The Draug (thesecretwrold)  

The Norsemen who fought in the Darkness War paid a great price for their victory.

None of the boats that set off from the North American coast would return home with their crew unchanged. Some would not return at all, but those that did would travel through the roiling fogbanks and alien weed stretching out from that accursed sea-grave: the Filth manifested, gathering under their fingernails like soot, catching in their throats like smoke, running fingers through their nightmares. And in their nightmares, it found the tales of the Draug.

By the time they returned to their coastal villages, the Vikings had fallen sick, and the sickness spread despite the administering of their dreamspeakers and shamans: worse, it overcame them, too, in their trances. In the course of weeks the once-thriving villages were left abandoned, for outsiders to wonder what had drawn them all out to sea. It was the call of the darkness, gathering its newfound instruments, bringing them back to escalate the physical and mental changes in their bodies beneath the waves. Not dead, but now consumed by some horrible unlife, these Draug shed their old skins in the brine to grow tougher, colder flesh. The matter they sloughed off in the primordial deep joined with the Filth weed, coalescing into new forms, colonies and pods that supported their new, unnatural reproductive cycle.

In the years to come, they would prey on seafaring nations - the cause of a hundred ghost ship tales - drowning the crews, putting them to work as slaves and eventual material for the creation of new Draug. Now, the Draug are on the warpath, empowered by the activity of commanding whispers and dark dreams...

The source of this information (the secret world website) [1]