"And now, Prendick, I will explain," said Dr. Moreau.
–from The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells

One of the fun parts of reading "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" was picking out the "easter eggs" --characters or places from famous and not-so-famous works of Victorian literature stuck in here and there as supporting players in the story line. And a really cool place to learn about them all is Jess Nevins' Annotations to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen web site.

During some of the casual conversation with the players in my silly SteamPunk campeign, I've realized that it might be useful to put together a sort of Annotations to the Game here on the site, if for no other reason than to satisfy the curiosity of those wondering when I'm stealing something from Victorian literature.

1. SteamPunk:

SteamPunk is the name of a subsection of science fiction in which the sensibilities of late 20th-century dystopian science fiction are applied to the setting of 19th century scientific romances. "Steam" because the primary motive power of the age was steam, and "punk" from cyberpunk. One of the best examples of SteamPunk is K.W. Jeter's Morlock Night, and the very worst (bar none) is Sterling & Gibson's The Difference Engine. Literary critic John Clute (and others) have made the case that some of Dicken's later novels were actually the first SteamPunk--and have cited numerous works of fantasy and science fiction written before the cyberpunk craze which seem to fit the SteamPunk label.

2. April, 1870:

I chose 1870 as the year to start the campaign for a number of reasons. I wanted the campaign to begin after the American Civil War, because that was the first truly mechanized war. By the late 1860s (in the real world) a number of technological advances which underpin the scientific romances (the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells being prime examples) were in place. It is not that much of a stretch to imagine many of those technologies being slightly further developed by that time than they were in our world.

I wanted the campeign to be during a time when Britain had many rivals. Late in the 19th Century, after the unification of Germany and a few other political events, the only true rival of Britain is Germany. But earlier in the century France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia are all potentially equal rivals, with several other powers not that far behind them. So I couldn't set it after about 1871.

By picking 1870, I could take advantage of the recent revelation of Captain Nemo's nefarious submarine, and have a large number of possible players in a game of international intrigue.

April is the end of the "quiet" season in London during the 19th Century. By May all the wives and daughters of the upperclass families have left the country estates and filled the townhouses of London. The London Season kicks off with balls and dances and the theatre season in full swing. By starting in April, I could get the cast of characters together before other social events would make it less likely that a group from different social strata might work together.

3. Sir Cosmo Cowperthwaite and Lady Ottoline Cornwall:

I lifted these characters from Paul di Filipo's SteamPunk Trilogy, although I have taken extreme liberties with them both. In di Filipo's novel, Cosmo was born around 1812, and Lady Ottoline around 1795. I've moved their births more than 20 years later.

Furthermore, though there are many elements of di Filipo's novel I found entertaining, he suffers from the two problems of many recent steampunk novels: being overly fixated on the salacious sexual hijinx he suspected (or hoped) occurred behind the scenes of the original scientific romances, and thinking of silly ways that 1990s inventions might have been done-up with Victorian technology, instead of taking actual Victorian inventions and taking them a couple of logical steps forward. Another minor quibble is that di Filipo did less research than any of the players in my campaign. He makes some outrageous blunders about titles and forms of address, for example.

So I stripped the characters of the puerile elements and made their histories more in keeping with actual social practices of the era. I made Cosmo's inventions more in line with the sorts of things that appeared in scientific romances of the day. And I gave Cosmo a butler who fit in with the mythology of scientific romances and steampunkish anime.

4. Mr. Benton Frazer and Turgenov:

These characters are being shamelessly cloned from that fun but short-lived television series, "Due South." In translating the ultra-competent, ultra-upright mounty, Benton Frasier, to Victorian England, I needed to make only a few changes. He's from Scotland, rather than Canada. His father was a constable, rather than a mounty. His grandparents were eccentric scotts naturalists and linguists traveling through Eurasia, rather than eccentric travelling librarians in the Yukon. In the television series Frasier is often assisted by the preternaturally intelligent half-wolf, Deiffenbacher. Our Mr. Frazer is assisted by the equally brilliant siberian husky, Turgenov.

In the 1870s, huskies are not well-known outside of the Chukchi region of Siberia. In the 18th century the Russian Empire had actually tried to keep the huskies a secret to outsiders, the breed being indispensible in traversing the tundra. Note that the Chukchi's Husky is not the same breed of dog as the Inuit Qimmiq, though both breeds are closer, genetically, to wolves than any other breed, and both were selectively bred for life on the tundra. The Husky was bred as a sled dog and a herding dog, whereas the Qimmiq was a sled dog and a hunting dog.

I changed the spelling of Frasier's name to match that used in Scotland in the 19th century. Finally, I have made him a clerk in the detective department of the Metropolitan Police Department.

5. Prof. Arronax:

The players have not met the professor, but early in the first game they came into possession of transcripts of interviews of the professor and plans for a submersible ship based on his notes and recollections. The professor is a character from the Jules Verne classic, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the novel, the professor is a French paleontologist who happened to be in America, having collected fossils and completed a lecture tour when the world becomes aware that something is sinking ocean-going vessels at an alarming rate. At one of his lectures he asserts the opinion that a primitive narwhal of enormous size is responsible. His theory is quoted in major newspapers. When the U.S. government decides to send an expedition to kill this narwhal, the professor is recruited. Eventually the warship they are on is sunk by the Nautilus and Arronax is among the survivors taken prisoner by Captain Nemo (see below).

The professor comes to grudgingly admire Nemo and his wondrous invention. The prisoners eventually escaped and wound up on in a fishing village on an island in the north sea. During the months while awaiting a ship to take them back to civilization, the professor writes a novel-length account of his adventures.

For the campaign, I decided to assume that the events of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea happened more or less as reported in Verne's book. I have assumed further that when the professor and his companions reached Copenhagen, that the press got hold of the story and began publishing it right away. The French government, anxious to gain the secrets of the Nautilus and keep same from their rivals, placed the survivors into "protective custody" at the earliest opportunity, and began grilling them for additional details. The whereabouts or well-being of the professor after the interviews is not currently known to the players.

6. Ned Land:

Ned is another character from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Mr. Land is a canadian harpooner who was considered one of the best in the business. During the 19th century harpooners were as famous as rock stars are today. There were whole families of harpooners that people followed like a favorite sports team, so it was no accident that Jules Verne placed such a character in his book and had the other characters place so much faith in his ability to conquer the beast.

