Thinking about some background stuff we were discussing last session. In your Duskwall, do you have/make use of photography (either the Victorian spirit or Kirlian (electroplasmic?) aura variety?
Spirit photography sounds like a positively lethal idea to me, but then how far would well-heeled types go capture a snapshot of their loved ones before their trip on the funeral barge to Bellweather? Sounds like a side job for a Whisper and some kind of esoteric gadgetry.
Leading on a little from that, how about newspapers? We all know how important control of the media is – how would that work in Duskwall, especially given the variety of groups looking to further their cause? Thieves with a printing press? Might be interesting to consider.
These are very good questions.
An offshoot of spirit photography could be how hollows get made, though this risks being a little too on the nose. Heliotype steel plate with a soul embedded in it, screaming to be let out, and a pliant, docile hollow ready to be used as labor.
The equipment would probably be room-portable rather than man-portable – don’t want people turning in their black-powder guns for MurderCameras. But these things could somehow be used as a nasty trap in a building.
That could be something a whisper could use tinker for during down time as an extended project. Also, it could be a great way to kidnap someone, and ransom the spirit while the family hangs on to the hollow body.
A newspaper faction (the Ink Rakes, created here on the forum) is going to be in the game!
I can hardly think of printing presses without adding zealous revolutionaries cranking out inflammatory pamphlets, and bluecoats bursting in and smashing up their presses, conducting raids to get at their seditious pamphlets.
One of our ‘all Whisper’ crew had a predisposition for capturing the ‘print’ of a spirit as it left a body by slamming the escaping soul between the pages of her rather large and ectoplasmically enhanced ‘pressing book’.
The player likened it to the victorian predilection for pressed flowers and their preservation/display. Back at the lair, the Spectral Sisters have a library that is cluttered with glass display cabinets full of ‘pressed spirt’ pages…