The Vampire Wars

For three long and terror-haunted generations, the dead made war upon the living in the campaigns remembered as The Vampire Wars. From the benighted province of Sylvania rose the vampire counts of the von Carstein line, undying aristocrats who raised armies from the graveyards of the Empire of Man and sought to rule it as a kingdom of corpses.

The first and greatest of them, Vlad von Carstein, wielded a cursed ring that would not let him die, and his legions of skeletons and zombies swelled with every battlefield he crossed. Where mortal armies tired and bled, the undead simply rose again; battle after battle was won by the living only to be undone by moonrise, when the fallen of both sides stood again beneath the count's banner. The Empire was pushed to the very brink of ruin before a fortunate blow finally felled Vlad during the siege of Altdorf.

His heirs proved no less dangerous. Konrad drowned the land in mindless slaughter, while the cunning Mannfred plotted with a patience only the deathless can afford, each in turn testing the Empire's resolve to the utmost. Between the great campaigns lay uneasy years of truce and terror, in which Sylvania's borders were watched like the lid of a tomb. The war ranged from moonlit Sylvanian valleys to the great battle of Hel Fenn, where the last von Carstein was at last brought down.

The Vampire Wars scarred the Empire's soul and taught it a lasting dread of Sylvania and all its works. For the fuller tale of the von Carsteins and the long war against undeath, see the Vampire Wars: the long night when the Empire learned that even the grave keeps no faith.