In 1918, the Imperial German Army had been backed into a corner with the arrival of American reinforcements into Europe. In the spring of the ”Kaiserschlacht” the Germans introduced a new biological weapon codenamed ”Schlurfende Plage,” or the “Shambling Plague,” originally developed from a strain of the prions within the utmost secrecy of their research laboratories. The manmade affliction was intended to induce a rapid cellular breakdown, causing enemy soldiers and civilians to succumb to a hemorrhagic fever within two days and shatter morale. Collapsing logistics and morale. It was to be the ghost that won the war.

It was battle tested on the Western Front against the Entente forces across the Belgian and French territories; the German deployment saw approximately one hundred of these experimental biological agents in artillery shells that contained an aerosolized form of the prion. It was a terrifying success, as the British, American, and French forces fell into chaos with reports of crazed individuals frothing at the mouth turning against each other and rampant cannibalism; the concentrated nature of trench warfare allowed thousands of Entente soldiers to succumb to the infection within the first few days. The Germans would make a disastrous miscalculation when their own men, whom were sent to hastily recapture these now abandoned Entente positions, succumbed to their own weapon, bringing the infection into the fatherland and further eastward.

In a span of months, this outbreak forced the combatants of the Great War into a temporary alliance in the face of an apocalyptic threat. The remnants of the French Third Republic relocated their capital to Algiers while Pétain commanded the remaining French forces on the mainland, independent organizations operated in the Paris Catacombs, the German Empire ruled from their Alpine fortresses with the surviving members of the government and the military, and the British and American expeditionary forces held out in their coastal redoubts on the French coasts and enforced an indiscriminate “quarantine” against survivors and infected alike.

On the Italian front, rumours state fractured Austro-Hungarian and Italian forces endured the hellish conditions of the Alps against infected hordes and their own men who had gone mad, known as the “Alpine ghouls,” identified by the strange choice of painting their faces in blood or ash and in the Eastern Front, disintegrating mix of German and Austro-Hungarian units fleeing eastward introduced the infection to the corpse of the Russian Empire and the Balkans. It was there a discovery was made in which the infected decayed far quicker when experiencing prolonged starvation. The Bolsheviks and White Armies signed a temporary ceasefire as Western Russia was overrun. On the Caucasus front, Russian units retreating to the south would carry this plague to the Ottoman Empire, quickly overrunning the Anatolian peninsula and flooding into the Levant and Arabia.

Detail your character sheet and select a scenario in 1918 or 1919.

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