House Tepes is a lineage of dark renown, marked by its old ties to the undead and to vampiric lore. The house is bound up with a noble ghost fettered these many centuries to the ruins of Saint Benoit Church — a spectre who names himself the brother of Vlad the Impaler, and who is said to have caused chambers to be built for the containing of Vlad and the curbing of his murderous appetites. Its association with the dead is written plain in the heraldry borne upon the animated cadavers met with in those ruins.
Of late, during the festival of the Ghost of March, this same spectre put Nazif to death, a perfumist, charging him with betrayal and declaring that his charge had passed to the Council of the Ninth Life. That act done, the entourage of the Ghost of March, clad in the uniforms of the disbanded Sekban soldiery, stirred the city to a state of emergency, and so to chaos and to whispered talk of some tie between the Ghost of March and the old Janissaries — a hint of resistance stirring underground.
In the aftermath of Nazif's death, the gatekeeper Sharif the Strong Fur disclosed that the Ghost of March had relieved Nazif of his office over the undercity's passage. Thereafter a company was set to confront the unquiet dead beneath Saint Benoit Church, where they met with spectral crowds and with the Ghost of March in the shape of a nobleman, who sought their help in the matter of his brother, Vlad. The Ghost of March warned that the shedding of blood would but strengthen Vlad, a token of how perilous the labour before them lay. And as the company pressed on through the ruins, they faced sundry threats among the walking dead and began to bring to light the dark history bound up with House Tepes and its lingering hold upon the city.