Player's Guide to Long is the Night

Confused? Intrigued? Trembling? Here is a brief guide for players entering the long night.

Limitations

The setting is grounded — late 18th-century Europe, with all its corsets, carriages, and class divisions — but with an undercurrent of the supernatural. Player characters are mortal (probably), and the world is dangerous in ways gunpowder cannot answer.

• Magic is rare, dangerous, and never casual. It is the province of witches, alchemists, mystics, and things that wear human skin. There are no fireballs in ballrooms.
• Religion is real in the sense that faith has power — relics, prayers, and consecrated ground push back against the dark — but the divine is distant, and clergy are as flawed as anyone.
• Technology is what 1788 affords: flintlock pistols, smallswords, chemistry, early medicine, the printing press, and letters. No anachronisms.
• The supernatural is mostly hidden. The world at large does not believe in vampires. Those who do tend not to live long enough to convince anyone else.

Tone Expectations

This is a setting of horror and romance, in roughly equal measure.

• Expect intimate stakes: a single life, a single household, a single secret.
• Expect slow burns. Letters, glances, silences across a dinner table.
• Expect cruelty rendered with restraint. The horror is in implication.
• Expect that love may damn you, and damnation may be loved.

Character Concepts

Characters tend to fall into archetypes that suit the genre:

• The scholar of forbidden lore.
• The disgraced noble with a debt to the dark.
• The clergy member whose faith is being tested.
• The artist — composer, poet, painter — touched by something they cannot name.
• The hunter, sworn against the night.
• The outsider — Romani, foreigner, commoner — who sees what the powerful cannot afford to.