Victorian-era D&D

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.

Killing no murder?

It was a Victorian setting, and the player-characters had pursued a mad scientist to the top of the world. (There's something about mad scientists and the Arctic.) They trounced her hirelings, broke up her lab, put paid to her callous experiments, then one of the characters snapped. 'We'll never bring her to trial,' he said before giving her both barrels of his shotgun.

That summary execution might seem shocking, but I've been hardened by years of refereeing. We had one player-character whose thing was butchering 'witches' -- a term he seemingly applied to any woman with a scheme in the pre-industrial era. On Tekumel I've seen captives hurled in their hundreds into the fiery pits of sacrifice, and slaves slaughtered to pay a demon for a minor gift.

Most horrible of all (it still makes my flesh creep) was the time in Crossgate when the characters got hold of their longtime enemy Lord Belvoir, who had unwisely stopped at the manor house without his men. It was Twelfth Night, but what they did made Lavinia's fate in Titus Andronicus look tame. They truly got medieval on his ass -- but then, it's Legend, so 'medieval' is exactly right. Isaac Babel would have recognized it:

'I'll put it this way. With shooting you just get rid of the person. Shooting lets him off easy, and it lets you off easy too. With shooting you'll never get down to the soul -- where it is in somebody, how it shows itself. So I don't spare myself. More than once I've stamped on a foe for an hour or more. You see, I want to get to know what life is like, what it's really all about.'

As the referee, it's not my job to comment on the characters' deeds. Nothing should be out of bounds. Roleplaying, like art in general, should be free to go anywhere, and in refereeing I have to be like God, who never has anything to say when a child is raped or a man has his hands macheted off. After the game it's a different matter, and then I will sometimes confess that the PCs' moral attitudes give me a shudder. I regard capital punishment as barbaric and vigilantes as scum. Vigilantes who dress up their killings as justice are committing plain murder.

Naturally the players get prickly about that. They don't want to be thought of as murder hoboes. They see themselves as heroes -- and so they should. If you're in character, of course you think you're in the right. Hitler believed he was a good guy just as much as Gandhi did.

'I'm not the Red Skull,' one player retorted, 'I'm Judge Dredd.' If the judges of Mega-City One existed in real life, they'd be the goon squad of somebody like Ramzan Kadyrov, not stalwart defenders of civilized society. But let's face it, pretty much all cops in drama are rule-bending, violent, arbitrary, partial, unstable and dangerous. Stories have their own rules and (one of the big mistakes a beginning writer can make, this) likeability is overrated. Player-characters should be interesting, they don't have to be likeable -- at least, they don't have to be likeable to civilians in a comfortable 21st century democracy.

A murder hobo PC is boring. They'll shoot every NPC in the face and they do that because the player's imagination is too limited to see the NPCs as real people. But characters who wreak terrible violence because of their own sense of justice, however warped and self-righteous that may be, can be very interesting indeed. They're Bond, or Dredd, or the Punisher, or Philip Jennings. There's an inner contradiction that has to go somewhere, and the player is inhabiting the character thoroughly which means they're on an interesting journey too. Consider for example E M Forster's self-analysis of his time in Egypt:

'I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudice, but in ten months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pump-shitting [pissing] or eating or laughing or anythinging—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian towards the native. It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.'

Forster had found in himself a knee-jerk racism that horrified him. He didn't go so far as murdering anyone, of course, but it was nonetheless a darkness within that he came face to face with and, with his scrupulous honesty, confessed to. Roleplaying lets us do the same and come away knowing ourselves and being better people for it. Or so I hope of my more violently inclined players, anyway.

Pointing the finger

British literary critics of the 19th century had the notion of the "Young Lady Standard", which was a kind of family-friendly U-rating for novels that would not offend the sensibilities of a Victorian girl. Because of this, British literature often shied away from the sort of forthright depiction of life you find in French or Russian novels of the time. There was a feeling on the Continent that literature was an art form and had a right, indeed a responsibility, to mirror life warts and all. In Britain literature was the forerunner of early-evening television.

Even so, authors like Jane Austen were not the twee and cosy yarn-spinners that many suppose. Lady Susan Vernon is an amoral, manipulative adventuress who deserves a place in the ranks of dark antiheroes alongside Vic Mackey and Walter White; Catherine Morland runs afoul of predatory sexual vindictiveness; Lizzie Bennet takes on a real-life dragon for very high stakes; Becky Sharp is willing to betray even those who love her just to squirrel away some cash. Nonetheless, though depths of human depravity are certainly there to be inferred in 19th century British literature, those are all pre-watershed conflicts. None of them is described with the uncompromising raw honesty and occasional breathtaking brutality of authors like Balzac or Chekhov.

Dickens wrote stories to stir your emotions, but he and his readers knew they were parlour entertainment, to be read by the whole family -- a "safe space" in entertainment. A Victorian paterfamilias who opened a novel to be confronted with the likes of Madame Bovary might well have stormed back to the bookshop and thrown it through the window.

I think something similar is behind the uproar we sometimes see nowadays over "unsuitable" content in roleplaying games. There are some people who play games the way those Victorian families read novels; there are others who expect games with no holds barred. This has led to the concept of the "x-card" -- sadly nothing to do with homo superior, but a mechanism to interrupt games whose scenes or subject matter a player is unhappy with. To quote from the blog I linked to there:

"The x-card is used to signal that a boundary has been crossed or that a player is not OK with the content. The game stops immediately, and discussion shifts to the reason why the card was used."

For me that's as absurd as calling a halt to a disturbing play or movie. If you don't like what you're seeing, don't tell me about it; there's the exit. But there's a category disconnect here. I regard roleplaying games as art, no different from literature, theatre, cinema, poetry, and painting. The people who advocate x-cards want their games to be morally uplifting and to avoid upsetting anybody, just like those family novels for the Victorian fireside. We have different expectations.

