The most surprising thing about re-reading Castle Falkenstein was the fact the game came out in 1994. I clearly remember Steampunk being all the rage on the internet and in roleplaying forums for a while – with its own GURPS book, a re-issue of Space: 1889, and a whole slew of d20 books that put some steam into your D&D game – but I’m almost ceratin that this was some time in the early aughties. Falkenstein is something of a forerunner, then, ahead of its time by six or seven years, though still not as ancient as the original Space: 1889. In a way, you can see the difference from the later wave of games, as Falkenstein focuses more on Victorian society and a fantastical version of 1800′s europe and less on the mechanical gadgets and giant steam robots. Those still exist, but they are just one element of the game along with magick and faerie creatures.
The real focus of CF, then, is what it dubs the Great Game. Borrowing the historical term, Falkenstein uses it to describe the politics, war and espionage of 19th-century Europe, with all its tiny kings, republics, dukes and princes. A little after the advent of instant communication and a little before the rise of the nation state, Falkenstein‘s back story casts Otto von Bismarck as the nefarious villain bent on world domination and the Mad King Ludwig along with his little kingdom of Bavaria as the only thing standing in its way. It’s all spiced up, of course with the Faerie rivalry of the Seelie and Unseelie court and a little bit of magic, steamtech and their inevitable combination.
That’s not what we did in our one-shot, though.
The other thing that Falkenstein does is let you play with all your favorite fictional characters. There’s some backstory to all of this, talking about how the reality of that world trickles into our world in the form of legends and make-belief, but the bottom line is that CF is the world where Captain Nemo, scourge of the high seas, can meet with Jules Verne, French minister of science, to discuss the latest theories on the aether, and they can both team up with Abraham van Helsing to hunt down dracula.
Which is what we did do in our one-shot, more or less.
I started working on the CF game perhaps two months ago, at about the same time I had rented Fury of Dracula from the local game shop, and the two kind of clicked in my mind. What better way to hunt down the count than with a horseless carriage and a stake-gun? I imagined a game session a little like the boardgame, with the heroes chasing Dracula from town to town, always one step behind, until they catch up with him on a dark and stormy night. I came up with a cast of characters – one of van Helsing’s cohorts, a consulting detective that wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, a 19th century version of Lois Lane and a faerie, a dwarf and a wizard to show off the CF world, and our game was born. This is the first one, I think, which I prepared from scratch.
So, we’ll join our diverse group at the gates of the Palais Luxemburg in the next post.
