Victorian Setting Games

There’s plenty of court intrigue you can do, but upped to colonial empire levels of gravitas. You could explore some far off ruins or civilizations in the colonies. Maybe as ambassadors. Or there could be some major war between the various empires.

>Are you fucking retarded or just American?

Neither. I'm just aware Victoria took the throne in 1837 and fashions didn't change immediately after the archbishop rubbed whale oil on her head. After all, we're talking about a period from 1837 to 1901. A lot changes occurred in that time and not just in uniforms.

>Or there could be some major war between the various empires.
That's how everything goes to shit.

Not saying it's not a good sword of damocles to have, or you shouldn't give your players opportunities surrounding the potential outbreak of war, but in and of itself that's really very counter to the feel of the Victorian era - times a decade or so either side were a big global (well, European where they own half the globe) war, but for the main era itself you're looking at skirmishes, colonisation and border wars

>I know I shouldn't ask, but which one?
Let's hope this doesn't derail the thread too much.

I think though if you are doing your own setting you can have a major war. The era was capped by the Napoleonic Wars on one end, and WW1 on the other. Plus the American Civil War took place in this time as well.

Abolitionists for cute elf girls, or sexy orc guys?

>I think though if you are doing your own setting you can have a major war. The era was capped by the Napoleonic Wars on one end, and WW1 on the other. Plus the American Civil War took place in this time as well.

While people too often fixate on the American Civil War, there are plenty of major wars between major powers to choose from. In Europe alone there's the Crimean, Franco-Prussian, Russo-Turkish, Austro-Prussian, and 2nd Schleswig wars plus all sorts of rebellions and civil wars. Further afield there's the Mexican-American War, The War of the Pacific, the War of the Triple Alliance, the Sikh wars, the 1st Boer war, the 1st Sino-Japanese war, and the granddaddy of them all is China's Taiping Rebellion which lasted ~20 years and ended up killing ~25 million.

It just all colonial skirmishes and border spats as suggests. You can throw your players into some serious fighting if you bother to actually examine the period.

Is that American Dr. Who?

At the risk of starting something, they're on the Thames, which connects to the major docks of London. Most black folk would have lived along the Thames or the docks.

By the 1760s it was estimated that there were about 20,000 black servants in London, based on registered burials. The conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars actually saw an upswing in their population due to displaced black soldiers and seamen settling in London. By the early 1800s there were, further, already several black gentlemen, merchants, and traders, and enough of a black population that 4,000 of them emmigrating to Sierra Leon to found one of Britain's first African colonies did not notably deplete their numbers.

My point being, in the opening second of the video you posted, I count maybe three black folk and one East Asian, in a crowd of 13. Given the time and specific location (London, the Thames), that seems about accurate.

Now having said all that, Jesus wasn't black. He was Middle Eastern/Levant and probably looked like a modern Palestinian, more or less. There's a specific passage in the Bible where Judas must point him out in a crowd to the Romans; if Jesus was either black or white, he wouldn't have needed to do that because Jesus wouldn't have blended into the crowd.

Sadly no.

Jesus was a Jew. I thought this was common knowledge.

And where did the Jews live? The Levant.

The Jews at the time are the same people who would become the Palestinians, they just followed a different god.

I’m not disputing you, just pointing out that it’s silly for people to claim he was white, let alone black.

>Given the time and specific location (London, the Thames), that seems about accurate.

It's not the numbers. pinhead. It's how they're portrayed.

Rather than being portrayed as laborers, servants, or seamen which is what the vast majority of blacks, "Lascars", and other similar types would have been during the period, the scene has one black dressed as a gentleman instead of a gentleman's servant and another in the uniform of a line regiment instead of a colonial unit.

Also the Crimean war, i totally blanked on that

You blanked on much more than just the Crimean War.

>ctrl-f Castle Falkenstein
>no results

Good catch. That's one we all blanked on.

> which is what the vast majority of blacks

Sure, but not all of them. There WERE black merchants and gentlemen in Regency England. Not more than a handful, but they existed. Are the odds of encountering them especially high? No - but given the utter lack of black folk that tend to be depicted in the era (which is preposterous, they made up somewhere between .2 to 2% of the total population of England and Wales, and drastically higher in London, Bristol, or other major port cities), showing a black gentleman hardly seems like an unforgivable sin (consider that I've yet to see a single black person in a Christmas Carol movie even though they certainly should be shown among the poor and downtrodden of the time). Less likely things have happened in Doctor Who.

>and another in the uniform of a line regiment instead of a colonial unit.