I have a player who doesn't like horror scenarios. If we're going to be playing a horror campaign, that's OK; she sits it out. Sometimes there's a grey area. A scenario may not be overtly intended as horror, in the sense of belonging to the horror genre, but horrific things happen. There have been a few times when my players have shocked me to the core with some of the things they're willing to do. And that's fine. It's why I play, in fact, to see those things that emerge unexpectedly from characterization -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes very nasty. It's the same when writing characters. You ask yourself how far they will go, what lines won't they cross, and the answer is often revelatory.

What do you do if you come up with something you know will be shocking, whether as a player or a referee? If I thought my players couldn't handle it then I'd keep it to use in a story, perhaps. But really, if my players were like that then we'd soon part company. They and I know we're not setting any limits.

Taking the blog post I cited again, one of that player's boundaries is "I don't want any romance involving my character." But it's really hard to plan that kind of thing in advance, especially in the improv style of play that gives the best games. When refereeing, I wouldn't have an NPC profess love for a PC if I didn't think the player was capable of running with it. (I'm talking about their acting ability and imagination, of course.) What if one player-character falls in love with another? I'd much rather they both played it. Unrequited love is one option there, and it could develop in interesting directions as we know from countless TV shows and novels. It would be pretty disappointing if a player just said, "I don't want to roleplay that." In that case play your blocking. Reject them, spurn their advances in-character. Don't tell everyone about it.

But what about games in a public forum? Twenty years ago I went along to a convention to sign Fabled Lands books but soon got roped into a series of fascinating mini-RPG scenarios run by the guys behind West Point Extra Planetary Academy. Each game had a different setting and was built as a moral quandary to be played out in twenty minutes. They could hardly have started by saying, "This scenario deals with issues X, Y and Z." It's the trigger warning problem. If you're trying to capture a genuine sense of surprise in the game, you can't give too much away upfront. (Not to mention that the evidence indicates that trigger warnings are of no use in any case to the genuinely traumatized.)

Why have these debates crept into games of late? I think partly because roleplaying is becoming -- well, not mass market entertainment, not by any stretch, but certainly it has opened up beyond the hardcore gaming demographic of the early days. Aficionados take a sophisticated approach to their hobby. The casual fan tends to have a less mature outlook.

Also, American culture has always had a much more censorious streak than European. The idea of shutting down a discussion because it offends somebody's moral code is perhaps natural if your country was founded by Puritans. And because of social media, the Overton window has shifted away from liberalism towards moralism. Hence gripes like this, that maybe do make sense over in the US (American friends, feel free to chip in) but strike most Europeans as potty.

And because most roleplaying derives from genre fiction, and genre sensibilities tend to be a little less grown-up than proper literature, there's a tendency to expect roleplaying games to stick to the soft-soap forms of conflict you get in traditional SF and fantasy. Witness the outcries over Game of Thrones when the writers stepped outside genre norms -- even though that was pretty much the entire thesis of the show from day one.

Anyway, enough theorizing. What do we do about it? Well, surely few gamers want to sit around listening while one player explains their reasons for halting the game. The next stop on that line is struggle sessions, which nobody will enjoy. But those people's sense of offence seems genuinely to overwhelm them, and there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they disapprove of. So we're going to need better ways to signal which kind of roleplayer you are. High literary with anything goes, or pulp with puritan boundaries? As long as everyone around the table knows what they're letting themselves in for, I'm sure we can all keep on gaming without needing to call the thought police.

"The Bloofer Ladies" (scenario)

A little late for Halloween, here's a short adventure seed for a Victorian horror campaign, possibly but not necessarily something like Tremulus, Call of Cthulhu or The Yellow King. This adventure assumes some background:

1. The player-characters were previously involved, months or even years before the events of this scenario, in an adventure such as “The Night of the Jackals” in Cthulhu by Gaslight (see video playthrough below), or any scenario which ends with a mansion being gutted by fire. 
2. The villain of "The Night of the Jackals" adventure is now in a mental asylum in Hampstead.

It’s not necessary for you to have run that specific adventure, just as long as there has been some earlier scenario that ended with a house fire. That ought to be easy enough to engineer in a Victorian horror/investigative campaign!

An invitation to the theatre
It is Tuesday, 4 August 1891. Bram Stoker (44 years old) sends a message asking the characters to come to the Lyceum Theatre at lunchtime to talk about some eerie experiences. It is feasible that at least one of the characters has met Bram Stoker before (at a dinner party, perhaps, or at their club) but that’s not essential for the scenario, as long as he could know them by repute.

The Lyceum is in Wellington Street, off the Strand, with the Wellington pub on the corner. As the characters arrive, Henry Irving (53 years old) is rehearsing a scene in a play Stoker has written. Stoker is business manager of the Lyceum but is not yet established as a novelist, though he recently had some lukewarm reviews for The Snake's Pass.

Irving is not impressed, disparaging Stoker in front of Annie Oakley (31) and her husband Frank E Butler (44) who are both crack shots with a .22 rifle and are on a break from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which is currently touring Europe.

Irving finishes the scene, one where he comes up behind the actor playing Jonathan Harcourt (sic) who cuts himself while shaving. In character as the Count, Irving reaches for the blood on Harcourt’s cheek but recoils from a crucifix around his neck.

‘Take care,’ says Irving, putting little feeling into his delivery of the lines. ‘Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country. And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!’

Stoker, watching from the stalls, jumps up brandishing a copy of the script. ‘Then you break the shaving-glass, Henry.’

‘Oh? Why don’t I do this while I’m at it?’ And Irving slowly tears up the script. ‘Absolute twaddle, Bram. “The children of the night, what music they make.” Pah.’

