlightenment philosophes who dismiss what walks at night.
The Sublime East	An empire to the east — vast, ancient, and home to traditions older than Rome. Travelers from here are regarded with both fascination and suspicion.
The Romani	Wanderers of every land and citizens of none. They remember what others have chosen to forget, and they carry charms that actually work.

Bloodlines

Some old families have grown… strange. The Church has files on them. The hunters keep their own.

Name	Description
House Vargheist	An ancient Mornavian line. Pale, beautiful, never seen by daylight. Their estate at Castle Karnstein has stood for nine hundred years.
House de Saint-Cyr	Valluvian aristocracy with a curiously short list of recent funerals and a curiously long list of disappeared servants.
The Sanguinari	A whispered name. Said to be the oldest of them all, and to be the source of all others.

Faiths and Orders

Name	Description
The Church	The dominant faith — vast, political, fractured. Its relics genuinely repel the dark, but its leadership is more interested in power than in salvation.
The Order of Saint Severin	A militant clerical order sworn to hunt the strigoi — the undead. Officially disbanded in 1742; very much still operating.
The Cunning Folk	Village-level folk practitioners — wise women, hedge witches, charm-makers. The Church tolerates them only because the peasantry would riot if it didn't.
The Illuminated	A secret society of Enlightenment thinkers who believe the supernatural is a problem to be solved. Their methods are not always more humane than the things they hunt.
The Sanguine Communion	A heretical cult that worships the vampires as saints. Larger than anyone admits.