Behind the Screen- Solid on the Mystery and Loose on the Connections

At the moment, my gaming group is scurrying through the third adventure in a Victoriana campaign. My adventures steal very heavily from Victorian detective fiction for plots, themes, and pacing. We still fight monsters, start bar brawls, and steal booze from upper-crust gentlemen’s clubs, but we also solve mysteries with pluck, luck, and brains. Even though almost all scenarios contain some form of mystery, some Gamemasters have trouble writing investigative scenarios. I follow a couple of guidelines that help me craft an investigation for my table: Solid on the Mystery and Loose in the Connections.

Solid on the Mystery

Most mysteries tell two stories: A) the story of what happened/what is going on and B) the investigation into the former. Whether it’s recovering Lady Bishley’s incriminating letters or stopping the gargoyle attacks in Soho, the investigators uncover the narrative of the mysterious past even as they adventure in the present through their skills and choices.
Nothing helps me run an investigative scenario like a solid grasp of the mystery. The who, what, where, why, and how come first for me. The more I know about the mystery's’ solution (who killed him, what caused his death, where is the killer now, why was he killed, and how was he killed during a racehorse auction in broad daylight with no witnesses) the more prepared I am for the players to stretch, destroy, stumble and surprise me into the solution.

Loose on the Connections

The more you know about what has happened, the less you need to worry about how the players uncover the solution to your mystery. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have bloody footprints, a monogrammed glove, or mysterious receipts for digging equipment ready to go. Rather, if the players think up some way to plausibly or excitingly uncover your clue, the time you spent thinking through the mystery’s solution beforehand gives you everything you need to improvise an answer to their question.

Player: “I check the coal shoot. Do I find anything?”
Game Master (Thinks): Well, the Crooktail brothers need some way to get the stuffed crocodile out of the house, so yes.

Game Master (Outloud): “You sure do. Disruptions in the coal dust indicate something large was shoved up the shoot and into the ally outback. You also see some dark fur snagged on a couple of nails in the side of the coal shoot, possibly belonging to a ratfolk.”

Once your players play through one or two investigative adventures, they should be able to follow the mystery through the application of skills, contacts, and creative thinking too numerous for a Gamemaster to out plan. Don’t skimp on the clues, but give the players the lead on how those clues get uncovered. Some of their ideas lead nowhere, but they don’t have to read your mind and guess the one correct answer. They just have to come up with interesting ideas that connect to your mystery.

Obviously, the successful implementation of these two guidelines relies on the chemistry of your gaming group. The first requires a Gamemaster building adventures full of interesting narrative leading to exciting things for the player characters to do. The second requires a party of players engaged with the presented story and ready to venture forth risking mistakes with only a little nudging. If your group has that trust and pluck these two guidelines could set you up for some prime investigative adventuring.

Hades Hotel p3- The Increasing Evil

The history of the Thames Tunnel is a story of disappointment, death, disease, and civil engineering. It’s a monumental achievement conceived in genius, built-in hellish darkness, revealed in triumph, and abandoned to sleazy ignominy. Such a bizarre structure with such a checkered life makes a perfect lair for whatever malicious forces hide in Victorian London. As Brunel wrote in a letter describing the conditions eroding his workforce’s health and sanity, “The evil is increasing”. You just have to decide what that evil is.

Adventure Ideas

The criminal element of London loves the Hades Hotel. Its privacy, cheap admission, and lack of police oversight beg for more complex illegal ventures than simple thievery. Literal underground prizefights could take over one of the entry shafts for a fight night protected from the elements. Under the rotunda, the spiraling stairs ensure every customer a good seat, while outside, lookouts armed with signaling flares watch for trouble at both ends of the tunnel.

Brunel conceived of his revolutionary method of bricking up the tunnel as his shield inched forward from the Teredo Navalis (more often known as the Naval Shipworm), a mollusk which burrows into a ship’s timber as it’s excrement reinforces the walls of its hole.  After acquiring the loan from the government, perhaps Brunel resorted to desperate invention to ensure his tunnel’s completion and protect his laborers. Instead of a bigger, stronger tunneling shield, Brunel actually used a massive Teredo Navalis fed with necromantic magics to eat through the dirt, darkness, and disease. Some of the diggers remember a “big red worm”. Where is it now, and what effect did its presence have on the tunnel?

