Fashion history in gaming: the implications of flappers

Over on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias discord server, a discussion about the Call of Cthulhu first edition cover art lead to some jokes about bras.  Nothing inappropriate, I'm glad to say, but it did make me realise that a people playing RPGs in historical settings don't necessarily know much about the fashions of the times. Fashion history might initially seem like a frivolous subject compared to things like war and civil rights, but once you start to dig in, it goes deeper than you'd think.

I'm not a fashion historian, just an interested amateur who loves dressing up, but the 1920s is one period I have looked into for costuming purposes, so here's my introduction to women's fashion in the 1920s.

But first, let's take a look at this bastard.




The corset, that is, not the woman inside it.

For decades, corsets had been squeezing women into whatever the fashionable shape of the moment was, and towards the end of the Victorian era, some people were starting to think that maybe compressing all your internal organs into the smallest space possible might not be completely healthy.  This was a proposed solution - the S-bend corset.  The straight front was intended to put less pressure on the organs and allow for easier breathing.  However, given that this woman's back is bent like a comic book superheroine, you won't be surprised to hear it turned out to have problems all of its own.

In normal wear, rather than this posed underwear shot, it wasn't quite that extreme. However, looking at photos of women in the early 20th century, the shape is quite distinctive - bosoms were large, hips were broad, and waists were tiny.  The Gibson Girl was the personification of feminine attractiveness, and she combined this torso shape with hair piled up in soft curls.

But the world changed a bit between 1910 and 1920.  Between WW1, the Spanish Flu and women finally getting the vote, women did not want to be Gibson Girls any more.  They rebelled.  Hard.



Let's start at the top.  No fluffy curls here.  The hair is cut short and severe, and the wide brimmed hat is ditched in favour of the close fitting cloche.

Moving down, there's no large bosom.  In fact, their chests are almost flat.  Never mind femininity and maternal ideals - the boyish figure is in, and the bras they wear wear reflect that.  There are no underwires, and barely any elastication.  They could be wearing a simple camisole, provising basically no support, or a bandeau intended to compress and flatten the breasts, more like a modern sports bra, or even a binder.

Move down a little further to the waist - or rather, past the waist, as the corset is in the bin and there's no emphasis on the natural waistline.  These dresses have dropped waistlines, which combine with the flattened chest to give an overall rectangular shape.  Again, the aim is for boyish rather than feminine.  The long unstructured jackets they wear serve to further emphasis the straight vertical shape.

And finally the hemline, sitting just below the knee rather than the ankle.  No more hiding legs behind long skirts - they were out on display for all to see.

With their rejection of conventional femininity, adoption of male habits like drinking and smoking, and all round outrageous behaviour, flappers were the punks of their time.

Not all women were flappers, of course, and by the 1930s things had softened somewhat, with waistlines back at the waist and bras no longer flattening the chest.  But there were lasting changes, corsets being one of the biggest.  They have made a recent reappearance as occasion wear, but as routine underwear they've never come back.

If you're playing a game set in the 1920s, it's useful to know how the clothing people wore tied into politics and society, and that the choice to wear a drop waist can mean a lot more than it might appear

And on a purely practical note, that you're going to have to look elsewhere for an improvised lock pick.

First time playing: Symbaroum

I picked up the Symbaroum PDF when Fria Ligan were doing a one-day free giveaway, but hadn't actually got round to looking at it.  Then our Coriolis GM asked if anyone was interested in a one-shot.

We were offered a selection of pre-gen characters.  I picked up Magdala, the barbarian witch, because she was a witch.  Last time I played a witch it was in Pathfinder, when the APG came out and we wanted to try out the new classes.  She was an early casualty of the Player Massacre of 2010.  But back to Symbaroum.

I love dark Germanic flavour fantasy, and I've played Warhammer FRP a couple of times, but I always feel like it suffers a bit from the fundamentally comic nature of some of the races.  Mohawk-wearing dwarves and pie-obsessed halflings don't make for a dark and gritty game.  (See Diversity Hires for what the last game of WFRP I played was like.)  Symbaroum gives me the same flavour but without the comic elements.  The playable races are humans, changelings, ogres and goblins, who feel far more like they wandered out of some ancient fairy tale than the standard Lord of the Rings style party.  The world feels smaller, and a little claustrobic, but there's certainly room for a campaign in there.

The system is uncomplicated - just a row of stats to roll under, and a few special abilities - but still feels flexible.  My first level witch has only one spell, but each spell can be cast at three different levels with different effects.  There are no spell slots.  The only limitation is that each spell cast gives her an amount of temporary corruption, and with that amount being rolled it can vary wildly.  With a threshold to avoid crossing, each spell becomes a gamble.  In one stroke, the game has both done away with Vancian magic and given magic more thematic flavour.  I love it.

Besides magic, I'm also enjoying the fact that the monsters don't roll to attack - the players roll to defend.  This is a mechanic I've only recently encountered in games (The d6 Hack, specifically) and I like it a lot - just as much fun for the players but with fewer dice rolls.  Some of the mechanics are being slightly hidden from us by the VTT (Fantasygrounds appear to have excellent support for Symbaroum) but I can see enough to know I'd be just as happy playing this on a real table.

