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!

Beasts of England- Batfolk

The essential Victoriana supplement “Darwin’s Catalogue: Beastmen of Britain “lists a plethora of beast folk options available for player characters. However, it excludes two famous mammals: Bats and Whales. These atypical creatures could still work in the world of Victoriana. For now, cetacean categorization has to wait. Today we look at Batfolk!

Batfolk-( May use the Attributes of Agile Beast folk  or +2 Dexterity, -1 Presence, -1 Strength)

Batfolk are unique among beastmen both for their ability to fly and their malevolent appearance.

Although only a few batfolk actually possess wings, their natural head for heights makes all batfolk valuable additions to the crews of sailing ships and build sites. Even if a batfolk is born without wings their fingers still extend a few inches longer than a human’s.

Whether winged or long-fingered, batfolk posses sinister visages with their tall pointed ears, slim bodies, and sharp teeth. Neighbors often ostracize batfolk until they look past their dour exterior. While batfolk enjoy the company of others and the bustling activity of city life, their nocturnal nature restricts many to socialize solely with other night-dwelling denizens of London.

Batfolk may choose Animal Traits or Complications from the following list along with those from the Victoriana Core rulebook.

Nocturnal Senses

Your senses explore the night world in ways others cannot understand. Your sense of smell, sight, and echolocation overcome all penalties for darkness, and reduce black dice penalties for being blindfolded, or other visual impairments by three.

Flight

You can fly! Your hands end with five elongated fingers connected by sails of leathery skin giving you wings. Whilst air born, actions requiring the use of a single hand suffer three Black Dice. Performing any two-handed actions incurs no penalty but sends you plummeting ten feet towards the ground immediately or at the end of a combat round. You have a flying speed of 5 + Dexterity x 4 yards per round.

Spooky

Bats carry a stigma across many cultures around the world both good and bad. Europeans and Americans associate bats with the macabre while other cultures revere the bat as a bodiless soul or a good omen.  As a batfolk, you carry the weight of superstition wherever you go.  Your Presence tests suffer +2 black dice when interacting with strangers or the prejudiced.

Wings in the Way

While your wings propel you to the skies, they do not make great hands. Nor do they help you move along the ground. Any skill tests using the Dexterity attribute suffer one Black Dice unless you are flying. This complication may still be taken even if you do not have wings.

Making Friends and Losing Them- Privileged Reputation Dice

During my years of running Victoriana, I’ve noticed my players prefer to invest in raw dice-power stats like attributes or skills. If they do take some of the other character options, they gravitate towards the special rules of Talents and the material resources of Assets. Privileges get very little use. I have also seen that Reputation dice (which are rolled to see if people have heard anything about you) don’t very often get to pull the story in interesting directions. It takes a long time to accumulate enough dice through adventuring to cause offended gasps at the mention of your name or grateful glances toward you in the street. I say let’s point these problems at each other and make a house rule.

Some of the Privileges and Complications give Reputation Dice to a player character. If you are using my house rules for Complications, those Reputation Dice are gone, making the problem worse. So, I’ve gone through the Privileges in the 3^rd Edition Victoriana Core Rulebook and assigned each a Propriety or Notoriety Reputation Dice. When a Player Character gets the Privilege, they get the Reputation Dice attached to it. This represents their “public face” based on their social circles, uniforms, and titles, as opposed to Reputation Dice gained by their actions through play. If a Privilege already gives Reputation Dice, that text can be ignored. Those dice have been factored in the following list:

Privileges

Artificer’s License-Propriety 1

Barrister- License- Propriety 1

Blackguard- Notoriety 2

Ear of the Street- Notoriety 1

Engineering License- Propriety 1

Friend of the Library- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Gang Member- Notoriety 2

Hero- Propriety 1

Higher Station-Propriety 1

Knighthood-Propriety 2

Livery Company-Propriety 1

Local Hero-Propriety 2

Maleficium- Notoriety 2

Medical Practitioner’s License- Propriety 1

Military Commission- Propriety 1

Museum Trustee- Propriety 1

Noble Tinkerer- Propriety 1

Notary Public- Propriety 1

Peer- Propriety 3

Police Officer- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Political Legacy- Propriety 1

Private Club Membership- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Private Club Membership Elite- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Pub Regular- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Public Carriage License- Propriety 1

Scrap Yard Source- Notoriety 1

Second Family- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Social Anomaly- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Society Friends- Propriety 1

Street Informant- Notoriety 1

Street Informant- Peeler’s Pet-Notoriety 1

Thaumaturgical Degree- Propriety 1

Theatre Box- Propriety 1

Theatrical Patron- Notoriety 1

Warrant Card- Either Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1

Certain Privileges listed come with the option of Propriety 1 or Notoriety 1. When a Player Character takes the Privilege, they choose whether this is seen in a notorious or proper light in society’s eyes. If a Private Club has a reputation for being full of Libertines with shocking vices, taking the Privilege gives your character a Notoriety die. Similarly, if polite society knows the Private Club for its charity work and stable political connections, the Privilege gives a Propriety Die.