At least six diggers drowned in sudden floods during the tunnel’s construction. One ghostly digger remains trapped in the tunnel. He greets visitors garrulously claiming to have gotten mixed up and asks which direction is north and south. If told, he thanks them but as he walks away a huge brackish phantom wave sweeps him out of sight. If a good Samaritan would just walk him the whole way to daylight he might finally reach his final reward.

The grimy marble staircase leading underground suggests a modern temple dedicated to a Chthonic deity of the underworld. Perhaps the Hotel Hades is more than a nickname and the Thames Tunnel leads to the land of the dead.  Some vile force transforms a small part of the Thames’ rushing current into the Styx, the river dividing the land of the living from the Underworld in Greek mythology.

To make extra income during its troubled construction, the Thames Tunnel Company charged sightseers a shilling to brave the descent and visit the excavation to watch the digging underway. What might have been fortuitously dropped in the soggy dirt just before the bricklayers started their work? It makes a secure a hiding place.  Even if they could pinpoint its location, who would ever dare disaster by pulling up bricks from a tunnel under the Thames?

During the excavation, horrible fumes and disease-carrying water filtered up through the disturbed earth blighting the diggers with a multitude of maladies. Now the entire population of a certain street in the East End suffers from the same symptoms. A strange dark fog weakens the sunshine over the street. What else might have been disturbed from its hibernation when Brunel dug too greedily and too deep?

Hades Hotel p2- The Tunnel Under the Thames

During the first day Brunel’s “Eighth Wonder of the World” opened to the masses, over fifty thousand amazed pedestrians paid the one penny toll to walk through the Thames Tunnel. Visitors first enter the octagonal rotundas  covering the descending shafts on both the Wapping and Rotherhithe shores. Landscapes depicting scenes from all four seasons of the year brighten the rotunda’s interior. Within the doorway, a brass turnstile and a toll keeper bar anyone from entering the tunnel without payment. After crossing a floor decorated in blue and white tiles, visitors reached the edge of a great circular chasm eighty feet deep and fifty feet in diameter. Two marble stairwells crisscross down the stucco walls. Paintings and statues at the landings, divert visitors during their long descent. Music from an organ echoes up the length of the shaft.

At the bottom, those entering or leaving the tunnel pass by entertainers, buskers and fortune-tellers assembled to take advantage of the crowd. Two grand arches cut into the side of the shaft lead into the tunnel, for the tunnel itself divides into two parallel stone-lined passages, each fifteen feet high and thirteen feet wide. Arched corridors, some large enough for a carriage to pass through, connect the passages through the ten-foot thick partitioning wall. These arches allow for ventilation and for pedestrians to turn around on crowded days. The river rushes as close as fifteen feet over the pedestrian’s heads as they cross the one-thousand three hundred feet to the egress on the opposite shore. Everywhere gaslights illuminate the underworld.

Stalls and small shops along the passages and the arches of the dividing wall leave little more than three feet of pathway for visitors in the busiest marketplaces. During the Thames Tunnel’s first years, no visitor ascended back above ground without toys, glassware, and souvenirs to commemorate their visit purchased from cheerful shop girls at the subterranean stalls. Unfortunately, the public’s enthusiasm for the tunnel waned. The Thames Tunnel Company never raised enough funds to convert the tunnel’s entrances into spiraling ramps suitable for vehicular traffic. Without regular tolls for passing coaches and shipping goods through the tunnel, the company lost all hope of recouping their costs. The Thames Tunnel soon gained the name “Hades Hotel”, both as a dolorous portal through the underworld and for the lost souls spending their lives in its depths.

By 1855, the stalls sell novelties only of interest to the tourist or rubbish only good to the desperate, the drunk, or the devious. Stripped of glamorous novelty, darkness resettled into the gloomy gaslight. The girls keeping the stalls enter the tunnel before daylight and often close shop after dark, leaving them pale anemic looking retches. Pedestrians glance up at the disconcerting moisture dripping from the ceiling, and noisome smells sift into the chilly air. Small restaurants refreshing visitors with cakes and wine occupy the largest corridors connecting the two passages. Puppet shows and street musicians attempt to brighten the damp passages with entertainment. To most Londoner’s a descent into the Hades Hotel is a necessary but unpleasant trek by day and to be avoided at night.