In the book Ned is portrayed as an impatient man of action who is forced to spend most of the novel twiddling his thumbs in heavy confinement. He is given a few chances to act bravely in the face of danger, and he is the one who comes up with the daring escape plan at the end of the story. The professor, who narrates the book, dismisses Ned's intellectual abilities. However, there are reasons to question the professor's objectivity. Early in the novel the professor asserts that "he who calls himself Canadian, considers himself a citizen of France." Since many Canadians, even some of the French-speaking inhabits of Quebec, do not consider themselves citizens of France, I decided that this little tidbit betrayed a certain high-handed chauvinism on the professor's part.

So I took the liberty of assuming that a man whose livlihood depended on ships that plied the sea, might indeed notice some things of importance about the design of the Nautilus. It seemed reasonable that the French officials would decide he knew too much to be allowed to return home to Canada, a province of the British empire. But I also inferred that a man who could outwit Nemo and escape from the Nautilus could also escape the French intelligence officers and at least make his way to London.

7. The Nautilus:

The fabulous submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. According to the book, the vessel was designed by Captain Nemo to take him away from the evils of society and to take revenge on those who had caused him great personal sorrow. One scene in the story implies that his wife and two sons were brutally murdered by agents of some goverment. There are other clues in the text, but they are somewhat contradictory (see notes on Nemo below).

The ship was named after a real submersible boat built by inventor Robert Fulton in 1800, which was itself named after a cephalopod with a chamber shell. It is particularly apt to name a submarine after these marine creatures because they control their own bouyancy by pumping water in and out of the chambers of the shell. They also propell themselves through the water with a form a jet propulsion.

The novel gives some dimensions and other technical data about the boat, but a careful attempt to construct engineering diagrams from the description quickly reveals that this description must be seriously in error. One must remember that Verne was not himself either an engineer or scientist.

The players have never seen the ship. Some of them have seen engineering drawings created by French experts. The players do not yet know if these drawings are more accurate than what could be deduced from the published accounts of the vessel.

8. Captain Nemo:

Another character from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The players have not met him. When it was published (serialized in a weekly publication), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was an enormous hit, and spawned numerous imitators and rip-offs. What most readers did not know was that throughout the writing of the book, Verne and his editor had numerous bitter arguments about Nemo's identity.

Verne had originally invisioned Nemo as a wealthy Polish engineer whose family had been killed during the brutal Russian oppression of the polish insurrection five years earlier. The editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, wanted Nemo to be opposed to slavery, and the ship to have been built to destroy freighters carrying the ill-gotten gains of slavers. Russia had already proven to be an extremely lucrative market for Verne's stories, and Hetzel feared the book would be banned by the czar if Nemo were a polish nationalist. They eventually compromised, agreeing to leave the national origin of Nemo, and the nation he was angry at, obscure.

Many clues that Nemo was Eastern European remain in the text, nonetheless. In 1875 Verne wrote a sequel of sorts, The Mysterious Island, Nemo appears and reveals himself to be Prince Dakar, the son of a rajah of the once-independent territory of Bundelkund, who was involved in the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and has hated Britain ever since. The problem with The Mysterious Island is that it contradicts 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the first book, the narrator clearly identifies the action as taking place in 1867 and 1868, after the end of the Civil War. The second book begins during the civil war in 1865, and covers a period of less than 2 years, ending in January 1867. Near the end of the book the heroes finally meet Nemo, whereupon he claims that he has been living in the cave under the island for over 10 years; meanwhile, the protaganists have all heard of Nemo and his exploits of "years ago." The problem is that none of those exploits have happened, yet. Obviously this was a blunder on the author's point, though readers at the time didn't seem to care.

The players haven't met Nemo, and don't know, yet, whether he survived the maelstrom at the end of Prof. Arronax's account, as recorded in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, let alone whether he is polish or hindi.

9. The Morriarty Family:

Jerrold Moriarty, crimelord of Limehouse, master of the Thuggees, also known as the Cobb, is not from literature, but he is also not wholly original to me. Jerrold Moriarty is inferred from certain hints in the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While the Jerrold Moriarty in my SteamPunk game is not the Prof. Moriarty of Doyle's creation, he is a relative.

Of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, Prof. Moriarty is mentioned in only three: "The Adventure of the Final Problem," The Valley of Fear, and "The Adventure of the Empty House." Because the Professor is considered Holmes' archnemesis, many people are supprised to learn that he appeared so seldom. Moriarty was created for the express purpose of killing Mr. Holmes. Conan Doyle always considered the Holmes stories a fairly minor work. He had been writing mystery and adventure stories for some years before the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in 1886. He grew tired of the character and originally planned to kill him off in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," but was talked out of it by his mother. A few years later, he introduced Prof. Moriarty in a single story, without any previous clues that this criminal mastermind had ever existed, then had Holmes and Moriary kill each other by the end of the tale. Later, giving in to public pressure, Conan Doyle brought Holmes back to life in "The Adventure of the Empty House."

Throughout the Holmes stories there are many contradictions and inconsistencies, not surprising given that Conan Doyle wrote the stories over a span of 41 years, and never considered them "serious writing."

In the original story, Prof. Moriarty's first name is not given, but his brother, Colonel James Moriarty, is identified as a war hero whose reputation is "above reproach." In the later stories, the Professor's first name is revealed to be James, whereas his two brothers are referred to as Col. Moriarty and "the youngest, a train stationmaster of no concern to us." While some people have gone to great lengths trying to come up with explanations for why there would be two brothers named James, I decided to assume that Watson had simply made a mistake, and have named three Moriarty brothers Jacob, James, and John in the SteamPunk world. In "The Final Problem" Holmes explains that Prof. Moriarty obtained a full professorship in his early 20s based on the strength of an outstanding paper on the binomial theorem, and appeared to be headed for a distinguished career in the sciences until he succumbed to "hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind," whereupon he lost his professorship, and had to support himself as an army tutor (preparing petty officers for the tests which had to be passed to certain promotions). It is implied in the story that Prof. Moriarty is 10 or 20 years older than Holmes.

In the Valley of Fear, in which Prof. Moriarty appears entirely in flashback, it is also revealed that the Professor had a bad relationship with his father, but a close one with a "beloved uncle" who exhibited the "hereditary criminal madness" previously mentioned.

There is one other clue from literature of the late 19th Century. In 1882 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote New Arabian Nights, a collection of short stories about Prince Florizel of Bohemia. The prince goes around London solving crimes. In one of the stories the prince is aided by a man identified only as "the detective" who matches the description of Holmes. When the stories were collected together in book form in 1890, Conan Doyle consented to write an introduction, and made mention of the "brief appearance of someone with whom readers may already be acquainted." This has caused a couple of Holmes scholars to include the Stevenson story into the original Holmes canon (even though it was originally written before Conan Doyle wrote the first Holmes story). In Stevenson's book there also appears a Dr. Noel, whose physical description is eerily similar to the way Conan Doyle would later describe Prof. Moriarty. Furthermore, the story mentions that Noel had lost his medical practice many years before due to the discovery of certain "criminal tendencies." It is also mentioned that madness runs in Noel's family. As portrayed in the Stevenson story, Noel exhibits a sadistic fascination with murder.

