First draft of the timeline. Nitpicking of historical inaccuracies/improbabilities is highly encouraged.

[hider=Timeline of the Grey Rot]November 1755 - The Transylvanian village of Întuneric, known for the supernatural happenings that occur there and the perceived ‘eccentricity’ of its natives, suddenly goes ‘quiet’. Visitors to the village are never heard from again, letters sent there go unresponded to, and a faint smell of rotting flesh permeates the surrounding countryside.

December 1755 - A coalition of nearby villages, assisted by a small company of Austrian imperial soldiers, is formed to investigate the sudden silence of Întuneric. A party of 50 spends one night in the village and returns a party of 40, panicked, with bite marks all over their bodies and accounts of the villagers attacking them like rabid animals. All of the 40 survivors expire within 8 hours. Minutes after their supposed expirations, said 40 survivors begin to display the characteristics of their attackers. By New Years’ Eve, hordes of the dead are already crossing the borders of Wallachia.

January 1756 - The Holy Roman Empire sends troops into Transylvania as the infection, now dubbed the ‘Grey Rot’ after the complexions of its victims, progresses southward into Bulgaria and Greece. The panic it creates causes a sudden influx of refugees into Ottoman Turkey, resulting in a surprise outbreak in Constantinople that quickly overruns the entire city.

February 1756 - Imperial forces are unable to contain the infection as the Grey Rot has already contaminated the Danube. Outbreaks occur throughout all of the Balkans as the region is thrown into anarchy.

March 1756 - By this time, the infection has a significant presence in southern Poland and the Ukraine. The Rot is held back only by the sheer military might of the Holy Roman Empire, and the effective closing of all rivers to Western Europe. The petty squabbles of Western Europe that would have led to the Seven Years’ War are set aside in the hasty Treaty of Nice to deal with the threat.

April 1756 - Ottoman refugees in the Caucasus discover that the infected freeze when exposed to sub-zero temperatures. Subsequently, a risky attempt is made by the Russian Empire to lure the horde into the northeast cold to perish. Meanwhile, the Grey Rot breaks through the Alps, rendering the German states dead in the water.

May 1756 - Martial law is enacted in France, Spain, and Great Britain as refugees from eastern Europe spill over into those areas, fleeing a dying Holy Roman Empire. As Polish boats cross the Baltic to escape to the Scandinavian cold, British battleships patrol the English Channel, boarding refugee ships at random and sinking those with suspected infected on board. The craze to get to America, long simmering since February, reaches a climax as hundreds of members of the French, Spanish, and British nobility begin to escape across the Atlantic.

June 1756 - Britain, France, Spain, Russia and the Scandinavian states form the Council of Lyons, an ad hoc committee whose ultimate goal is to cease the Grey Rot. The first ordinance of the council is to deploy a coalition force in Prussia and along the Rhine to consolidate a ‘last border’ against the infected horde.

August 1756 - Correspondence with Russia becomes more and more intermittent as the government in Moscow is forced to temporarily relocate to allow for the Imperial Army to lure the dead further into the east. Meanwhile, the North American colonies grow more and more discontent with the massive amount of refugees (and therefore risk of the disease) they are forced to receive by their colonial overlords, with minor riots and civil unrest sparking in French Louisiana.

September 1756 - A ghoul is dispatched aboard a refugee ship docking in New York harbor, adding to the paranoia in the North American colonies. The province of Georgia, in a near-suicidal defiance of British colonial mandate, refuses to accept any more refugees from the Caribbean, and it is clear war will be inevitable if the refusal is upheld.

October 1756 - A huge outbreak occurs in Nassau, the Bahamas, that forces the colonial counterparts of the Council of Lyons to quarantine the entire island. Ships that departed before the official enactment of the quarantine make their way to St. Alexander, North Carolina.

November 1756 - Present day. The Southern Colonies are on the brink of rebellion, nobody knows whether the Russians have routed the eastern horde yet, and you are on the last ship from Kingston into Saint Alexander.[/hider]