Review: Cthulhu by Gaslight, Keeper’s Guide
As anyone who spends ten minutes in my presence knows- I love CoC and I am fascinated with 19th century London. Given that, one might think that the Gaslight setting would be perfect for me and they’d be right.
Lets begin with the physical stuff.
The book is a well constructed hardcover of roughly 275 pages, 267 of which are gaming content. There are three pages of advertisements for other CoC books at the end.
Two ribbons bookmarks are sewn into the spine. This is pretty standard with CoC (and Savage Worlds) books. Personally, I love it.
It bears mentioning that Gaslight is meant to be its own game. The Investigator’s Guide contains a complete version of CoC core rules. I haven’t read The Investigator’s Guide, but, even so, I suspect you could get by without it if you already own the standard Keeper’s Rulebook. Let me know if I’m wrong about that in the hypothetical comment section.
Content:
The table of contents is adequate. However, I’d prefer something longer with more individual entries as opposed to the broad categories found here.
The book begins with a content warning. There’s a little something for everyone who wants to indulge in fashionable outrage. So if you’re upset by the very mention of several isms and things like slavery or even the use of modern terms like ‘sex worker’ in leu of ‘prostitute’ I guess you can fuck off and find something else with which to occupy your time.
The first chapter ‘A Keeper’s Miscellany’ contains some floor plans of common Victorian buildings, a breakdown of how the legal system works, mental institutions and write ups of several ‘villainous organizations’ real and imagined.
This is all well done and the organizations are a fine springboard for the keeper’s imagination.
The title of the second chapter ‘Occult Secrets & the Golden Dawn’ adequately describes its contents. Here we find guidelines and suggestions for running seances and mediums, genuine and otherwise; a lengthy write up of the Golden Dawn; rules for astral combat and a section on mythos tomes. As with the first chapter this one is well done. I found the section of mediums especially interesting. The selection of tomes contains quite a bit of overlap with the CoC Keeper’s Rulebook, but this is to be expected, because as mentioned above, CoC Gaslight is designed to stand on its own as a game.
Chapter Three ‘Running Gaslight Games’ contains, as one might assume, advice for running games set in the Victorian setting. It kicks off with another content warning. This is far longer than the first and is mostly focused on informing the reader that they can run any sort of game they like. By nearly any measure, this goes beyond conscientious and, frankly, feels more than a little condescending. Personally, the people in my life are all over the political spectrum and I feel the need to say that even my left leaning friends find this sort of thing tiresome. I mean, you’re playing a game based on the works of HPL which takes place in the 19th Century, what more need be said? This book was published in 2024 and I suspect the authors may have spent just a little too much time online.
Moving on, this chapter contains rules for carriage chases; a brief survey of the British class system and rules for the same; rules related to various hazards and conditions ranging from fog and other weather to gas leaks; suggestions for the new Keeper and a list of adventure seeds. It’s all fairly straight forward and any given Keeper is likely to find some of it, at least, useful.
Chapter Four ‘Notable Victorians’ is where the book really shines in my opinion. The chapter lives up to the title and provides an extensive list of interesting people from the time period. These write ups, by their very nature, contain a large amount of setting data. There is also a shorter list of fictional people at the end of the chapter.
Chapter Five ‘Victorian Horrors’ is also excellent. It covers the Mythos in Britain and horrors that lay outside they mythos, such as vampires, werewolves and the Martians of H.G. Wells. There is another section of fictional characters at the end of the chapter which includes Dracula, Frankenstein’s Creature and some other notables such as Carmilla.
One of these characters is Helen Vaughn the antagonist of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. For reasons beyond my understanding, the authors have chosen to fold Pan into the mythos as an avatar of Shub-Niggurath. Pan as presented in the story is quite horrific enough on his own terms and need not be associated with any other entity. Countless authors have created their own mythos gods which have been integrated as initially presented. I’m uncertain as why Pan was handled in a different way. Maybe the name doesn’t contain enough consonants. I cannot think of another viable reason. Machen’s story was, without a doubt, a huge influence on HPL and contains many of the earmarks of a mythos tale. If you have not, I urge you to read it.
The remainder of the book (Chapters Six and Seven) is taken up by pre written adventures. I am not qualified to comment on these as I have never run a published adventure in my life.
Please feel free to give you opinions of these adventures, or anything else, in the comments. Be advised, I really don’t have anything else to say in regards to the content warnings, though.
Taken as a whole, love this book.
It is my intent to review the 7e versions of Arkham and the Malleus Monstrorum in the near future.
Thanks for reading.
