Gin Lane
Bibliography
A list of Gin Lane’s sources and influences.
I’ve been intending to OCR my copy of John Gay’s 1716 Trivia and put it up as a page here, but I’ve found someone’s already done it, of course: Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London.
A major contributor to Gin Lane reporting is The Gentleman’s Magazine in the form held on the Internet Library of Early Journals.
Roughly in order of influence
Dr. Johnson’s London Life in London 1740-1770 – Liza Picard. This is full of little GM-friendly snippets. In fact that is pretty much all it is. The main reference for the first dozen or so sessions of Gin Lane.
London The Biography – Peter Ackroyd. Covers a far wider period than the game but is irritatingly poor in giving dates. Otherwise rather like Dr Johnson’s London but more of an account than snapshots. (Ackroyd’s promisingly titled book: Thames: Sacred River is nothing like as useful or interesting).
Craze Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason – Jessica Warner. Fills in a lot of the details of the gin ‘wars’.
The Much-lamented Death of Madam Geneva The Eighteenth-century Gin Craze – Patrick Dillon. The other accessible work on the core period.
Tales from the Hanging Court – Robert Shoemaker & Tim Hitchcock. A print spin-off of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online site.
Behind Closed Doors At Home in Georgian England – Amanda Vickery. Looks at the significance of the home in Georgian society.
City of Laughter Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London – Vic Gatrell. Cartooning from the second part of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
English Society in the 18th Century – Roy Porter. A slightly academic view, but clearly written and provides context into which to fit a lot of the pieces from elsewhere.
Lascivious Bodies A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century – Julie Peakman.
Dr Johnson’s Dictionary The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World – Henry Hitchings
The Kit-Cat Club – Ophelia Field. A history of the early 18th century Whig club and its denizens.
The Hellfire Clubs – Geoffey Ashe. Nothing like as inspiring as I’d hoped…
The Wooden World An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy – N.A.M. Rodger.
Enlightenment – Roy Porter.
(and I’m sure there are a couple more Roy Porters around here somewhere too…)
I suppose I should be citing Smollett and Defoe and Fielding, but taking them as given, some modern views as background colour rather than direct inspiration:
On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers. A man chasing a misappropiated family inheritance gets involved with Blackbeard. Yes, I know this was cited for the Pyrates game too, but it is set in the eighteenth century. Recently optioned for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film.
A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption by David Liss. About the South Sea Company stock bubble and an election respectively. The central character is a retired prize-fighter, turned debt collector and thief taker in the 1720s. Kent’s Coffee House features! What makes them particularly interesting is that the central character is Portugese Jewish. Recommended by Nick (Solomon ben Ezra). Pleasantly readable. The Devil’s Company, yet to be read, concerns the East India Company.
Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World collectively The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. The series opens in 1713, jumps back to the Great Fire of London in 1666 then proceeds mostly forwards to 1714. They are somewhat heavy going through sheer volume.
Blind Justice – Bruce Alexander. Represenative as the first of the Sir John Fielding Mysteries, a series of 11 historical crime fiction novels set in the 1760s featuring the blind Justice himself. Not quite as well written as A Conspiracy of Paper &c.
Core game rules are from the Fate RPG, some bits of Fate 2 and the Spirit of the Century instantiation of v3 – call it Fate 2.75 perhaps.
Philosophy – that is, the magic system – is based on various material from Steve Jackson Games’s GURPS line, most of which has been gathered into GURPS: Thaumatology, though I worked from the predecessors, GURPS Cabal and GURPS Spirits and an article on the old SJG Pyramid webzine that tied them together.