Foreword
Victorian England. Foul cults and lone sorcerers seek out forbidden lore and the secrets of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Knowledge that can consume and destroy. From wicked acts to murder committed in a lust for power, riches, and immortality. Like the Roaring Twenties, the Gaslight era provides a wealth of storytelling possibilities. Here, fog-shrouded streets hide dark secrets, while technological advances inspire inventors to push the boundaries of science and common sense. Who knows what horrors may be unleashed?
This new edition of the classic late-Victorian setting adds depth and broadens the scope of gaslit London and the world beyond. This volume, for Keepers of Arcane Lore, is crammed with advice, rules, and guidance on making the most of the setting, alongside two scenarios to confound and challenge your players.
For the first time, we have divided Cthulhu by Gaslight across two separate books: a Keepers’ book (the one you are reading now) and a players’ book. Thus, this Keepers’ book holds all the secrets—from dastardly plots and crazed cults to the hidden corners of the Gaslight world!
So, with this book in hand, as Keeper, you shall be prepared to unleash the mysteries and horrors of the Victorian night on your players’ investigators!
Mike Mason 2024
Introduction: Through the looking glass
Welcome to the Cthulhu by Gaslight Keepers’ Guide, the companion to the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. The Gaslight setting focuses on the late-Victorian period of 1880 to 1899. While the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide is for players and Keepers alike, this volume is for the Keeper’s eyes only, as it contains secrets and adventures for your gaming group. Thus, as the Keeper, you have access to information that your players do not.
Using these guides
This volume is a complementary partner to Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide, and assumes that you are familiar with its contents—much in this volume will only make sense in the context of information given in the other volume.
- The Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide sets the historical scene, detailing the late-Victorian setting; while focusing on Britain in general and the capital city of London in particular, some information pertaining to the rest of the world and the East Coast of United States is also present. That volume contains the rules for creating player characters or avatars (“investigators”) that players use to interact with the game world to solve mysteries and fight the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as setting out the game’s core rules system. Everyone in the gaming group should be able to read everything in that book—there are no secrets there.
- This volume, the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Keepers’ Guide, provides the Keeper (the person who will referee and run adventures for their gaming group) with extra resources for Victorian world-building, including rules guides and examples, villains and allies, the threats of the Cthulhu Mythos, occult secrets for the setting, and floorplans for key building types, as well as plenty of advice for running the game. In addition, there are two scenarios provided. The Forby Masterwork and Oranges & Lemons are both suitable for novice Keepers and players, while also presenting challenges for experienced players. If you are planning to play as an investigator, not as the Keeper, please read no further!
For the first time keeper
If this is your first-time running Call of Cthulhu, congratulations—a real adventure lies before you! Call of Cthulhu scenarios can be some of the most memorable and enjoyable gaming experiences imaginable. This game has been around for 40+ years because it is fun—the rules are intuitive and easy to play, even for beginners to tabletop roleplaying games—and because it taps into our deep interests as human beings: mystery, challenge, companionship, and fear.
It may be a bit nerve-racking the first time you sit a group down and begin a game. This book is here to help you through the nerves—Chapter 3 should guide you over the bumps. You can find a summary of the core game rules in the companion volume, Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide—or you may prefer to begin with the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set. But possibly the best place to start is not with rules and historic background, but by reading through the starter scenario, The Forby Masterwork (see page 173), which is intentionally straightforward and makes a good introduction for any gaming group. It should give you a mental picture of what a game looks like in play (minus the snacking, the jokes, and the sound of players whimpering at their terrible dice luck, of course). Once you’ve read that through and familiarized yourself with the plot, you are already on your way to being a Keeper. All the rest of this guide is just a toolkit for you to draw upon as you need.
Your resources
It is possible to run Cthulhu by Gaslight games using only the two Gaslight guidebooks and no other rules sets. However, once you are familiar with the core system, advance your game with a copy of the full rules and options available in the Call of Cthulhu: Keepers’ Rulebook, which also contains an enormous amount of advice on running games, monster profiles, spells, tomes, and much more.
