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.

A Long, Dark Day

Six of us sat down on Saturday afternoon to play the modern day Call of Cthulhu scenario, Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home.

The scenario comes from The Things We Leave Behind, a collection of modern day scenarios from Stygian Fox.  It's written for Call of Cthulhu, but we played it with Cthulhu Dark - or rather with the GM's own slight variation on Cthulhu Dark.  For a one-shot pick-up game that was a good choice - character creation takes minimum time and effort so the GM didn't have to go to the effort of making pre-gens or worry about exactly how many of us there were.

This scenario has the PCs playing the members of a child abduction response team.  We assembled a police pursuit driver, a forensic IT specialist, an FBI field agent, an FBI profiler and an ex-military paramedic.

(Apparently FBI agent is my default character in investigation games in the same way that ranger used to be my default class in fantasy games.)

The story involves searching for an abducted child, although it rapidly becomes apparent there is a lot more going on.  The scenario is very well put together, and comes with a bunch of handouts, plus one particularly interesting thing.  One organisation the PCs end up looking into has a website, and said website actually exists.  Being able to browse the site on a phone made it feel a lot more real than just reading it off paper.

There's also a bunch of material for the GM, including a chart with key clues in boxes, which the GM was marking off as we found each one.  (I would recommend using a screen when running this adventure, as I had to make an effort not to let myself read anything when he was using this chart.)  What it apparently doesn't include is a timeline of events up until the present, as the GM had to write his own.

One oddity of this scenario is that as a fairly genre savvy person I'd figured out pretty early on that certain actions would be at best very unwise and at worst disastrous.  The characters don't know they're in a horror story though, and so we were having them act accordingly.  Trying to find the right balance between having the character act like a real person and my own reactions to all the weird things going on was quite a challenge.

Ultimately we failed to avert disaster, ironically by being compentent at our jobs and still clinging onto sanity.  Had we taken longer (in game) to complete our goals, things might have gone differently, and had my character failed that last sanity check it would have pushed her over the edge to the point where she might have done the thing that needed doing.  But we all kept it together until the end.  And it really was the end.

This scenario is one of a set of six, and apparently there is an overarching campaign thread that can be used to tie them all together.  Unless this is the last scenario in that campaign, I can only assume that it expects the investigators not to fail the way we did.

Despite our absolute failure I liked the adventure, and it worked very well with the Cthulhu Dark rules.  It did take a very long time to play.  We started some time after lunch, took a break for dinner, and finished in the late evening.  I hope I can find an opportunity to play the other five scenarios, but we're going to need to allow a substantial amount of play time if they're anything like that one.

While not the best Cthulhu adventure I've played, this one is well worth a look, and I feel like I could run it myself with reasonable competence despite not having done much horror GMing.  And while the Cthulhu Dark rules are a little on the light side for my tastes, they work well, and for this type of game I can't fault them.

Call of Cthulhu: The Case of Cinthia Castillo

This is the character I played in a modern day Call of Cthulhu game at Tales from Dreaming Spires.  While 13 is not my record for SAN loss in a single game of Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green, never before have I had a character end an adventure so utterly broken.  Which means the only way to get her out of my brain is to tell her story.

"It would really help if you could tell us what happened."

Cinthia Castillo sat hunched up on the bed, arms wrapped around her legs.  Physically she was looking better.  Neat dressings covered the tissue damage, and she'd finally submitted to having her hair brushed.  But one look into those haunted brown eyes was enough to see that she'd suffered far worse than physical damage.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"You won't believe me."

Not the first time she'd heard that.  "Miss Castillo...may I call you Cinthia?"  She waited for a nod, then continued.  "Cinthia, I've heard a lot of strange things.  You can tell me anything.  There's no need to hide.  I need to hear the truth so I can work out how to help you."

She watched the girl.  No words, but the shift in body language gave her her answer.

"Shall we start with the plane?"

"We were all sitting together at the back."  Cinthia's voice was hesitant.  "Me and Doctor England.  Doctor Chandrasekar and Doctor Green.  Nick, the other student.  The Japanese doctor - Hina?  Doctor Gates.  The Russian and the Italian  I...I can't remember their names."  She took the offered tissue, and composed herself again.  "There was turbulance, but I wasn't worried about that.  Someone said we'd been struck by lightning, and then...then the crash."  She paused for a deep breath before continuing.  "Nine of us made it.  The others...all we could do was make them comfortable."

Nine survivors.  There had been considerably fewer than nine people airlifted off that mountain.

