The Campaign Builder's Guild

Nobody does that gothic viscerality quite like you do. It reminds me a lot of the upper tier of OSR materials.

"Feast, Stone" is probably my favorite name on the list and I can't properly explain why. It's such a weird name for a presumably animate creature that it could be anything but it's probably not pleasant.

ALPTRAUM FOR ALL YOU COWARD

Bought it, love it. The Fossil Vampire is inspired, the Arachnopolis Rex is one of the scariest things I've ever had to think about, the Silichominids are adorable in a way I wasn't expecting.

Outstanding characters, sparkletwist. Puts my character idea to shame.

A Red and Pleasant Land is ridiculously compelling.

I'm just brainstorming at work but my current spin on this concept is that the undead are scary and alien and apparently "mindless"' largely because they're unencumbered from all those endocrine urges. Laboring endlessly out of pure love for the commune and tirelessly slaughtering anything in their path are two sides of the same coin.

The idea of a peasant commune powered by the eternal labor of the posthumous proletariat is a pretty compelling one...

I'm definitely in. I'll try to post my characters tonight.

I noticed that the values on the government types don't seem to add up and I was wondering if this was deliberate or just an oversight?

Count me in as well!

I'm recovering from surgery so trying to write anything extensive is something of a chore right now, but I wrote the beginning of a response months ago and never got around to posting it.

Canada has undergone the same pattern of collapsing central authority, regional devolution, and intermittent balkanization that has played out in the United States, with the effects being – if anything – even more dramatic. It surprised no one when Quebec finally achieved formal sovereignty, which included Montreal – where disagreement about secession was at its strongest – adopting the status of autonomous city-state. The general rule is that the further west one goes, the more splintered the country becomes. Alberta and British Columbia were both hit incredibly hard by environmental degradation: city-sized firestorms are still a seasonal occurrence and the oil sands look like something out of Mad Max these days. The feeling of government neglect led large chunks of both provinces to declare independence and form their own – surprisingly-successful – political network. Both Vancouver and Calgary-Edmonton are among the most divided cities in North America, with as little as half their districts fully recognizing the authority of the federal government. Vancouver has not been swallowed up by the sea just yet, though rising sea levels have turned its neighbor Richmond into little more than an archipelago of concrete islands. Then there is also the matter of the more than 600 First Nations bands. See, the Canadian economy is still almost entirely dependent on a handful of transcontinental arteries that the federal government had difficulty securing even at its most powerful – and which tend to run straight through First Nations lands. Holding the rest of the country by the metaphorical balls, many indigenous peoples have either negotiated self-governing provincial status or forced the government into giving them diplomatic recognition as sovereign nations.

I'm having a hard time envisioning the Tsar and the rest of Russia's nobility bowing down to a dragon. I think the Germanies would be a better location for a draconic empire, especially since you have a perfect human collaborator in the form of Otto Bismark.

I really dig the general idea but I don't understand the logic behind some of your decisions.

You said the convergence of the planes happens around the beginning of the Civil War, so lets pin it down to 1860 just for the purposes of discussion. What was said convergence like: a subtle and gradual awakening as in Shadowrun or a violent interposition of realities, with magical creatures suddenly spilling into our world en masse? Is there any relation between our real world mythologies and the magical planes or are they completely alien?

There's absolutely no way that Japan colonizes the Western United States unless you make some enormous historical changes. The Meiji Restoration, which is generally accepted as the beginning of Japan's industrial revolution, didn't occur until 1868; prior to that, the country is still essentially medieval. It didn't become anything approaching a modern military power until 1905. If Russia is ruled by a dragon, I imagine that the Russo-Japanese War plays out a lot differently, though I have doubts about that decision as well.

Basically, I think Germany and Austria-Hungary are the best choices for being the heart of the Occult Powers. The fractious states of Central Europe would be the perfect location for an extraplanar conqueror - whether a dragon, a vampire, or something else entirely - to hammer out their own kingdom. 

Yeah, I was referring to humans specifically when I made that assessment.