Arriving on the continent, they met Kerridwyn, a member of one of the new orders of Druids that were springing up everywhere in Victorian England, and Carmen, a gypsy rogue.

Carmen was your typical fantasy setting gypsy: Beautiful, seductive, a seer and, of course, a thief.

(Chris groaned when I started using the name Carmen. A ghost named Victoria in a Victorian ghost story was one thing but now I was being cliché. I replied that 95% of gamers had never heard of Bizet.)

A short time later they encountered Shatiro, a Japanese ronin, a silent man with a deep secret.

Visions of Victoria's ghost guided them through Switzerland, where she had been murdered and Sarah abducted, to a castle in Bavaria. Inside the castle, they met it's unlikely owner, an old Oriental man who bore a striking resemblance to Shatiro.

Here, they also found Sarah.

The unholy consort of the old man.

A vampyre.

That was my idea for 1888.

Now, it had to be fleshed out and we needed an ending.

We wanted to craft a strong story and felt the characters needed deep, personal motives for getting involved.

For "Prot" and Michael, the motive was obvious. In fact, Michael's guilt only deepened as he now blamed himself for Sarah's "death".

With Carmen, it was decided that her lover had been killed by the vampyre. With our Druid, Kerridwyn, it was the "balance of nature", vampyres not being part of the natural order.

And this was where Shatiro's secret came into play, our justification for having two Japanese in Europe in 1888: the vampyre was his ancestor.

We wanted it possible to save Sarah, to reverse the curse of vampyrism. So, we threw in time travel.

With Victoria's ghost providing the clue, our party would travel to Fuedal Japan of the past, to a time before Shatiro's ancestor became a vampyre.