More Portraits- Orcs!

This week's post is fanged and misunderstood. I added four portraits to the gallery. One is a pretty halfling, and the others are something new: three tough and craggy orcs.This is my favorite batch so far. The orc-y style was very simple to do, and all three are very obviously orcs.
So if you plan on playing an Orc, feel free to use these as character portraits.

Adventure Idea- the Skeletons in Benjamin Franklin’s Closet Are The Bodies In His Basement.

Recently it was brought to my attention that in 1998, 10 skeletons were found in the basement of a house in London. All of the bodies had tool markings on the bones. The skeletons dated to the mid 1700s when American statesman Benjamin Franklin rented the house. 
After wondering why I hadn’t heard of this already, my second thought was that this discovery would be great for a Victoriana scenario.

A Bit of Background

Between 1757 to 1762, and from 1764 to 1775, Franklin lived in a London home rented from a woman named Mary Stevenson.  His mission in England began with the politics of Pennsylvania and expanded, with the threat of Rebellion, into his becoming the colonies’ spokesman to the British Government. 

During his years in the Stevenson home, Franklin grew close to Mrs. Stevenson’s son-in-law, William Hewson.  The bodies found in the basement were probably the remains of dissections performed by Hewson, who was an anatomist. Hewson later died because of an infected cut suffered during a later dissection in 1774. 

Franklin’s house would have been the perfect spot for Hewson’s illegal scientific exploration. His mother-in-law owned the property, the current tenant was a friend of his known for scientific curiosity, and a gallows on one end of the street and a wharf on the other provided easy access for the deliver off specimens.

As creepy and morbid as that is, in Victoriana we can nudge that in a number of directions. Here’s an explanation for the skeletons, and an adventure

Skulls and Shovels

Benjamin Franklin, William Hewson and a team of anatomists and resurrection men (criminals who stole bodies to sell to dissectors) waged a secret war against necromancers across the graveyards of London. The bodies buried in the basement are captured zombies that were dissected in an attempt to find clues pointing to the identity of the necromancers. After bringing the chief necromancer to justice, the macabre cadre split up. 

One Hundred years later, the player characters find evidence of new zombies being made with a familiar technique. The necromancer is back with a sickly plot of revenge if he can get his hands on the remains of his old enemies, or their ancestors. 

Investigators can look into old newspaper reports with chilling similarities to the day’s headlines, find the group’s abandoned headquarters under Franklin’s house, fight body snatching minions in London’s cemeteries, and recover equipment to handle mobs of the undead.

Alternatively, the concept of a secret society of criminal medical practices hunting zombies would make for a great association. Perhaps the group did not disband and the players are the next generation of the grave digging conspiracy.  Depending on Benjamin Franklin’s race, he could be alive to recruit the investigators into the adventure or serve as the villain. An eldren Franklin is in his later years, a dwarven or gnome Franklin is very long lived.

More Portraits

This week's post is very photogenic. I've added a Portrait Gallery to the Navigation Bar. You can find all the Victoriana portraits on one page, arranged by subrace. Feel free to use them in your games as PCs or Npcs.

All of these portraits start as images from two very special Flickr pages: the British Library and the Internet Archive Book Images. I smush and scrunch the images (and add the occasional deer head or fangs) until I get the effect needed to identify the face with a Victoriana race. Enjoy!

Skullduggery in Motion- Deleted Content from Saltwater Tears

Now that all the synopses of Saltwater Tears and Istanbul Intrigue have been added, I thought it might be helpful to illustrate a flaw of my campaign preparation. I tend to overthink my campaigns and I get far too ambitious for the amount of time I have to run the game.In this case, I had to cut a number of side plots, encounters and even the main plot line.
As a warning for others (and to remind myself of this foible), here is some of the content cut from the campaign.