From these clues I constructed a family tree of Professor Moriarty. Mr. Jerrold Moriarty is the "beloved uncle" of Prof. Moriarty. Captain William Moriarty is the father who never understood Prof. Moriarty. Dr. Noel is related to them through Jerrold and William's mother (the Professor's grandmother).

In the game the players have met William and Jerrold.

William is a naval officer on the general staff whose hopes of advancement have been frustrated by the notorious exploits of his older brother and the scandal of his father's murder.

Jerrold, the elder brother, went to India in his youth ostensibly to make his fortune. Trained as an engineer, he designed bridges, aqueducts and roads. He returned to England when his mother succumbed to the hereditary madness (murdering her husband) to help put the family affairs in order. His nephew, James, as at an impressionable age and took an instant liking to his exotic uncle. Jerrold took over the family holdings and invested in various businesses.

Some years later, through the careful work of the detective division of the metropolitan police, Jerrold was revealed to be the head of a large criminal organization based in Limehouse and was eventually captured. Before he could go to trial he died in his cell, having apparently committed suicide. His body was stolen from its grave. He and his followers claim that he rose from the dead. Skeptics say that he faked his death somehow as a way to escape custody. Since he was last seen having had a large portion of his torso blown off by an elephant gun, it could be that the world has seen the last of Jerrold Moriarty.

Before his final confrontation with the players, Jerrold claimed to be Edward's grandfather. If this is true, Edward would be Prof. Moriarty's first cousin once removed.

10. Sir Anthony Blakeny:

One day in 1901 Baroness Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy was standing on the platform at The Temple waiting for the train to Kensington. She had just left a meeting with the editor of The Daily Express, one of London's periodicals, discussing the series of detective stories she had been writing for them. The editor had opined that the public wanted something new and different. Suddenly she had a vision of a phantom of a man dressed in the fine clothes of a bygone era, surrounded by swirling fog. She instantly knew he was a man of adventure who pretended to be an idiotic fop. She began writing a novel starring this new creation, The Scarlet Pimpernel, as soon as she reached home.

Unfortunately, the idea was a bit too new. No publisher felt confident that the public would want to read the adventures of an 18th century British aristocrat rescuing French aristocrats from the guillotine. A couple of publishers confessed confusion at how to promote the story: at first glance it appeared to be a swashbuckling adventure best pitched at young men, yet the protagonist of the tale was Lady Blakeny, who is first blackmailed by a French ambassador into helping find the identity of the daring adventurer who is plaguing the Revolutionary Government, and then, when she realizes it is her own dear husband who she has betrayed, sets out to rescue him from the French trap, or share his fate if she should fail. Failing to sell it to any publisher, the Baroness converted the story to a stage play.

In 1903 the Nottingham Royal Theatre agreed to produce the play, but there were numerous complications, so that the play didn't appear on stage until January, 1905. However, with the production underway, the Baroness was able to convince Green and Company to publish the novel, and release it concurrently with the play. The play opened to extremely negative reviews. The book, however, was an immediate bestseller. It was so successful, that the Baroness wrote and sold 16 sequels to the book (17, if you count the book claiming to be the biography of the Pimpernel, written by "John Blakeny" a supposed descendant).

The first book centers on Margarite Blakeny, wife of the extremely wealthy fop, Sir Percy Blakeny, Bart. Sir Percy met Margarite some years before the action begins, when she was active in the theatre in Paris. She was young, beautiful, charming, and often described as "the cleverest woman in Europe." He charmed her, they married, and he took her back to England. Unfortunately, the French Revolution, in which Margarite's brother, Armand St. Just, was an active participant, became the Reign of Terror. As the wives and children of aristocrats more frequently became the victims of the guillotine, a group of english aristocrats formed a secret society to rescue those deemed innocent. They named their organization "The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel," after a small wildflower common in the english countryside.

As more and more victims of the Terror were rescued by this band, the leaders within the revolutionary government came to the conclusion that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a single man, thwarting their efforts. Finding evidence that Armand St. Just had assisted in some of these rescues, Citizen Chauvelin, posted as an ambassador to England, goes to Lady Blakeny and threatens to have her brother executed unless she will help him. She very reluctantly agrees. Unfortunately, she doesn't learn that it is her own husband who leads the League until after she has assisted Chauvelin, and her husband has gone to France, headed into a trap which she helped to set. Lady Blakeny contacts one of the other men she deduces is in the League, and the two of them set out to France. After much sneaking about and a few disguises, Lady Blakeny and Sir Percy manage to rescue each other, and her brother and some other intended victims of the revolution. At one point in the novel it is implied that the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) is aware of the identities of the members of the League and approves of their actions. Later novels makes the relationship between the crown and the League more official, as well as placing both Lady Blakeny and the wife of one of the other original members of the League into leadership positions within the League.

So, in the SteamPunk world, Sir Percy and Lady Blakeny were part of one of the early intelligence bureaus of the British government. At first their position was completely unofficial, but some time after George III became too ill to carry out his duties and his son was appointed Regent, Sir Percy was given an official position within the Foreign Office, along with a small budget. It was probably at this time that the bureau began being referred to among those in the know as the Secret Intelligence Service. Eventually at least two of the Blakeny's sons, Robert and Armand, held positions within the intelligence service, and Sir Robert become head of the agency after his father's death.

Sir Anthony, grandson of Sir Percy and Lady Blakeny, is the head of the Secret Intelligence Service in 1870. Whether any other members of the family are involved or not, the players don't yet know.

11. Iota the Devil Monkey

After the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man, the idea of beasts, particularly apes and monkeys, as lenses through which to interpret human behavior became sufficiently widespread (and disturbing) to be a rich literary device. Prior to Darwin's work, a clear demarkation separated humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. In Edagar Allen Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the ape is clearly nothing more than a tool of the true murderer. But by the time of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, authors routinely questioned how much really separated us from our cousins.

Wells' work is probably the most famous, though Frank Chalice Constable's novel, The Curse of Intellect, written one year before Well's book, is worth checking out if you can find a copy.

