REGENCY CTHULHU DARK DESIGNS IN JANE AUSTEN'S ENGLAND Is A Fantastic Resource For Any Game Set In Regency England

The fine people at Chaosium have released a new set of rules for Call of Cthulhu, Regency Cthulhu Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England.  You can find it in hardcover, a special leatherette cover, and PDF. Each purchase of a physical copy will also give you the PDF which I love about Chaosium.

This new book is so amazing, it introduces new rules for creating Regency-era Investigators, introduces a new mechanic of Reputation that fluctuates like sanity and luck, a fictional town of Terrytown that you can use for games set in 1813 and 1913, and two adventures for your party to see if they can survive. If you would like to watch it played, you can watch the game run by Chaosium’s Marketing Director Brian Holland with players Saige Ryan, London Carlisle, Paula Deming, and Cynthia Marie on Chaosium’s YouTube channel. 

The most impressive thing about this book is the massive history lesson it contains. Everything you could need to know about the era from important events to how life looked for everyone from high society elites to lowly lower class workers is in here. I’m usually impressed at the amount of detail that Chaosium puts into all their supplements to help a keeper prepare to run a convincing game, but this one goes above and beyond what I expected to find. This is seriously so good that if you are wanting to run a different TTRPG in this setting, I would still recommend this book to you. It’s also awesome at being inclusive, delving into topics of sexuality and race for the time that talks about how to be accurate and how to let your players have freedom of what kind of character to make and how to make it fit into the world. The artwork in this book is also incredible. I always love to see the combination of historical eras with the horrors of Cthulhu and this has plenty of that for you.

I think the only drawback to this is it is very dense. As most rulebooks are for TTRPGs, but this one has all that extra history that can be difficult to read in one sitting and retain all the information. I would also say that if you want to run a game of this for your friends, I would send them copies of the historical context if they aren’t already familiar with the time period. What I’m saying is, you might need to do a little more homework than usual as a player for this one. Or not, a lot of people like to wing it and rely on the keeper to know the history so it really depends on your players and group dynamic.

All in all, I would definitely recommend checking this book out. I give this new book a 10/10 and now I really need to find a group to play it with.