London Chronicles - What the Ashes Conceal

After a lot of planning, my Steampunk superhero game, set in 1880 London, finally hit the table. I used SuperMission Force rules by Four Color Studio. I made very few changes to adapt the rules to Victorian London. The main alterations were to the pre-game and post- game sequences, mainly because I wanted to develop a stronger narrative around my characters.

For an introduction to this alternative London and the London Chronicles, see my earlier post.

A TALE OF SHADOW, STEAM & THE UNQUIET DEAD

LONDON, 1880. Fog thick as mourning crêpe rolls off the Thames. Somewhere in Whitechapel, in a warehouse that keeps its secrets locked behind bonded iron, a girl named Clara Ellington waits in the dark — and something far older than the men who took her waits with her.

A Tale of Shadow, Steam & the Unquiet Dead

Dramatis Personae 

THE HIDDEN SOCIETY - Charlotte Holmes, Mr Tonks, The Augmented Man and Voltaire

CHARNEL SOCIETY - Cornelia Ash, The Resurrected Man, Tobias, Emerson and Shamblers

Prologue 

Fog rolled from the Thames like funeral shrouds, and somewhere in Whitechapel, a young nurse named Clara Ellingworth waited in darkness.

Three weeks earlier, Clara had vanished. A volunteer nurse at St Mary's Hospital, she disappeared without a trace, and the Metropolitan Police showed little interest in the case. Her employer, Dr Evelyn Farrow, was less inclined to let the matter rest. Unable to get official help, she sought assistance from the Sherlock Holmes Detective Agency.

At 221B Baker Street, Charlotte Holmes listened carefully to the doctor's account before accepting the case. Accompanied by Colonel Hargreaves, she travelled to the Ellingworth family's townhouse in Holborn.
The house yielded nothing.
No sign of Clara. No sign of her captors. Only dust, silence, and the uncomfortable suspicion that someone had searched the place before them.

As they prepared to leave, however, a figure emerged from the fog.

It was Thomas Ellingworth, Clara's brother.

Gaunt and hollow-eyed, Thomas pressed a hastily written address into Hargreaves's hand: a warehouse in Cable Street. They believed Clara was held there, somewhere on the top floor.
Then Thomas disappeared back into the fog.
The investigation had suddenly become a rescue mission.

Cable Street and its Environs

The Warehouse of the Dead

The warehouse was waiting for them.

Voltaire announced their arrival in characteristic fashion: with lightning. A blast tore away the upper door, and Colonel Hargreaves plunged into a swarm of shambling dead.

Yet the Shamblers (zombies) were not the worst thing waiting inside.

The Cornelias and the Resurrected Man take on Voltaire and the Augmented Man.

The air itself folded, and from a black rift stepped Cornelia Ash—elegant, deadly, and armed with claws sharp enough to open steel. Another Cornelia soon followed, cutting through Voltaire's arm with a savage claw.

Below, Charlotte and her Symbiot took grenade fire from hidden enemies in the warehouse yard. Emerrson had struck as she tried to persuade Thomas to leave the area. The living metal shielded her from the blast, but Thomas was hurled senseless against the brickwork.
Within moments, the rescue had become a battle.

Cornelia's Gambit

As the fighting spread through the warehouse, Cornelia ignored the chaos around her. She had come for something more valuable than Clara: secret Society documents hidden within the safe.

But the Rift is a treacherous master.

When Cornelia opened the warded brass tube to place the precious documents in, a pulse of strange energy swept through the building. The Shamblers convulsed—and turned on their nearest living being - in this case, their mistress.

For the first time, Cornelia was forced to fight for more than the prize she had come to steal. Cornelia's predicament brought her guardian, the Resurrected Man, to her side. To protect Cornelia, the construct had to give up on trying to repel Augmented Man and Voltaire from the warehouse's top floor.

Then came another complication.

Inspector Crale and a squad from Division H burst through the warehouse doors, charging straight into a melee of policemen, gunfire, and hungry dead.
London, as ever, had arrived late—but noisily.

Inspector Crale and Division H Arrive. The Original photo and the AI comic version. 

Still trying to work out the best way to present this story, so here are two of the options.

Clara's Rescue

The police bought the heroes precious time.

