Characters for Victorian Evil, day1

Okay, so that should be the setting.  Now for characters.

As stated, the PCs will get a choice, either as Constables or as Victims.  ‘Bystanders’ is a word that just doesn’t quite cover the meaning. 

Constables are likely to be strong heroes, as they enforce the peace and investigate for the Crown for a living.  Ranks should be set low, and fortunately there are a number of easy resources for these on the web.  Understand that “police” is a word that in this age applies much more readily to the cities, or to the continent, not the British villages, towns and countryside.  If we take Victorian Web to be true, it is about 1856 that Parliament mandated the provinces to set up police forces, and that many forces remained grossly inadequate for years.  It is not at all impossible for the local police force to include slobs, fools, and castaways who couldn’t make it in the army.  But they have to conduct themselves, or pretend to be conducting themselves, with patience, professionalism, and impersonal gain.  None of this taking bribes when everyone is looking!

The first uniformed rank would be Chief Constable, with Commissioners, a quasi political office, overseeing them.  In the counties, we could ignore Commissioners entirely.  They are in some far off city eating imported turkey.  The Chief Constable is probably the last word on what a local constabulary would do, and the PCs orders should come straight from him. 

The BBC further informs this, suggesting that Sherlock Holmes (first penned in 1887) was exceptional precisely because the Constables had no investigators.  Investigators themselves were common enough in France, but were at odds with British ideas of privacy and freedom, their profession being nosy spies more than uniformed symbols of order.  This would tend to rule out the Smart Hero class altogether, or push them outside of the class of characters that a chief constable would send into a home invasion mission.

As for what to call them, Wikipedia is most helpful for data but not for sources.  All Police officers are called Constables, though there are higher ranks with greater powers.  I don’t wholly believe it, but it will work for a role playing game.  We will most likely find it hard to stop referring to each other by personal names, and the Chief Constable as HQ anyway.  I will finish by soliciting any help with sources from readers like yourselves.  If I missed anything, let me know, please.

That’s an excellent place to leave it for today.  Tomorrow, the Victims!

Source:

Marjie Bloy, “The Metropolitan Police,” The Victorian Web: Literature, History, and Culture in the Age of Victoria, Last modified 11 October 2002, Accessed 1 March 2012, Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/history/police.html.

Clive Emsley, “Detective Policing” Crime and the Victorians, Last modified 17 Feb, 2011, Accessed 1 March 2012, Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/crime_01.shtml.

“Police” Wikipedia, Last modified on 17 February 2012, Accessed 1 March 2012, Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police.

“Constable” Wikipedia, Last modified on 25 February 2012, Accessed 1 March 2012, Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable#United_Kingdom.

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