Breeding better animals and plants had been a human pursuit long before the 19th Century, but such projects took on a new energy during the steam age, perhaps goaded on by the lure of publicity and the potential for wealth. Or maybe it was just that the the industrial revolution made it seem as if anything could be accomplished if enough power and engineering was applied.

In any case, the central conceit of the second adventure is that an eccentric, wealthy naturalist has been attempting, through selective breeding, purified "growth stimulants" and even surgery, to create significantly more intelligent animals. In order to make an adventure out of it, there must be unintended consequences. In this case, the enhanced monkey developed mental powers beyound the wildest speculations of the doctor, Baron Scarisbricke. And the monkey resented being locked in a cage, forced to submit to painful treatments, and watching some of the less fortunate experiments suffer.

12. Owen

My favorite character in the Cowboy Bebop anime is the "data dog" Ein. It is almost inevitable that I'd eventually clone him for the campaign. When one of the players based his character on another character from the same anime, I couldn't resist. So another species that the baron experimented with was the Pembroke Corgi, which is a breed that has been a working dog in Wales since at least the 8th Century.

Being a good dog, Owen was loyal to his master. When Iota engineered the baron's murder, Owen set out to capture the killer.

The characters have determined that Owen understands spoken english quite well, and can read . He is able to communicate complex ideas by spelling. Given an alphabet board, he can tap on letters in sequence with a paw. No other unusual abilities have yet been confirmed by the players.

13. the Order of St. Jerome

When Joss Whedon was in his teens he noticed a disturbing pattern in scary movies: pretty young girls were most often the victims of monsters and killers and such. He thought it would be cool if just once in a while the perky young girl would kick the monster's butt and rescue everyone. So, years later, he wrote a movie script that did just that. It was made into a slightly campy comedy called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A few years later, in 1995, a more experienced Whedon adapted his own idea to the small screen, and convinced a studio the let him produce a pilot. Buffy the Series still had some comedy, but there was also a serious undercurrent of the growth of a young woman into adulthood.

Adapting the original idea to an episodic medium meant beefing up the background mythos. It was implied in the original movie that the Slayer and her mentor, or Watcher, were both reincarnated. Again and again they were reborn and found each other, teaming up to slay vampires. For the series the Watchers become a separate organization, scholars and practicioners of white magic who scoured the world, searching for girls born with the gift, training and guiding them.

In the series we are only given a few mildly contradictory glimpses into the workings of the Watchers. This left me plenty of room to play around. I wanted to put the Watchers in the campaign world, but I wanted them to make sense and be a possible resource for the players. By the late 19th Century England was awash in Clubs, Societies, Benevolent Orders, and the like. Some of the older ones claimed a heritage stretching back centuries, so I decided that the Watchers would probably operate as one of these Societies, and since they had dealt so often with the occult, and had been in existence before the Crusades and through the middle ages, it seemed to me that they could only survive if they at least appeared to be a religious order. Many of the Watchers shown in the television series have a cover job as a librarian, so I looked up the patron saint of librarians. And struck the mother lode.

St. Jerome was a figure of some controversy in the fourth century. He advocated training women as scholars, scribes, librarians, and teachers at a time when it was very, very unfashionable to do so. He got into a bit of trouble with his Bishop at one time over his insistence that a particular young woman had been called by god to "extraordinary service." He also got in trouble to rescuing banned books, arguing that a book could not commit heresy, only a person could, and that good could be learned from studying just about anything. He had eventually settled near Bethlehem where he founded two orders: one for monks, the other for nuns. And the orders coexisted on the same property. When he died, his last translations were finished by two women who had been his students and assistants for over a decade. This story sounded an awful lot like a Watcher -- a scholar who discovers a young woman with a special gift (enhanced strength, reflexes, endurance, and healing powers to fight vampires and demons), and who makes a practice of studies those forces of darkness so as the fight them. And thus the Order of St. Jerome was born.

In the series it is established that many Watchers are the children and grand-children of Watchers; that multiple generations of families serve the Order. So in additional to Andrew and Rupert Pryce (who are probably related to two of Buffy's watchers: Rupert Giles and Wesley Wyndham Pryce), the players have also met George Travers (an ancestor of Rupert Gile's boss and old colleague, Quentin Travers). Other familiar names may pop up as adventures continue.

14. Wooster and Spode

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the first Jeeves and Wooster short story, "Extricating Young Gussie," in 1915. The narrator of most of these stories is dim-witted (and very rich) Bertie Wooster, but the hero is his impecable valet, Jeeves. In most of the stories Bertie is caught in various predicaments, often involving an old school chum or one of his Aunts, and Jeeves has to arrange a solution. For over five decades Wodehouse wrote his frothy fun stories and his fans devoured them. Throughout the stories one meets a veritable menagerie of eccentric and memorable characters. One character who is mentioned several times, though I have never found an actual appearance in a story, is Bertie daft uncle, Henry. When one of the players decided to make his character the selfsame Henry Wooster, I felt I had free reign to borrow more characters from the Wooster Milleiu, though since Wodehouse's stories are mostly set in the 1920s, I will usually have to content myself with ancestors.

Two of my favorite characters, Bertie's Aunt Agatha and Aunt Dahlia, would be Henry's sisters. Agatha has made two brief, but important appearances already. A few members of the extended family of Baron Scarisbricke are also ancestors of characters who will appear in the Jeeves and Wooster tales.

Probably the funniest of all the Jeeves & Wooster stories is the novel, serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1938 (and the Strand in 1939), The Code of the Woosters. One of the obstacles Bertie must deal with in the book is Roderick Spode, founder of the "Saviours of Britain" and a would-be dictator (Spode was patterned after the real Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists). Spode is the butt of many of Wodehouse's best jokes. In later stories Spode becomes the Earl of Sidcup after the death of his uncle and we learn that he had been serving in the House of Commons as a member of the conservative party before his ascension to a peerage. Since Roderick Spode is one of the best "villains" in Wodehouse's stories, I decided to make his father, Lord Cornelius Spode, a nemesis of Henry Wooster in an earlier generation.

The surly and lazy valet, Brinkley, appeared in two of Wodehouse's stories -- first as the man an employment agency provides when Bertie and Jeeves have a falling out, then later, after inheritting an uncle's grocery business, he returns as a more active villain, trying to ruin the political career of one of Bertie's school chums (and also wreck the marriage of Miss Madeline Bassett, to whom Bertie is constantly trying to keep from being engaged to). I decided that Lord Cornelius needed to have a valet, and he needed to be the opposite of Caine, Henry Wooster's ultracompitent valet, so Brinkley's father or grandfather seemed the perfect choice.