Mr Tonks used the distraction to knock out Tobias as the police officers pushed past him, focused on the warehouse's doors and what lay beyond.

Amid the confusion, Colonel Hargreaves fought his way to the top floor and found Clara's cell standing open.

For one terrible moment, he feared they had arrived too late.

Then he saw her.

Clara Ellingworth was alive—terrified and exhausted, but alive.

Cornelia, meanwhile, had decided that discretion was the better part of villainy. Gathering her resurrected servant and the plans, she tore herself sideways through the Rift.

Charlotte managed one final shot as Cornelia appeared fleetingly on Cable Street, but the bolt merely grazed her. A heartbeat later, Cornelia and her monstrous protector had vanished into the Rift, taking the stolen documents with them.

The heroes had rescued Clara.

But they had lost their quarry.

Mr Tonks, after dispatching Tobias, climbed the warehouse's wall to find that Cornelia Ash had already departed.

What the Ashes Conceal

With the fighting over, Voltaire returned to the strongroom to see what else their enemies had left behind.

There, hidden in a barrel, he discovered several small phials of cold grey ash.

It hummed faintly in his hand.

The energy within was neither purely Rift nor purely necromantic. It was something stranger—an impossible marriage of the two.

Something or someone had created it.

Something unnatural.

And whatever that something was, it remained somewhere beyond the fog-shrouded streets of Whitechapel.

The case was far from closed.

To be continued in The Corpse Engine.

Game Notes

This was the first outing for the Hidden Society and proved an excellent test of both heroes and villains.
Voltaire and Mr Tonks were immediately effective, while Charlotte took longer to master, especially after the team split early in the game. Cornelia Ash, meanwhile, proved an excellent villain—dangerous in a fight but far more interesting when manipulating events from the shadows.

As always, the best moments were the ones I hadn't planned.

Thomas's being knocked unconscious in the opening turn forced a series of oracle rolls and created an entirely unexpected subplot. The longer the campaign runs, the more convincing these decisions become as the characters acquire their own personalities and grudges.

Most surprisingly, Colonel Hargreaves appears to have developed a soft spot for Clara since her rescue. Perhaps her military family reminds him of an old comrade.

Colonel Hargreaves removed Clara to the Diogenes Club safe medical facility, the Sanitorium, but her unstable links to the Rift remain undeveloped. The mystery surrounding her simply never developed.

Inspector Crale, although unsuccessful, remains undiscovered. Something to develop in a later chapter.

Either way, London has not heard the last of the Ellingworth case.

And some ashes are best left undisturbed.

London Chronicles - Charnel Society

The Charnel Society is a secretive and radical splinter of the Blackthorn Necromantic Society, convinced that the convergence of Rift energy and Charnel current represents not a danger but an evolutionary threshold. They operate in absolute secrecy, funded by sources that include — though the heroes don't yet know it — the Moriarty Network.

THE OPPOSITION 

Cornelia Ash

Collector of secrets, mistress of duplicates, allergic to being touched 

Daughter of Cornelius Ash, the unconventional scientist, aka Construct. She was a famous stage star, famed for her Shakespearean roles and well known to London's Bohemian community. She is also the mistress and lover of Lord Grey, and it is rumoured that it was he who exposed her to the rift energies that have changed her both physically and mentally.

Now a cold, precise woman who moves through Rift micro-tears with unsettling ease. Her primary abilities are self-duplication and teleportation— she can generate up to three copies of herself from Rift-folded space, each fully capable and independent. Distinguishing the original from the duplicates is the key to defeating her. She serves as Grey's field commander in his absence and runs the Cable Street operation.

The Resurrected Man 

A construct that does not tire, does not doubt, does not stop.

The Society's most disturbing creation, and in some ways its proof of concept. A living man who died during Babbage's Folly and was subsequently reanimated by a simultaneous application of Rift energy and Charnel current. He is not a Shambler — he thinks, reasons, and feels. He is also not entirely human. His touch can temporarily suppress the life force of living beings, and he heals damage that would kill ordinary men. He is fiercely loyal to Lord Grey, who gave him his second existence, and Cornelia Ash, whom he sees as an angel, the herald of the new beginning.

Tobias & Emerson 

The muscle, not terribly bright and a coward with very good aim. 

Two bonded men. Brothers — or close enough as makes no difference, raised together in one of London's charity orphanages after both lost their families within the same terrible year. Where one grew canny and careful, the other grew reckless and brutal. 

Their linked origin pulled them into the Rift underworld young, firstly undertaking petty work, running messages, standing lookout, doing the small, unglamorous jobs. Finally. Resurrectionists, stealing bodies and killing some innocents to meet the demand for Shamblers. One night a botched job exposed them raw Rift power when a grave held an alien body. Now, with some powers, their fates are permanently bound together.

More to Come

Further members of the Charnel Society, including Lord Morbius Grey, will be introduced as our story unfolds. Cornelia and her allies will make their debut in What the Ashes Conceal.

Cynoscephalae - The Battle

Following on from the set-up post, here's how the refight actually played out, using To the Strongest rules in my second Phalanx versus Legion recreation. 

A Slow Start

Oddly enough, the game started off very historically.

The Roman right just couldn't get going. Activation roll after activation roll failed, and the wing shuffled forward at a snail's pace towards hills that were, for now, still empty. Over on the Macedonian left, Nicanor was having exactly the trouble he had historically: getting the phalanx files into any kind of order was proving a nightmare, with battalions still trickling up from the rear and trying to sort themselves into a coherent line.

Meanwhile, on the Macedonian left, the cavalry piled straight into a fast, bruising melee that would run on for two or three rounds, both sides trading blows without either gaining the upper hand.

On the other flank, things followed the history books rather nicely. Philip, commanding his right-wing phalanx and the Agema, pushed his men down the hill and straight at the Romans. The legions counter-attacked, and the two sides settled into a grinding, prolonged melee. Only one phalanx managed to punch its way through the Roman line — and promptly discovered the classic phalanx problem: try turning a formation that dense once it's committed. It wasn't going anywhere fast.

The Roman Left attacks Philip's Right Flank

Round Four – Flamininus Commits

By round four, Flamininus decided it was time to act. Like his historical counterpart, he could see the Macedonian line fragmenting, with gaps opening up, and rode over to his right wing in person to get the attack moving.

It didn't quite go his way at first — the Macedonian attack on that flank actually faltered, and the phalanx-versus-legion slugfest in the centre ground on with neither side able to land a decisive blow. Whatever advantage the phalanx got from fighting downhill, the Romans clawed back with their knack for rallying and rotating troops through the ranks. Say what you like about the legion, it's an awkward, stubborn thing to shift.

On the left, Flamininus pushed his own right wing forward. Nicanor, meanwhile, was learning the hard way just how difficult it is to get a phalanx into any kind of formation mid-battle. A line did eventually form, but it had drifted rightward, leaving the Macedonian centre thin and exposed, held only by the mercenaries and Thracians.

On the Macedonian Left, Nicanor finds it difficult 

to form the phalanx into a battle line

The Collapse

And then it all started to unravel for Philip.

First the Thessalian cavalry quit the field, tearing open a gap between the phalanx and the guard cavalry and leaving Philip dangerously exposed to being surrounded. On the left it got worse still — the phalanx, under constant pressure before it had even properly formed up, began to lose cohesion. The Thracians broke from the centre, and the mercenaries, reading the way the odds were shifting, decided discretion was the better part of valour and made themselves scarce.

With the Macedonian line in tatters, the Romans poured into the gaps, especially on the left. Nicanor's own phalanx broke, and he was surrounded. That was that — the battle was over.

The Legion have exploited the gaps in the 

Macedonian formation and has flanked the Phalanx. 

The Verdict

All in all, the game reproduced the historical outcome pretty faithfully. Philip found himself neatly surrounded, though he could have cut his losses and escaped with the guard cavalry, and on the right the phalanx could still have managed an organised, if costly, fighting retreat rather than the rout it suffered.

Great fun to play, though it does demand a bit of discipline in managing your cards and chits — it's easy to let activation priorities get away from you. The other lesson I've taken from this one is entirely cosmetic: my general bases need to be redone to make the commanders stand out more clearly on the table. Games should look good, after all.

Next up in Legion versus Phalanx, we head east to Asia Minor for the Battle of Magnesia.