It was 1863 when the spirits of the dead started rising. Monsters came down from the highlands. Terrors lurked in the night. That was calamity enough. Then, a few decades later, a darkness arose across the sea. He declared himself our eternal master and our doom. He had many names. Still does, I suppose. J'esh'ua. Cain. To this day we still call our occultists "Whispers". The world shattered. Mountains erupted. Lands split and fell into the sea. The oceans went black and the sun was shrouded in darkness. The ghosts became plentiful...and ravenous. Beings of power emerged to fight back the night. The Duke & Duchess in the East. Queen Rat in the West. Archangel Patrick and his Templars in the South. And for us in the North: Lugh. Though now he's just known as the Immortal Emperor. He extracted oaths of fealty from our ancestors in exchange for protection. He held the terrors at bay in a handful of refuges on the isles. He brought us gifts of knowledge from the ruins of our civilization, bade us build schools. In time, artificers learned the ways of harvesting and distilling plasm, and with the Emperor's help we built the lightning barriers to keep out the horrors. Humanity endures. This city has many names: Doskvol or Duskwall, North Hook, The Port. The rich in their mansions and the poor in their slums. The factories and ironworks belching smoke and fire and soot. The great leviathan-hunting ships setting sail to extract the fuel that lights the near-eternal night. Everyone scrambling to get ahead. To get a bigger share of this haunted city, trapped inside a wall of lightning powered by demon blood. This city has many names, but once it was called Edinburgh.