‘Well, maybe if you said it with an accent…’

‘I know how to read a damned line. And as for “Count Wampeer – ’

‘Vampire, please.’

‘It’s been done to death in the penny dreadfuls, old chum. Warney the Wampeer. Forget it. I might as well stick a stake through my career and bury it as play this old hokum. Just stick to managing the accounts, will you? I say this as a friend – you have no more talent as a playwright than McGonagall has a poet.’

Stoker’s story
With Irving’s criticism stinging his ears, a flushed Stoker takes the player characters to his office. There, if distracted from his public embarrassment, he explains why he asked them to come and see him.

In 1885 (on October 24th to be exact) Stoker went to look at the wreck of a Russian ship called the Dmitry, which had been washed ashore at Whitby. There was a coffin broken open on the sand and he remembers the crest: a crude copper symbol, a rozeta solara with a serpent or dragon curled over it.

Stoker goes on: ‘A large black dog raced across the sand and started barking at me. I conceived the notion that it was warning me off the casket. Probably it was nothing of the kind. Perhaps the beast was merely made nervous by the smell of death. But it gave me an idea for a play I may one day write.’

That was six years ago, and Stoker had almost forgotten it until an incident near Hampstead Heath a couple of weeks ago:

‘It was evening. I’d emerged from the Heath after a long walk and was looking around for a pub. I was wandering deep in thought, so I don’t know the road I was on. A carriage pulled up and a man and woman got out. The woman was beautiful but very pale, and stared ahead of her as though in a dream. She wore a cloak, under which her dress was white. The man, whose face I scarcely noticed though I recall he was tall and gaunt, led her into the driveway of a large house. I had the impression the house was unoccupied, though I couldn’t see it for the high hedge that surrounded the property. As I crossed the road, I happened to glance at the open carriage and saw that it bore the same symbol inside the door that I saw on the coffin at Whitby: a serpent on a rozeta solara. At first it didn’t register, and I had gone a few yards before I realized where I’d seen it before – or thought I had, for I had barely glanced into the carriage. I hesitated, and had a mind to go back for another look. Then the man came back out of the drive.

‘It was like looking at a moving image in a zoopraxiscope. He was at the hedge bordering the property, or so I thought, but as I turned my head he was already passing me. And as I then looked back it was as though another blink had occurred, and he was already climbing back into the coach. It rolled off and was swallowed in darkness. It was most odd. It seemed to me as though he had either moved at unnerving speed, though he seemed merely to be walking at a normal pace, or else I experienced a series of momentary blackouts. For a moment I thought of looking in the driveway of the house to see what had become of the woman, but my nerve failed me. At any rate, I abandoned all thought of a pint and went straight home. Then yesterday he saw this piece in the paper.’

He hands them yesterday’s Westminster Gazette:

A HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY

The neighbourhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines as “The Kensington Horror,” or “The Stabbing Woman,” or “The Woman in Black.” During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a “bloofer lady.” It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighbourhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a “bloofer lady” had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favourite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the “bloofer lady” is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the “bloofer lady” should be the popular rôle at these al fresco performances. Our correspondent naïvely says that even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of these grubby-faced little children pretend—and even imagine themselves—to be.

There is, however, possibly a serious side to the question, for some of the children, indeed all who have been missed at night, have been slightly torn or wounded in the throat. The wounds seem such as might be made by a rat or a small dog, and although of not much importance individually, would tend to show that whatever animal inflicts them has a system or method of its own. The police of the division have been instructed to keep a sharp look-out for straying children, especially when very young, in and around Hampstead Heath, and for any stray dog which may be about.

“The Westminster Gazette,” 3rd August.
Extra Special.

THE HAMPSTEAD HORROR. ANOTHER CHILD INJURED.
The “Bloofer Lady.”

We have just received intelligence that another child, missed last night, was only discovered late in the morning under a furze bush at the Shooter’s Hill side of Hampstead Heath, which is, perhaps, less frequented than the other parts. It has the same tiny wound in the throat as has been noticed in other cases. It was terribly weak, and looked quite emaciated. It too, when partially restored, had the common story to tell of being lured away by the “bloofer lady.”

Stoker himself cannot remember other details, such as where the house was, but hypnosis or even just careful questioning would help. For example, he was on the north side of the heath and he said the carriage was soon lost in the darkness, meaning the house must have been quite near to where the electric street-lights run out.

Investigation
Things the characters can find out:

• The house turns out to be the burnt-out ruin of Kandahar House, which in this scenario is located on the Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, east of which the newly installed electric street-lighting peters out. 
• The names of the two abducted children were Sally Vane and Jimmy Murdin. (Whether they can be rescued or are already dead depends on the bleakness of tone you're striving for.)
• The symbol Stoker saw (he sketches it) is Romanian and is the ancestral crest of the Counts Vârcolac, a noble house now thought extinct.

At the ruined house
The players have been here before, and will remember the house when a family was living here (Colonel Hollingsworth’s, in the original scenario), so there is something melancholy in seeing the sooty brickwork, charred timbers, blistered paintwork and weeds growing through the weather-ravaged ruin. The smell is of dank ashes, brick dust and decaying wood.

The stairs are unsafe but can be used with caution to reach the upper stories. The characters find evidence that somebody has been searching the house: fallen rafters that have clearly been recently moved, cupboards that largely escaped the fire but that show signs of having been broken into, and so on.

The “Bloofer Ladies” will be encountered up in the vast cavernous space of the attic. They are to all intents and purposes vampires, though in our campaign that’s a science fictional effect (engineered retrovirus) rather than a mark of the undead.

