Campaign Toybox
The Story: Dodgson had the math – the fundamental curves that described the universe. If somebody thought hard enough along those lines, they could describe a whole new reality. But that kind of power would require massive amounts of psychic power – a level you could only get from a whole city. It was Charles Liddel who came up with the solution: take one girl’s dreams, write them into a book, coded with the maths, and then sell it. Once the whole city of London knew about Wonderland, they could open a gateway through Alice’s dreams, and step into fiction themselves. And they did it: Liddell, Dodgson and Tenniel were the first Oneiromancers.
But once they tore open the rabbit hole, the whole world’s dreaming fell through it. Soon, they created a massive dreamscape, and the biggest landmark of all was Mythic London: the city its inhabitants believed it to be. There, Dickens characters walk the streets, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are real and penny dreadful plots are enacted every moment. Even more, the public perceptions of real people and places come to (larger than) life. In Mythic London, the poor really are sinful and lazy and scandalised ladies are deformed monsters. And the greatest monster of all is Wilde, a gigantic black shadow composed of everything that so desperately terrified 19th century English society.
None of this would be a huge problem if the bleed didn’t go both ways. The shadows of Mythic London don’t just pervade the nightmares of the denizens of the real city, but are slipping through the cracks and walking the real streets. And those who wish to build up a name for themselves in London society – or stain the name of a rival - can do it in ten minutes in Mythic London. And when reputation is all that matters, the risks are totally acceptable.
Against such madness stands the Dickensian Society, a group of people dedicated to slipping in and out of Mythic London through the insanely popular works of Dickens. Once there, they can do what they can to keep the fictional world from being completely insane, and the real one relatively safe.
Style and Structure: When you’ve got two worlds bi-locating, the format always ends up working like the Matrix. Your PCs go for runs – or “excursions” – into the nightmare realm, on missions of exploration, rescue or assassination. From Dickens’ home and places from his childhood, they can suit up and cross over into Bleak House or The Old Curiosity Shop, and from there set out into something like Escape From New York re-imagined by Dave McKean and Oscar Wilde. For variety, the heroes can have back home adventures trying to affect Mythic London with their own manipulations of public opinion. That’s slow and boring most of the time, of course, but it can be fun to have a bi-located story, as one group of PCs fights to rescue the impugned name of a lady of society by milling around a society party while another group tries to accomplish exactly the same thing by destroying hideous Gossipmonger-beasts with swords, pistols and spells. And that’s really the key here: there were times in London society where reputation was everything and the right scandal, at the right time, could literally be a death sentence. The aim of this campaign is to replay those struggles, only with more gun-fu and explosions.
PCs and NPCs: The best thing about combining social climbing with extreme violence is it allows all manner of PCs to be involved, from pulpy mad scientists and explorers to realistic book-keepers and cab drivers, from real world legends like Baden-Powell and Cecil Rhodes to fictional ones like Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray, and from thugs and guttersnipes from the East End to whimsical poets or ladies of the highest rank. You can even play fictional characters from Dickens, Austen or your favourite novel – or even a novel you invent. A great and hilarious odd-couple team might be an author or two and their main characters – the former understanding the real world but needing their own creation’s advice when dealing with the strange nature of a fictional London.
So PCs are manifold. The bigger job is coming up with a nice big roster of NPCs, because if you’re going to be manipulating society, there has to be a society to manipulate. Still, a quick browse through both history and the many fictional works describing the time should provide much inspiration.
Plots and Villains: The printing press may have been invented in the Middle Ages but it really didn’t begin to create mass media until Victorian times. And they loved it. Books could be printed so cheaply they could be sold for a penny and still draw a profit, assuming they were salacious enough, which then as now meant big hunks of sex and violence. Hence the name penny-dreadfuls, and they contained porn and slaughter far beyond today’s tolerances and in truly excessive volumes. And since these things were captivating the public’s imagination, Mythic London will be bursting at the seams with monsters imagined into life. Meanwhile the public perception of the criminal and poorer elements of the city will provide millions of orc-like minions to bash about in pulp style (or flee from if you want to go horror). The same goes for the reputation of licentious soldiers, inscrutable orientals, bestial Africans, thieving Jews and loose women. It is of course horribly politically incorrect to throw punches at a nightmare creation of racist hatred, so make sure your players are okay with this before going this way, and be sure to stress that these nightmares are born of ignorance, not reality. Indeed, one might imagine that Mythic London has zones of belief: the inscrutable oriental is a terrible clawed villain among some streets, but if the players get him to chase them into Chinatown, he becomes nothing more than a man.
You can also adjust power level depending on belief, letting really horrible monsters be weak because of low readership and seemingly innocuous people becoming enormously powerful because “everyone” knows about it and has judged it evil (like Wilde’s homosexuality). And when it came to collective belief, the Victorians put modern fans to shame. There were three illegal versions of Oliver selling out each night on the London stage (each with their own guess at the ending) before Dickens had even finished serialising the novel, and thousands of people lined the streets in protest when Conan Doyle dared to suggest that Sherlock Holmes might be able to die. Anything that can harness this kind of power would be terrifying, and thus an excellent villain, whether they are sorcerers, politicians or evil authors from our world, or gigantic personifications of repressed sexuality.
But for really superb villains, perhaps irony is the best route. There will of course be people in London whom the PCs know are evil incarnate but because they do their work softly and scrupulously manage their reputations will be thought of as saints – and thus will be the greatest heroes of Mythic London – heroes the PCs may have to team up with and aid when in that nightmarish realm. Of course, you don’t want to get preachy, or worse, turn the psychogenic landscape into an exercise in painful allegory, like some terrible political cartoon. The best way to avoid that is keep the moral issues ticking over in the background, for the players to pick at themselves, while their missions have nice clear directives that run perpendicular to such concerns.
Sources: Thankfully, a great amount of Victorian literature remains and have become classics – and classics are cheap. Any bookstore will be able to give you Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, and everything by Dickens, Austen, Wilde and Conan Doyle – plus about six million retellings of the Ripper stories. Countless TV shows and movies have been set on the streets of Victorian London – Sherlock Holmes is still the most filmed character of all time, with Dracula a close second – and all of Wilde’s plays have been filmed. However, when it comes to Alan Moore’s Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell, go for the comics, not the films. For Mythic Londons, try Mary Poppins and Neverwhere, and for excellent dreamscaped metropolises, check out Dark City and Mirrormask.
RPGs: Etherscope gave us a steampunked London complete with the Matrix, but with less supernatural gribblies – while Savage World’s Rippers and EOS’ Unhallowed Metropolis have all the monsters but no other world. A combination of these could work really well. It’s totally the wrong genre but Edge of Midnight shows how a world can be shaped by a genre, because its world really does run on the rules of noir – and thus provides an excellent template for scaping a Mythic London of Victorian times. Of course, I stole Mythic London from Ars Magica’s Mythic Europe – the Europe that the people in the 13th century believed it to be. Again, the wrong period, but another good template on how to bi-locate the fantastic on top of the historical – and it has duelling realities based on belief, too. Call of Cthulhu’s Golden Dawn is a great look at London actually in the right period, and GURPS has probably also covered the period. It’s that kind of line.
