Rasputin
Any alt where the breach point dumps you into their version of World War I is bad enough. But throw in zalozhniy roaming no-man's-land, vodyanyk in the rivers, and leshyk in the forest, and it's even worse. If you manage to get far enough behind the lines, it doesn't get much better. There's a safehouse we've got in Petrograd, and 'safe' is a sick joke. If you're desperate to hook up, find another breacher. Buddy of mine wandered off with some Natasha he met at the bar, we found a few pieces of him the next morning. I don't wanna think what happened to the rest.
History
The history of the world termed 'Rasputin' was fairly close to Baseline until 1916. Then, the attempted assasination of Rasputin went horribly wrong. In this world, his mystical powers were real, granted by pacts with dark figures of ancient lore. It is probable he was a student of Khoschei the Deathless, or had somehow learned the same rites, for upon what should have been his death, his body flared with power. The assassins, the Moika Palace, and much of the surrounding area was turned to ash. A dark and malevolent energy erupted, scouring the globe. The world changed. Horrors of legend became manifest. Everything became darker and colder, literally and spiritually.
The Darkening World
The first and most obvious change was to electricity. Telegraphs, telephones, and radios went dead. Batteries could not be charged, and lost all stored power. Cars could not run (except for diesels). Electric lights worked, but sporadically; the range of power from a generator was very limited, so while a building could be electrified, a city or a nation could not. A ship with its own generator could keep working, though it was a constant struggle for the engineers.
Supply chains collapsed. Anything relying on power lines, such as many factories not run by steam, simply stopped. Truck-based transport ended. Trains could keep running, as long as the mechanisms that brought them coal to burn did not fail, too.
Scientists attributed this to "unexpected sunspot activity", which also accounted for the global cooling and general dimming of the light. It is constantly said that this is a cyclic, temporary phenomenon which will end as swiftly as it started... someday.
The Isolated World
If you want to go have a drink with the locals, go in a group, and prepare for a brawl. Our Russian is fluent, our credentials perfect, but we aren't natives of the city. They don't need to suspect we're from another world; our own claims of coming from Moscow or Kyiv are enough to set them off. They don't like strangers here, and anyone they didn't grow up with is a stranger.
Communication dropped to the speed of travel. No message could travel faster than a train or steamship. (Or signal tower, for what that was worth.) It could now take days for news to travel the length of England; weeks for the United States. People began to turn inwards, as well. A farming town now had to feed itself, not send its product to some bakery in a distant city. No one knew what was happening on the front lines, and orders were delivered by couriers, if they survived.
More and more, people began to fear the night. Travelers between towns tended to vanish. In the alleys of cities and along the roads between farmhouses in the villages, things stalked anyone foolish enough to wander alone. In the trenches, those on watch were found the next morning as corpses: Some bloodless, some all too covered in their own blood. A stranger became a thing to be shunned and feared, especially if they arrived after sunset.
The Cold World
Global temperatures have dropped. Winters are longer and harsher, with snow falling in places it never has; summer are short. Local food shortages are common, and famine is a constant fear. Trains, the one remaining form of rapid transit, must constantly fight sudden blizzards. Tracks and bridges are in constant need of repair from a level of sustained cold they were not engineered to withstand. During winter, many towns are isolated for a month or more, and sometimes, when there's finally a thaw, rescuers find scenes of horror as the trapped residents turned on each other to survive. The term "Donnerville" has entered the American vocabulary in whispers; other nations have similar words.
Mother Russia
The October Revolution never happened. Rasputin's power grew, as did his control over the Tsar. Purges of nobles suspected of being part of his assasination, combined with a new secret police, cemented his indirect rule. His agents were called Strigoi, and it was not far from the truth. Worker uprisings were ruthlessly suppressed, the soviets were infiltrated and destroyed. Not that the capitalist class was doing any better; industries that functioned without electricity were given over to appointed managers loyal to the Tsar -- that is, to Rasputin -- with or without the consent of their former owners. The dark, satanic mills became all too literal under their new owners.
The Tsar views the eastward expansion of the Russian Empire as his legacy, or so he says publicy; who knows the last time he had a genuine thought of his own? Despite public claims of only seeking to restore the 'true borders' of Russia, there is little doubt Rasputin seeks global dominion.