Count Vârcolac is long gone. The characters may encounter him eventually, but not in this scenario. He left his “brides” here to search for an item in Col Hollingsworth’s collection of ancient artifacts. It doesn’t much matter what that item is; it can be a MacGuffin for a future adventure.

The Butterworth Hospital 
A private mental asylum in Hampstead run by Dr Algernon Mahler. Other useful NPCs are a burly male warder, Stackpoole, and a nervous young psychiatrist, Dr Hiram Carver.

Mounir Faez from the published “Night of the Jackals” adventure is a patient here. Faez is unable to take control of complex minds, but is slowly building a “hive mind” of insects he has captured. That’s just a seed you can build on or ignore as you see fit; it’s not an essential element of the scenario, though it could of course inspire Stoker (if the characters give him a full account later) to create the character of Renfield.

Notes

There are no real twists here. The characters go looking for vampires in Hampstead and they find them. OK then. In my campaign the surprise factor was that they didn't expect vampires (it's not a fantasy game, as I mentioned) and the fun was to be had in meeting Stoker & company and experiencing the retooled elements of Dracula. I tend to use my notes as a springboard for improvisation, and so rarely bother to pre-plan twists as I expect to use the "plot" as a McGuffin while the characters' actions and interplay create the story. If you're going to run the adventure, it will work best as the teaser episode of a longer search for Count Vârcolac, something like this.

"The End of the Line" (scenario)

This adventure was written for GURPS but would work equally well in a Cthulhu By Gaslight campaign, or any rules that support a Victorian or Edwardian cosmic horror game. It owes a lot to HPL's "The Whisperer in Darkness" so, if you don't know the story, read that first.

The characters have been abducted by Mi-Go and are being transported to Yuggoth (Eris) for preparation for the much longer journey to Carcosa (Aldebaran). This adventure should ideally follow on from an apparent TPK in a larger campaign, though you can also launch into it with a cold open, as I did.

The characters are all experiencing an illusion of relative normality. Instead of a spaceship to Eris, they seem to be on a night train heading north. Though they are disembodied brains trundling around in metal canisters with fragile metal grippers for arms, they see themselves as normal.

Personally I loathe describing roleplaying games in that Hollywood jargon of acts and plot points, but for once it could be helpful, so here goes:

Act I: THE NIGHT TRAIN 

The characters are just brains on trolleys, on a small ship bound for Yuggoth. So an actual Mi-Go (if they confront one) will be unbeatable.
1. Card Tricks
2. The Faceless Man

Act II: THE TOWN 
They are still brains on trolleys, but if they escape they may take the Mi-Go unawares (ie unarmed) in which case all of them together might be a match for one or two Mi-Go. (But any such confrontation risks alerting the other Mi-Go, if the characters allow one to get away.)
1. Finding Cavor
2. The Morgue

Act III: THE SHIP 
They are now back in their own bodies but still hallucinating.
1. At the Docks
2. Across the Void

Epilogue: HOME AGAIN
Back on Earth, normality restored.
1. Landfall

Ways into the adventure
The version I ran started in medias res: ‘You’re on the night train to Scotland.’ Of course, it took very little time for the characters to start trying to figure out why they couldn’t remember boarding the train, or even the reason they were travelling.

I used two NPC characters in Act I who you may or may not need, depending on how you've brought the characters into the adventure:

The Good Friend
A Mi-Go construct taken from the characters’ memories of someone they trust. The Mi-Go are not clear on whether death is final, so in the case of my campaign the Good Friend was an NPC who had been killed years earlier. When the characters raised that very point, he responded blithely: ‘I like to be back in the swing of things. I don’t think it helps to cleave too strongly to logic, eh? It’s a very deceptive tool.’ His function is to keep the characters focussed on reaching their destination.

The Lost Comrade
This could be a missing or former player-character, or another NPC friend of the party – not dead, though, because he or she is not a construct, but has been abducted just like the characters have. The difference is that he or she has managed to see through the illusion and is trying to snap the others out of it.

THE NIGHT TRAIN

The characters are on a night train. They can’t see anything outside. Just darkness and scraps of steam flitting by. The train is very cold, and getting colder. They check their watches, which have stopped. In their cabins, they have their luggage and any equipment (guns, etc) they might normally travel with. Or so it appears.

The carriage they are in contains their own sleeping compartments, with a corridor running past, and the dining car. The doors at either end of the carriage are locked and they cannot get through them by any means, even though from time to time a steward or guard will appear who must have come through one of those doors.

Card Tricks
In the dining car, they see a man with his back to them performing magic tricks. This is the Good Friend. He asks them to join him for dinner. ‘You’ll be accompanying --- , no doubt,’ he says, mentioning the name of the Lost Comrade.

Where is the Lost Comrade? ‘Oh, a long way out,’ says the Good Friend. ‘We’ll have to go right to the end of the line.’

Check for claustrophobia. Since they are actually in much smaller spaces than they seem to be – the train and the steamer, that is – claustrophobia could be triggered without any obvious reason, and that is a clue that all is not what it seems.)

Some odd things:

• Bottles behind the bar – for a moment they all seemed to have blank labels 
• The deck of cards – for a moment they all seemed to be the ace of spades 
• The ashtray – didn’t notice the steward empty it 
• A man looks in from the corridor – just a silhouette of a figure in a long coat and floppy hat.

They will occasionally catch a glimpse of gangling men in long coats with floppy hats. These are the illusory form of the Mi-Go. If the hat is pulled off (not easy) it seems to be part of them and reveals momentarily a grey-pink "face" of thick frills and fins. Check IQ to avoid stun, check for Flashbacks, etc. My players soon took to calling these fellows the Mushroom Men.

A Mi-Go on the train can do anything to them: blindness, causing them to start melting. (A note of panic: what if they flow right down through the bottom of the train?)

