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.

Life in the Bones- Bone Manure

The inevitable process of decay reminds all of death, but decay also brings life. The breakdown of rotting and disgusting manure feeds barren ground the vital nutrients needed for growth. In Victorian England, mills and factories collected, processed, and sold the most blatant symbols of death, bones, to cultivate fertile land.

Originally a German innovation for growing tropical plants, the use of manure made of ground bones spread through English horticulture in the 1840s. Though it first met with skepticism, decomposing bones quickly became the most sought fertilizer for the soggy cold English climate. Before the British public caught on to collecting their waste bones, farmers imported their bone manure from Germany through ports in northern Europe. More than a small taste of the tens of thousands of tons of this valuable commodity exported to England was exhumed from German graveyards. Now every farm features a barrel tucked away in a dry place slowly filling with half-cleaned femurs, vertebra, ribs, and skulls. In the city, a bone collector’s cart stops at taverns, inns, and restaurants to pick up the day’s worth of skeletal waste nibbled clean by patrons. Rag-and-bone men sift through rubbish piles and keep shops where servants take their household’s unwanted but valuable remains.

Many farmers toss bone dust by hand to distribute it over a field during dry, sunny weather or scatter walnut sized bone chunks before planting seeds. The most common method of fertilizing is mixing one bushel of bone manure (weighing nearly 55 pounds) to every ton of traditional fecal manure, but the mixture must be used before the compost completely decompose the skeletal fragments. Fertilizing an acre of land with bone manure costs £10. Fields fertilized with bone manure only require another treatment roughly every ten years.

Decomposing bones fill the soil with phosphate of lime and nitrogen, key elements for growing turnips and potatoes and very helpful for quickly growing wheat and grasses. Chunks of bone also collect and hold moisture underground making it an excellent source of easily absorbed water for thirsty plants. It is not uncommon to pluck a vegetable from the earth and find its roots snaking through a shard of bone also pulled free. Bone manure works best in aerated, sandy soil, and has little measurable effect in clay-rich or wet soil.

Adventure Ideas
As a farmhand scatters bone manure over a field, a strangely sharp sliver of bone scratches his hand. The next day he starts to change.

In the city, the most successful professional rag-and-bone men collect their product from high volume establishments, such as stockyards, and eating-houses. Sometimes the competition at the bottom of the social ladder is just as ugly as that at the top. Theft, hold-ups, bribery, and frame jobs keep the best bones in the best hands.

The first farmer in a remote village decides to try bone manure on his fields. After purchasing and mixing his supply, the local clergy protest this sacrilege of possible human remains. The farmer doesn’t dare spread it with this condemnation, but how can he find out if some of the bones are human before the entire batch rots to uselessness?

In Greek mythology, the hero Cadmus buried the teeth of the Ismenian dragon in a field. Those teeth grew into the dangerous Spartoi warriors. Accidently planting bits and pieces of mythological creatures could have any number of strange side effects.

Several visitors to a rural village disappeared. A barrel of freshly processed bone manure sits in a local farmer’s storeroom ready to be spread over his land. The crime goes unsolved until ominous phenomenon manifests in the fields fertilized by his victim’s bones.

Next Friday, we move on from bone manure’s use to the utterly unappetizing process of its production in bone mills.

Paper Trail- Now Available

I’m very pleased to announce that Paper Trail is now available to download for free on Skullduggery in the Smoke’s resources page. The PDF contains forty-eight visiting and business cards ready to be printed out for Victorian role-playing games. You can download it here or on the resources page.

I knowingly veered away from historical accuracy in a few cases to make these cards a bit more user-friendly. For example, while some visitor cards displayed the owner home address, it was not as common as the cards in Paper trail suggest. I also gave only a street name and number to avoid setting the cards in a specific city or town. Most obviously, Paper Trail is a black and white PDF to be a bit more printer friendly. Some of the colors used in actual Victorian Visiting Cards have to be seen to believe. 

