4671 Universe

Victorian (V) — Smoke & Mirrors

Victorian 4671 is not polite nostalgia. It is soot, appetite, invention, and class violence dressed as progress. Cities expand faster than mercy, patents become a new kind of nobility, and relic science gives industrial society the dangerous idea that miracles can be mass-produced if the factory is large enough.

Era‑Specific Rules

  • Industry & Soot: Factories increase output and Soot. Soot raises epidemics/unrest; public works reduce it.
  • Rails & Telegraph: rail corridors and wires transform logistics; News Cycle editorials sway legitimacy and markets.
  • Patents & Exhibitions: file patents, exhibit at world fairs, poach rivals’ staff.
  • Secret Societies: the Relic Conclave hides as “Progress Committees;” Followers run pain‑salons for elites; occult insight can replace years of R&D.
  • Urban District Control: rookeries, factory wards, cathedral closes, docks—each has unrest dials and bosses.

Era Items

Rifled musket, revolver, sabre, bayonet, gas lamp, field camera, telegraph tap, patent lockboxes, early respirators, Aetherglass lenses, Ketran screw‑frigate designs.

Era Materials

Coal/coke, steel, copper wire, rubber, dyes/bleach, cordite (late), Aetherglass, whale oil (early coastal), marsh‑toxin alkaloids.

What This Era Rewards

  • city campaigns where class, disease, and infrastructure matter as much as duels
  • invention that always comes with a bill attached
  • public image wars fought through papers, exhibitions, and scandal
  • grim optimism: people really can build a better world here, but never cleanly

Overarching Story — Smoke & Mirrors

Act I — A City of Chimneys

Greyspire becomes a soot‑haloed capital. The D’haro Green Trusts wage war on cholera. A string of ritual murders matches the Rocky Spire’s geometry and riots follow.

Act II — Exhibitions of Wonder

World fairs unveil Relic Apparatuses. Patent No. 0 works only inside relic fields. Ketran drydocks finish screw frigates as Nabour’s currents shift.

Act III — The Patent of No Number

The Conclave moves to monopolize Patent 0; the Church calls it idolatry. A camera plate captures a rift halo and vanishes into a university Bone‑Vault.

Act IV — Greyspire on Fire

Bread riots, rail strikes, gasworks explosion, citywide blackout. Choose your city’s future:

  • Humanist Industrialism: sanitation, education, slow prosperity, relic quarantine.
  • Occult Modernity: legal relic integration; miracles with maintenance nightmares.
  • Mailed Hand: rail‑police, curfews, quiet streets, deeper anger.

Player Paths

  • Public Works Baron
  • Occult Engineer
  • Newspaper King/Queen
  • Ketran Commodore

Endgame & Seeds → Pre‑Modern

Armories overstocked, signals units trained, patent wars bitter—the Great War waits like a pressure boiler.