The guard as he takes their tickets mutters something about them travelling to Carcosa.

The Faceless Man
Later, either when they are trying to sleep or are in the dining car, a figure with a scarf across his face tries to sneak (Stealth 26) into their compartments, get their bags and throw them off the train. This is the Lost Comrade, trying to snap them out of the illusion. If they pull off the scarf, they see he has no face.

The Lost Comrade
Punch 17   2d crush   plus Pressure Points 13
Wrestling 25   ST 22
Parry 17
HIT POINTS 30
Dodge 19  Armour 0  Stealth 26  Perception 26

If he can’t get their luggage, the Lost Comrade returns later and tries to abduct and bodily throw one of them off the train. If thwarted, he jumps just as the train passes over an unfeasibly massive suspension bridge. Possibly they are left holding something from the struggle: a mask of the Lost Comrade’s face.

If anyone has Flashbacks, they find something under a seat: it looks like crumpled paper but it’s a thin cellulose mask of the face of the steward.

More creepy stuff that might be revealed through Flashbacks:

1. Noticing that a newspaper another character was holding has crimped pages as if it had been gripped by a metal claw. 
2. Waking up, touching your face and feeling a mask. 
3. Catching a glimpse of yourself reflected in the window as a Meccano-type structure with a glass brain case, spindly gripper-tipped arms, and a cellulose mask face.
4. Machine oil stains in place of blood stains.
5. Rubber wheel-marks on the floor where you might have expected to see footprints.
6. An impression left on the bed in one of the sleeping compartments – not of a human form, but a heavy box.

The reality:
They are being conducted to Yuggoth, ie the dwarf planet Eris. The Good Friend isn’t really here, it’s just a Mi-Go construct to get them to cooperate.

They are in brain canisters throughout this sequence, so seeing through the illusion should carry a risk of mental breakdown.

Ways to see through it:

• Flashbacks: any Flashback gives some glimpse, albeit distorted, of the real situation. 
• Claustrophobia attacks can occur even in apparently large spaces – a hint that things are not as they seem.
• Hypnosis: can remove the illusion, but the character will need to pass a fright check not to immediately reject that and retreat into the illusion.

THE TOWN

They arrive and walk through billows of steam to find themselves in a town of dank, narrow alleys and cobbled streets. There’s a sweet scent of mushrooms in the air. Foggy. It’s still night.

If anyone has Flashbacks: they might feel a wall that’s smooth, like a painted board, or hear a whirring mechanical sound, something like that.

They hear footsteps behind them in the fog. Looking back, they see the tall cloaked figures in floppy hats.

If they tackle any Mi-Go at this stage, they have no chance of overcoming them. The Mi-Go are herding them to the lab (Cavor’s basement flat, as it seems). The Mi-Go plan is to convey them from Yuggoth (Eris) to Carcosa (Aldebaran). Their brains have been removed, and their bodies are being kept on Yuggoth for study.

Finding Cavor
They see a light over a narrow door. Down in a basement flat they meet a Scotsman called Lionel Cavor (pronounced “caver”). He offers them a drink but seems rather infirm, keeping a blanket over his knees next to the hissing gas fire.

If anyone has Flashbacks: they momentarily see Cavor as a waxwork. Drifting shapes like pinkish fungi adjust struts and arms to move the brandy he offers them. His voice comes from a metal box suspended behind the waxwork’s head.

Cavor indicates his telescope by the window. It’s pointing up through a grating and the foggy air, but if anyone looks through it and rotates the wheel on the side they will see, in succession:

1. A distant pale blue dot. 
2. Then ten times bigger, a cluster of stars centred on a tiny sun. 
3. Then part of the sweep of the Milky Way. 
4. Then an arm of a vortex of lights.
5. Then a flattened disk of lights. 
6. And further out: something like tendrils of smoke wrapped around the disk, extending from a pulsing blackness in the centre.
7. If they keep watching, they see the disk rotating as the tentacular thing sucks birthing stars into its central maw.

‘It is blind Azathoth ye see there!’ says Cavor. ‘See him batten on whole systems that will never live. A hundred thousand stars every eon, yet he’ll keep devouring till this galaxy is but a husk…

‘Were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare…’

Cavor refers to the rotation of the galaxy every 250 million years, and how the sweep of Azathoth’s polyp will either doom life on Earth this time or it won’t. That’s inevitable, it will either happen or it won’t. Of course, this being the 1890s, the characters will not be aware that our galaxy is only one of billions. If they know anything of astronomy, they may be aware of Herschel's estimate of the shape of the Milky Way, however, and so recognize the "disk of lights" for what it is. (Most astronomers in the late 19th century don't realize that it is rotating.)

Another chance for Flashbacks now, even the players who haven’t bought them as a mental disadvantage.

‘You should get back to the warm and your ain loved ones,’ Cavor reckons. ‘I’d take ma ticket and be on my way, but I’m waiting till I’m a bit firmer on ma feet. Ma ship’s the Selene, but if ye want to go home you’d best find your ain ship and your ain ticket.’

He’s worried, though; what if the “custodians” didn’t keep all his “bits”? (Ie body parts.)

Cavor also refers to his old friend. ‘He’s gone on ahead. Lang syne he’s been gone. I’d not like to go if there’s any chance he’d come back.’

He refers to Bedford, who has indeed been sent to Carcosa. They will find a cellulose mask of Bedford in Cavor’s bookcase which they can use to imitate him if they think of it. That will help get Cavor to talk more plainly.

And where is the Lost Comrade?

‘He’ll be in the Quiet Place, no doubt. That’s where they took ma friend. Past the Last Wall, you’ll find a square. It’s the building on the far side.’ ‘The Last Wall?’ ‘Last Wall and testament, man!’ Cavor laughs madly.