15. Lord Robert Lochsley

In 1983 the BBC broadcast a comedy series called The Black Adder. The series was set in medieval England, and follows the misadventures of bumbling (and weasely and cowardly) Prince Edmund, the fictious son of the nearly fictitious King Richard IV (the real Richard IV ascended the throne when he was a child, and was kept prisoner in the Tower of London while his uncle ruled as Regent. Richard and his younger brother were killed before they reached adulthood). In the Black Adder series, this was all a terrible misunderstanding by some historian, and Richard grew to manhood and became King... although he died at the end of the series (along with the entire cast) when Prince Edmund the Black Adder's clever plan to exile his father and seize the throne didn't quite work out. Three years a second series was produced, set in Elizabethan england sometime betweein 1558 and 1602. A descendent of Edmund the Black Adder, Lord Edmund, is a member of a rather dippy Queen Elizabeth's court. In the third series another descendent has fallen on hard financial times and is working as the butler to the Prince Regent (later George IV). And in the fourth series we see yet another descendant, Captain Edmund Blackadder, trying to survive in the trenches of World War I.

The show had a number of running gags and one of those was Lord Flashheart. In the second series Edmund became engaged to a young woman who had masqueraded as a young man to become Lord Blackadder's squire. When it comes time for the wedding, Edmunds best chum for school, Lord Flashheart, almost doesn't arrive in time to be the best man. Portrayed by Rik Mayall Lord Flashheart is all flash and glamor and 1000% sex appeal. He steals the bride and they run off together (after exchanging clothes, of course). A descendant of the character appears in the fourth series. That Lord Flashheart is a dashing pilot in the Royal Air Corps, a flying ace who has shot down more germans than any other, who can outshoot and outfight any ten ordinary men. Rik Mayall played two other characters in the show. In the Millenium Special (Blackadder Back and Forth) when the late-20th century Blackadder accidentally recreate's Leonardo DeVinci's time machine and blunders through history, changing the world. He meets and first kills (then goes back and saves) Robin Hood, who is played by Mayall.

So I decided that if I needed to put Lord Flashheart in the game universe, but I wanted him to be a rip-roaring adventurer the players would meet. So Robert Lochsley, second son of the current Lord Flashheart, became one of the officers on H.M.S. Griffin. He may not be bright, and he may have an over-inflated ego, but he's a dashed good fighter and leader of men. The Seer in the party has already had a vision that indicates later in life, after he becomes a decorated war hero, he will inherit the family title when his brother dies without any surviving sons.

16. She Who Must Be Obeyed

In 1886 H. Rider Haggard wrote an adventure novel titled simply, "She." A runaway bestseller it was a thrill ride of a novel, featuring a lost African kingdom ruled by a mysterious, implacable queen; ferocious wildlife and yawning abysses; and an eerie love story that spans two thousand years. The novel had one direct sequel, "Ayesha: The Return of She" and many years late a prequel "She and Allan." (A cross-over with Haggard's other runaway bestselling series begun ith "King Solomon's Mines" a novel about the great white hunter, Allen Quartermaine, adventuring in Africa; Quartermaine appeared in 17 sequels and numerous short stories).

In the novel "She Who Must Be Obeyed is a mysterious woman who is worshipped as a goddess by the primitive and socially degenerate people who live in the ruins of a previously unknown, ancient, and apparently vastly superior civilization. Haggard popularized the "lost civilization" trope that became a mainstay of fantasy and adventure fiction for decades afterwards. The story begins when our narrator, a very intelligent buy homely Oxford don named Horace Holly, is asked to become the guardian to the son of a friend (said friend dying of some unspecified incurable disease). The son, Leo Vincey, is handsome, charming, debonair, and otherwise the opposite of Holly in nearly everyway. As a first-person narrator, Holly repeated says that Leo is nearly his equal intellectually, but from the way Leo acts completely belies this claim.

When the elder Vincy asked Holly to take care of his son, he entrusted him with a chest and the key thereof, and told him not to open it until the son turned 21. Years later, when the appointed birthdate arrives, they dutifully open it and find a number of artifacts, some of them over 2000 years old, which the reader is asked to believe has been handed down parent-to-child for all those generations since the year 339 B.C. The oldest object is a large potsherd into which the mother of the founder of the family carved her unlikely tale of how her husband died at the hands of an immortal woman.

The concept of the immortal queen-goddess-tyrant-protectoress seems to have become an integral part of the collective conciousness and it was born in Victorian adventure fiction, so I wanted to do at least one adventure with it. But I didn't want to lift the character, the city, and the storyline whole from Haggard's novel for a variety of reasons. One of them being that the only way the original plot worked was because Leo did a number of bull-headed and foolish things, and Holly continually went along with them. Not much of a guardian if you ask me.

So though I have used the concept of the queen, and have named her city after the (ruined) city in the original book, I've put together what I felt was a slightly more sensical background to the character. I've also lifted the name of Her ancient lover (the one she killed), and his wife. And while I was add it, I lifted most of the text of "The Sherd of Amenartes" from the original book, as well, though I changed some details to match my change of setting.

17. Sentenza, a.k.a., "Angel Eyes"

The bounty hunter, Angel Eyes Sentenza, is from the Sergio Leone western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Leone reinvigorated the western genre of movie making in the 1960s when he cast Clint Eastwood as the man with no name in A Fistful of Dollars, which was a remake of the Kirazawa film, Yojimbo. The movie was a stunning success in Europe, and didn't do too badly in the U.S., either, so Leone made a sequel, For a Few Dollars More, and then a prequel, The Good the Bad, and the Ugly. In third movie Lee Van Cleefe plays "Angel Eyes" Sentenza, a cold-hearted bounty hunter who happens to find out that a shipment of Confederate Gold has been waylaid and hidden. He doesn't know where it was hidden, but he knows who hid it. A complex tale involving two other cold-hearted outlaws ensues. Before the film is over it is revealed the Angel Eyes is a Sergeant in the Union Army, stationed at a POW camp in New Mexico -- the bounty hunting and smuggling operations he's involved in are just a side business. The film climaxes in a three-way show down which was filmed and edited in a way that revolutionized movie making. Sentenza loses the showdown. His bullet-ridden corpse is last seen lying in a partially opened grave, staring lifelessly into the New Mexico sun.

When the player characters were created, Kid Rocket had an "enemy" listed on his character sheet, but no name or information about this enemy was given. Since Kid Rocket is based on outlaws of the dime novel period, I figured he needed an enemy of truly epic proportions. Unfortunately, the level of enemy specified wasn't very interesting. Then I noticed in the two letters home to his sister, an amusing story about someone who was obviously trying to kill Kid Rocket, but was so bad about it, that Kid Rocket never quite realized it. He could easily be the enemy. And, given the disadvantages implicit in the description in the letter, it was easy to make him Wealthy, and still keep him in th epoint limits for the type of enemy specified. Now, a wealthy enemy could afford to hired more compitent people. In came Sentenza.

