London, 1838: Gaslight, Empire, and the Kindred of Victorian Albion #5

The Seven Clans of Victorian Albion

Within our chronicle, players encounter the seven Camarilla clans permitted in Victorian Albion:

Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavian, Nosferatu, Toreador, Tremere and Ventrue.

Each experiences London differently.

The Ventrue find opportunity among banking houses, aristocratic families, government offices and the old institutions of British power.

The Toreador thrive around theaters, artists, fashionable drawing rooms and the rapidly changing culture of London society.

The Brujah hear anger in taverns, workshops, political meetings and among people who believe Britain's old social order must change.

The Gangrel watch the city's relentless expansion consume countryside that once began only a short ride from London.

The Nosferatu know the hidden London: drains, cellars, abandoned chambers, poor districts, forgotten passages and secrets respectable society pretends do not exist.

The Malkavians walk through a city where wealth and starvation, faith and science, progress and misery exist beside one another every night.

And the Tremere see a capital filled with old places, old blood, old rivalries and occult mysteries beneath a society increasingly convinced that reason can explain everything.

Every clan wants something from London.

None controls all of it.

Wealth Above, Hunger Below

London's social divide provides one of the defining elements of the chronicle.

A vampire may spend one evening attending dinner in a wealthy townhouse where servants carry silver trays beneath chandeliers.

An hour later that same Kindred might walk through a neighborhood where several people share a single rented room.

Cheap lodging houses offer beds to those who can afford them and miserable alternatives to those who cannot. Food adulteration, unsafe housing, polluted water, disease and chronic poverty were genuine parts of nineteenth-century London life.

The World of Darkness requires very little alteration here.

It merely asks one question:

Who benefits from the misery?

A corrupt landlord might simply be a corrupt landlord.

A missing dockworker might simply have fled his debts.

A physician purchasing bodies might have perfectly mundane reasons.

A wealthy gentleman entertaining visitors only after sunset might simply be eccentric.

Perhaps.

The Masquerade in 1838

Victorian society gives vampires an unusual advantage.

People believe in etiquette.

They respect social boundaries.

The wealthy possess enormous privacy.

Servants are expected not to discuss their employers' affairs.

A gentleman who sleeps during the day may claim illness.

A widow who never seems to age can withdraw from society and later return as her own supposed daughter or niece.

A foreign nobleman may possess unfamiliar habits.

A doctor can request blood.

An undertaker can purchase bodies.

A merchant can keep warehouses that no respectable person would ever think of entering at midnight.

But the same century that provides these disguises is beginning to destroy them.

Police forces are expanding.

Newspapers spread stories.

Railways carry information.

Government bureaucracy grows.

Science investigates what earlier generations might have dismissed as superstition.

The world is slowly becoming connected.

The Kindred have not yet understood how dangerous that may become.

Not Yet the London You Know

It is important when entering Victorian Albion to remember what has not happened yet.

This is not 1888.

Jack the Ripper has not stalked Whitechapel.

The London Underground has not opened.

The Great Exhibition and its Crystal Palace have not appeared.

The great sewer transformation of Joseph Bazalgette lies decades ahead.

Bram Stoker's Dracula will not be published until 1897.

Even the published Victorian Age: Vampire setting concentrates primarily upon the later nineteenth century; its gothic-Victorian focus is generally associated with the period beginning around 1880.

Our game deliberately begins much earlier.

The future icons of Victorian Britain are still being created.

London Bridge has only recently received its railway.

Queen Victoria is nineteen years old.

Charles Dickens is still a young author; Oliver Twist is appearing during this very period.

The Metropolitan Police are younger than many mortal player characters.

Industrial London is growing around ancient buildings that remember entirely different worlds.

And beneath those buildings are Kindred who remember them too.

Welcome to London, 1838

During daylight, London belongs to merchants, laborers, servants, policemen, aristocrats, politicians, sailors, thieves, and a young Queen beginning what no one yet realizes will become one of Britain's longest reigns.

After sunset, ownership becomes considerably more complicated.

Gas lamps burn along the great streets.

Carriage wheels echo between buildings.

Coal smoke hangs above the rooftops.

Church bells mark another passing hour.

The Thames carries ships silently through the darkness.

Behind curtained windows, bargains are made.

Beneath old streets, forgotten doors open.

Some Londoners hurry home because they fear robbers.

Others fear disease.

A few still fear monsters.

They are wiser than they know.

For beneath the new railways, the new police, the fashionable houses and the confident promise of Victorian progress lies another London—older than the monarchy currently celebrating its young Queen.

This is London in 1838.

This is the World of Darkness.

Welcome to Victorian Albion.