Main
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Old friend,
I am in dire straits. As you are aware, our nation has taken great strides in medicine these past years; yet the very advances that allowed my school to flourish now threaten its survival. England's maddening lack of cadavers is seeing us fall further and further behind other institutions. This must change.
There is a church nearby in need of a gravetender. The plots are fresh. It will be dangerous, but I promise you, worthwhile; if not for science, than for the money.
Burn this letter once you have read it. Find your men. We will speak soon.
M
PLOT
tagged for: blood, gore, violence, abuse, drug use, sexual themes, cannibalism, horror
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London, 1831. Many young men have taken to the scalpel in England's thriving medical schools. Three cadavers makes a doctor out of each of them, and therein lies the problem: there aren't enough death row inmates to go around. Dissection tables lay bare and the medical community begins looking for a solution. Any solution. London's worst rise to the task; murderers, graverobbers, thieves, gangs, desecrating cemeteries by night, vanishing into the vast network of tunnels beneath the city with their prizes, and fighting bloody skirmishes over territory. Corruption infiltrates every institution from the police to the church, every brothel and shipyard and sanitarium. They call themselves the resurrection men. Occultist shenanigans ensue.
Note: the extent of technology at this time was horse-drawn wagons, coal, gas lighting, muskets, and flintlocks. Anesthesia wasn't used until the 1840s.
STORY SO FAR
as per the last run of the roleplay
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To ensure its survival, Birkbeck University's medical department has formed a seamy alliance with a faction of resurrectionists. A pair of runaway prostitutes unwittingly lead them to cross paths with the city's most powerful opium smuggling ring, a sawbones clinic run by a cannibal, and a vengeful brothel madame. Meanwhile, an undercover police officer has infiltrated their ranks, while a mortician's eldritch experiments and feud with the church threaten the continued existence of the city.
Locations (hover for more info):
The tunnels; their street code is "under"; "heading under," "I'll meet you under," etc.
Birkbeck University
St. John's Anglican Church
Nuestra Señora de Lourdes (also called The Rookery)
The Rosebud
Red Petal Opium Den
East London Funeral Parlor
The Quiet Lady
The Moonraker
Mother Clap's
CARE TO JOIN?
group currently open - closed
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Roleplay is inactive for now. I'll reboot it when I have more free time. Usually I look for 1-3 other players.
When active, replies average six paragraphs in length and we have a posting order so that everyone knows when it's their turn to write. Keeps things neat. Overall, as a GM I value open group communication so things can be planned out, clarified, and adjusted as needed. The only real "requirement" is that interested persons should be 18+ due to the roleplay's darker themes. Knowledge of the Victorian era would be helpful but isn't necessary. Send me a message if you're intrigued.
I'm open to adding low fantasy elements to this concept.
HISTORY
(more history facts are on my character's profiles in hover format)
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The premise of this roleplay is more or less based in history. Resurrectionists ran rampant between the 1820s and early 1830s-- a little bit before the Victorian era, which started in 1837. I decided to take some creative liberties and extend the timeline, because if I advertised for "Georgian-Victorian transition era roleplay" it just sounds fuckin' pedantic. Anyways.
Medical students had to complete two or three dissections each as part of their program. Ergo, medical schools needed an upwards of five hundred cadavers yearly (in London alone) and death row inmates provided only a fraction of that. Fifty at most. So, authorities often turned a blind eye to graverobbing, or participated in it in some capacity, because it was seen by many as a necessary evil. Or just a profitable one.
Alright, so: context. People at this time were terrified of improper, un-Christian burials. They didn't even let undertakers start embalming bodies before the 1860s. Everything was handled in the family parlor by close relatives for fear that otherwise the deceased would go to hell. To be dissected postmortem by a doctor was considered a fate worse than death. It was something done to felons, not upstanding, god-fearing members of society.
People came up with all kinds of ways to protect the departed from resurrectionists; sitting vigil over the grave for days at a time, using extra nails in the coffins or laying stone slabs over them, mixing the soil with materials like straw to make it harder to dig in, constructing watchtowers, storing corpses in mort houses, and even installing mortsafes, the cagelike contraptions that are frequently misattributed to people believing in vampires. The English weren't trying to stop assholes from getting out of graves-- they were trying to stop assholes from getting in. And of course, as humans always do, they found ways around it.
Resurrectionists worked in the dead of night. They would use wooden tools, as they were quieter than metal. One method of corpse extraction was to dig at the head of the grave, break the coffin open, tie a rope around the corpse, and drag it out. Another method was to dig a 4ft deep hole about 15ft adjacent to the grave where it would likely not be noticed, have a smaller person tunnel in, and extract the corpse the same way. Some skipped the graverobbing part entirely and just murdered people, as fresher cadavers fetched a higher price. In most instances clothes and jewelry were stripped off the corpse-- tampering with graves was only considered a misdemeanor (fine/jail time), but if you were caught with stolen goods it was a felony, and you could very well end up in the same graveyard as your victims. Still, some found that the payoff was worth the risk. A body in good condition could fetch seven or ten pounds, which today would be in the vicinity of six hundred to a thousand dollars. If they had a pretty necklace to boot it was all the better for your wallet.
Fresh graves were targeted because the corpse had yet to decompose and the dirt hadn't settled, making it less likely that anyone would notice something amiss. Dirt would be piled onto a canvas tarp to minimize mess and allow it to be easily replaced afterwards. Only the head of the coffin would be uncovered, because resurrectionists used the counterweight to snap the lid off with a crowbar. They also frequently hired women to pose as mourners at funerals to scope out potential graves, or had them pretend to be grieving widows at poorhouses to obtain corpses. Locals would begin to post guards with dogs and guns at cemeteries that were targeted too frequently. But guards could be bribed.
Families who were victims of resurrectionists could be vengeful, attacking them, medical schools, and private anatomical collectors. This was hardly the first instance of graverobbing in human history, but an interesting one nonetheless. It ended with the Anatomy Act in 1832.
Next time on History with Yersinia: there was an honest-to-god Victorian gangster called Diamond Annie who punched people with her diamond-studded fists and ran one of the most accomplished crime syndicates in England.
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Art
As you can see, we're super serious roleplayers writing about a dark and gritty topic.
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Connections
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The Gutierrez (played by CoronelCoscacho)
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