Slowly reshaping the basic idea I had for the game into being more in line with Romanian history and myth.  It will hardly be 100% true to the culture there but I'm blending what actually exists with the Castlevania + Soulslike vibe more closely.  Here's an example of something I've added in response to what I've been learning:

Karagöz/Shadow Theaters

Karagöz is a Turkish tradition of using animal hide puppets in front of light sources to tell stories.  These shows have always had a grotesque and satirical nature but, after the advent of the Curse, they are just as often used to teach children critical information about the terribly dangerous world around them.  People from other cultures have developed their own variants upon interacting with the Turkish culture in New Wallachia.

I'm working on some kind of system to represent the rather nebulous nature of monsters in Romanian mythology and folklore.  The clear-cut divisions familiar to Dungeons and Dragons derived RPGs don't really match the vibe, so to speak.  For starters, vampires and werewolves were not necessarily different things, at least all the time, in Romanian folktales.  I'm debating on how to represent something like this efficiently without dragging down the pace of the game.  My tentative idea is to have a few vague templates that can be quickly tweaked with a menu of options.  This will require a lot of testing to get whatever I'm going to do here into a quick and relatively easy to use state.