Items they can acquire here:

• Cavor says he wants to go on a cruise to warmer climes, nearer to the sun. He has the cruise ticket (he shows them) for when he's well enough.
• Cavor also has a monocle that reveals actual reality, Eyes of the Overworld style. Anyone using that will need to roll IQ (not Will) to avoid mental stun. This can trigger Flashbacks even if they make the roll.
• He also tells them to take a hat box to the morgue with a wee hammer. ‘Aye, you can have those. Ye may find them useful.’

Cavor offers them the hat box and hammer, but they’ll have to steal the ticket and monocle, as he won’t volunteer those.

What these really are, if they see through the illusion:

• Ticket – the key that activates Cavor’s sphere; a brass rod with indentations and a wooden handle bearing a plate that says MADE IN LANARKSHIRE.
• Monocle – a viewing tube.
• Hat – a metal headband with a wire mesh over the top, such as you might see used in operations on the brain, only somehow of alien rather than human design.
• Surgical hammer – a metal probe of strange alien design with a button on the side.

The Morgue
At the edge of town they find a wall with broken glass along the top. Cavor called this the Last Wall. If they walk along they will come to a wooden door, bolted shut and covered in old peeling music hall posters. (They struggle to read the text, as in a dream.) Beyond that wall is interstellar space.

More horror: They will see two Men in Hats leading sleepwalking figures across the fog-bound square. Getting closer, they see the figures are equal in number to the party and the same mix of male and female. Closer still, and they see the backs of the figures’ skulls are open and a thin sulphurous vapour clings to the back of each head. If they look at the faces – but they will have guessed: it’s their own bodies.

The two Men in Hats are Mi-Go lab workers, not prepared for an escape and so the reality of any fight, which looks like the characters versus a couple of tall gangling men in hats, will be that their trolley-borne brains are fighting with crude mechanical grabs against fragile, low-gravity, creatures of floating ‘fungus’: drifting shapes like the fins of tropical fish, in which float sensory organs; their arms are delicate as daddy-longlegs but are many and capable of exerting surprising force.

Men in Hats (Mi-Go lab techs)
Punch 18    1d6+3 crush
Wrestling 14    ST 14
Parry 12
HIT POINTS 25         Dodge 13    Armour 0    Stealth 8    Perception 12

The characters fight with their ordinary unarmed combat skills and damage, or at least so they believe. Any guns they think they’re carrying turn out to be unloaded or otherwise malfunctioning.

For each round the fight goes on, roll 2d6. On snake-eyes another Mi-Go comes along and raises the alarm. The characters must also stop either of the “Men in Hats” from running off for the same reason.

Across the square is a set of steps up to a door like a London club. If they fought the Mi-Go, their sleepwalking bodies will have already gone in. Inside they find the Lost Comrade lying on a slab, motionless, his face covered by a hard wax mask. He wears evening dress but no hat. Further back in the room, four other bodies lie on slabs.

The hammer breaks the mask, then they must put the hat on him.

Anyone able to see the truth: The Lost Comrade’s body is lying on a steel slab. Their own bodies should now be moving to lie on other slabs. Using the “hammer” activates the automated brain surgery arms here. Placing the hat positions a number of drill/saw arms that then reimplant all their brains.

THE VOYAGE HOME

The reality: They are in a laboratory complex on Yuggoth. Locating Cavor’s anti-gravity sphere will be perceived as finding their way to the docks here. They’ll need Cavor’s ticket, which represents activating the cavorite panels aboard the ship. Note that the Mi-Go aren’t expecting an escape at first, but if alerted will arrive in unopposable force.

At the Docks
Cavor’s steamer, the Selene, is at the quayside. (Reality: it’s the cavorite sphere under a huge glass-&-steel dome). They need to have the ticket, which is the key that unlocks the sphere’s instrument panel. If they have a ticket, the engines start up, lights come on, the Venetian blind shutters test themselves. They will see that as the steamer getting ready to sail.

But: some "dock workers" have seen them and are heading off. These are cyborg workers, but they could bring the Mi-Go. If somebody chases the dock workers and/or makes a stand on the gangplank as the ship gets ready to sail, he or she can buy time but at the risk of getting left behind. (DX roll to jump as the gangplank falls away.)

Across the Void
They appear to be on a steamer surrounded by clouds at night. (As in the film Between Two Worlds.) But in fact this is Cavor’s sphere. Roll for claustrophobia because the vessel is much smaller than it seems!

Applicable skills for the voyage: navigation, sailing, physics, mathematics, astronomy. Three or four successful rolls are needed to steer the ship back to Earth. If those go wrong, as they very possibly will – well, your Victorian/Edwardian Cthulhu campaign is boldly going in a new direction. Let them discover some cosmic horror out there where no one can hear you scream.

They seem to be attacked by modern-day (ie 1890s) pirates, led by the Good Friend whose brain patterns and body the Mi-Go still have. The “pirates” just drop to the deck, accompanied by one of the hat-&-coat guys with four arms. The pirates are patchwork cyborgs, fairly tough but fragile. However, against the Man in Hat the characters need an IQ roll just to make an effective attack, and critical fail on that means you are losing the plot.

The Good Friend is just a body with a ghastly organic-looking robot brain clamped to the back of his scooped-out skull. But, slow-witted and clumsy as he is, he carries a force sword.

