Friday, April 29, 2016

Yet Even More Portraits



Today, I’m posting the last five Victoriana portraits in this deluge of period illustrations.
The Internet Archive and the British Library Flickr streams provided a ton of new (at least new to me) usable images, adding diversity, and some terrific animal illustrations to help supplement the Beastfolk section. I’m particularly pleased to finally have a bear folk portrait. The past three posts helped expand the portrait gallery beyond a bunch of dignified Englishmen.
If anyone finds these illustrations useful in game, I would love to hear about it. 

The full portrait gallery can be found here. 

Friday, April 22, 2016

Yet More Portraits

Welcome to week two of our three week deluge of Character Portraits. Our household is pretty busy helping with our church’s production of Anne of Green Gables so posting portraits helps a lot. These portraits are very relaxing to do, aside from beastfolk, so they nicely compliment my flurry of activity. Like last week, I am trying to avoid making more European men in formal wear, while still avoiding blatantly racist illustrations. It’s a very thin center to that Venn diagram in the 1800s, that gets even thinner considering I have to stretch and caricature the faces further to fit the subraces of Victoriana. I’m particularly pleased with the dwarf in today’s batch. I saw a top hat and ran with it. Enjoy.
The full portrait gallery can be found here.






Friday, April 15, 2016

More Portraits



While browsing the Flickr pages for the Internet Archive’s Book Images and the British Library this week, I found a ton of terrific faces. Today, I’m posting the first batch of a whole crop of new portraits. These can be used in your own Victoriana games as Character Portraits, NPC inspiration, or, as I have done, a deck of random encounters.
I’m trying to be a bit more experimental with the face shapes and add more diversity. Illustrations of white men in formal dress vastly outnumber any other category, but scans from travelogues and anthropological books are helping me bring the rest of the Victoriana world to light. Some portraits I find just scream out “NPC!” even before I alter them. 

You can find the complete Portrait Gallery here.
And you can find all these illustrations in their original forms at the links below:


Friday, April 8, 2016

Adventure Idea- Inked Hands are the Devil’s Printshop

While planning out a campaign for my playing group I read over the rules for Demonolgy in the Victoriana 3rd edition rulebook. The section mentions some grimoirs are “Primed” so the simple reading of a passage will automatically perform a summoning or invocation. What a diabolical idea! Anyone could summon an otherworldly monster at any time! Possibly by accident!
In the Victorian world new print techniques spread information through the empire. Newspapers could be made faster and bigger than ever before, information was more readily available to all classes, and the lithographic rotary printing presses cranked out pages faster than ever before. All of which means, the stage was set for an evil minded printer with infernal aspersions to use these new information technologies for dark purposes. Here is a sinister plot of mass produced proportions:

Overview 
A small print shop produces posters, pamphlets, and stationary primed for demonic invocations and supplies them to anarchists and other malcontents. The papers are prepared in advance with a variety of effects such as Curse of Entropy, Whispering Colors, Fleeting Messenger, Imp Calling, and the assorted summoning of named entities.
Numerous prominent citizens have been attacked and killed by other worldly creatures. The police, ably assisted by Guild Investigators, are stretched thin. Can the player characters track down the source of the tainted documents?

Leggit Printers
A small printshop in a bustling neighborhood keeps busy making theater programs, small run pamphlets, and advertisements, but at night Leggit and his assistants produce malefic materials.
In the back room of Leggit Printers, a very old hand press made of a dark metal with odd sigils burned into the handle stamps through the night to produce the primed prints. The text and any illustrations are loaded into the tray and a covered in ink with a roller. Paper is loaded onto the tympan, covered by the frisket, and then the stamp is lowered by the printer pushing the handle.
The malefic nature of the work requires some modifications to the press’s usual operation. Each paper is printed with woodcut illustrations and embellishments providing the quintessence and connection needed for the invocation to work. Neither Leggit nor his engraver will say where the designs some from, but they always use wood stolen from the gallows for the illustrations. The compositor has to throw all the used type into the Hellbox to be melted down after each print run, due to the residual infernal energies that manifest in their arrangement. All the paper has been cropped down to cut off the manufacture’s watermarks and embossing. The ink used for printing is still mostly soot and linseed oil, but more esoteric ingredients may be added as needed. After a few hours of work, the finished prints are collected and locked in a tin box hidden behind a few loose bricks in the alley.
Leggit sends his innocent apprentices home for the day before he starts his nightly work, but both are getting suspicious. One glimpsed squat shapes lurking in the shadows of the storage room.

Motive
Leggit entered a demonic pact and must cause one-hundred demons to be the summoned into the world, but in exchange for what?
The world is separated from the Pale by a thin dimensional membrane. Leggit is working to disrupt the reality separating our world from the Pale. Each spell in a concentrated area makes the membrane a little thinner. 
Leggit experiments and practices his craft hoping to improve his technique. He wants to mass print a powerful grimioir full of dreadful magic. Selling his primed documents is just fundraising for a more terrifying plan.
A foreign power hired Leggit to destabilize the British Empire by causing chaos in her greatest cities.

This scenario should be a good gameable idea, as my group is currently playing this adventure. It's been great writing practical posts based on current gaming experiences, and apparently it's been great for you guys too, as this blog had views everyday in March! Thanks so much for reading.

Friday, April 1, 2016

Social Currency- Using Contacts to Move Story and Influence Players



The players in my Victoriana campaign really enjoy some of the oddball details on their character sheets. They like weird assets, and rubbing each other noses in privileges, but what really drives their play is contacts.
 This love of contacts and generating new contacts changed how we play. It’s changed how I run Victoriana. A player character can still call on his contacts as a resource for clues, or another warm body in a fight, but contacts can be as helpful to the Gamemaster as they are for players. This idea is nothing new, but I want to highlight what a PC’s contacts can add to your game.

At character creation, each player makes up a couple contacts adjusted by their Presence attribute. Often the contact just gets a name, a sub-race, and an occupation, just enough information so players can justify the help they get. These player-generated NPCs (non-player characters) can be plugged into your starting adventure as readymade plot hooks. If a player gets word one of his PC’s resources is in trouble, they have a reason to dive into your story:
“The gnome that customizes your guns was injured in a black powder explosion. His family suspects foul play.”
“The maid who knows all the juicy gossip about the blue-blooded families of London is scared of her employer’s friends. She needs your protection.”
“That scummy bookie with all the insights to the fixed races owes a lot of money to ‘Finger-Breaker’ Jones. He has a scheme with a huge payout.”

By the end of the adventure, the players have gained new contacts. Did they save a street urchin in a carriage accident? Contact. Did a Guild Thaumaturge see their impressive magical abilities? Contact. Did they make a new friend at Lady Ethridges cotillion? Contact.
How easily PC’s gain contacts will vary from group to group. They have to leave their new friends with a favorable impression or at least in their debt, but if a player wants to add an NPC as a contact I rarely say no. Some contacts can’t be relied on to stick their necks out for the PC’s as far as others, but most can answer a quick question or wrangle an invitation.

Gamemasters often reward their players with equipment, reputation, money, and experience points, but I think the easiest and most exiting rewards can be contacts. Using contacts this way becomes a feedback loop of player investment, plot hook, and reward, providing the players and the GM with mcguffins aplenty.