The Thames Tunnel never closes. A single penny buys transit underground any time of day or night all week. After sunset, London’s night goers seek a haven of privacy safe from constabulary patrols.  Thieves, prostitutes, pickpockets, and other scoundrels gather in the tunnel to ply their trade and to practice their vocations. Countless masses of the poor and sick pay their penny for a night’s sleep in shelter and relative safety.  

Next week, we’ll put all this fact together and make up some fiction. This colorful history invokes all sorts of adventurous ideas.

Hades Hotel p1- The Excavation of Mr. Brunel

Awhile back, I wrote a series of posts highlighting real locations suitable for a secret lair or dungeon crawl in the heart of Victorian London.  Here’s another terrific subterranean space ready for an adventure.

The curves of the River Thames slither through London cutting the metropolis in half. The river is an essential waterway for shipping goods into the heart of Southern England. Unfortunately in the early 1800s, transporting cargo the short distance between London’s southern shore to the river Thames' northern shore was a chaotic mess. Additional bridges would help move foot traffic but also add obstacles in the water, worsening nautical congestion in the world's busiest port. To several inventive dreamers, the solution was not to cross over the river, but beneath it.

In 1821, the French expatriate engineer, Marc Isambard Brunel, left a debtors-prison in Southwark London, after the intervention of his influential patrons. They convinced the English government to pay the inventor’s debts on the condition that he use his inventing genius for England and not the Russian court. Brunel focused his keen but eccentric mind on the problems of tunneling under the river Thames. Both Ralf Dodd’s previous attempt in 1798 and Robert Vazie’s in 1802 ended disastrously when the excavations burrowed into banks of quicksand. Brunel devised an excavation method which reinforced the tunnel walls while his patented “tunnel shield” (an immensely heavy scaffold) braced the forward diggings from collapse. In 1824, Brunel raised enough money to begin this monumental project by selling shares in his Thames Tunnel Company for £50 each. He chose a narrow point in the Thames between Rotherhithe in the south and Wapping in the north. Construction started on March 2, 1825.

His crew began by assembling a massive 50 ft wide iron ring and constructing a 40ft tall circular brick wall atop the ring near the shore in Rotherhithe. As diggers removed the soil beneath the 1,000-ton tower, its weight drove it into the ground, transforming the tower into a shaft wall. When the ring reached its designated depth of 75 ft in January, the real terrors began.

A worker fell to his death down the shaft that July. This tragedy opened a flood of disease, death, and delirium plaguing the laborers in the tunnel. Work was hard and slow. Thirty-six miners dug out the earth from behind the relative safety of the 80 ton tunneling shield as another team of bricklayers behind them lined the newly exposed excavations with 2 feet of brick and concrete.  Once they had excavated a uniform 4 ½ inches across the shield’s face they pushed the mighty scaffold forward with jacks and began again. Men worked in eight-hour shifts, often wading up to their knees in brown and black river water tainted by every possible pollutant of 19th century London. Natural gasses sifted up through the ground, fouling the air and explosively igniting near open flames. Temperatures under the river fluctuated horribly, swinging 30 degrees in an hour. A host of maladies ranging from permanent blindness to diarrhea to nervous collapse destroyed the miners or sent them to lunatic asylums. In 1828, a flood halted all work on the tunnel with 549 feet finished. Although Brunel stopped the flow by dropping bags of clay into the Thames over the leak, the Thames Tunnel Company was now broke.

After seven years of lobbying, the Thames Tunnel Company convinced the British government to loan them £246,000, enough to build a new and improved tunnel shield and to finally reach Wapping’s shore four years later. Laborer’s sunk a second shaft into the dirt of the north shore. Thirteen months later, the Thames Tunnel Company completed the Thames Tunnel.

The Thames Tunnel opened to the public on March 25, 1843.  Sightseers and Londoners alike walked down its 1,300 feet length for one penny a head toll and praised it as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”.  Brunel’s wonder earned him a knighthood from Queen Victoria, but soon  his glorious achievement decayed into the gloomy cesspool known as the Hades Hotel.

Next week, we’ll look at the sad decline of the Thames Tunnel in the 1850s and the strange life of its denizens.

Yet More Portraits

When you make up a new type of Beastfolk, you’re going to have to make a portrait to go with it. It’s hard to stop at just one, so here are a few new and a couple old but never posted portraits. The gallery now features over ninety portraits, all of which you can find here in the Blog's Portrait Gallery!