Wrapping up our romp through the Victorian era this week is the 2012 revision of Cthulhu by Gaslight.

This edition jettison’s the obsessive focus on Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu fan fiction in favor of building a sourcebook aimed at plot seeds born from the folklore and history of England (as well as Ramsey Campbell’s fictional Severn Valley).

The vibes are better here, probably because a lot of authors have played with Victorian horror in the 20 years since the second edition. You can pick up a lot of subtle threads from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy influencing the book’s approach to the period’s occult societies. There are more than a few nods to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, too. It’s more fun, basically (H.G. Wells’ Martians are in here!), where the previous editions were a bit stiff. Stiffness is probably more historically accurate, but whatever.

You can tell just from the cover that casts a brain-stealing Mi-go as a sort of Jack the Ripper that this Cthulhu by Gaslight has a better understanding, not of the period, but of what players expect of a CoC game set in the period.

The book also gets rid of the dreadful Yorkshire Horrors scenario in favor of two new ones – The Burnt Man and Night of the Jackals. Neither are particularly exciting, in all honesty, but I’ll take them over Yorkshire Horrors any day.