Deep at the bottom of the Mediterranean Zat, a powerful Efreet, lies trapped in a prison of bubbles and currents. A rogue French admiral leading a crew of pirates on a legendary ship, the  Poisson Rouge, is searching for Zat in the hope of enslaving him to power his ship.
The admiral was going to be an Eldren who served under Napoleon and refused to surrender. He terrorized English shipping in the Mediterranean with a magically enhanced ship. My intent was to have the player’s encounter a wreck caused by the  Poisson Rouge, later have to run from the Rouge, and at the climax fight ship to ship over Zat’s prison.
If the players released Zat and set him free, the efreet would grant them 3 wishes (there were 5 players). I wrote up a few rules for the wish such as cannot use the words “and” and “or”, cannot change past or future, and no wishing for more wishes.
Additionally, with a successful Lore roll I would give a little advice for dealing with djinns. The simpler the wish, the less the interested the djinn will be in corrupting the wish. Djinn love a challenge, so the more a petitioner tries to make an ironclad wish that cannot turn out wrong the harder the djinn will try to find loophole.

A ship in the convoy, the Penguin, is on a secret mission to look for Zat and has diving equipment to look for the djinn. The crew hopes to capture Zat to empower an experimental military airship.
I wanted to add some mystery to the convoy. The players would notice that the crew on the Penguin is secretive and some odd equipment would be on their deck. During the fight, the Penguin could be distracted by their mission or be able to help if the players come up with any crazy ideas using diving equipment.

The Purser has contacts in every port. He leaves every port with cargo to smuggle. Players may be able to help.
Before the cuts, there was a lot more shore leave. I wanted to give the players lots of time to explore and get into trouble. The ship was going to stop in Algeria, Malta, and Crete on the way to Istanbul. After cuts, Malta was the only stop remaining.
Many of these sub plots would have involved some time in port to find some item needed. I thought a shifty officer could open up some criminal enterprises and give the players a starting goal in every port to lead to adventure.

A midshipmen was a crewmen on a boat sunk by the  Poisson Rouge. He wants revenge and he has a plan.A little bit of this made it in at the climactic fight. I gave the plan to the captain of the Unicorn and he tasked the players to carry it out. They released the Elemental spirit powering the ship and the spirit tore the ship apart.

A sea hag appears to give the sailors fortune and make some money. Careful not to insult her.
No part of this made it in. I wanted to pull in some sailing superstitions through a small nautical curse or blessing. I’ll use it someday.

A fellow crewman has a terrible aversion to crustaceans, too bad he attracts them. Like the sea hag, none of this made it in. I was going to give this plot to an NPC the players liked and would want to help. There were a few candidates, but like the rest it had to be cut.

Looking over this list, it’s not as bad as I thought. Some these ideas are good and I will use them later. Others would have been fun, but I don’t regret their cutting. I am glad the campaign didn't end with the wishes. Who knows where the players would have ended up with that opportunity!
It is obvious I did not learn from my last overambitious campaign as I’m doing it all over again right now, but I suppose it’s better to have a stock of surplus good ideas, than a lack of them.

Skullduggery in Motion!- Istanbul Intrigue

Synopses for the adventure Istanbul Intrigue have been added to the campaigns page.

At the conclusion of last summer's naval campaign the party came ashore in Istanbul. I didn't have an adventure in mind and seeing as Istanbul was the capital of the Ottoman Empire it was a natural time for a prewritten scenario from the D&D setting: Al Qadim. Al Qadim is a great fantasy setting centered around the tropes and textures of the Arabian Nights.. The exotic flavor fits the expectations of Victorian Englishmen abroad.

I ran the adventure "Twelve Flawed Sapphires" from the book "A Dozen and One Adventures". It's short, simple, and works as a transition to the next campaign.  I had already converted the NPCs and encounters to a dice pool rule set  making conversion very simple.

It ran very well, and worked as a 2 session break between lager stories. I did not change very much, but I did add a Gen that could be indebted to the party, and I kept the entry to the adventure open so I could add it to whatever trouble the player characters looked for in port.
The experience of adapting a written adventure from D&D came in very handy in the next campaign.

Skullduggery in Motion!- Salt Water Tears

I added a record of another Victoriana scenario played by my group to the Victoriana Campaigns page. This was a very experimental adventure with its own challenges.

When one of the first players in my gaming group was leaving to his first year of college I asked him what he wanted to play over the summer. He requested a naval campaign in Victoriana. Loads of research and several Aubrey/Maturin novels later I was ready.