Privileges aligned with Propriety heavily outnumber those with Notoriety dice, which is understandable. Most Privileges were built to fit upper-class characters, reflecting societal connections handy during an adventure. Only a handful could be considered scandalous enough to warrant a Notoriety point.

Remember, Notoriety is not a bad thing. It just means you get along better with the shadier or less accepted people in the Empire. A stage actor connected with revolutionaries won’t be keen to open up to a respectable citizen with close ties to the police. Of course, the respectable citizen won’t be pleased with it either. For the Rules for Reputation Dice see pages 190-193 in the Victoriana 3^rd Edition Core Rulebook. For the Rules for Privileges see pages 119-122.

More Portraits At Long Last

It’s been a while since we saw some adventurous faces on this blog. As we are between series at the moment, it’s time to expand the Portrait Gallery! This time I picked a few women whose portrait’s I’ve wanted to use, but required some very fiddly adjusting, editing, and stretching. While the ladies’ illustrations required some care, the bearded man was a complete gentleman and just needed some light cleaning.

These and many other portraits suitable for Victoriana games can be found in this blog’s Portrait Gallery.

Victorian Vice- Touts and Tipsters

If a wager contains no risk it’s no longer gambling. The search for a “sure thing” in Horseracing grew into an industry in Victorian England. Horse grooms, self-professed experts, mathematicians, fortunetellers, breeders, and charlatans all lined their pockets informing gamblers which horses to back for a price. Attentive customers eager for the name of a winner surround touts and tipsters at every racetrack and betting parlor in England. Enterprising touts purchase space in racing periodicals to advertise their tip mailing lists. Gamblers generally pay between 6 pence to 1 shilling for a tip, although prices rise for the biggest races (such as the Derby). An annual subscription by mail cost about 2 shillings, however, scam artists run most tip-by-mail operations.

Unfortunately, very few racing tipsters and touts have any better idea of what horse will win than their customers. If their information turns out to be useful through sheer luck, their customers return. If the horse loses, the customer already paid and touts never give refunds for faulty insights. They rely on patter, jargon, accomplices pretending to be satisfied customers, and plausible-sounding sources of inside information. Muddying the water further even touts with genuine information rely on these theatrics to bring in the customers.

Most tipsters lure in customers with promises of being “in the swim”, armed with genuine inside information.

These touts seem like regular working men and women with sharp ears and eyes, often claiming a connection to racing. The source of their information may be a friend working as a groom in the racing stable, an overheard conversation in a barbershop between members of a criminal syndicate, or a few hours spent perched in a tree outside the track. Their little known horses boast incredible practice lap times far outpacing the favorite. These “certainties” come with much longer odds and much higher potential payouts.

Some educated tipsters claim to possess an infallible system for predicting winning horses. Whether by advanced math, numerology, keen knowledge of horse anatomy, or just letting their 5-year-old child pick a horse, their customers follow the method all the way to the bookmaker. Tipsters alleging secret methods often act worldly-wise, honest, generous, mathematically gifted, or grandfatherly. Some might even assert their system earns thousands of pounds over the course of a racing season. The tipster merely charges a token fee to keep out the riffraff.

A few tipsters even profess to possess occult powers. They use their incredible gifts to pluck the names of winning horses out of the air. Such “Turf Prophets” appeal to superstitious gamblers with chants, nonsensical rituals, and esoteric auguries. They dress in exotic costumes or ritual robes. Many are foreign or try to appear foreign. Fortunetelling tricks, cold reading, and the occasional correct prediction keep the fakes employed, while genuine seers must be desperate for money to degrade their magical abilities.

Finally, the most genuine of tipsters are the lower-class men and women loitering around the track selling race cards. Once purchased, race cards furnish their owners with the horse’s names, weights, and coloration, along with key facts about their riders and saddlery. These key statistics arm their customers to make educated guesses for their wagers. Many card sellers leave their jobs as newspaper peddlers in the streets of London for a racing weekend. At 6 pence a card, they can easily make up to 10 shillings a weekend. Some card sellers earn extra money by working as a bookmaker. Others offer other more illicit products for sale.

Victorian Vice- The Turf

From the early 1700s to the early 1900s, horseracing reigned over English sport. Organized English horseracing (known as “the Turf”) took shape in the 1600s, and the sport grew in popularity and regulation. Seen as the “Sport of Kings”, the Gaming Act of 1739 tried to restrict participation in the sport to the aristocracy.  High entrance fees kept the riff-raff from competing, and enforcing prize purses of £50 or more should have killed smaller illegal tracks. In reality, the act proliferated illegal horse races. As Victorian England’s enthusiasm for horseracing grew, so too did their enthusiasm for betting on horse races. Faced with a national pastime, the Gaming Act of 1845 and the Betting Act of 1853 kept gambling at racetracks within the law.

