Usually nobody rules Sylvania as a united polity, and nobody much cares what goes on there. It might not even be a lie, and it's not like he's any more parasitic or eccentric than the wicked, reclusive human nobility. ![]() Literacy is also poor, as well-read people are often seen as would-be necromancers, or worse, tax collectors why else would a scribe come to Sylvania? So it's easy for a vampire to set himself up in a recently-vacated castle and say he's a distant relation of the previous owner. Sylvanian local nobles are all cruel, venal, and corrupt even when they're human, and have a tendency to disappear suddenly because a rival or an aggrieved peasant slits their throat in the unusually long nights even when vampires aren't involved. Likewise, devout Sigmarites want to put undead to the torch, but they also tend to want to do the same to hedge wizards and superstitious peasants, so they tend to be short-lived even when the undead don't get them. Priests of Morr (the mostly-benevolent funerary god of death) or Amethyst Wizards (the Lore of Death, as practiced by sanctioned Order wizards in the Empire) can prevent bodies from arising as undead and see undead as anathema, but those are both paths to actual necromancy and guises used by actual necromancers. ![]() The main people who can do anything about the endemic undeath are not seen kindly in Sylvania. Even later iterations rename the human refugees Stirgany and make them overtly sympathetic, applying the Stirgoi name just to the vampires that ruled over/preyed on them and followed them to Sylvania.) As far as the rest of the Empire is concerned, Sylvania is cursed, and so are its people. Later iterations first turn the text to subtext: the people are renamed Stirgoi, and many of their superstitions are reasonable in a place where dealing with random undead is an ordinary part of daily life. (Originally this was just real-world anti-Ziganism, just straight up "gypsy" with no subtext and making all the suspicions basically fact. Some takes also include an element of racism, where many of the people are descendants of Stirgany refugees and thus seen as suspicious fortune tellers and thieves. ![]() The nights are abnormally long, the soil is tainted and barren, death from deprivation or predation is common, and bodies often spontaneously arise as undead even when there's no necromancer doing it. It's creepy and especially poor, so nobody with any power cares much about the fate of the people who live there, most of whom are normal if superstitious and malnourished humans. Sylvania is also proportionally much smaller than in TWW, about the same size as the Moot. Sylvania is nominally part of Stirland and thus part of the Empire, but Stirland is large, poor, and weak, so the Elector Count of Stirland's actual control over the local nobles is limited at best. So what's the deal with Sylvania in the lore? Are they permanently at war with the Empire? Do humans live there or have they all been used as food?
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