I used several house rules for life on the open sea When the players encountered a new crewmember we rolled their stats together using the character generator. I cobbled together some broadside mass combat rules and combined them with the vehicle combat rules from “Marvels of Science and Steampunk” so the players could participate effectively in ship to ship combat. One of my players enjoys focusing on mundanity, so I built him a fishing minigame.

We transitioned the characters from the running Victoriana game by having them arrested for a minor disturbing of the peace and sentenced to naval service. The players enjoyed the constrained sandbox of life aboard ship, and they all quickly grasped the setting.

This was my least favorite and the most well loved by the players of our Victoriana adventures so far. I was over ambitious with this campaign, not realizing how few sessions we had left before the end of the summer, so a number of adventures and side plots were cut. However this is unnoticeable past the GM screen, and it’s my own fault for over researching and making rules and charts that were never used. I would like to try something similar again, but please don’t tell my players that.

Tanneries- You Can Smell the Plot Hooks

Among the warehouses and breweries of south London, certain buildings emanate noxious odors, whose stench rises above even the Thames midday breeze. Work in a tannery was decent, and required skill, but was absolutely disgusting. The smells of chemicals and bodily fluids combine with the making of an everyday material to make tanneries a great location for a Victoriana adventure.

The process of Victorian tanning is something like this: 

Freshly skinned hides arrive in massive piles, although some may have been cured poorly at the slaughterhouse and starting to rot. The hides are cleaned and hit with a wooden mace to soften the skins. Next the workers lower the hides into pits dug in the tannery floor or large vats filled with a mixture of lime and water. The mixture loosens the hair on the hide causes any fat still attached to swell. After being submerged for a week and a half, the hair comes out in handfuls. Tanners place the hide on a beam (a thick plank rounded like a tree trunk), and scrape the hair off using a blade with wooden handles on both ends. Then they flip over the hide and scrape off the fat.
Now the hide isready for bating. The tanner drops the hide in a mixture of dog feces, bird feces, urine and heated water that has been sitting in a vat for weeks. The bacteria in the water soften the hide, then the skin is treated with salt in preparation for the actually tanning.
The hides are stretched on frames and again submerged, this time in acid made from tree bark (containing the chemical Tannin) and water. More and more tannin is added to the water over a few weeks to tan the hide to leather. Once complete , workers clean, stretch and dry the leather in a dark shed or warehouse.
To finish, the leather can be dyed, bleached, greased or polished with wax for whatever finish was required for its eventual use. Then the leathers are bundled up and sold to leatherworkers to be cut and shaped into the finished product.

Plot Hooks: 
Most of the hides delivered to a Tannery come from butchered cows. The butchers often left the cow’s inedible parts attached, so a pile of hooves and horns was not an uncommon sight in a tannery backroom. Perhaps these discarded symbols of power and evil would be valuable to persons practicing darker magics in large quantities.

To make a few extra pence, the poor would collect dog feces found in the street and sell it to tanneries. A batch of hides produced by a local tannery has produced very fine quality leathers. The only difference in the tanning process was the inclusion of feces from an unidentified source. If a supply of feces from this animal could be found the tannery would be very appreciative.

With the terrible stench and the piles of unclean castoffs, few people other than tradesmen enter a tannery. Men of an illegal mindset may be able to use the facilities creatively, if they need a place to hide something. Preferably something that won’t absorb odors, or has odors that need to be covered up. Chamicales could be poured into the pits to allow certain things to be dissolved, electroplated, mixed, or bottled in secret.  

Tannery as Fight Scene Location:
There are worse places to throw a fight than a tannery. The lime pits and bating vats make for great obstacles and the threat of falling in should be emphasized. Piles of finished leathers or stinking hides can cushion a nasty fall.

The specialized tools used in a tannery will work as improvised weapons in a pinch. Vat hooks are long wooden poles with a metal hook on one end used to move or pull out submerged leather. Fleshing knives are used to slice fat from the hides. They have wooden handles on both ends with a sharp blade in the center. Could be awkwardly used one handed. Even an unfinished hide could be used to ward off an attack.

If the fight goes south, the tanneries delivery cart could be commandeered for a quick getaway, (although the load of unfinished hides may make the fleeing character’s easier to find).