I thought it a shame that Sentenza was dead at the end of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Wouldn't it be cool if, as in the roleplaying game Deadlands (Adventure in the Weird West), such a notorious and evil man was re-animated by evil spirits, and went on being the cold-hearted bounty hunter? Of course, being the research geek that I am, I had to figure out more about him. Doing some research on the Civil War in New Mexico, I learned about the U.S. Regiment of Mounted Rifelemen. The Regiment was created in 1847 and sent west with the mission to keep peace in the western territories and establish forts. They had barely gotten goint when the war with Mexico Broke out. All 18 companies of the Regiment fought in the war with Mexico, and were instrumental in key battles. It was the Mounted Riflemen who captured the Mexican Military Academy, and the National Palace. After the war, the Mounted Riflemen resumed their mission.An unusually high number of the men who served with the Riflemen in the Mexican War was still on active duty with the Civil War broke out. One of the history texts I found described it as the most battle-experienced unit of the army at the beginning of the war. In August, 1861, the Regiment was renamed the 3rd U.S. Cavalry. They remained in New Mexico, fighting hostile indians and occasional Confederate incursions. In 1862 most of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry was re-deployed to Missouri. Several companies remained in New Mexico, including one which was placed in charge of a POW camp.

A crucial scene early in the movie involved Confederate General Sibley's retreat out of El Paso, which places the action of the film in the late spring/early summer of 1862. I felt justified in making Sentenza a veteran of the Mounted Rifleman who became corrupt somewhere along the way.

18. The London Monster

According to official records, from 1788-1790 someone assaulted or killed about 50 women the area of London that had once been the medieval village of Stepney. Historians are very doubtful that all of the women were really the victim of the same man, but certainly the inhabitants of London believed it at the time. A factory worker named Rhynick Williams was eventually arrested and convicted for the crimes, although the case against him was very weak (he had an iron-clad alibi for three of the killings, for one thing). But the public was in hysterics, and someone had to be punished. A few years after Williams was executed, some enterprising writers unearthed records of several earlier killing sprees in the same area, at 30-80 year intervals, going all the way back to 1450. There were some folkloric accounts going back even further, but he had good written records, including names, dates, and crime scene descriptions, going back to 1450. A few sensational stories were published, speculating about a supernatural force that may have been responsible for all the crimes. When a couple more odd murders of women happened in the 1830s and the 1870s, the old stories about the London Monster were brought out again, but didn't quite capture the imagination.

About 100 years after Williams was executed, similar killings started again, in the same area, specifically a sub-neighborhood called Whitechapel. Only one or two newspaper stories alluding to the London Monster were printed before a letter taking credit for the crimes was received, signed by "Jack." The phenomenon got a new name: Jack the Ripper.

I couldn't let the players take on Jack, because the Ripper murders are still about 18 years in the future for them. But if the old London Monster story were more than a coincidence (and we are adventuring in a world of fantastic adventures), they could. But what is the Monster?

My research into all the old corners of English History had turned up several things that could be woven into an origin story. During the sixth and seventh centuries, all the little Saxon Kingdoms were converted to Christianity, and it was never a bloodless event. Several of the kings, when they were converted, set about burning the old places of worship, and sometimes the burned the people who refused to convert. Usually the victims were simpled tied up and left in the building to die. Although burning has used to punish heretics as early as 440AD, burning at the stake is generally believed to have developed much later. Often, during the seventh century, heretics would be executed by beheading or hanging or something similar, and then the corpse would be burned afterwards. There are a couple of stories in which it was alleged that a king of Essex (one of those saxon kingdoms) who converted to Christianity, later suffered the indignity after his death of having his body stolen to be hacked up and burined in various districts of the kingdom, in accordance with the old pagan custom. The problem was, two different kings were named in the stories, and historians doubt that it actually happened to either. There was another story of a plague late in the seventh century in the Saxon kingdoms, in which a young girls received a vision in which the Virgin Mary gave her a bleeding cross that could cure the faithful. There was yet another story from about that time of how the sword of one Christian Saxon king, still covered with the blood of a Pagan Saxon king, which had miraculous healing powers. So. I stole elements from all of these stories and wove them into one tale. Since the village of Stepney was in Essex, that's where I placed all the action for our fictitious Cursed King.

19. Baron Blackhall

Lucius DeMalthus, Baron Blackhall, was created by Alan as the enemy of his character for the game, Mr. Ramsay. Alan's idea was that if this is a world of fantastic literature, then there must be a connection between this world and the world of the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. The Malfoy clan in Rowling's books are notorious, aristocratic wizards. Malfoy could easily be a name derived from the more Norman surname, DeMalthus. Presumably the Baron is an ancestor of the characters in the Potter books.

20. The Death of the Foreign Minister

George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, (Grand Cross of the Bath, Knight of the Garter), was the British Foreign Minister in 1870, and he did die sometime in the afternoon/early evening of May 31 of that year in the real world. He was found dead at his desk, his head resting on a pile of reports he had been reading.

Lord Clarendon's official title in the government was Secretary of State for Foriegn Affairs. Clarendon had served in cabinet positions in both liberal and conservative governments for many years. He had served in several ambassadorial posts before being appointed Lord Privy Seal (at the time, a minister without portfolio) in Lord Melbourne's ministry in 1840. Over the years he served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, President of the Board of Trade (similar to Secretary of Commerce), Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (viceroy), before becoming the Foreign Minister in 1853. Clarendon is generally credited by historians with keeping the alliance together during the Crimean War, and with the creation of the Declaration of Maritime Powers establishing the laws of the high seas afterwards.

In the real world his death was simply due to natural causes.

21. The Molloys and Billinghams

For purposes of the "Home to Roost" plot, I needed several factions of Jerrold Moriarty's gang. Since Moriarty's organization had included thuggees and hindu sorceresses, at least two of the factions easily suggested themselves. I also wanted to have some more mundane criminals to contend with. In the real world, criminal organizations of the time were referred to as families, in part because members often were related to one another by blood or marriage. There were a few times during the 18th and 19th century when figures similar to the fictitious Moriarty managed to forge far-reaching alliances between the families, but for most of the period, their was usually a large irish family rivalled with a large cockney family.

