Campaign Mode

A constant preoccupation of late Victorian literature—reflecting a preoccupation of many middle-class Victorians—is duplicity, in the literal sense of a doubled personality, a disparity between what one says and what one does, how one appears and what one is. Hypocrisy, you might call it, but in a very complicated sense. Jekyll and Hyde have (or has) become the most enduring image of this concern, but Dorian Gray would be another obvious example. The Sherlock Holmes stories and novels depend upon Holmes’ ability to “read” people accurately, which requires that they be much the same on the outside as they are on the inside. If the man with the Chinese tattoo and the sailor’s walk is merely a brilliant actor with an Orientalist fetish, Holmes’ whole method collapses; conversely, Holmes’ own ability to disguise himself requires that everyone else also assume an identity between surface and depth.

Shaw’s Pygmalion, later made into the musical My Fair Lady, focuses on how, by transforming the exterior of Eliza Doolittle, Professor Higgins enables her to mingle with high society, part of the point being that the upper classes simply cannot imagine that someone who walks, talks, and acts so gracefully could not have been to the manner born. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, the vampire presents a danger to society not only because he is an evil, immortal monster, but also because he is so intent on “passing” among Englishmen as an English aristocrat.

As Jack the Ripper revealed, this duality also marked Victorian society and culture. London was the wealthiest and perhaps greatest city on earth, but its East End was a sink of some of the worst poverty in Europe. One could, in the course of a ten-minute walk, move from the height of wealth and power to the lowest depths of depravity and want. The ruling classes in effect chose not to see this, to tell themselves that if there were destitute paupers, their condition was their own fault.

These days, many also think of Victorians as hypocritical about sexuality, overtly exceedingly prudish but behind closed doors, fascinated by a wild sex-life. Homosexuality was criminal, but Prince Eddy, heir to the throne after his father the Prince of Wales, was himself gay or bisexual. High-class brothels served M.P.’s and other wealthy patrons, while alcoholic drabs charged tuppence for a quickie in an alley—and it was these unfortunate women upon whom Jack the Ripper preyed.

This disjuncture between what we will call the “Mask,” the exterior of a person, and the “Abyss,” his or her true depths, will be central in designing and playing your characters. Where probably most people are more or less “straight,” the same on the outside as they are inside, the player characters (PC’s) in Shadows in the Fog are precisely the sort of people who potentially endanger the Victorian world. Relatively privileged, of the middle and upper classes, your characters have hidden desires, interests, and abilities that make them very different from their apparent peers.

{Alternate History <--> Magic}

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 23 Dec 2004