I am including the second printing of Cthulhu by Gaslight (1988) mostly for my own nostalgia – it’s the one I got when I started getting into Call of Cthulhu. This is a square-bound soft cover, like most CoC books, and it basically just repackages the contents of the original box in a book. The main addition is some color plates, which I love.

The plates, and the cover, reveal a slight problem with the 1890s settings. Two feature diabolical coachmen. The third I’ve reproduced is actually the cover image from Games Workshop’s Call of Cthulhu supplement detailing England in the 1920, A Green and Pleasant Land – while I enjoy the idea of Cthulhu sneaking up on a cricket game, the plane in the air above gives away that this isn’t a depiction of the Victorian Era.

There is something about the cosmic nature of the Cthulhu Mythos that doesn’t jibe with the 1890s for me. Sure, there’s ton of Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu crossovers in bookstores, but those aren’t actually…good? No matter how evil, the horrors in the 1890s – the decade of spiritualists and occult societies and Dracula and Jack the Ripper –  always seem to wear a human shape. Even Chambers’ The King in Yellow, arguably one of keystones of cosmic horror, first published in 1890, is more concerned with artistic impulses and decadence rather than mind-blasting terrors from beyond space.

World War I marked a catastrophic shift in humanity’s self-image. Lovecraft’s brand of horror is at home in a post-Great War world, but it seems anachronistic to try to incorporate those concepts into a Victorian roleplaying setting. Which I guess is a long way of saying that Gaslight strikes me as a solid setting for a horror game, but perhaps a poor setting for a Call of Cthulhu game.