Victorian Vice- Building a Copper Hell

Much of the information about gambling halls comes from the vibrant and theatrical recollections of antigambling reformers investigating social ills from the inside. These detailed reports flow with colorful descriptions essential to replicating the myriad of copper hells in London. Here is a list of specific assets and attributes taken from their descriptions of distinct copper hells. If you want a copper hell in an adventure pick one or two details from each section:

Interior

- Splashes of drinks and tobacco juice stain the walls.

-A back corridor leads to many small rooms dedicated to private games, betting consultations, and dalliances.

-Twenty to thirty people surround the baccarat-table watching and waiting to play. Those at the table and near the walls sit on rough wooden benches.

-In the gambling room sits a long table draped in green cloth. Carefully regulated lines of white string clearly mark the betting spaces for the game of hazard. During a police raid, the dealer pulls out a pair of scissors, cuts the strings, and swallows the dice. All that is left is a simple table clothed in green.

- In a side room, a complimentary buffet of simple room-temperature foods, such as meat joints, chicken, and salad or glasses of sherry and riesling quickly sate peckish patrons and bring them back to the tables.

- Signs litter the walls of the gambling hall, reminding guests of rules, decorum, and the advantages of continued membership.

- Gamblers stand around the gaming tables due to a complete lack of chairs and furniture.

- Black paint covers the windows of the ground floor.

Organization and Rules

-The hall closes at 12 AM. This encourages frantic wagering as closing time nears and gives an air of respectability lacking in houses open all night.

-Dealers and card sharps avoid frightening new members away with losses. Cheating is saved for regular customers and high stakes.

- No women in the gambling house, except the barmaid.

- The hall is open only after dark.

-The minimum bet at any table game is one half-crown (2 shillings and sixpence).

-The gaming house’s bank is a large pile of coins on the roulette table.

-The bar serves its patrons strong drinks for free. The proprietor encourages drinking to fill his hall with reckless wagers.

-The hall remains open all night making it very popular with the after-theater crowd.

Location

-A dripping, dimly lit basement under a pub

- The upper stories of a disused workhouse

- Up three flights of stairs in a tall building

-Hidden in a club for members of a specific nationality

-Above a greengrocers

-In the back of a laundry

-In a coffee shop

- Behind a newspaper and periodical shop with a small reading room.

People

-Young men swarm around a few ballet-girls and music hall actresses waiting for dancing to start.

-The owner evaluates new members with jocular conversation.

- Two cardsharps conspire to fleece their target.

- A cadre of men discusses odds around a bookie noting horseracing wagers in his betting book.

-On nights when the house raked in a great deal of money, the owner distributes free drinks to console losers.

- A patron screams in indignant rage that he’s been cheated by the gambling house. The bullies employed by the house beat him in front of the other guests to discourage similar outbursts.

- After a losing streak, gamblers try to sell their pocket watches, rings, and waistcoats to fund their next wager.

- The burly doorman also acts as a waiter.

Victorian Vice- Copper Hells

Social class divides gambling houses into two categories: Copper Hells, and Golden Halls. Golden halls refer to respectable gentlemen’s clubs beyond the reach of the law, while the working classes gather in copper hells, illegal gambling dens hidden in clandestine locations. Their premises hide behind veneers of respectability or sit in the worst parts of London free of honest constables.

The proprietors of illegal gambling houses take precautions against letting snitches, reporters, crusaders, and police past their doors. No signs advertise their games and entertainments save a gas lamp or lantern hung over their entrance. Its light declares ongoing gaming in the house and shines on the faces of guests wishing to come in. The doorman looks over visitors through an eye slit and admits recognized patrons or those uttering that night‘s passphrase. Most hells force first-time visitors to pay a membership fee of about 3 shillings, although it may be inflated to as much as 10 shillings to line to doorman’s pocket. Others wait for the guest to gamble before taking their money and require only for a trusted member to vouch for the first-timer.

Once inside, the entertainments, games, and refreshments vary from Copper Hell to Copper Hell according to their membership’s taste and income.  Some attract young professionals with dancing and live music, while laborers and criminal’s crowd around cockfights in the back of a pub across town. Middle-class patrons of quiet gambling halls view their gatherings almost as a gentlemen’s club. In addition to illegal gambling, they escape the world with a drink, conversation, and a newspaper in a comfortable room.

The stakes wagered in the games may be as low as five pence in a dingy hell frequented by the most desperate of society’s dregs, or as high as £5 in halls populated with respectable professionals. Most money changes owners over table-games such as baccarat, roulette, hazard, and faro. Proprietors often set aside a room for billiards and other games of dexterity and coordination. The seedier and more disreputable hells host blood sports such as duck baiting, dogfights, rat baiting, and boxing. Every night, Bookies and bet-makers hold court in a private corner. To keep the operation under control, large violent men called “Bullys” evict obvious cheaters, rowdy drunks, and sore losers. Gambling halls also employ “Bonnets” hired gamblers who cajole others into playing, give the club more life by playing games on slow nights, or gamble on behalf of the house against lucky players for a percentage. Young members of the upper class fallen into debt or scandal often make their living as Bonnets.

