Baedeker’s Handbooks are like RPG sourcebooks before anyone knew what an RPG sourcebook was. They are travel guides, produced primarily from the 1850s through the 1930s and then trickling off through the 70s. There are tons of them covering Europe, but the occasional volume tackles other northern hemisphere locales like India, Russia, Canada and the US. This one, as you can see, handles Egypt, circa 1914.
These things are exhaustive and not like modern travel guides. Only a small portion of Egypt’s 500 pages is devoted to the business of traveling (like steamer fares and hotel recommendations). Instead, you get a deeply researched book tackling history, geography, culture, customs, language, religion and politics. Most of the information is presented in firsthand travelogues, detailing the author’s journeys. Accompanying these are gorgeous fold-out maps, floor plans and other illustrations. Baedeker maps were so detailed that the Luftwaffe used the guidebook for Great Britain to formulate targets for bombing raids in 1942 – both sides referred to these as Baedeker Raids after a German official said, “We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.“
The Baedeker guides capture something essential about travel in the early 20th century. If you read a lot of mysteries about the period (or watch BBC adaptations), you’re sure to catch a glimpse or a passing reference to the guides at some point. That makes them well suited for Call of Cthulhu games. Chaosium’s regional sourcebooks seems to grasp a bit at the Baedeker style and I have seen Baedeker floor plans in Horror on the Orient Express. This book (which, judging from the notes written in the margins, actually made the trip to Egypt) was on the table during the Cairo chapter of my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign (and the London guide for the London chapter as well) and I think it lent the proceedings a hint of verisimilitude. If I was running Orient Express in person, I’d have made a vague effort to have Baedeker’s for each stop.
