Sylvania is the Empire's haunted corner: a fog-bound eastern county of black pines, sagging gibbets, and villages where peasants nail hawthorn above their doors and never answer a knock after dark. The land itself seems cursed. Warpstone meteors fell here in ages past — Morrslieb usually gets the blame — salting the soil with corruption, and ever since, the dead of Sylvania have rested badly. Famine and plague visit often, and its isolated nobility were dabbling in necromancy long before the county's most infamous master arrived.
That master was Vlad von Carstein, who wed Sylvania's dying heiress, ruled from Castle Drakenhof for suspiciously many lifetimes, and at last revealed himself for what he was: a vampire, and patriarch of an entire aristocracy of the night. Under the von Carsteins, Sylvania became the seat of the Vampire Counts and the staging ground of the Vampire Wars — three great undead invasions that carried its deathless nobility to the walls of Altdorf itself.
The Empire has stormed Drakenhof, scattered the counts, and declared the province pacified more than once. Sylvanians know better. In their county, the question about a vampire lord is never whether he will return — only when, and how hungry.