By 1918, Imperial Germany’s Army had been backed into a corner with the arrival of American reinforcements into Europe. By the spring of the ”Kaiserschlacht” the Germans introduced a new biological weapon codenamed ”Schlurfende Plage,” or the “Shambling Plague,” developed from a strain of the prions within the utmost secrecy of state laboratories. The manmade affliction intended to cause rapid cellular breakdown, allowing enemy soldiers to succumb under hemorrhagic fever within two days. To shatter morale and collapse logistics. 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 descended into chaos with reports of feral individuals frothing at the mouth turning and slaughtering each other; the concentrated nature of trench warfare led to thousands of Entente soldiers succumbing with the prions within the first few days. The Germans made a disastrous miscalculation when their own men, whom were sent to hastily recapture these now abandoned Entente positions, fell to their own weapon, bringing the infection into the fatherland and further eastward.

In a span of months, the outbreak pushed the combatants of the Great War into a temporary alliance in the face of this 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 mention 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 using blood or ash. On the Eastern Front, a disintegrating mix of German and Austro-Hungarian units fleeing eastward introduced the disease to the corpse of the Russian Empire and the Balkans. It was there a discovery was made, where the infected decayed far quicker when experiencing prolonged starvation. The Bolsheviks and White Armies signed a temporary ceasefire as Western Russia was overran. On the Caucasus front, Russian forces retreating to the south would carry this plague to the Ottoman Empire, 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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