Freed from the hypocritical facades of golden halls and the seedy backrooms of copper hells, gambling racketeers publicly ply their trade at Ascot, Epsom, and other racing towns. During a race day, a haphazard city of tents and booths surround every track in England. Enthusiasts arrive early to play Hazard, Roulette, Faro, and simple games of chance and return to play between races. Most of these temporary gambling dens stay open all day and all night. Although racetracks charge exorbitantly high rent on their grounds during racing season, purveyors of table games rake in a bundle in the carnival atmosphere of a race day. In fact, some smaller racetracks would close if they lost this revenue and the customers attracted by on track gambling. The bosses of the most notorious copper hells leave London for race weekends in the country. In their dishevel booths, they rob ten or twenty customers an hour with crooked games and return home weighted with disreputable riches.

Of course, the government did not legalize gambling at racetracks as a courtesy to table games and cardsharps, but for wagers over horseracing. At the track, bookmakers busily give odds for upcoming races and make hundreds of wagers at all hours of the day. Most won’t accept any bets under half a crown. Fake bookmakers stalk raceways stealing from inexperienced tourists. They take a bet, pocket the stakes, and disappear into the crowd.

While hordes of lower-class gamblers flock to bookmakers at racetracks, the rich prefer to make their bets in more refined and exclusive circumstances. The most famous betting parlor is Tattersalls in London.  Tattersalls is not a gentleman’s club, nor a gambling hall, but the premier racehorse auction house in England frequented by a select group of aristocratic gamblers intent on organized and respectable betting on the Turf. Its members belong to all levels of society. Race enthusiasts, horse breeders, jockeys, grooms, and gamblers all rub shoulders at Tattersalls. For a monthly subscription of £3 3s, persons accepted by the election committee receive access to club bookmakers, Tattersall’s drinking room (the “Turf Tap”), the ability to place bets months before a race starts, and the insider knowledge of fellow members.

Cheating in horseracing is as old as the Turf itself, and the number of moving parts involved in a large race leaves many gaps for deceitful knavery. Thugs harm, hobble, or dope horses to muck up their performance on the track. In more “informal” races, large dogs trained to attack certain horses pull favorites out of the running. Even in regulated racing, owners enter horses too young or too old for certain races with falsified papers. In one case a horse named Leander was suspected of being a year too old to compete, but it died before officials could examine its teeth for age. When officials exhumed the carcass they found someone had already dug Leander up and stolen its head. The Jockey Club barred Leander’s owners from future races.

Victorian Vice-Hazard

Every night, countless thousands of pounds switch owners at gambling halls and gentlemen’s clubs over games of Hazard. In the 1700s and early 1800s, the perilous game’s name turned into a synonym for dangerous obstacles. An appropriate appropriation, considering the many well-heeled sons of well-bred families left impoverished after a night’s play. Bored crusaders may have invented the game while besieging the Arabian castle “Asart”, or it may have been named after the Spanish word for an unlucky roll of the dice, “Azar”. Hazard was the staple game for displays of status and wealth at Crockford’s fashionable gambling house. It remains popular in golden halls catering to fun seekers of independent means.

Hazard may only require two six-sided dice to play, but that doesn’t mean it’s a simple game. Its finicky rules require memorization, an understanding of odds, and a personal fortune large enough to absorb sudden losses. Any number of players may gather around a Hazard table. One player at a time takes turns as the caster. The caster names a number between 5 and 9 (known as the main). If the dice roll the main, the caster wins a payout equaling his wager. If the dice roll a 2 or 3, the castor loses. An 11 or 12 on the dice means the caster either won or lost depending on their main number.

                -5 or 9 loses on an 11 or 12

                -6 or 8 loses on an 11 but wins on a 12

                -7 wins on an 11 but loses on a 12

Any other number rolled by the dice is called the chance. The caster rolls again. If the caster rolls their chance number a second time, they win back their stake plus a little more derived from a complicated set of odds based on their main and chance numbers. If they roll the main (their original number) the caster loses their stake. If the dice roll any other number the caster keeps rolling until they roll the main or the chance.

Casters play rounds of Hazard until three loses or they quit. Then the next player takes over as caster. If played outside a gambling hall, the other players act as the bank covering the caster’s winnings and sharing their losses among the group. Impatient for their turn as caster, players often make private side bets over the next number rolled, whether it will be even or odd, and the size of the next caster’s wager.

No matter the main or chance, the quick changing and complex odds of Hazard never favor the caster. Despite the handicap, cheating at hazard is rare. In games among the nobility, most of the caster’s know each other. Any hint of a scandal pulls the accused out of society. All castors share the same two dice and any alteration to make the dice roll a certain way would equally improve the odds for everyone provided they were not serendipitously swapped back out.

Hazard in Play

To play an entire game of Hazard in one roll, the caster makes a Gambling test with 6 black dice. On a success, the caster wins an amount equal to double their wager. For each net success, the castor wins another amount equal to their wager. On a partial success, the caster may roll again. On a failure, the castor loses their wager and must give up the dice to the next castor.

For a side bet, the player rolls an opposed Gambling test against their opponents with no black dice. This may be done while the player is the caster or just waiting their turn. To cheat at Hazard, the cheater rolls a Sleight of Hand test with 6 black dice to affect the caster’s outcome.