Campaign Toybox
The Story: The Titanic didn’t sink anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle – but it might have done. And even if it didn’t, something with a socio-cultural imprint that big doesn’t just disappear. Especially not when you consider it was designed by Thomas Andrews, nephew of the William Pirrie, chairman of Harland and Wolf, the company that built it. Lord Pirrie built a strange building called the Temple of the Four Winds in a place called The Devil’s Punchbowl a few years before the Titanic sailed, a journey which illness prevented him from taking at the last minute. A similar excuse prevented major financier and richest man in the world JP Morgan from making the journey too. No doubt both of them had debts to pay to otherworldly entities, which might explain why an aethyric arctic hammer appeared out of nowhere that fateful night of April 14th, 1912, and cracked the ship like a nut in a vice.
Regardless of why, the ship did sink and then, a year later, it was born again. The ship now holds 1520 ghostly souls, mostly crew and lower-class passengers, and almost all men. For the moment, even the shroud of death has not shaken their ingrained system of class and the wealthy passengers have decided that they must have been returned for a purpose. Landing is out of the question, for the dead to not belong among the living, but perhaps here – in the wilds of the sea – there is more work for the dead to do, and more things on heaven and earth than were advertised in the cruise brochure.
Style and Structure: The Titanic was a perfect simulacrum of Edwardian culture on the verge of a structural collapse in the face of war and a new world of finance. A richer setting for roleplaying does not exist. As such, probably the best kinds of games for this setting will be character-heavy ones, utilizing relationship webs and systems with mechanics designed to build deep backstories and developed personalities. On the other hand, a ghost ship is still a ship, and it still has a naval crew, which means the Star Trek model can easily apply as well. Each new session can bring a new encounter on the seas, for the expert crew to solve before the curtain falls and the journey begins once again. You can run the full gamut of character vs plot, from the closed-in horror of a ghost ship lost in an empty ocean to the wild openness of exploring the real final frontier. Likewise, if your crew can at least appear human, they can meddle in the affairs of almost anything on the sea from the completely mundane to the unimaginably alien and horrific.
PCs and NPCs: Managing Director of White Star Lines and owner of the Titanic, J. Bruce Islay survived the crash, leaving a potential gap in the peak of the power structure. Islay was only a passenger, of course, with Captain Edward Smith in charge and he did go down with his ship. But there’s no reason to suggest all the dead came back – the PCs might just as easily be young lieutenants taking orders from Smith as young lieutenants forced to replace Smith. They could also be navy-trained passengers roped in to help out the now-reduced crew, or simply keeping an interest in where Smith sends his vessel – Smith does, after all, still take orders from White Star and many more of the company were on board. Thomas Andrews, head designer, also died in the crash, and if he isn’t a PC he makes an excellent NPC, knowing absolutely everything about every inch of his ship, no matter if it is made of steel or ectoplasm. Whether Smith is alive or not, there is some potential fun to be had in the fact that William Murdoch was supposed to be Chief Officer for the trip but Smith demoted Murdoch before sailing, replacing him with Henry T. Wilde, Smith’s colleague from the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.
The Titanic took passengers from all over England at Plymouth, as well as large numbers at stops in Chambourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland before sailing the Atlantic. In third class, people could sail for as little as three pounds (about a months’ wage for an unskilled laborer, about a week’s for a skilled one). For a first class suite, the price was over eight hundred pounds, the equivalent of almost seventy thousand dollars in modern times. This means that almost anyone from the US and Europe can conceivably be on this ship, from kings to soldiers to beggars, from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich. As to whether love will cross such boundaries of class, that’s up to you to decide.
Plots and Villains: Ghost ships have a powerful feeling of menace to them. While the Titanic may be sailing with good intent, there’s no reason to suppose that they have allies among the aethyreal waves. The Fliegender Hollander is said to be seen in the darkest of storms, sailing resolutely against the wind, and the Demeter is said to be crewed by a corpse crew, the zombie captain tied to the wheel for eternity. The Black Pearl or the Black Freighter may also appear, and then there’s the mystery of the Mary Celeste, which was found entirely intact but without any sign of crew. And that’s only a few of the mysteries of Davy Jones’ Locker.
Even without mysterious events, sailors lived in such fear of sinking and drowning that the sea is stuffed with a cornucopia of horrors, myths, legends and tales of death and that which lies beyond it, any number of which could offer glimpses of insight into why the Titanic remains at sea and how it might end its journey, should those aboard wish to do so. Meanwhile, the adventures of all the sailors from Sinbad to Shatner should provide plenty of monsters-of-the-week adventures to keep any crew up to their armpits in nautical adventure.
Sources: Five seconds on Google provides these two excellent starting points on the Titanic, and the latter has a great Bibliography to follow up. For ghostly ships, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy is unmissable, as is the Tales of the Black Freighter in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Once you look past the Sweet Valley High plot, James Cameron’s Titanic is an awesome spectacle which works very hard to recreate the ship in detail and in feel – the feel of the cultures on board, and the immensity of the place itself. His later documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss is an even better footnote on the subject. For the drama of Edwardian Britain, the best source are TV series like Brideshead Revisited (or the Evelyn Waugh book itself), To Serve Him All My Days and Upstairs Downstairs. I particularly enjoy The Admirable Crichton, wherein the roles of servant and master are strained when an Edwardian family and their butler are marooned after a shipwreck. The excellent Remains of the Day and the fun of Gosford Park will also help players understand the service culture into which they will be embarking. If you need more on pirates and the supernatural, you’ve either been asleep for the last five years or never read On Stranger Tides. Fix both of these immediately.
RPGs: Call of Cthulhu is a good first stop, with many an already published adventure hanging upon a cruise ship journey in some way. GURPS Time Travel Adventures has a superb adventure set on the Titanic by Stephen Hatherly and its details and maps are as yet unsurpassed – an absolute must for an extended Titanic campaign. Given the ghostly milieu, this makes for an excellent Wraith campaign, or indeed any part of the World of Darkness, likewise the world of Witchcraft or Buffy or any other horror setting. Finally, the campaign plot arc of 50 Fathoms details a way a traveling nautical crew can save the world – bits of it won’t work, but 80% of it is absolutely perfect for stealing.
