Backsides By Gaslight

As I’ve mentioned before, here on Cthulhu Reborn and also over on the Yog-Sothoth.com forums, I was fortunate enough to have a (rather small) role in the production of the 3rd Edition of Chaosium’s 1890s horror setting, “Cthulhu By Gaslight” (shipping in the next few days in paper-form, already available from Chaosium in PDF)

It was a lot of fun helping out, both by contributing some designs (handouts and the new character sheet are mine) … and also by tracking down some obscure graphics and illustrations from old Victorian-era books (such as the rather splendid engravings of 1890s firearms which made it into the final version).

As with all these kinds of things, there’s a lot of additional *stuff* that was produced along the way that didn’t make the Chaosium book but are still kinda neat. I figure it might be kinda fun to share some of these on the blog … and if someone can do something useful with them, well more power to them! (or, in Gaslight-speak, “Top-ho!”)

Not the Title Page

One of the last items to be completed in Badger’s layout for the Gaslight book was the front-title page and the table of contents. The Great Old One in charge of the book (Kevin Ross) put forward the idea of creating some pages that had a Victorian typographic look to them. I liked that idea, and contributed a couple of ideas as to how the title page might look. One of my two ideas was taken up, but the other — much more bonkers — idea was something that I thought was kinda cool in its own way, though not really right for the book. The idea was basically to attempt a page layout in the form of a 19th Century playbill. Here’s what my attempt at such a beast looks like:

Images of London

While trawling through old books about 1890s London I found heaps of wonderful examples of sketches and engravings from the era that so perfectly capture the mood that I just had to snip them into Photoshop and tidy them up. Here’s a flickr gallery I made of some of these great pictures — if you want some illustrations for your own game in 1890s London, use these to your hearts content!

Here are a couple of examples, to give you and idea of the goodness included in this gallery of 130+ engravings: