REGENCY CTHULHU DARK DESIGNS IN JANE AUSTEN’S ENGLAND is a fantastic asset to any game set in Regency England

The good 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. Every purchase of a physical copy will also give you the PDF I love about Chaosium.

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

The most impressive thing about this book is the enormous history lesson it contains. Everything you could ever need to know about the era, from notable events to how life affected everyone from high-society elites to lower-class workers, is here. I’m usually impressed by the amount of detail Chaosium puts into all of their supplements to help prepare a goalkeeper to lead a convincing match, but this one is beyond what I expected to find. This is really so cool that if you want to run a different TTRPG in this setting I would still recommend this book to you. It’s also great to be inclusive, delving into topics of sexuality and running for time that talks about how to be precise and how to let your players have the freedom of what kind of character to create and how to fit that into the world. The artwork in this book is also amazing. I always love to see the combination of historical eras with the horrors of Cthulhu and this one has plenty for you.

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

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