This month, I explore a genre I have not spent a lot of time with — Victorian horror!
Most of my horror gaming has happened in the 1920s, the default setting for Call of Cthulhu. The 1880s never pulled me into its dark embrace, but the excellent new edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight inspired me to take a Jack-the-Ripper-like-stab at writing my own adventure in this period.
In this month’s adventure, An Opera Unceasing, the Paris Opera’s audience and performers vanish without explanation in the midst of a new premiere. The authorities are baffled, and the investigators are called in to help solve the mystery before the city plunges into fear and rumor.
I spent a lot of time researching the “rules” of Victorian horror, trying to figure out how to really separate a gaslight adventure from a more modern one. I emerged with some interesting results.
4 Tips for Gaslight Horror
1. Ground the Supernatural in a Dramatic Societal Failure. Victorian horror is most effective when chaos breaches established order. This approach is faithful to Victorian novels, which consistently place horror amid refinement and progress rather than in the gutters. So don’t begin your gaslight horror with a murder in a dark alley – begin it with a murder in a dark alley outside a prestigious gentleman’s club in London. In An Opera Unceasing, the adventure opens with an inexplicable vanishing at the height of propriety – the opera. The disappearance does more than shock, it also imperils the stability of Parisian high society itself, elevating the mystery into a matter of public dread and private panic.
2. Double-down on the Era’s Rigid Social Hierarchy. The late 19th century is known for a very rigid social structure. This element makes the period unique from others. Weave this into your players’ investigation! To solve a mystery, PCs should have to navigate diverse settings and personalities from all manners of societies, forcing them to change tactics as they go. In An Opera Unceasing, I move the players all across the social hierarchy, forcing them to deal with servants, workers, lazy gentlemen, and the richest of magnates, in a variety of settings poor and wealthy. And as a GM, I really enforced this and had dramatic reactions to roleplaying that was not taking into account social status…. forcing my players to really think about clues are gathered. A servant with low social status should have to get a clue in a very different way than a wealthy lady of society. (GURPS GMs, use those Status reaction modifiers!)
3. Erode the Mind. Madness is in the center of Victorian literature. It’s something an ordered society feared. Emphasize this! Exposure to the unknown should degrade the PCs’ mental fortitude, not just threaten their lives. In my adventure, I reinforced the horror with weird nightmares that chipped away at the PCs’ sanity or could threaten to grant obsessions or unnatural knowledge… things the PCs most certainly did not want.
4. “Industrial-level” Cruelties. The Victorian era was well-known for its grinding industrial evil, as well as workers’ fears of being exploited. I used this and decided that to make the horror feel earned, the evil artifact at the center of the adventure should demand maximum depravity from the antagonist. I invented an artifact that not only did terrible things to people — casting them into a universe of utter terror — but also was fueled by a man’s callous cruelty. This not only helped highlight my antagonist’s vileness, but created new opportunities for horror when the players discover that his ambition had no limits.
What are some of your favorite gaslight horror adventures? Let me know in the comments below.
Get An Opera Unceasing FREE here…
During the premiere of La Demoiselle aux Lanternes, the Paris Opera’s audience and performers vanished without explanation, plunging the city into fear and rumor. Drawn into the mystery, you must navigate the salons, streets, and shadows of 1879 Paris, where wealth, obsession, and forbidden knowledge intertwine… before the echoes of the opera draw you into something far worse than silence.
- An Opera Unceasing (GURPS Horror)
- An Opera Unceasing (GURPS Horror) – Printer Friendly
- An Opera Unceasing (Call of Cthulhu: Cthulhu by Gaslight)
- An Opera Unceasing (Call of Cthulhu: Cthulhu by Gaslight) – Printer Friendly
- An Opera Unceasing – VTT Tokens & Assets
Related: From 1870s horror to 1970s horror…
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