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Several Months ago I made a very eclectic purchase from Noble Knight and the books sat staring at me from a dark corner of my closet as they remained forgotten and unread. On the top of the pile was the Havering Adventures by Cubicle 7. I have a fondness for the Victorian era through the early 1920’s so it seemed like a good purchase. I also had the Victoriana 2nd Edition rule set and some of the adventures from the first edition which I enjoyed. Having said that my disclaimers:
I am in no way connected to Cubicle 7 or any of the authors. I’ve never laid eyes on them and probably couldn’t pick them out of a police line up. This is not a playtest review. I’m not tied to any particular system (D20, Heresy, HEX, Savage Worlds, etc) and will be more interested in the flow of the adventures and writing style. No spoliers
In Short
An extremely well written series of linked adventures that are open enough that they could be fairly easily used for any game system.
The Good: excellent, clear and evocative writing with great period background, art, and diagrams.
The Bad: The adventures are designed to fit the Havering family (pre-generated characters), which is not bad in itself, but if you use a different group of characters, you’ll be extremely disadvantaged without one or more high society players. Could limit usefulness for existing players.
The Physical Thing
The book is a very attractive soft cover, designed to resemble a Victorian era book with a picture of the Havering family and friends on the front cover. It runs 101 pages with a table of contents, index, but not counting three pages of ads at the end.
Under the Cover
The Havering Adventures are three linked adventures (Lost Luggage, Behold the Valiant Ones Shall Cry, and Dead Man’s Hand) set in 1867 England. The book provides a group of protagonist, the Havering family, their friends and servants for use as player characters. The Victoriana game has a strong focus on social class and the conditions of England in 1867. The Havering clan provides characters from most of the social strata, giving options to play a low class thug to a high society lady. If you’re not familiar with the system or the setting, this is a good thing and would allow a new GM to let players chose characters and have a pre-established reason for the party to be working together. The inclusion of the Haverings is both a strength and a weakness. A strength for a one off or a short campaign, but a weakness as the adventures are designed around a certain mix of characters and social classes.
Without providing spoilers, the three adventures provide a good mix of action and different locations around London. In the first adventure, Lost Luggage, the players will get to visit a horse racing track and a social gathering before the race. the background provided on racing during this period was exceptional. The writers really did their research and provide a clear description of how the race track is set up and run. The plot and action are fairly straightforward, but it’s a good starting adventure and will get the players used to their characters, how to work in their social circles, and hopefully make a few useful contacts for the later adventures.
The second adventure, Behold the Valiant Ones Shall Cry, takes place on an airship, the Valiant Rose. There’s a lot going on in the second adventure with several intertwined events and a couple of interesting plot twists with unexpected enemies and allies A good, fast paced adventure in the air over the Atlantic ocean. As a fan of Hollow Earth Expedition, I could see adapting this one for use in HEX with a Dirigible. The airship graphic is good, and the description of the airship and the crew is more than enough to support the adventure.
The last, Dead Man’s Hand, is the conclusion of the trio of adventures and requires an experienced party of characters. An enemy from the first adventure is the main antagonist and failure of the party will have very dire consequences for Victorian London. There is some good investigation that can be done to draw the threads together and stop the sacrifice of an innocent.
Overall, all three are extremely well written, evocative adventures that should be fun and relatively easy to run in any system. There are very few stat blocks in the book and the description of the key NPCs is complete enough to give the bones you need to build their stats in another system.
As you can tell, I liked it a lot. So why the grades? It gets a 5 in style due to the quality of writing, lack of any typos I could find, clean layout that never felt over dense or difficult to read, good use of sidebars, good to excellent art, and humor every so often. My favorite: “should the player-characters insist on staying then he uses the universal signal that they should push on by leveling a gun at them.”
It gets a grade of 4 in substance due to its design around a particular mix of social classes that you may not have in your group, although they give sidebar advice how to adapt the adventure. Second, the action slews too heavily toward the upper classes and could leave other players with too much time on their hands. And finally, the writers are in love with upraised animals with fox men, weasel men, goat men, etc. This is part of the Victoriana setting, but is used too heavily in the adventures. It can easily be ignored and made a human only setting. For example, the bodyguards in adventure two are dark skinned, dwarven Sikhs. There’s also a dwarven Texan in the third adventure. It’s probably just a personal bias, but the inclusion of other races weakens the book for me.
In summary, well worth my investment and I’m sorry it sat gathering dust for so long. Good for any Victorian era through early 20th century game.
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