Towards the end of my second year at college, I got a hankering to run a Victorian occult investigators campaign. This was 1978. There wasn’t yet GURPS or Cthulhu by Gaslight, so I used white box D&D rules only with spells capped at 2nd level. 3rd level spells were possible too, but only if found on scrolls. That way it wouldn’t all get too munchkin.
That was the idea. It didn’t stop the PCs slapping charm spells on suspects and just asking if they committed the crime, so investigation took a back seat to the usual OSR donnybrook with demons. If I were running it today I'd use a variant of the Dagon Warriors rules with sorcerers as well as psionics but spell-casting capped at maybe 3rd rank (4th rank from scrolls).
We had three player-characters. Father Simon Arkayne (Steve Foster) was a Catholic priest. A.X.E. Knolsbet (Andy Booth) was a gentleman detective and magic-user. And Tufton Beamish, Lord Beauchamp (Chris Elston) was a nobleman with a penchant for derring-do.
In the absence of a lot of spell-casting, there was much use of revolvers (there were few legal restrictions on those in 1890s Britain), sword-sticks and fisticuffs. The characters investigated murder cases, usually with a cult connection like this, often embroiling them in battles with mummies, werewolves or Babylonian demons. Sexton Blake and the Demon God was on TV and I had been a devotee of Sherlock Holmes in my teens. Blend those influences with Doctor Strange's interdimensional forays and a dash of Carnacki and John Silence (and, though I hate to admit it, Jules de Grandin) and you have a sense of what the games were like.
In fact, talking of Jules de Grandin...
That scene is taken straight from one of our adventures -- which, since it spilled over into the summer vacation, we had to complete by post. Paper letters with stamps, I mean, email not being a thing in those benighted times. Here's part of the very write-up I sent to the players:
The following term we even recorded a session in Steve's college rooms. That was long before actual play was a thing, and I have no idea if the cassette tape (1978, remember) still exists, but if I should come across it in a box in the attic, I'll digitize it and put it online.
I see you’ve had AI rework your original pen-and-ink artwork!
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember that Arkayne was to be played by Patrick Troughton.
I wish I'd remembered that. Copilot is good enough now that I could have given it casting notes.
DeleteI did think about including my old sketches alongside the AI versions, but they really look embarrassingly scrappy in comparison!
Just in case anyone is interested in seeing my original drawings (not nearly as good as Copilot's versions, I'm warning you) I've done a short post about them here.
DeleteGreat stuff Dave! I hope you find those lost tapes - or should that be gramophone records?
ReplyDeleteI think that Father Simon Arkayne (love the Patrick Troughton casting note from Steve!) must have attended the same seminary as Father John Pentagram, a character who's been noodling around my head a- while. Pentagram is a reformed user of black- magic, now a Catholic priest, but rumoured by some to be searching for a way to awaken amnesiac Elder Gods from amongst the serried ranks of the Saints...
At least you didn't say wax cylinders, John!
DeleteI briefly played a Jesuit priest, Father Gideon Tyndale, in a recent Victorian Cthulhu mythos campaign, but found that Catholicism and the Cthulhu mythos didn't really fit in the same game universe. The advantage of the 1978 campaign was that it was traditional occult stuff with black magic and demons; Father Arkayne was in his element.
Oh, yes, you're right about Catholicism and Cthulhuism not mixing; when I say Elder Gods here I'm thinking not of the indescribable- infinitely- tentacled lot, whose blasphemous abhorrence blows all our brains bits, but to those gods and goddesses of Pagan antiquity smuggled into the Christian cannon as patron saints...
DeleteOh yes, John, I did realize that. Some saints remembering their real origins as Elder Gods has a nice resonance with Derek Jacobi's Master opening that fob watch and Mike Moran accidentally reading "atomic" backwards and remembering his identity as Miracleman. Your idea sounds exactly the kind of case Father Arkayne & co would investigate.
DeleteThanks Dave! That "fob watch" scene was a good one.
DeleteI've this week heard that Pentagram is off to carry out research with the Vatican Excavations office, in the lost city of the pagan dead below St Peter's. I'll keep you posted...
How could they go wrong with Derek Jacobi, John? Other than regenerating him as John Simm, I mean. Looking forward to despatches from under the Vatican -- which, come think of it, could be the title of a Doris Lessing novel.
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