Originally released as an April Fool's Day piece (something Onyx Path Publishing seems really fond of) in 2015, these characters draw on classic 'Victorian Gothic' literature and are beautifully constructed based on characters from various well-known works. As with previous offerings of this type, the PDF is free but you have to pay, understandibly, if you'd prefer a book.

There are six characters in all, and they all fit into the bracket of Historical Angst™ which the author claims has been trademarked! (Not sure if this is the case or a joke but I'm playing safe...) Each comes with a description/backstory, role-playing notes, an illustration and a complete character sheet - so you could use them (probably best as NPCs) if you really want to. After all, who could resist an eighty-seven year old Russian aristocrat from the early nineteenth century? As a card-sharping ghost she lingers on and it's easy to think of some kind of mischief in which she could be embroiled. She comes from a Russian short story published in 1834.

The other characters are Captain Robert Walton (a failed poet who failed as an explorer too, from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley), Princess Hermonthis (from a French short story of 1840 about a mummified Egyptian princess who got a bit annoyed when one of her feet fell off), the Black Cat (from Edger Allen Poe's short story of the same name, a luckless feline whose owner blamed it for all his shortcomings), Baron Vordenburg (a vampire hunter who reads a lot but rarely actually comes out until the very last minute when others have done all the legwork, from Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published in 1871) and Thomas Carnacki (star of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, a collection of short stories by William Hope Hodgson that actually came out in 1913 but he oozes Victorian Gothic).

Thoroughly-researched and realised well in game turms this is at least entertaining and who knows, perhaps you might find a use for one or more somewhere in your chronicles!

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Reviewed: 17 January 2016