Gambling is rarely the only illegal activity practiced in a copper hell. The ubiquitous bar serves unlicensed liquor to their patrons and prostitutes flock to gambling houses open to both sexes. Pickpockets comfortably spend evenings waiting for the proprietor’s permission to steal from gamblers wise enough to stop when they are ahead. Desperate gamblers recover their losses by buying and selling of stolen valuables. Above all, card sharps cheat in a plethora of blaggardly ways as does the gambling house. In the worst copper hells, players cycle through a gaming table through the night and not one a winner.

Victorian Vice- The Gambling Laws

Gambling requires little more than stakes, an agreed wager, and an event or contest over which to wager the stakes. This simplicity and the growing percentage of the population with disposable incomes spread gambling as a pastime and a business through English society in the 1800s. Men and women of the working class tossed away their week’s pay on games of chance and dice throws, as gentlemen and ladies lost thousands of pounds a night sitting at a gaming club. From copper hells to golden halls, we’re looking at gambling in Victorian England.

Since Englishmen first gathered to wager, English law sought to discourage it, or at least discourage it among the poor. King Henry VIII decreed only members of his court were allowed to gamble and play games. Everyone else could only play games of chance on Christmas day. Another well-intentioned act in 1739 banned betting over games such as hearts, hazard, and faro in clubs. Parliament later amended the act to include dice games and roulette as well. Faced with this iron-clad law, gentlemen’s clubs simply claimed any games on their premises were private affairs unassociated with club policy or rules. They couldn’t be held accountable for wagers among their members. Despite these attempts, gambling (or as it’s more respectably known “gaming”) reached it’s most ubiquitous and notorious heights in the late 1700s and early 1800s. By the 1850s, middle-class concern over the notorious gambling scandals of high born young men and moral outrage over the corruption of the lower classes brought new legislation designed to curb gambling’s iron hold.

The Gaming Act of 1845 legalized games of skill (such as tennis and bowling), made cheating a crime punishable by two years in prison, enabled police constables to more easily obtain warrants for searching suspected gambling houses,  and most importantly prohibited wagers from being enforced by law. Disgruntled gamblers with influence and means no longer took up time in court to argue the minutia of their bets. While this rapidly cleared many drawn-out cases, it clearly had more ramifications for the poor than the closely knit upper-class. If a bookmaker decided not to pay out to a lucky client, there was nothing legally the client could do about it. 

Her Majesties’ government took further steps against gambling’s corruptive influence among the working class with the Betting Act of 1853. The act outlaws the keeping or use of “any house, office, room, or other place, for the purpose of the owner or occupier betting with persons resorting thereto, or receiving money in advance in respect of bets”. Those managing the gambling house or those caught gambling inside faced a fine of up to £500 or up to a year in jail. The act also set fines for those delaying or obstructing the police from entering a suspected gambling club or giving a fake name and address to the police while caught in a raid. Once again the law left the gaming in gentlemen’s clubs legal. Betting at the racetrack, which was popular with the upper and middle classes, remained legal as well.

Faced with these new laws, many bookies left England to set up shop in Scotland or continental Europe and their clientele continued betting by mail, a method of gambling not criminalized by the acts. Some moved outdoors and did all their business in the street employing messengers for payments, payouts, and bets. Others continued to break the law moving their gambling house from premises to premises ahead of the police.

Life in the Bones- Bad Bones

Just as Necromancy stains the body of its practitioners so too does necromancy stain the materials used in its rituals. The remains of a failed nocturnal experiment, the corpse of an undead put to rest, surgical tools long used to join dead and living tissues all potentially host the taint of dark magic.

If this foulness settles in a bone used in a ritual and left long enough without disturbance or interruption, the necromantic stain infects other bones around it forming a “Bad Bones”. These dark energies manifest as inky ectoplasmic tendons connecting and articulating the bones into a shambling, whirling mess. The tendons also act as sense organs giving bad bones a remarkable ability to perceive and react to stimuli in any direction. No intelligence directs its reconstruction, making each bad bone a random conglomeration of ribs, phalanges, and skulls. Bad bones incorporate new skeletal members with surprising speed and range. More than one monster hunter has been surprised to find himself attacked on two fronts: the bad bones before him, and the remains of his lunch in his pocket!

Bad bones only want one thing: to harvest more bones from dead bodies so it can grow. Most of the bad bones in London are small accumulations of rat and poultry skeletons skulking in dark sewers, basements, and alleys waiting to harvest a dead vertebrate or to kill a living one. Larger bad bones incorporate the skeletons of draft animals, livestock and humans.