Cthulhu by Gaslight also contains brief notes and numeric figures (“profiles”) for using the optional Pulp Cthulhu rules supplement, which is a more action oriented version of the Call of Cthulhu game for those who enjoy fistfights with cultists and machine-gun battles with tentacular monsters. Pulp Cthulhu works extremely well for those who desire a Victorian setting with a more “weird science” or steampunk aesthetic. If you are a big fan of pulp-style adventure or want tougher investigators that use psychic powers, then Pulp Cthulhu is something to check out. If you don’t use the Pulp Cthulhu rules, simply ignore the parts in this book noted for “Pulp.”
Horror in the Victorian era
It should be clear, reading the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide, that the late-Victorian era was not lacking in real-life horror. Despite the advances made by both political reformers and by science, late-Victorian Britain is a place of widespread suffering and cruelty, both deliberate and incidental. An era when violence against children is the norm, when those who perpetrate atrocities claim the moral high ground, when the power of men over women is the law of the land, and when the gulf between the living standards of rich and poor has never been greater. The two percent of the population who own 80 percent of the land might turn a blind eye to the millions living in or close to destitution—the difference in their lives is, in fact, almost unimaginable. The middle classes zealous for material progress and free trade might pretend that poverty is a result of personal vice and poor breeding, not exploitation; the evangelists of Empire might tell themselves that they are bringing civilization and enlightenment to the benighted peoples and corners of the world. Yet all are complicit.
At the bottom end of the social scale, the cruelties perpetrated are only more overt and immediate, as everyone struggles to stay out of debt and keep a roof over their head, and survival leaves little room for compassion. The poor literally starve to death on the street, carters whip their foundering horses, “child strippers” target well-dressed children for their clothes, farmhands beat plow boys, milk-vendors disguise rancid milk with borax and sell it to infants, mothers pimp out their underaged daughters, and enlisted soldiers fire upon Indian rebels.
While the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide already touches on this dark side of Victorian life, in this volume we take a deeper look. There is information here that should come as an exceedingly unpleasant surprise to investigators, as they explore the underbelly of society during their enquiries. The Jack the Ripper murders are the iconic crimes of the era, but hardly the only ones. Keepers interested in putting investigators—voluntarily or otherwise—into the parish union workhouse or the prison environment will find resources here.
Beyond the mundane horrors of life lurk the supernatural terrors that concern investigators. These range from the ancient mysteries of the landscape—spirits and entities so lightly labelled “fairies,” bound to stone circles or barrows or gloomy lochs since time immemorial—to the restless dead, who may be extremely old or uncomfortably contemporary, eerily insubstantial or savagely corporeal. Keepers who are interested in Folk Horror can find it meshes perfectly with the Cthulhu by Gaslight setting. Fans of the wonderful ghost stories of M. R. James (1862–1936) should find it easy to transpose similar chills into Victorian times.
And, of course, looming above all are the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. Cultists of the ancient gods and lone devotees blur the boundaries between science and magic, and both are right at home among the other high-achieving but sometimes unhinged Victorians. Traditional rites and new spiritualities may have prehuman origins. Faith and science are not always at war, and sometimes they can forge an unholy alliance. Attempts to pierce through the mysteries of Mother Nature may lead to sanity-destroying revelations as to the true character of the universe.
Lines of communication forged by Empire and steam technology allow explorers to stick their noses into places others fear to tread, from mountain fastnesses and seething rainforests to the hearts of deserts. Archaeologists (and worse) are digging ruined civilizations and treasures out of the sands, and it is a time when things wisely forgotten are slowly escaping from the grip of the ages. British (and other) adventurers are arrogantly meddling with religions and cultures that they do not understand. As for the colonized peoples, desperation or vengeance might give them every reason to hit back at their oppressors, even if it means striking the most horrible of bargains with allies or entities far beyond their control or understanding.
The Cthulhu Mythos actively corrupts. Not all its entities wait indifferently until called upon by human agents; some have hungers that stir them to act, whether that be for flesh and blood, or terror and chaos. Their messenger, Nyarlathotep, has its eye upon humanity, as always, and the Victorian era is when the King in Yellow makes a major move into the limelight, with the publication of that vile eponymous play.
We examine all these strands in this book, so that you, the Keeper, may make use of such ideas to create your own adventures, or add further depth to published ones. While the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide holds up a mirror to Victorian society, so that investigators might see themselves and their place within it, the Cthulhu by Gaslight Keepers’ Guide is where we step through the looking glass into the even stranger world beyond.