That is a bit more understandable an objection, but hardly one that seems like it's worth getting worked up over.

>Not more than a handful...

... but somehow there's one in that scene.

It was nothing but pathetic SJW virtue signalling on the part of the BBC and not some honest attempt to accurately model the demographics of the period.

>>I've yet to see a single black person in a Christmas Carol movie

While that's a fair observation, current day producers won't cast blacks among the poor and downtrodden either shown Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Present or as laborers in the various City scenes. Instead the Cratchits will suddenly be multiracial, Marley an Hindu Inuit, Fred's wife Janet a "handiabled", transexual, ginger all in the name of "inclusiveness".

There's a great difference between being right and being righteous, despite what many soft headed fools want to believe.

>>but hardly one that seems like it's worth getting worked up over.

More like calling them on their shit.

Fug, I can't even read tonight it seems. Crimean was first on the list.

Counter to the historical truth, but all the invasion literature of the late Victorian following the Franco-Prussian War suggests it'd be in keeping with some of their actual fears.

To play it like that it would have to be a home front defense though, rather than a continental expedition.

>Not more than a handful...
>... but somehow there's one in that scene.

Hold on to your pants /pol/ack, this is going to surprise you...
..
..
....one

.... is LESS than a handful....
.
..!!

>Hold on to your pants /pol/ack, this is going to surprise you...

Can't do the math, huh?

A handful in a city whose population numbers in the millions and yet one shows up in a scene with less than 20 people. What are the odds?

>reality strictly conforms with the mathematical ideal and nothing interesting or unexpected ever happens

What's it like to muddle through life as a gormless NPC?

I do love this thread.

OP, try Victoriana, it's from cubicle 7. Very good, and not that pricey.

>... but somehow there's one in that scene.

...okay, I can see we're going to need to go step by step here. God damn, human beings really are bad at statistics.

1) Do you accept that there was at least one black gentleman in London in 1800? If your answer is anything other than "yes", you're an idiot.

2) Presuming you're not an idiot, is there a chance of encountering one on the Thames during an unusual snowfall? Not a certainty, just a chance, whether it's a 1 in 100 or 1 in 100,000,000. If your answer is anything other than "yes", then you're an idiot.

3) Having established that there IS a chance, what is the problem with showing a black gentleman? It simply means that a thing happened. It was unlikely, but not impossible.

Spoiler: UNLIKELY THING HAPPEN. In point of fact every day is filled with things that had only a million to one odds of happening, but nevertheless happened. The odds of being attacked and killed by a shark are 1 in 3,748,067. In 2015, six people died of shark attacks. The odds for them were the same as the odds for you, but it still happened despite there being less than a one in a million chance for each of them to get eaten by a shark.

>and not some honest attempt to accurately model the demographics of the period.

I can't see how you could possibly know that without sitting in the producer's room during filming, especially since it does accurately model what a crowd of 13 people could have looked like (except for the soldier's uniform, I guess. Mistakes happen).

>What are the odds?

More than zero, which is all they need to be to justify his presence.

>Can't do the math

This is hilarious because you're making the most fundamental mistake with statistics that anyone can make: the fact that something happens doesn't mean that it was likely to happen, and the fact that something didn't happen doesn't mean that it was unlikely to happen.

Call of Cthulhu had a really good sourcebook called "Cthulhu by Gaslght" for running late Victorian Era games.

Even if you aren't running CoC, it has some very good background information

So Bloodborne?

By your very logic Victorian period didn't start for real until Crimean War

>Victorian period
>Bloodborne
Jesus fuck... why people are keep doing this? It's like there is something very weird happening and there is absolute nothingness when people get asked about the period between 30 years war and Napoleon.

I know what you’re talking about, I just figure for the purposes of the thread the elements of the two period are pretty interchangeable.

You mean the Early Modern Period? (colonial period for my fellow yanks.)

Early Modern spans from end of medieval (so depending on who you ask 1450 to 1492) till French Revolution/Congress of Vienna.
A "bit" longer than fucking 2nd half of 17th and 18th century. But I think there is a reason why it eludes so many people:
It doesn't come with a catchy name. Englightment doesn't start until 1730s, baroque definitely ends before 1700s (and starts in the tail end of 16th century, so...), leaving rubes without a name to apply to it to cover the entire period. Geologist might argue about little ice age, since the actual, effective time of it happend in exactly those years, but the "ice age" itself as such is even larger than what "early modern" catches.

tl;dr people can't think about stuff they can't name, being bunch of undereducated idiots

>the elements of the two period are pretty interchangeable
They aren't. There is enough difference between Regency and Victorian period to people instantly pick it up and you want to dismiss completely different aesthetics of a fictional setting as "pretty interchangeable".
Good luck with that.