Bad bones serve only their desire to survive and grow, but a necromancer can subjugate their magical stain with a Necromancy roll against 9 black dice. If successful the bad bones follows commands until the necromancer’s or its death. Respectable bone mills carefully check incoming material with sigils to avoid bad bones sprouting in a dark corner surrounded by an endless supply of new limbs. Most workers prefer to take care of any problems themselves. The guild offers a 5 pound bounty for proof of a bad bone’s destruction and charge 6 pounds to exterminate one. An adequate amount of fire or acid disrupts the necromantic magics animating a bad bones and dissolves the abomination into a foul-smelling pool. The animating force can also be disrupted by removing the original “Bad Bone” from the skeleton, although discovering the right bone won’t be easy, and there could be multiple members fueled by necromantic magic. If these tools are not to hand, slashing or bashing apart enough of its skeleton puts a bad bones to rest long enough to deal with its remains. If left alone and forgotten, the process of corruption begins again.

Bad Bones

Physical: 8           Initiative: 8

Mental: 4             Health: 18

Armor Value: 2

Special Traits:

Regenerate- 4 (as long as there are bones nearby),-see page 294 of the Victoriana 3rd Edition rulebook

Chaotic Mass- Any opponents attempting to grapple, avoid a grapple, or escape a grapple suffer 6 black dice to their rolls. Bad Bones may also maintain one grapple each combat round without suffering the penalty for taking multiple actions.

Dark Incorporation- instead of regenerating, bad bones may create a lesser bad bones as long as there are bones nearby. This does not require an action.

Complications:

Fire Vulnerability- whenever a bad bones is damaged by fire or acid , it suffers +3 damage

Damage: Skeletal Claws and Jaws (6),

Lesser Bad Bones

Physical: 6           Initiative: 5

Mental: 4             Health: 4

Armor Value: 0

Special Traits:
Regenerate- 2 (as long as there are bones nearby),-see page 294 of the Victoriana 3rd Edition rulebook

Chaotic Mass- Any opponents attempting to grapple, avoid a grapple, or escape a grapple suffer 3 black dice to their rolls.

Complications:

Fire Vulnerability- whenever a bad bones is damaged by fire or acid, it suffers +5 damage

Damage: Skeletal Claws and Jaws (4),

Life in the Bones- Bone Mills

The fact that manure made from bones revitalized the prospects of countless Victorian farms doesn’t prevent its manufacture from being a disgusting, filthy ordeal. While a few forward-thinking farms purchased bone-milling machines and dug sulfuric acid pits to process bones on their own, large industrial factories crank out most of England’s bone manure. England’s earliest bone mills started production in Yorkshire during the 1810s. By 1850, cargoes full of bones shipped from continental ports feed mills in every seaport in the southern English coast. In the metropolis, bone mills scavenge their raw materials from the surrounding population. The people of London alone consume over 10,000 tons of meat a day, producing a remarkable quantity of unwanted bones.

The eponymous bone mill (or bone crusher) is a machine with a series of large metal rollers covered in durable spiked teeth. Laborers pour bones down into the whirling cylinders to pulverize bones down to the desired size. Those that survive the process with too much mass fall into a compartment which is again dumped out over the cylinders.  Beneath the cylinders, an oscillating grill further collects and separates the fine bone dust from the chunks. Deafening and unnerving cracks, pops, and rumbles constantly fill the air, making verbal communication impossible during the machine’s operation. The toothed cylinders can be adjusted or replaced to produce pieces of varying sizes, such as inch, or half inch bone nuggets. Water wheels provide constant power for those mills with access to flowing water. For the rest, a hundred pounds of coal keeps the toothed rollers crushing all day.

Wagons and carts full of stinking skeletal heaps surround the mill building. First workers separate the useless refuse (such as stones, hoofs, horns, or simple garbage) from the precious but filthy bones. Certain of the remains collected by bone mills have more valuable uses than being crushed to powder. They pull out the femurs and other large bones and ship them to France for manufacturing hair combs, knife handles, toothbrushes, and more. Then they run the larger bones through the crusher with the least thoroughly toothed cylinders or chop them up with axes. This step speeds up the next part of the process by breaking up the largest fragments and scraping up the bone’s surface. Next, the bone boilers drop the broken pieces into massive lidded cauldrons full of foul-smelling, pitch-black, boiling water to remove any remaining meat and fat. Many mills sell their own soap and grease made from the cooled animal fat skimmed off the top of these cauldrons. After their removal from the water with a ladle or pitchfork, the cleaned bones dry in storage for days or months before again facing the metal teeth of the bone mill. This last pulverization breaks the bones down to the right sized nuggets or dust.

Bone dust is the most valuable but most time-consuming product of the mill. Wicked bone-boilers adulterate their dust with clumps of dried lime, crumbling plaster, potash left over from soap making, sawdust, old wood, or any other substance they can crush to powder. Some of these additives hinder plant growth; others (such as arsenic) could seriously endanger farmhands. Upstanding and enterprising bone-boilers enrich their bone dust further by dumping it into an iron tank and mixing it with sulfuric acid. This treatment increases the dust’s efficacy which further increases crop yields.

Adventure Ideas

As a collection center for dead remains, a plethora of carcasses pass through bone mills. Biologists, taxidermists and magicians pay the bone-boilers to keep an eye open for specific animals useful to their business and research.

I think we’ve just about reached peak grimy grotesque Victorian history. Next post, I’ll unleash a fun new monster inspired by Bone Mills ready to menace your players.