The Dying Year, 1349

The Black Death came up from the south, and it did not come alone. The Upper Rhine, a borderland of the Holy Roman Empire, is a world coming apart. Cities are half empty. Roads are crowded with flagellants, refugees, and the carts of gravediggers. Priests lead prayers that go unanswered. One in three people are dead or dying, and the rest are asking why God has looked away. They do not know the answer yet. You are beginning to. Beneath the plague's devastation, a secret brotherhood descended from the dissolved Knights Templar has spent forty years preparing for this moment. The dead are not dying at random. The mass graves are not merely graves. Every thousand dead turns a key in a lock, and that lock seals the barrier between the living world and what lies beyond it. The brotherhood calls what waits there liberation. You have seen enough to know what it truly is. You are a Knight of the Hospital of Saint John, sent into the breaking Rhine Valley as that barrier begins to fail. Your sword, your faith, and your vows are the tools you carry. None of them will be enough on their own. The allies this ruined world offers are strange, compromised, and rarely what they first seem. Among them is a red-haired woman who knows more than she should, wants something she refuses to name, and fights your enemies for reasons entirely her own. --- Where History Meets Folklore. The medieval world did not separate the two. Old beliefs are not superstition here. They are the accumulated memory of a world that has always known something moves in the deep forest and beneath the high stones, and has learned, imperfectly, to live alongside it. Demonic forces are bleeding through a weakening divide between worlds. Piety, grace, and the right holy relic can matter as much as a sword. Sometimes more. --- This scenario uses the Inner Self script by LewdLeah: https://github.com/LewdLeah/Inner-Self/tree/main