The Cthulhu Campaigns by Mark Latham

Author:Mark Latham
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

During Trajan’s war of conquest in Dacia (106 AD), hardened bands of legionary veterans were sent into the caves of the Carpathians to clear out nests of flesh-eating ghouls.

The Strigoi

The Strigoi were said to have been a coven of witches once, who spent too long at their meditations, journeying deep into the spiritual aether known as the Dreamlands. There, they lost all sense of their humanity, and attracted the predations of an Outer God of great power. Manifesting itself as ‘Lilith’, this alien deity infected the very souls of the witches with its preternatural lust for human blood, before banishing them from the Dreamlands forever.

When they returned to their bodies the witches found that they had indeed dreamed too long. Nourished only by magical energy, their bodies had wasted away into shrivelled husks of hideous appearance. When their souls returned, the witches found their physical forms dying – but death could still be avoided. Animating their withered, creaking limbs, they crawled from the crypts where they had long before begun their secret dream-rituals, and found a village that had changed almost beyond recognition. Driven by an insatiable hunger, the creatures climbed into the hovels and feasted on the blood of the living – men, women, and children – glutting themselves many times over until Lilith’s dark magic had fully consumed them.

The Strigoi found themselves whole again – young and beautiful beyond imagining, possessed of great physical strength and magical prowess. Each of them carried a fragment of Lilith’s manifest consciousness, which drove them to acts of increasing cruelty. Furthermore, the poor villagers upon whom they had feasted were not dead, but had instead become shrivelled, cadaverous ghouls, bestial and mindless, who had inherited a taste for human flesh. The Strigoi found that they could control these ghouls with but a thought and, finding that their powers waned as the sun rose, the nocturnal Strigoi employed the ghouls to guard their resting places as they slept.

Over the centuries the Strigoi passed on their gift to others – men and women alike – and their cabal grew stronger. They shied away from large settlements, where they were reviled, and sometimes hunted by hardy Dacian knights, making their homes in the endless caves of the Carpathians. Fearful villagers from across Dacia, however, brought offerings of human sacrifice to the Strigoi, beseeching the aid of these powerful wampyr to protect them against invaders, to heal the sick, and to prolong the lives of the old and dying.

When the Romans came to Dacia, even the most ardent noble was forced to entreat the aid of the Strigoi, who only sometimes listened. Many times over the course of their battles against the Roman legions, the Dacians marched to war alongside a powerful, pale-skinned sorcerer of fearsome aspect, able to darken the sky at their approach. When such creatures rode to war, the battlefield echoed to the guttural snarls of loping, gangrel half-men, hunting in great packs and gnawing upon the bones of the fallen. No prayer

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