>Are there any pre-built victorian style worlds for RPG playing?

Yup

Call of Cthulhu by Gaslight

chaosium.com/gaslight-era/

>historians and educators lump an enormous tract of time into one era and give it a wibbly wobbly name that does nothing to inform the layman literally anything about the period

Sounds less like poor education and more like poor educators.

Considering what people throw into ‘medieval’ settings?

I don’t know about other nations, but here in the USA, education is often the first place to start making cuts when the deficit hawks refuse to tax rich people.

huh missed this when i was scrolling down first time so posted about it

we had some good games of this back in the day, all those sewers and underground tunnels being built uncovered some things that shouldn't have been

>Victoriana
what kind of system is it?

Things that only happend in my head: The Post

Please, do yourself a favour and stop showing everyone how uneducated you are

>Brotherhood of the Wolf

mon cherie

At least they don't try to undervalue existing niches, but rather expand them. Your lumping meanwhile does the exact opposite - undervaluing both Victorian period and Bloodbourne aesthetics.

Similarly, there's no real good name for the period between the French Revolution and Revolutions of 1848, even though they encapsulate a pretty important part of Europe's political, economic, and social development.

One of the Veeky Forumsst movies out there. But since most of Veeky Forums is movie-illiterate, I just love to mess with people pretending there is an actual Bloodborne movie.
For the record, works absolute wonders with /v/

What is Congress period?
What is Concert of Europe?
What is Vienna period?

Can you please stop making an idiot out of yourself, my friend?

All of those are names are post-1815. There is no good name that holistically includes the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, even the whole period is thematically and causally linked.

I don’t know. This is my though process- I get that it’d annoy history nerds. It doesn’t annoy me, and I’m a history nerd, but I see it. Most people aren’t history nerds. So if I threw a train in a Bloodborne setting, or a few tricorners in a dishonored setting, I think I could largely get away with it.

>Similarly, there's no real good name for the period between the French Revolution and Revolutions of 1848
Concert of Europe is a videly-accepted term by Anglosaxon historians, you dipshit. Continental Europe likes to talk about "Congressional/Congress era/period" and/or "Vienna balance". Either way, all of those things look directly at Congress of Vienna and Crimean War and lump it together, for pretty obvious reasons.
Which coincidently corresponds to what you've asked for. Considering this is all literally entry-level stuff to anyone even remotely interested in 19th century, you apparently don't even use wikipedia, not to mention actual textbooks.

Are you fucking retarded or just American and before anyone gets defensive - Americans cut and cut a lot out of history, so they can be somewhat forgiven the utter lack of knowledge, reason or just common sense when discussing historical stuff?
The aftermath of Revolutionary/Napoleonic period is a stark contrast to both revolutionary and post-revolutionary situation, you mouth-breathing moron. It's like you've picked Fall of Rome and Viking era, put them together with a straight face and said "look guys, we should totally take those two together in holistic fashion"

Napoleonic period is a completely different deal than things after Vienna Congress, not to mention the messy time when French Revolution was still a thing. Predominately because Vienna shaped balance of power in Europe like no previous (and some would argue - future) diplomatic deal ever did before. It completely changed the landscape of alliances, supports and policies, along with actions toward any sort of "Jacobine" activity, paranoid about another popular revolution. Saying it is "thematically and causually linked" is the surest sign you have no clue whatsoever what the hell you are even talking about. There is a lot of solid reasons who those two are completely separated and why it was such a big deal when Crimean War suddenly happend, starting the domino effect that eventually lead to WW1, but for purely historiographic use provides a nice caesura for unification period and definite end of Congress order.

Maybe, just maybe because nobody sane and with just about any level of historical education would try to pretend two clearly separate, distinctive periods should be treated "holistically".
To put that for a Clappistani like you to understand (because no European would have a problem like that to begin with): imagine someone trying to put together War of 1815 and American-Mexican War. Hey, it has "war" in it, surely it's the same deal!

Haven't seen it so I'll mention blades in the dark, it's basically Dishonored but you play as a Gang trying to make a living.

I think most Americans wouldn’t care much. In a sense it’s just adding an extra front. The main difference I see is that the US almost lost hard in 1812 (which is the actual year mind you) but won hard in Mexico, so it might come off as a bit schizophrenic in that regard.