Like everything else I've seen from Järnringen / Fria Ligan, the art is gorgeous and evocative.  No surprise to see there's an art book available, and a bunch of it has made it onto All Rolled Up products as well.

We played the one-shot introductory adventure, The Promised Land, and enjoyed it so much we agreed to come back for more.  So we're now diving into The Copper Crown, and I eagerly look forward to what terrible places it will take us to.

Pretty much the only criticism I've seen of Symbaroum is that there's not a lot to it, and that's all from early reviews.  There's a bunch of extra stuff available from Modiphius, which hopefully fills in any gaps.

In short, if you like dark fantasy and aren't wedded to WFRP, this is definitely worth playing.  Especially if you managed to pick it up for free.

Running Delta Green: Nobody Suspects A Thing

It was the Crowne Plaza hotel at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport where the team next met up, where they were greeted, not by Agent Chung, but by Agent Pakrati.  He looked a lot happier to see them, and explained that they'd been brought in for this mission due to past experience and that it was going to require subtlety.

They were to investigate Bertram "Bert" Heaviside, an accountant whose strange dreams as relayed to his physician had caught the Program's attention.  They were to find out if the dreams meant what the Program suspected, but also to find out if there was more to this potential unnatural incursion than just one person.

They began, once again, with Avocado getting on his laptop to do some background digging.  He found a rather sparce facebook profile, with pictures of Bert and his wife, Wilhelmina, a.k.a. Bill, and their two children, Doug and Katy.  A slightly more fleshed out LinkedIn profile had details of his accountancy job at Wells Fargo.

After considering a number of potential plans, they decided to keep it simple, and do a 24 hour surveillance on Bert to see if he was going for midnight swims or anything.  They saw him leave the house at 7am to take the bus to work, then leave the office at 1am, walk down to the shore, buy a sandwich, and eat it while staring out at the water.  Avocado had a short chat with him, where he claimed to be looking for seals.

After lunch he went back to work, and from there back home.  He had, as far as they could tell, an entirely normal evening at home with his family, and then went to bed.  But at 1am he emerged again and walked back down to the shore.  There he stripped off and went for a swim.

Crusty considered stealing his clothes, then having him arrested for public nudity, but in the end they settled for bugging his clothes.  After he'd swum for about an hour, he got out, got dressed and went home.

They needed to know more, and with the whole family out at work or school during the day, that seemed like the best time for a visit.  Avocado got them into the building with minimal effort and they began searching.

Buzz went for the home office.  He found some of Bert's paintings - disturbing imagery with a distinctive octopus theme - and a small statuette of a cuttlefish eating a smaller cuttlefish, accompanied by a note:
"It's time.
-Mom."

The statuette was distinctly unpleasant to hold, but Buzz was unable to determine if there was anything unnatural about it.  He called in Bones for a look, who identified it as being around a hundred years old, and possibly related to an incident known as the Great Octopus Hoax, when many small statues like this were created and distributed under false pretenses.

Avocado remembered the biomarker testing kits from the trip to Alaska, put in a call to requisition some, and went looking for DNA samples.  The bedroom proved a good source, with a bin full of used condoms.  Apparently Bert and Bill had been busy.  He also managed to get hair from the rest of the family's hairbrushes.

Bones had a look in the children's bedroom.  The younger child, Katy, enjoyed drawing.  Her notebook has a lot of pictures of her family, but notably, the most recent picture of her father included a number of tentacles.

It was clearly time to talk to the family.  Having previously acquired appropriate law enforcement credentials, they made use of the local FBI field office for questioning.

Crusty, as the one person with actual social skills, did the questioning, with prompting from the others.  They learned that he enjoyed the swimming because it was good for his skin condition - some kind of eczema.  After some prompting he acknowledged that the strange streams, skin condition and so on had all started around the same time as the statue arrived.  He was pretty sure someone was playing a joke on him, because it said 'Mom' and his mother had died when he was sixteen.

Avocado's background dive said that checked out.  She'd drowned during a trans-Atlantic boat trip.  'Drowned'.

They talked to the rest of the family.  Bill seemed pretty oblivious to the whole thing.  Katy was aware there was something a bit odd about her dad having tentacles but she didn't mind because she still loved him.  Doug didn't know anything about his dad having tentacles, but did admit to having snuck into his dad's office to play with his cool statue.

It was looking bad.  And it looked worse once the results of the biomarker tests came back.  Bert and both his children tested positive.  It looked like it was running in the family.

They met up again with Agent Pakrati.  The statue had to be destroyed.  There was no way the family could be left where they were.  Agent Pakrati assured them there was a suitable facility well away from the ocean where they could be taken, thanked them for successfully securing the threat and congratulated them on a job well done.

With the mission complete, Avocado headed home to spend some time practicing at the gun range.  Bones requested assignment to the research facility where the family were being taken.  Not for any reason.  No reason he told any of the team, anyway.  Buzz continued his research into gates.  And Crusty decided to stay on the case, and see if he could find out exactly where that cuttlefish statue had come from.