I hope you enjoy Paper Trail and use these cards at your own gaming table. Few gamemaster tricks help immersion as quickly and simply like handing a paper prop to a player. If you do use these cards in your own games, I would love to hear about it.

Paper Trail- Following the Cards

Visiting and business cards may seem like a mundane setting detail to some, but they can tell extraordinary stories at the gaming table. They’re the perfect Victorian clue machine, leading investigators and scoundrels forward to the truth. Finding a mysterious card in a poor corpse’s pocket is just the beginning. Both business and visiting cards form tangible connections between people. Every respectable home keeps a collection of visiting cards in their entryway. While peeping at this pile is an absolute taboo, it would be an easy way to check if any of the other suspected cultists have dropped by. In the same vein, finding a business card for an industrial chemist in the back room of the anarchist pub connects a few dots.

The etiquette of visiting cards could guide a story’s pacing. A servant drops off the visiting card of a person of interest. Her At Home day for visits is tomorrow. It might be a trap, but we can look into other leads until then. Or the right man might drop off a visiting card in person at the right moment to be asked to translate some hieroglyphics. Alternatively, a providentially dropped visiting card might pull the party away from an accidental red herring and back into more productive investigations.

A player character with visiting cards at their disposal has a host of new ways to approach a problem. While it won’t open every door, following the etiquette of introductions impresses most respectable people or spooks the right guilty persons into the open. Leaving a card with the right people at the right time could also bring much-needed backup in time-sensitive situations. A pack of cards with a variety of names could also help add a layer of verisimilitude to an improvised lie.

Adventure Ideas

Customer’s regularly found new uses for business cards. A card with all the ingredients needed to hatch a basilisk listed on the back distinctly spells trouble.

The social codes surrounding the proper use of visiting cards provide the perfect cover for clandestine communication. Every few weeks, a clerk in the foreign office receives six visiting cards from different names but all with the same folded corner.

Of course, once a social visit begins, adventures should be on their best behavior, despite the temptation to search the house for the missing balloon plans.

After a bout of slight inebriation, a friend remembers dropping off a visiting card with some ill-advised words written on the back. Fortunately, the lady of the residence is in the country for the weekend. Will someone please help him get his card back before the lady returns home?

We're past all the prologue! Paper Trail is ready for its release next Friday.

Paper Trail- Business Cards

The more mundane and crass cousin to the visiting card is the business card (also known as a trade card). The purpose of a business card is to advertise, so a business card should never be left as a visiting card. Only the most uncouth tradesman would consider them a suitable replacement. Any mention of a profession on a visiting card was very impolite. The only exceptions to this rule were professions with a title such as doctors, lawyers, clergy, and military men. Their very name advertises their vocations. Most business cards list the owner’s occupation, business address, specialties, and services. If the card gives a business address rather than a home it’s a business card.

Unlike books or posters, cards were printed on the small hand presses ubiquitous to every printer’s shop. They were cheap and quick to produce making business cards available to even entrepreneurs of the lower class. By the 1860s, every printer’s shop had a typeface book full or sample text in a variety of styles. Business owners often chose an eye-catching typeface or a variety of eye-catching typefaces with little regard to taste. With the spread of lithographic techniques, cards could advertise twice as loudly in bright colors. Even after paid advertisements blossomed with explosive growth of magazines and newspapers in the 1850s, business cards remained an essential tool for businessmen of all trades and classes. Anyone could have a stack of cards in their pocket, ready to be presented to future clientele, left at every door in the neighborhood, or tacked to the wall of public gathering places.

While ubiquitous in the Victorian world, middle and lower-class households reused and re-reused every spare scrap of paper they had on hand. A fine visiting card might be spared and kept on casual display, but after being handed to a potential customer business cards saw a lot of use. Price quotes, directions, and shopping lists commonly cover their blank white backsides.

Next week, I’m pulling out story hooks, adventure ideas, and mysterious clues revolving around visiting cards and business cards. The following week, Paper Trail will be available to download for free on this blogs resources page.