My six-part Vaesen campaign was only concluded just before Christmas, but already I'm pondering an episodic horror/investigation serial, this time using the Edwardian period as a backdrop. I'm still brainstorming this, but my idea revolves around a group of gents circa 1905 who are all members of a semi-secret society that undertakes investigations of the supernatural.
Below is the suggested society which acts as the nexus of the campaign. Currently, I'm pondering the use of World of Darkness as the rules. This is subject to change.
The Aegis Noctis Society (London, 1905)
Motto: Ex Tenebris Custodiamus — “From the Shadows, We Guard.”
Public Face: A private antiquarian and philosophical dining club in Bloomsbury.
True Purpose: Investigation and containment of supernatural threats within the British Empire.
Origins & Founders
The Aegis Noctis Society was formally constituted in 1871, though its intellectual roots reach back to the panic years following the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak and the unsettling spiritualist fervor that swept London thereafter. Its principal founders were three men of divergent talents but shared conviction: Dr. Horace Bellamy, a physician who believed certain epidemics were neither natural nor divine; Sir Reginald Ashcroft, a colonial administrator returned from Ceylon with tales of “hungry gods” beneath ruined temples; and Professor Matthias Crowle, a Cambridge classicist whose translation of a fragmentary Alexandrian grimoire convinced him that ancient cults had never entirely vanished.
These men concluded that the Empire’s expansion had disturbed older strata of belief...and perhaps older inhabitants. Their early meetings, held in rented rooms near Russell Square, focused on cataloguing credible reports of hauntings, occult crime, and inexplicable calamity. By 1873 they had adopted the name Aegis Noctis and drafted a charter: the Society would collect knowledge, train discreet investigators, and intervene only when necessary to preserve the public peace.
Philosophy & Methods
The Society stands apart from fashionable spiritualism and theatrical occultism. It rejects table-rapping sensationalism unless corroborated by evidence. Its doctrine is sober and practical: the supernatural exists, but it is rare, dangerous, and best handled quietly.
Members are expected to cultivate respectable public lives - e.g. physicians, officers, academics, gentlemen - so that inquiries can be made without arousing suspicion.
Operationally, the Aegis functions through committees:
The Athenaeum Circle (Research & Archives) gathers texts, translates manuscripts, and maintains a card index of cases dating to 1856.
The Field Committee dispatches small teams to investigate disturbances across London and, when necessary, abroad.
The Wardens maintain certain protective rites and safeguard restricted artifacts.
The Society prefers containment to destruction. Some phenomena can be bound, sealed, or persuaded into dormancy. Others require sterner remedies.
Premises
Since 1884, the Aegis has occupied No. 17 Woburn Crescent, a tall Georgian townhouse discreetly purchased through a holding trust. The brass plaque at the door reads The Woburn Antiquarian Dining Society. The ground floor contains a respectable smoking room and dining hall where members may entertain guests. The upper floors, however, are private.
The second floor houses the Bellamy Library, a gaslit chamber lined with locked cases. Here are kept rare folios on demonology, comparative mythology, mesmerism, and Eastern mysticism. Several volumes are chained; a few are missing pages by design. A hidden cabinet, accessible by rotating a carved atlas globe, conceals the Crowle Papers, including the Alexandrian fragment that inspired the Society’s founding.
The basement contains a reinforced chamber known as the Aegis Vault, lined with salt channels and iron fittings. Artifacts deemed too perilous for ordinary storage, for example mirrors that reflect unfamiliar faces and reliquaries that hum faintly in darkness, are sealed here under ritual wards renewed quarterly.
Resources & Influence
The Society’s funding derives from quiet subscriptions by wealthy members and a modest endowment left by Sir Reginald Ashcroft upon his death in 1892. These funds maintain the townhouse, pay a discreet caretaker couple, and support travel and equipment expenses. The Society keeps a small arsenal: revolvers, shotguns, blessed blades, chemical agents, and certain alchemical preparations acquired through continental contacts.
Influence is exercised indirectly. Several members hold positions in hospitals, universities, and the civil service. Through them, police reports may be reviewed before they are sensationalized, coroners persuaded toward prosaic verdicts, and shipping manifests examined when peculiar crates arrive from distant colonies.
Present Condition (1905)
In 1905 the Aegis Noctis Society is cautious but strained. Reports of strange occurrences have increased, particularly in London's docklands and newly electrified districts where gaslight once reigned. The Wardens complain that older protective rites feel “thinner,” as though the veil between worlds is less secure than it was thirty years ago.
Yet the Society endures, bound by scholarship, discipline, and the unspoken certainty that if it fails, no one else will stand between London and the dark intelligences that watch it from beyond the lamplight.
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