First Time Playing: Darkness of the Demimonde

I love the Victorian era as a setting and particularly love Victorian horror. Victoriana was the first game I ran in that setting, but ultimately the system didn't work for me and neither did the Shadowrun inspired take on the setting. Vaesen does what it does very well, but what it does is the clash of the industrial revolution against rural folklore, which I love, but isn't exactly the same thing as the classic works of Poe and Stoker. And The Between got pretty close, but between the weird design decisions and very limited character options, it really wasn't giving me anything other than the TV show on which it's based.

And then up popped a Kickstarter for Darkness of the Demimonde, pitching itself as 'Victorian Pulp Horror'. Zine sized and priced accordingly, I decided it was worth a shot. To avoid excessive postage costs I went for the PDF + POD option. The POD is printed through DTRPG and is the usual quality I expect from there.

The book is A5 size and 39 pages long. Rules are simple and reminiscent of Liminal. Character creation is deceptively simple. Players choose between playing Enlightened (human with an occupation) or Afflicted (supernatural powers with an associated drawback), assign 10 points between 7 skills, and choose knacks and items. With a few pages of options, there's enough there to cover pretty much any concept from the realm of gothic horror. Which meant that even with all the players having largely figured out their concepts beforehand, there was still a fairly long period of finishing off characters at the start of the session.

Setting information is minimal, and consists of a two page introduction. That is all the game really needs though, as the assumption is that you're going in with a pretty solid idea of what Victorian pulp horror is. The character creation section and monster list lays out all the tropes that are in play.

There's no specific rules about group concepts, but as an investigation based game, it tends towards some variation on occult detectives. The players decided that the Detective character was the owned of the business, and given that they had gone for the Wealthy knack I suggested placing it in Mayfair. (This did lead to some fun moments as we had to explain the pronounciation of such locations as Berkeley Square and Grosvenor Square.) The other two characters were a Psychic and his Created servant.

The book comes with three adventures. I picked Horror in Houndsditch to run, as it was very much my kind of thing. It's a pretty light scenario, intended to allow for a lot of improv, and gives several suggested options for involving the player characters. I went for the one that I felt best fit the occult detective agency concept: a young woman asking for help finding her missing brother.

My only issue with this adventure is the map. The one provided is very useful for the GM, but with several key locations marked on it, it's not ideal to give to the players. The geography of Houndsditch is very much not what it was in the 1890s so my usual go-to of Google Maps was less helpful as I had to locate streets that no longer exist under the Gerkin and similiar buildings. I did manage to dig up a period map via a Jack the Ripper website, but vintage maps are a struggle to read. There may be some photoshopping of the adventure map to try to hide the location markers before I run this again.

Despite the book's length, it finds time for a reminded to GMs that key clues shouldn't be hidden behind a dice roll, so if the characters went looking in a suitable place they always found something. In these cases when I asked for action rolls it was to determine if they found something extra, if they got the job done fast and efficiently, etc. Despite being only half a page, the GM advice is a solid bit of writing that's worth reading and absorbing.

(Note: the game indulges in my pet peeve of making up a new name for the GM - the somewhat cheesy sounding Gravemaster. However, since it does still have the initials GM, I'm willing to let this one go.)

The action rolls themselves are 2d6 + skill (here called Archetypes for some reason) + bonuses. There are only seven and they're fairly broad, so figuring out which one to use was sometimes a bit tricky. In particular there's quite a bit of overlap between Priest and Occultist when it comes to knowledge of the supernatural. The GM also had to determine  the Difficulty Score (DS) for each roll. There's a set of guidelines, which suggests DS8 for easy and DS10 for moderate, but I think this is a bit off. Starting characters have Archetypes from 0 to 3, and with an average roll on 2d6 being 7, a character is going to fail DS10 rolls most of the time. For starting characters I would stick with DS8 as the default, increasing it if there are additional complications as suggested.

Two features of the rules I found particularly interesting. First is stress. Stress rolls are made when encountering horrific things, and a failure gives you a stress point. Each stress point gives you a penalty to all your action rolls. The maximum is 6, and while there's no specific consequence to hitting 6 stress, it's pretty debilitating. The only way to get rid of them is rest and sleep. There's a tendency for players to want to get the whole adventure done in one day. This game encourages not doing that - once the stress points start racking up you really need to get some rest, especially since you only recover 1d6 stress each time. Something worth mentioning to new players to manage expectations.

The other interesting feature is combat. Monsters all have their own DS, and you need to exceed it to actually do any damage. But their DS is also their hit points, so once you start damaging them they get gradually easier to hit and damage. Some interesting possibilities for tactical play - particularly as failed melee rolls mean the attacker gets hurt instead.

Overall there are some small niggles with this game, but nothing that can't be overcome. Particularly as the GM I'd advise going in with a reasonable knowledge of Victorian Britain and the classic horror fiction of the time, but there's a lot packed into these 39 pages. The system is light enough that most of the time it was a breeze to run, while still having enough going on to keep things interesting. The authors know what Victorian horror looks like and deliver on that. I had a great time as the GM and fully expect to have a great time in our next session when one of the players takes over as GM and I get to make my own character.

Darkness of the Demimonde will be coming to DTRPG for general purchase soon, presumably once all the kickstarter fulfillment is sorted out. Edit: Available now!