That’s good to know, I’ll have to find a way around that.

So I think Lise was upper middle class prior to running away to bang Dracula and likely educated enough to find all sorts of references to when humanity knew more.

So magic in Castlevania is mostly elemental and offensive, and it belongs to the educated class. A mage can cause earthquakes, create rain, snap their fingers for fire, and force choke someone but that’s the large part of their powers. A creative person could absolutely come up with some mundane utilities (irrigation, leveling land, fires without fuel in winter, etc.) but then it would be more of a life hack then it is transformative to the culture. Especially since mages seem to be in short supply and the church is down with burning witches.

(I’m cheating a bit by having wards be a thing, but order of ecclesia had glyphs, and portrait of ruin had magical painting so clearly we don’t know the full scope of magic)

So I think Jesus was the first crusade against the vampires that succeeded at least partially which is how the church got to be such a thing. Once you prove a thing can be done, more people will do it. And of course people succeeded in the past but I think that the vamps were pretty on it with a cull immediately afterward so those stories never got out. But the whole Jesus thing was too public and they were too apathetic to get on it.

So I kinda found them to be a mix of both, the caravans, historic persecution, and pograms were features of both Jewish people and Romani. I mostly lean Jewish because I like the idea of Sypha speaking ladino as her first language, hence the Spanish accent