Rumpole of the Bailey is a BBC television series (written by John Mortimer, based on his books) about an "old Bailey hack" a rumpled and curmudgeonly barrister by the name of Horace Rumpole, and the various criminals and alleged criminals he is called upon to defend over the years. One of the mainstay's of Rumpole's practice, in the late 20th century, is the Timson family, a group of non-violent felons who have been involved in robbery and other petty crimes for many generations. Their principle rivals are the coarser (and more violent) Molloys. The Timsons and Molloys manage to make at least one appearance in each of the Rumpole books.

The Timsons try to keep a low profile and stay away from the more serious crimes, so I didn't think that their ancestors were likely to be leaders of any faction that emerged to infamy after the death of Jerrold Moriarty. However, a couple of Rumpole's adventures involve criminals by the last name of Billingham who seem to be a bit more like the Molloys in temperament. The stories never explictly say that the two Billingham's are related, nor do they tell us if they may be distant relatives of one of Rumpole's nemises, Judge Bullingham, but I didn't think it was a great stretch either way.

So the irish faction of Moriarty's old gang is led by the Molloys, while the cockney faction is led by they Billingham's.

22. Proctor Xanthus

This villain was inspired by two very different bits of literature. When I was creating the basics of my Steampunk mileau, I lifted Sir Cosmo from Paul di Filipo's SteamPunk Trilogy, though, as mentioned above, I made him more heroic and less salacious than di Filipo's novel. In the novel, Cosmo contends with an evil aristocrat named "Lord Chuting-Payne," who is trying to disgrace Queen Victoria and topple the monarchy. As I mentioned before, di Filipo appears to have researched 19th Century England by way of bad American television series, rather than doing real research. The hyphenated last name phenomenon happened late in the century, generally when impoverished aristocrats married their daughters off to untitled, but wealthy, young men. Noble titles were very seldom the same as the family names, so the name is just wrong (besides being a really stupid pun). However, the name of the lord's estate is given as "Dearingford" and it is mentioned that upon the lord's death (since he has no legitimate issue) that the estate will revert to the Crown. That last bit would only be true if the estate were attached to the noble title, as opposed to property which an individual lord bought on his own. Therefore, I transformed Lord Chuting-Payne into the Marquis Dearingford, who is killed during a duel with Cosmo, over the matter of "a lady's honour."

This was all back story. It seemed to me that the way the comment about legitimate issue was worded, that at least one illegitimate child must be known to exist. Since avenging sons often figured in adventure fiction of the time, such a character as a possible recurring villain seemed like a good idea. In 1893 Alfred J. Harmsworth decided to start a new magazine, The Halfpenny Marvel Library, to publish "good quality" adventure literature aimed at boys. He hired Somers J. Summers to edited the magazine, and Harry Blyth to create a series of detective stories as one of its regular features. The result was Sexton Blake, a sort office boy's Sherlock Holmes. Harmsworth bought the rights of the character from Blyth (though Summers claimed the character was actually his idea, and eventually left the magazine over the disagreement), and eventually made a fortune publishing his adventures over the course of 50 years. In 1918 George Norman Phillips, writing under the pseudonym Anthony Skene, created Blake's most enduring villain, Monsier Zenith the Albino. Zenith was so popular with fans that he eventually had a number of novel-length adventures of his own. Michael Moorcock says that he got the idea for his sword and sorcery anti-hero, Elric of Melnibone, from reading the exploits of Zenith as a boy. In the series, Zenith's background is only hinted at: probably the illegitimate son of a disgraced nobleman or an exiled prince, probably raised in an Eastern European country. He is a master of many languages, cold, calculating, clever, cunning, and skilled at hand-to-hand combat, fencing, and a master theif. All great qualities for victorian villain.

Proctor Xanthus is thus the illegitimate son of the Marquis Dearingford, who was living in exile in Europe after killing another nobleman in a duel and causing several other scandals.

23. The Song and Dance Demon

Joss Whedon is the son of Tom Whedon, who wrote for such TV series as "The Dick Cavett Show," "Alice," "Benson," and "The Golden Girls." He is the grandson of John Whedon, who wrote for such TV series as "Leave It To Beaver," "The Donna Reed Show," and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." So it came as little surprise when he became a writer for the "Rosanne" TV series himself. As a kid and teen-ager, Joss noticed a pattern in a lot of horror movies (and other kinds): the petit, pretty girl was always the victim. "She was only there to scream and die." So he had this idea for a movie that turned the cliche on it's head; he was even shopping a script based on the concept. The script was made into a camp comedy, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," in 1992. Though Joss' original idea did have a lot of humor, he also had a serious side to the plot: how the powerless can become the empowered. Eventually something closer to his original idea came to the small screen as a television series, with Joss producing and in control of the tone.

Joss had also always wanted to do a musical. When he discovered, at a party, that most of his cast members could carry a tune, he began writing a musical episode for the sixth season of the series. "Once More, With Feeling" has fun with all the usual musical cliches, but it also moves the plot forward in a way that would hav been more difficult in ordinary dialogue. To explain the characters suddenly bursting into song, Joss postulates a Song and Dance Demon, who is accidently summoned by one of the characters who was just trying to make sure everyone lives happily ever after. The demon forces everyone to sing the true feeling, revealing their deepest secrets. Eventually the singers will burst into flames and die if the demon cannot be appeased. When the demon finally takes the stage, his song includes lines that imply he's been around for a very long time, including, "Somthin's cooking I'm at the griddle; I bought Nero his very first fiddle." So I figured since I already had stolen the Watchers and hinted at the Slayer's existence in the game world, I could include the Song and Dance Demon. I've always wanted to write a musical, too. Writing songs for the characters wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, but we managed.

24. Bialystock, Burnand, Gilbert, and of course, Sullivan

William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, composer and lyricist respectively, are famous for a series of comic operas that many people equate with the Victorian Period. Unfortunately for my purposes, Gilbert and Sullivan didn't create their first collaboration, Thespis, until 1871--in the future for our heroes. However, both had been involved in the theatre and orchestral scenes from the mid-1860s, so I could have them cross the players' path if it seemed to make sense.

Francis Burnand wrote political commentary and satire for a number of London magazines in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, eventually becoming the editor of the leading humour magazine, Punch. In the mid-1860s he also dabbled in musical theatre. He had a few moderate successes--all of them collaborations with other people who went on to become more famous in the theatre. Two of those were collaborations with William S. Gilbert: Cox and Box in 1866 and The Contrabandista in 1867. He continued to try writing musicals, trying to bring his political commentary to the stage. Most of these operettas were, thankfully, never produced because, frankly, he had a tin ear for lyrics. He became estranged from his old friend, Gilbert, over the years, and often wrote disparagingly of the operettas. Most poeple attribute his bitterness to plain old jealousy.