"We could smell the jet fuel, so we grabbed what we could and ran.  We were in the forest by the time it exploded.  We had to keep walking.  It was the only way we could keep warm.  We found a river and decided to try following it downstream.  That's when we found the writing."

"Yes?"  She could guess which writing.  One of the survivors was still clutching a book, with notes scrawled in two different hands and two different alphabets.

"It was written on the trees.  We thought it was old Norse at first, because of the runes, but then we realised we could read some of it.  So we made a copy and I wrote it out in English, but I was still working on it when we found the first stone.  It had carvings on it, and...blood, I think.  Doctor Green was the first one to touch it.  He went a bit strange for a few moments, and then told us about how he'd seen himself as some kind of barbarian with a spear.  So we decided we should have several of us touch it at once.  Doctor England was doing it and I couldn't let him think I was scared."

"You were Doctor England's research student, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"But you were paying your own way on this trip.  A long way to go for a conference.  Was there more to your relationship?"  A long silence followed that question, which nonetheless spoke volumes.  "I'm not here to judge.  Just to understand."

"No.  But I hoped if...if we spent this time together..."

She handed Cinthia more tissues.  "It's OK.  I understand.  Shall we go back to the rock?"

"Yes.  Yes.  We all put our hands on it together.  I thought maybe I'd see something like what Doctor Green talked about.  But it was...it was..."  She hugged her legs tighter as her whole body began to shake.  "I was trapped in a box.  Surrounded by fire.  My shoes were melting.  Then my feet were burning.  I thought I was going to die.  And then I was back with the others and they were talking about Romans and stuff but all I could do was scream."

A hallucination, of course, but nevertheless one that had profoundly affected her.  It was some time before she found the strength to talk again, and when she did it was in a quieter voice.

"It was getting dark.  We went back into the trees and the others lit a fire.  I was so cold.  But I couldn't...I couldn't..."

"It's OK.  You're safe here."

Cinthia nodded, took a few deep breaths, and carried on.

"We managed to get some sleep, but when it got light something had happened to Doctor Gates.  She started wandering off back to the stones, and then she fell over.  Doctor England said she'd had a stroke.  If we could have got her to a hospital she might have been OK, but out there there was nothing we could do.  There were these little crystal things in the ground that froze anything they touched, so we pushed her onto one of them.  So at least it would be quick and painless."

She didn't wait for the offer of tissues this time, reaching out to grab a handful instead.

"We had to leave her.  We followed a game trail through the trees.  There was a little hut and the others found some old things there.  Someone else who'd been here years ago.  And then we found the clearing with the stone altar.  That's when they started putting it all together."

"They?"

"The others.  Some of them saw that altar when they touched the stone.  We found remains in the snow.  Romans.  Some of them saw Romans.  And the messages on the trees.  It all fitted.  But we'd left two people in the hut.  I don't know what happened but when we went back..."  She paused for a moment, steeling herself to continue.  "One of them was dead.  The Italian, I think.  The other one killed him.  He came out with blood on his face.  He was holding an arm.  I think he'd ripped off the body."

"Did you see the body?"

"No.  One of the others did.  But I couldn't go in.  We ran when he came out, back to the altar.  They'd all figured it out by then.  The reason why the tree messages said the way out didn't work with only one.  The way to escape was to sacrifice someone on the altar."

"And did you all choose someone to sacrifice."

"Yes.  They chose me."

She was rocking back and forth now as well as shaking, and had given up any attempt at keeping her eyes dry.

"I ran, but they chased me.  All except Doctor Chandrasekar.  And Doctor Green wasn't well and couldn't keep up, but it was...it was Doctor England who caught me.  I tried to stop him.  I tried to make him understand.  But I was so cold and so scared and he dragged me back through the woods to the altar.  That's when I saw what happened to Doctor Chandrasekar."

For a while she was sobbing too hard to carry on, but with an effort she managed to pull herself together enough to speak again.  "The Russian.  He wasn't even human any more.  He stabbed Doctor Chandrasekar with a pen.  I saw him die on that altar.  He was the only one who didn't try to kill me, and all I could think of was how this meant I didn't have to die."

"What happened to the Russian?"

"The others tried to fight him, but none of us knew how to fight.  I stuck him with an epipen and he ran off.  And that's...that's all I can remember before the helicopter arrived."

"That's OK.  You've done really well."

Five people had been pulled off that mountainside alive, all frostbiten and hypothermic.  She had wondered how Cinthia had been the worst affected, despite being the only one wearing a proper coat.  Now she understood.  But the frostbite was already healing.  There were other wounds here, that had cut much deeper than mere snow and ice.  And they would take longer to heal.