Man in Hat (Mi-Go fighter)
Punch 18     2d+2 crush x 4
“Shotgun” 15    1-3 targets, dodge or make HT-10 to avoid unconsciousness
Parry 12 (but you need an IQ roll for your attack to be effective)
HIT POINTS 40
Dodge 14    Armour 5    Stealth 8    Perception 17
The Good Friend’s body with robot brain
Force Sword 13    8d burn
Parry 11
HIT POINTS 16
Dodge 11    Armour 0    Stealth 13    Perception 13

Pirates (8 cyborgs)
Sword 12    1d+2 cut
Parry 10
HIT POINTS 10 eachDodge 10    Armour 2    Stealth 10    Perception 10

The Mi-Go is armed with a stun ray: dodge or you must make a HT roll at -10 to avoid unconsciousness. This looks like a shotgun affecting 1-3 targets. In melee it fights with claws, which are mechanical prostheses extending from an artificial exosketeton. Its actual form within that is a tissue-like translucent growth with internal nodes that floats on gossamer wings in low gravity.

If anybody is aware of the real situation and thinks of it, they could possibly use the cavorite panels to make some kind of gravitational attack on the fragile body of the Mi-Go.

Once the “pirates” are defeated, the ship’s trajectory carries them outside the range of the Mi-Go’s mind control – or perhaps it is simply wearing off with time. Now they can see things as they really are: scars on their shaven scalps, the vessel just a wooden-and-steel icosahedron with cavorite-painted Venetian blinds, and beyond the portholes lie stars and nothingness.

Landfall
Assuming the navigation rolls, etc, work out okay then they’ll touch down on Horsell Common near Woking in late 1895 or early 1896 with an earth-shaking impact that attracts Herbert George Wells, walking on the common in the early hours before the dawn. 'We're testing an experimental military device,' the PCs told him. 'You mustn't write about it.'

'Of course not...' said Wells, peering at the sphere.

RUNNING THE ADVENTURE

Act I is about hints and eeriness – the should get the sense that all is not what it seems.

Act II is about tension and horror – they learn what’s going on and almost wish they hadn’t.

Act III is about action and terror – this is where character deaths are a real possibility, and where one mistake could cast them into the outer darkness beyond the solar system’s rim.

The point of the adventure was to make some use of the mental disadvantages that proliferate among GURPS characters but that rarely contribute anything to the game, even when players remember to roll for them. If GURPS isn’t your thing, I don’t blame you and I’m sure Call of Cthulhu’s insanity rules would serve just as well.

‘Cauld blaws the wind frae east to west,

The drift is driving sairly; 

Sae loud and shrill’s I hear the blast, 

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.’

“The Climate of a Foreign Logic” (scenario)

If you tried out last year's Victorian roleplaying scenario “Murder Your Darlings” then you might like to give this much simpler and more traditional adventure a go. It’s also set  in Oxford but a few years earlier, in 1884. Incidentally, in our campaign there is no magic as such, as it’s a science-fictional universe which has room for Cthulhu, time travel and even Victor Frankenstein, but not sorcery. All the same, psionic abilities are real (if rare) and are usually accepted as magic by those who possess them.

Teddy Trittfield has recently gone up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read Literae Humaniores. Teddy has always been a dutiful child and a hard worker, but in his first term he has not been in touch with his parents and reports suggest that his studies are slipping. His mother (who could be one of the player-characters) is worried that Teddy is neglecting his studies, running up some whopping debts, and falling under the spell of some pretty unsavoury types.

On investigation, it soon turns out Teddy has fallen in with a group of friends who have a dining club called the Procrusteans. They are:

• James Orpington-Soames (Christ Church, English)
• The Hon Reginald Wincanton (Christ Church, History)
• Count Konradin (“Konnie”) von Hegel und Vasserkind (Magdalen, postgrad Music)
• Basil Hinge (Keble, Chemistry)

The Procrusteans at Christ Church are in the circle of the senior History tutor, Sir Nicholas Tollens, who is said to be a member of a club called the Five-Sided Table (motto: Tuta petant alii – “let others seek security”) itself a remnant of the once-notorious Hell Fire Club.

Sir Nicholas has a fellow Five-Sider staying with him, the Spanish spiritualist Jose Lunares.

Sir Nicholas’s coachman is Jollyback and his valet is Chifton. They have some handy skills and can find a half dozen ruffians if needed.

If the player-characters visit Telbeck & Sons in the High Street, who supply hunting equipment to Sir Nicholas, then a bribe of a few pounds will reveal that Sir Nicholas has his bullets engraved with a special symbol. An Occultism roll identifies this as a Satanic rune.

They might also want to buy some firearms of their own:

If the characters search Teddy’s room they will find a burnt scrap of paper in the hearth with part of the Lord’s Prayer written backwards.

Other notable NPCs

The President of Magdalen is Dr Frederick Bulley (73 years old, distinguished, tall, white-haired; quite infirm now).

Teddy’s tutor at Magdalen is Dr William Cove.

The Senior Dean of Arts is Dr Waverly Bamfield.

The Dean of Divinity is the Rev Dr John Joyce.

The Head Porter is Dannock.

The SCR Butler is Carndyce.

What’s going on

Lt-General Augustus Pitt Rivers is relocating his famous collection of obscure ethnographic artefacts to the University Museum. The majority of the collection will not be moved until an new annexe is built to the Musuem in two years’ time, but a few items are already on display. Sir Nicholas and Jose Lunares have a plan to break in, get the mask of Saaga the Devil Doctor, and perform a ritual that will make them both immortal.

To complete the ritual, they intend to sacrifice Teddy, whom the Procrusteans have had doing a bunch of initiation tasks that are actually components of an old spell. So far he's completed the first two of these. The recital of the Lord's Prayer will take place on the final day of Michaelmas term:

• Taking the sacrament while wearing an inverted crucifix
• Climbing the Martyrs’ Memorial to put kindling around their feet
• Reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards on Advent Sunday

Teddy is important to the ritual because he has some Haida blood – his great-great-grandfather had a child by a native woman in British Columbia in the 1770s. The ritual is actually irrelevant, as is Teddy’s ancestry, but Lunares and the others believe these to be important components of a spell. The truth (at least in our campaign) is that it is all a psionic effect and the mask and Satanic elements are just window-dressing.