In 1968 Mel Brooks wrote and directed the frenetic comedy movie, The Producers, about a failed broadway producer and a neurotic accountant who cook up a scheme to get rich by intentionally producing a flop. Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, was the failed producer. Leo Bloom, played by Gene Wilder, was the accountant. Many years later, Brooks re-imagined the story as a Broadway musical, and it became the biggest hit on Broadway for several seasons. In the movie version, Bialystock has a really good rant in one of the early scenes in which he alludes to the many generations his family has been involved in the theatre. When I was researching the name, Bialystock, I found out it came from the name of a town in Poland, Bialystok, and that many jewish families imigrated from the area of the world to England, the Dominion of Canada, and America from about the 1830s. They gravitated toward certain businesses, often because they were specifically barred from others. Theatre was one of the areas that many of them became prominent. So it wasn't at all out of line to imagine that Casimir Bialystock, presumably an ancestor of Max, would be a theatre producer in London in 1870, so I made him the manager of the company at the Royal Gallery of Illustration for our adventure.

While I was researching Gilbert, Sullivan, and Burnand for the musical, I found a college web page that included a things like scanned in images of period scripts and programs. I was reading "The Contrabandista" from an 1869 manuscript, when I chanced upon the following stage direction: "bandits exit merrily, pursued by castenets." There were castenet players in the scene, and presumably it was meant that the castenet players ran after the bandits, but I loved that idea of being pursued just by the castenets, so that became the title for the musical adventure.

After the main action of the musical adventure was over, I had Cosmo take the characters to a new musical play, "Our Island Home" by Gilbert and Thomas G. Reid. That was a real play performed at the Royal Gallery of Illustration in the summer of 1870.

25. Franco-Prussian War, Bismark, and the Big Gun

In the real world the Franco-Prussian War was declared because Prussian embassies published an edited version of King Wilhelm's telegram explaining the conversation he'd had with a French diplomat. Count Otto von Bismark simply removed key sentences from the telegram, making a pedestrian report sound like a rude breaking of relations. France felt it had been insulted, so declared war. The emporer attempted to veto the declaration, but was overruled--because of generations of animosity over the Rhineland and the Alsace-Lorraine territories. The whole business about the throne of Spain being offered to a relative of King Wilhelm and the telegram and so forth were really just pretexts.

Throughout the 1860s Otto von Bismarck was working to unite all German-speaking people into one nation under the King of Prussia. There had been several previous unification movements within the dozens of German nations, small and large, but had failed one way or another. A very ineffective German Confederation had been in place for almost two decades when the Seven Weeks War was fought by Prussia against Bavaria, Austria, Hesse, and Wurttemburg. Prussia mopped up quite well. The old German Confederation was abolished, and a new Northern German Confederation, consisting of Prussia and most of the norther German kingdoms, principalities, and duchies, was created. While Austria, Bavaria, Wurttemburg and a few of the other southern countries were allowed to go their own way. The new Confederation was, on paper, still an alliance of countries. However, the King of Prussia was the hereditary President, with the power to handle all foreign relations and declare war. A confederation parliament did exist, but was structured in such a way that Prussia's king appointed more than half the members. The King did have to receive the parliament's approval to appoint cabinet ministers for the Confederation government, but since he appointed most of the members, that wasn't a big deal. The Kings, Princes, and Dukes of the other states in the Confederation were left with little to do--however, due to a compromise they retained an ability to censure cabinet ministers. It wasn't quite the ability to remove them, but was almost as effective.

In the real world, Bismarck scared the Southern German states into joining the war on their side with the spectre of France's forces overrunning all the German territories. The southern nations were very reluctant, and almost didn't join in. Bavaria was the last to join, and King Ludwig was open about his scorn for the entire operation. It has been speculated that if he hadn't been suffering from pneumonia, he might have held out longer. Historians have found some evidence that Bismarck had agents ready in the capitols of the southern states prepared to incite riots or even assassinate some leaders if necessary. So it didn't seem like that big a stretch to have one of those agents attempt to kill King Ludwig's principle military advisor. I had already decided that I wanted to keep the balance of power on the continent more complicatedly divided, so I had already had the game world Ludwig become engaged -- to a princess of the mythical kingdom of Ruritania (made famous in the novel The Prisoner of Zenda). There are a few other things I have done to the gaming world Bavaria to make it less likely that Ludwig will descend into his infamous madness. But I'll leave those revelations for later games.

For the tech of the war, I had already given France "aerofrigates" (based in part because in the real world France had been a leader in balloon technology for decades leading up to the gaming period), so they were set. In the real world, Count Zeppelin of Wurrttemburg had become enamoured with the commercial and military possibilities of balloons, in part because of the use to which France had put observation balloons in earlier wars. His son, the next Count Zeppelin, would perfect the airship in the 1920s, so again I didn't think it was a big stretch to have him developing something like those airships to counter the aerofrigates. Since Wurrttemburg and Bavaria was close allies, I decided to have them working together to develop the "aerocruisers." Several fantastic invention stories of the late nineteenth century feature various genius inventors in Bavaria who build a lot of fantastical clockwork devices, including in at least one story (actually written around 1910) ornithopters. So I gave Bavaria ornithopters, which were a good addition to the "aerocruisers."

I noticed in several steampunk-style stories the authors kept giving the Prussians big "land ironclads" as their secret weapons. This was obviously projecting backward Nazi Germany's obsession with bigger and nastier tanks--yes, H.G. Wells proposed just such weapons himself in 1903, but he carefully didn't identify the nationality of either side of his fictitious future war. In the mid-nineteenth century the only nation that was seriously developing armored land vehicles was the United States. Prussia was developing new and bigger guns; they eventually built a cannon capable of shooting projectiles 40 miles, and the gun's barrel did melt and expand slightly each time it fired. They just didn't get that far until 1910 (but then the gun made quite a nasty impression on France in WWI). Since we're dealing with accelerated tech, I just moved it up a few decades. Prussia had also been re-organizing their army, based in part on close study of battles in the Civil War. von Moltke was quite impressed with how useful telegraphs and trains could be to getting armies into position and sending them orders. The rapid deployment of the Prussian forces did happen in the real world, and caught everyone by surprise.

 

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Portions of this page copyright 2002-2005 by Gene Breshears. All Rights Reserved. The Island of Dr. Moreau was written in the 19th Century by H.G. Wells and is an excellent book. Read a book! Smallwood's 8-day, 16-face clock first published in Scientific American, 1892.