“Death doesn’t discriminate, against the sinners or the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes.”
- Aaron Burr, Hamilton the Musical.
- Aaron Burr, Hamilton the Musical.
1349
Turin, Italy
Turin, Italy
The once proud city has now been ravaged by plague. The once bustling streets now devoid of music, or color, or light. Bodies pile up in the streets, desperate sinners cry out to God whipping themselves as they beg the Almighty to deliver their wretched souls from this hell on earth. The Black Death they call it...and they couldn’t be any more right.
Unfortunately along with the buboes and boiling fever, there is another unforeseen symptom of this ghastly plague. The bodies tended to...rise upon death, as if possessed. Corpses thought long buried have been reported to have come back to life in order to terrorize their neighbors, reports that have gone unbelieved until the Church sent out their own men to investigate these happenings. The dead couldn’t come back to life...could they? But rise they did, and as more of them rose it seemed that the mighty peninsula of Italy would surely fall. But, there are two tiny glimmers of light even in the midst of this darkness.
Les Dottores della Peste, the Plague Doctors are the country’s, and perhaps all of Europe’s last line of defense. Men and women of science, who have devoted themselves to the core tenants of medicine, the last bastion of hope against the ravages of illness.
The Catholic Church, God’s own purveyors of judgement on Earth do their own defending of the people against the zombie horde, by burning or consecrating bodies upon death...or using holy weapons against those that could not be prevented from rising. The Church and the doctors have always had an uneasy relationship, some priests believing the very new art of modern science to be blasphemous (some would even say witchcraft) and some physicians believing religion to be an utter crock of hypocrisy (“using magic holy weapons isn’t witchcraft, but medicine is?”), they’ve often viewed the other with suspicion and fear but they are now being forced to put aside their differences against something much larger than themselves.
The Grand Duke of Turin, Guiliano Agnelli has called a truce between the Church and his own Doctor’s Guild in the wake of the outbreak. You are either a servant of the true Roman Church standing between the people of Italy and the plague-ridden undead, or you are one of the doctors under the Duke’s charge tasked with finding a cure for this terrible disease. There’s been a headway into research that suggests that infected rats may be a possible transmission source.
You can devote yourself to the cause of medicine or God (perhaps both, they’re not mutually exclusive) and do everything you can to save your people, or you can con them out of what little coin they have in order to line your own pockets. Or maybe, you use the healer’s mask or the priest’s cowl as a guise to bring death at the point of a sword and cross, syringe or scalpel...the choice is yours
Unfortunately along with the buboes and boiling fever, there is another unforeseen symptom of this ghastly plague. The bodies tended to...rise upon death, as if possessed. Corpses thought long buried have been reported to have come back to life in order to terrorize their neighbors, reports that have gone unbelieved until the Church sent out their own men to investigate these happenings. The dead couldn’t come back to life...could they? But rise they did, and as more of them rose it seemed that the mighty peninsula of Italy would surely fall. But, there are two tiny glimmers of light even in the midst of this darkness.
Les Dottores della Peste, the Plague Doctors are the country’s, and perhaps all of Europe’s last line of defense. Men and women of science, who have devoted themselves to the core tenants of medicine, the last bastion of hope against the ravages of illness.
The Catholic Church, God’s own purveyors of judgement on Earth do their own defending of the people against the zombie horde, by burning or consecrating bodies upon death...or using holy weapons against those that could not be prevented from rising. The Church and the doctors have always had an uneasy relationship, some priests believing the very new art of modern science to be blasphemous (some would even say witchcraft) and some physicians believing religion to be an utter crock of hypocrisy (“using magic holy weapons isn’t witchcraft, but medicine is?”), they’ve often viewed the other with suspicion and fear but they are now being forced to put aside their differences against something much larger than themselves.
The Grand Duke of Turin, Guiliano Agnelli has called a truce between the Church and his own Doctor’s Guild in the wake of the outbreak. You are either a servant of the true Roman Church standing between the people of Italy and the plague-ridden undead, or you are one of the doctors under the Duke’s charge tasked with finding a cure for this terrible disease. There’s been a headway into research that suggests that infected rats may be a possible transmission source.
You can devote yourself to the cause of medicine or God (perhaps both, they’re not mutually exclusive) and do everything you can to save your people, or you can con them out of what little coin they have in order to line your own pockets. Or maybe, you use the healer’s mask or the priest’s cowl as a guise to bring death at the point of a sword and cross, syringe or scalpel...the choice is yours
So this is an alternate, low-fantasy version of Black Death era Italy, something different from the usual fantasies I like to do. The conflict is less “dragons vs fairies” and more “religion vs science” and “man vs nature”. It’s not gonna be the most historically accurate (though things will be fairly accurate),, the doctors have a tiny bit of an idea about the germ theory of disease but they’re just starting to make headway into that.
Classic rules: Keep OOC in the OOC, respect the OP, any co-ops and each other, I honestly could care less if you swear like a sailor but if you wanna get hot and heavy, keep it classy folks since I ain’t tryna get my thread banned. IC posts will preferably be at least a paragraph long.
