Videos sourced from Absolute History.
OK, so why am I telling you about this? Well, for one the channel's great, especially if you have any interest in history or storytelling in a historical context. The material's fascinating, story's well told, and there's no shortage of detail. By the time you finish one of these you should have at least two or three ideas for a scene, even a scenario.
Which brings me neatly onto 2: while these shorts are talking about the Victorians, the Edwardians and so on, you can bet the farm and all the chickens in it that these threats continued well into the 1930s. After all, bookshops, to name but one example, aren't usually fitted out with the latest and greatest when the doors open on the shop's first day. I guarantee you nobody's taken out the old gas fixtures, never mind renewed or repaired the electric wiring first put in by Bob back before the War. Bob could read and write, you know. That made him an expert in electrics. That peeling wallpaper, half-hidden behind the bookshelves? I'm sure it's a-OK! The dodgy fridge in the staff break room? Luxuries! Why, in my day we had to walk twenty miles uphill both ways before we even saw a fridge ...
It's remarkable to me that these events are set in roughly the same time period M.R. James sets most of his ghost stories. You almost never see an electric light or fixture in his tales, and I can't recall even one that had gas lighting. It's all done by candles. The only story I can think of where electricity plays any kind of part is Wailing Well, where the boy scouts have electric torches, but the torches don't play a significant part in the narrative. The same's broadly true for his contemporaries, like E.G. Swain who wrote the Stoneground Ghost Stories. It's only when the tale's written by someone like Charlotte Perkins Gillman that you get stories about wallpaper; it takes an engineer like L.T.C. Rolt to write about ghastly doings in factories and railway tunnels. Part of it is the old saw 'write what you know,' but what strikes me as telling is what M.R. James apparently didn't know - possibly because that side of life was all arranged for him without his having to think about it.
To set a scene you need to know what's in it, and (roughly) how it works. Then you can play with the set dressing until it does what you want it to.
Let's talk about wallpaper. Gilman's chiller has as its unnamed protagonist a woman suffering from depression. This has been interpreted many different ways in many different treatments of the story, from audio drama to television, but the key point is that her doctor husband advises fresh air and prevents her from working or any mental stimulation, so she can recover. She spends much of her time in the room with yellow wallpaper. The story progresses from there, but I shan't go further in case you haven't read it.
Taken in context with what we now know about the dangers of wallpaper, consider what might happen (in a Purist game in particular) where spending much time in a room whose air is contaminated by toxic fumes can cause temporary Stability loss, or permanent Sanity loss.
Let's say that room is the rare books collection, in the rear of the store. The bookshelves hide the remains of the old, toxic wallpaper; the store owner didn't bother to get rid of it since it would be covered by the shelves, mostly, and so wouldn't be objectionable to look at even if it was manky and peeling.
But one of the problems with the slower arsenic poisoning, of a smaller amount over a longer time, is that it could cause very vague symptoms ... as the video puts it.
If the protagonist suffers 1 Stability loss every time they go into the rare books section, they may put it down to some Cthulhoid influence. After all, this is a Cthulhu game; Cthulhu is always sus.
The Keeper should make it a toll, publicize it, put its name up in lights for all to see: every time someone goes into the rare books room they lose 1 Stability. If they are at 0 Stability they lose 2 Health or 1 Sanity. Sanity losses are always permanent; Health can be restored.
I mention Dreamhounds because this applies equally to both settings, but consider: the Hounds enter the Dreamlands either in the flesh, or mentally. If mentally, then their bodies are still somewhere in the physical realm.
Now, imagine what happens if that light fixture in the physical realm becomes overwhelmed by all the cheap bits and bobs that the Hounds plugged into it - the heater, the kettle, the cooking pan. A cascade of fizzing adaptors, just waiting to go off.
Hitchcock once said Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one ... The point I'm making here is that you can have a bomb that is not a bomb. Anything will do, so long as the audience knows it is dangerous and that it is about to go off. Imagine the Hounds' anxiety if they know, as they try desperately to finish what they're doing in the Dreamlands, that their cheap apartment is about to go up in flames because the electrics have given up the ghost. The Keeper can helpfully remind them of this every few minutes, by telling them what's happening in that cheap apartment. Smoke billows. Cheap adaptors fizzle, That printed tablecloth everyone hates goes up as soon as a few sparks drop on it - and all the while the Hounds are snoring away ...
Play with it further. The video points out that Victorian books sometimes used arsenical dyes. The example given is a wallpaper sampler, but really, it could be anything. Imagine a high-quality printing of an occult book. The obvious example is Yellow King, but that's a bit too on-the-nose, to have a book that already sends people mad also kill them with arsenic. As this Jstor article points out, using arsenic to make books was a common practice from the 1800s onwards; from the article:
Bartrip adds that it was “found in literally dozens of goods in everyday use,” including books. “Any manufactured item coloured green was as likely as not to have been dyed with arsenic, and in the mid-nineteenth century shades of green were the height of fashion, especially for home furnishings and women’s clothing.”
So let's imagine a limited edition of some occult text. Fairly modern, at least from a Bookhounds perspective. Let's say it's published aroundabout the 1860s or 70s. For the purpose of this example I'm going to say it's Magyar Folklore, published in English in the 1880s (borrowed from the old Keeper's Compendium for Call of Cthulhu) but really it could be any grimoire from about the 1790s onwards.
The Bad Penny
This is the third time your Hounds have noticed this particular book come to market: a limited edition of Theodore Dornly's Magyar Folklore, published 1881 in a very limited run of 100 copies. It's not especially sought after except by specialists; it has a lot to say about shamanism and demon spirits.
Funny thing. When it first came to auction a Cambridge academic bought it. He's dead now; heart failure. When it came to auction again a reliable shop customer, Major Thornton, bought it. He's dead now; a stroke.
Now #26 of a run of 100, slight damage to the spine otherwise in excellent condition, is up for sale again. It's not supposed to be particularly dangerous in the occult sense, yet two people who've owned it have died within five years. Further research can find six other previous owners, all of whom have died under more or less mysterious circumstances.
What's so dreadful about Magyar Folklore - and should the Hounds stop another of their valuable customers from acquiring it?
Magyar Folklore: Skimming gives 1 dedicated pool point, Occult or History, specialization Magyar. Poring over it gives +1 Mythos, no spells. However poring takes several weeks, as the text is rather esoteric and dry, and Dornly is very fond of his obscure Latin and Greek tags. Every week costs the reader 3 Health and 1 Stablity (arsenic poisoning).
Enjoy!
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