“Spells” (psionic effects) to which Lunares has access:

• To enrage dogs and turn them upon their masters.
• To call a fog: 10 yards visibility in which Lunares has a lantern that shines clearly (a mental effect, but one that covers a very wide area).
• To cause people to become drowsy (WL roll) or, if asleep, to remain so.
• To incite paranoia (EQ or argue with friends, to the death if EQ failed again).
• To foresee elements of the future by means of automatic writing.

What the players might do to stymie the ritual:

• Prevent Teddy being abducted. The Five-Siders will use Basil Hinge instead. The ritual can still go ahead but less successfully.
• Prevent Teddy doing the third task. The ritual can still go ahead but less successfully.
• Save Teddy before the sacrifice. The ritual will feed off Lunares’s own essence.

Fully successful ritual:

Both Sir Nicholas and Jose Lunares become immortals. Saaga’s spirit (actually an aspect of Lunares’s own personality) “awakens” in the mask which will float in the air.

Less successful ritual:

Saaga’s spirit (see above) will be available for the Five-Siders to consult and get a “spell” from once each new moon.

Using Lunares’s own essence:

Lunares dies horribly and Sir Nicholas, driven quite mad, insists that he is the reincarnated Saaga.

Background: the year is 1884

The British prime minister is William Gladstone

The American president is Chester A Arthur

The Poet Laureate is Lord Tennyson (until this year just plain Alfred Tennyson)

What you might be talking about:

The electric street lighting starting to appear in London

The first automobiles (early models reaching 10 mph)

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show now touring the USA

The eruption of Krakatoa last year (still said to be affecting the weather)

The ongoing siege of Khartoum by the Mad Mahdi

The invention of the machine gun (not yet in production)

The opening of the first Underground stations (parts of the Metropolitan & District lines)

The first commercially available fountain pens (1884’s iPod?)

Scotland Yard’s dismissal of the concept of fingerprinting identification

The patenting of linotype earlier this year

Construction of the Cresta Run

Laying of the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty

The architecture of Gaudi

The banking crisis that is threatening an economic depression

The terrorist attack by the Irish Republican Brigade on Scotland Yard

What you might be reading:

Stevenson (Treasure Island)

Twain (Huckleberry Finn)

Edwin Abbott Abbott (Flatland)

Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)

Das Kapital volume two in early pre-publication pamphlet form

Works by Wilkie Collins, Ambrose Bierce, Jules Verne, Mrs Oliphant, Henry James

Where you might be seen of an evening:

Plays by Oscar Wilde (just starting his career) and Ibsen

Operas by Gilbert & Sullivan (at the height of their success) or Puccini

Concert works by Bruckner and Wolf

What you might be whistling:

“Oh my darling Clementine”

Who you might know:

George Bernard Shaw, 28 years old, unsuccessful novelist (a Fabian)

Oscar Wilde, 30 years old

Richard Burton, explorer, 63 years old but mysteriously left London 12 years ago for Trieste

Lewis Carroll, 52 years old, still resident at Christ Church but no longer teaching

Richard D’Oyly Carte, impresario, 40 years old

Henry Irving, actor, 46 years old.

Sir William Kelvin, scientist, 60 years old

Rudyard Kipling, journalist, 19 years old

Arthur Machen, editor and private tutor, 21 years old

Robert Louis Stevenson, author, 34 years old

Bram Stoker, literary critic, 39 years old

Ellen Terry, actress, 37 years old

Beatrice Potter, sociologist and Fabian, 26 years old

Charles Booth, sociologist, 44 years old, currently compiling London Labour & the London Poor

Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers, ethnologist and collector, 57 years old

Thomas Neumark-Jones, occultist, 43 years old

Naturally these or other prominent figures would need to be paid for as Contacts.

WEALTH

Average                      -10 points
You have a job and are dependent on it for living expenses. Income £100 a year.

Comfortable               no points
You have lodgings in a respectable part of town (if that’s where you want to be) and income of £200 a year.

Wealthy                      10 points
You have a townhouse or pleasant home out-of-town and the use of your club. Income £400 a year.

Very Wealthy             20 points
You have a country estate and a townhouse, each with its own staff, plus a coachman and valet who travel with you. Income £1000 a year.

You can live quite well on £400 a year (roughly £60,000 in today’s terms). 

Adventure seed 

The following incident has nothing to do with this scenario, but is a real newspaper report from 1884 that might provide the seed for a follow-up adventure:

Aftermath

Lastly a few notes about how it panned out in our game. Lord Eidolon (Tim Savin) opened the luggage of one of the other characters, Teddy's father, and was affected by a paranoia rune left there by Lunares. This was a powerful hypnotic influence that caused him to distrust the others, which of course soon led to nobody trusting anybody very much. Sensing trouble, Henry Morton Stanley (Paul Gilham) moved from the Randolph Hotel to the Eastgate. That saved him when Eidolon burst into the Randolph lounge and opened fire with a shotgun, crippling a couple of characters before leaping through the window and disappearing into the fog. A city-wide manhunt ensued. The others learned that Eidolon could be cured by burning the rune and giving him the ashes to drink mixed in wine, but that if he failed to do so by midnight the paranoia would be permanent. (Merely a matter of belief, of course, not real magic, but it was the only way to break the hypnotic suggestion.) There seemed little hope of catching him before midnight, or of convincing the police to let them in with a goblet of wine if he was apprehended. As for the fate of Eidolon himself, my write-up of the session ends with this note of finality: "Even his dog now fears him."