London, 1838: Gaslight, Empire, and the Kindred of Victorian Albion #1

London in 1838 stands at the threshold of a new age. Queen Victoria is newly crowned. Railways are beginning to change the boundaries of the city. Gas lamps push back the darkness along the major streets, while only a short walk away, narrow courts and alleys remain places of poverty, crime, disease—and, in the World of Darkness, things far worse.

For After the Sun Sets Games' Victorian Albion LARP, this is our London: a combination of the real city of 1838 and the gothic supernatural London presented throughout Vampire: The Masquerade, Victorian Age: Vampire, London by Night, and Vampire by Gaslight.

The result is not the familiar London of Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, or the final decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Those nights are still half a century away.

This is early Victorian London.

And something ancient is already waiting in its shadows.

A Young Queen and an Ancient City

Victoria became Queen on June 20, 1837, at only eighteen years old. The following year, on June 28, 1838, she traveled from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey for her coronation. Contemporary accounts describe extraordinary crowds; the Royal Archives estimate that approximately 400,000 people lined the streets to watch the procession. Victoria had also become the first sovereign to make the newly completed Buckingham Palace her principal London residence. The Royal Family

To mortal London, this is the beginning of something new.

To the Kindred, a young mortal queen taking a throne is merely the latest chapter in a city that has survived Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Plantagenets and Tudors.

London has changed its kings many times.

Its vampires are another matter.

In the established World of Darkness, London is famously associated with Mithras, the ancient Ventrue ruler whose influence over Britain stretches across centuries. London by Night describes the capital as the Domain of Mithras, a place where powerful Kindred inhabit both fashionable estates and the darker corners of the metropolis. White Wolf

Victorian Albion begins earlier than the primary period portrayed in the published Victorian Age: Vampire material, so our 1838 chronicle draws upon that lore while adapting its personalities, conspiracies, and supernatural politics to an earlier London.

The great conflicts of the later Victorian nights have not all happened yet.

Their foundations, however, are already being laid.