Introduction
Umbra Sumus, a.k.a. The Black Joak, a.k.a. Gin Noir, and a bunch of other working titles, follows on from Gin Lane, being set some 30 years later.
The gap allows me to move on the background, technology and plot a bit, but also allows the Gin Lane characters to make occasional walk-on appearances as background NPCs, as contacts and sponsors. More about that on another page – check the Marginalia.
My intent is that the focus of the game will be a bit different from Gin Lane’s, with less investigation and Philosophy, more fighting and looting. Though as always with early intentions I suspect that statement may come back and haunt me.
Date is (probably) 1767, around 30 years after the last Gin Lane session (set in February 1737).
We are into the Enlightenment far enough that it is being generally recognised as such; the American Revolution is a dark cloud bank somewhere in the offing, with patriot protests over taxation – retroactively paying for protecting them from having to speak French and abdure the true protestant faith – starting to rumble ‘over there’.
London
London has changed in the past 30+ years, once you get past first glance. The streets and buildings are much the same, as are the people and fashions. At second glance by one who had been away for some time – perhaps prisoner of the Turk, a galley slave, now enlarged – there is a different tone to the teeming streets. A long hard stare might pick out details:
HERE:
A Fop in full panoply, spying a group of surly oafs slouching by a mud puddle adjacent to his intended course, pauses contemplate and adjust his pocket watch, then passes them by, never deigning to acknowledge the clots and splashes that rain all about him, but somehow fail to disturb his promenade. Though just past the next turn he hurriedly rewinds his now still and silent watch.
HERE:
They sent a Stosshund upon Mr. Turner’s trail at Piccadilly, slotted it to his Personalia and the Colour of his Wig. It caught up with him on a Street called Charing Cross and came scrambling for his rented Hackney through a Forest of Horse Legs and Carriage Wheels. Its Core was a stone weight of military grade corned Powder and a bound Fire-Imp.
He didn’t see it coming. The last thing he saw of Whitehall was the rapidly oncoming wall of a place called the Admiralty Office.
Because he had a good Agent, he had a good Contract. Because he had a good Contract, he was across the river in St Thomas’s Hospital an Hour after the Explosion. Most of him. The Scotch Surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified Percentage of Mr. Turner hadn’t made it off the Admiralty Wall onto that first Scull from White Hall Stairs and had to spend the Night there in a Shed, in a Bucket.
The Enlightenment is underpinned by the rational miracle of Mechanicks and the putting aside of childish Superstitions, such as the theatrical Chants and obsessive Ritual of the Mountebank “Occult Philosophers” of the first Part of the Age.
In the late ’30s a new Philosophickal paradigm started to displace the Occult Philosophy of the Sephirotic Rituals. Those with some familiarity with the History of Philosophy will remark that a Change to the Philosophicks was becoming generally evident to Practitioners some five Years after the Gin Lane era. Though the first uses of the Enochian Script were cumbersome to deploy, prone to unintended Consequences and issues of Control, the coupling Enochian Inscriptions with Mechanisms and Clockworks by the Lunar Society allowed Practitioners – Mechanick Philosophers – to safely, precisely, predictably and reproducibly achieve their Effects. Simple technomantick Devices are on the Street by, say, the Time of the ’45.
Those who knew London in the 1730s will now find Kent’s on The Strand, far more a rich man’s Club than was the old coffee house, and that ben Ezra & Nephews is a Name in the bespoke technomantick Trade. Lord Foppingham has long abandoned London for the rural pursuits of uxoriousness and escapes into Improvement of his country Estates.