The Russian Orthodox Church is a hollow shell; a few priests recognized what was happening and vanished with whatever ancient books and scrolls they could find to give them hints on how to find it. In countless small villages, the local church remains the center of social life, but the lure of all kind of cults, sects, and secret societies is strong. The holidays, feasts, and celebrations remain the same, but everyone from the humblest peasant to the most sophisticated urbanite knows where the real power is, though none speak it.
Current Situation
It is 1922 locally. The Great War still rages -- or more accurately, squats in sullen bitterness. Lines have barely moved, though those which have favor the Russians. The breach opens in an area of active combat in western Estonia, where the Germans are being slowly pushed out.
The Americas remain resolutely isolationist, even more so than before. The collapse of telegraph and telephone systems means days of travel to communicate between San Francisco and Washington. The "wild west" is rapidly returning as each town or county needs to rely on its own resources, knowing help might be a week or more away, by the time a message is sent and received, longer if there's no train line. And there's little interest in expanding lines, or doing anything else to restore rapid communication without electricity.
Anti-colonial movements are spreading rapidly in Africa and India. Cut off from their homelands, the colonial powers find themselves without resources and with a new threat: The forces unleashed by Rasputin are particularly hostile to invaders and outsiders. The locals, while hardly immune, also retain knowledge of wards, rites, and rules which can placate or redirect a hostile creature, at least some of the time. Myth and the new reality mesh imperfectly, but it's better than nothing.
BREACH Operations
BREACH has a few dendrioccultists studying what they can find, and more mundane agents looking to get a secure route to London, Berlin, or Paris where they might covertly support them against the Russians. They also have to deal with Baseline Russian agents who hope to form an alliance with the current Tsarist government. "Just kill Rasputin" seems to be out of the question as a practical, rather than ethical, matter; BREACH still has only a limited knowledge of working magic, but has enough to know it's well outclassed in that department. Simply staying alive and feeding as much info on the horrors back to Baseline as they can, in the hopes of developing working counter-measures, is their current goal.
Horrors In The Dark
Mostly they come out at night. Mostly.
The creatures that roam this world are lured by fear, and strengthened by shadow. The knowledge this is so can be a self-reinforcing effect; if you know monsters attack when you're alone in the dark, you'll be frightened, and knowing fear draws them only makes you more afraid. Traveling in groups can help, but only when the group itself doesn't begin to sense its own isolation. A gang of friends singing and laughing as they return from a party is safe... until one thinks they may be lost, that the street isn't familiar, that no windows show a crack of light from behind them, that the sounds of city life have died... and then the fear spreads among them, and a pack of something will come upon them from the swirling gloom.
The Power of the Mob
The horrors thrive on not being seen, except by victims. Bright lights and many witnesses weaken them. If they are seen by more than twice their number (i.e., 2 undead facing 5 people clearly perceiving them), they suffer a -1 to ST, DX, and Will checks, increasing to -2 if there are 2 'extra' witnesses, -3 if there are 3-4, -4 if there are 5-7, and so on. Very powerful creatures (over 250 points) can face 3x their number, and truly monstrous ones may not suffer these effects at all -- Rasputin regularly appears to large crowds with no evident ill effect.
In addition:
"Clearly seen" means at most a -3 to PER checks for vision due to darkness.
Anyone who is currently frightened doesn't count towards the total. Anything that forces a fright check, such as particularly gory killing, can flip the script. Kindly GMs (a myth) might wish to give a bonus to such checks equal to the penalty currently suffered by the monster.
This is why a lage crowd of torch-wielding peasants can be a legitimate threat to a cornered monster. Most also have a weakness to actual sunlight, not merely to bright light (which only lets them be seen clearly, triggering the above.) Fortunately, the nature of the world makes truly sunny days rare. The clouds and gloom mean damage is typically 1d/30 minutes, mitigated by heavy clothes. However, a true sunny day will do 1d/minute, and no amount of clothing is sufficient; if a beam of the sun can reach them, through a window or a crack in a wall, it will burn.
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