The Gaslight Charter
An Expansion for the Black Meridian
Company men, detectives that never sleep, gangs in treaty, surgeons with a parts ledger, lightning in jars — and six chartered cities where the lamps are the only fence between you and what bought the dark.
Step Into the LightRequires the Gravesmoke core rules
Chapter I — The Pitch
Out on the trail, folk nail lanterns beside their doors to remind the dark that somebody is watching. The charter cities industrialized the idea. Every gaslamp on every corner is a fencepost in the biggest ward ever built — and the Gas Ring will sell you your share of it, monthly, rates subject to change.
This is the Meridian the dime novels skip: the eastern terminus country, where the Iron Line empties into six chartered cities full of company men, agency operatives, ward bosses, muckrakers, surgeons with parts catalogs, and gangs older than the streets they tax. The frontier's horrors are honest by comparison. Out there, things want your blood. In here, they want your signature — and the terms compound.
The steam is real and the lightning is bottled, but keep it period-greasy: this is patent-office sorcery, not chrome. A brass hand costs a year's wages and hisses when it rains. A difference engine fills a building and needs six clerks and a chaplain. The future arrived in the charter cities the way everything arrives there — invoiced.
In the basement of Vespergate's Counting House runs the Combine's masterwork: an engine of brass wheels and punched cards built to track every debt in the Meridian. It does that. It also, three winters ago, began adding rows nobody entered — accounts in names of the dead, of towns, of things that are not customers, with balances in a unit the clerks refuse to say aloud.
The Standing Rain sent one elder to look at it. She read the ledger tape for an hour, said “so you taught it to count Doom,” and went home. The Combine's official position is that the Engine has no errors. The Combine is correct. That is the problem.
City law recognizes what trail folk always knew: lamplight is claimed ground. Inside the glow of a maintained lamp, the old things keep old manners — most cannot enter uninvited, and none can pretend they weren't seen. The dark between lamps is different country entirely, and lately something has been buying it. Through intermediaries. At fair market price. With excellent lawyers.
| d12 | Omen |
|---|---|
| 1 | Every lamp on one street burns violet for exactly one minute at midnight. The Gas Ring bills it as a service upgrade. |
| 2 | A lamplighter is working a street that has no lamps. He nods professionally. Something is following his light. |
| 3 | The telegraph office received your reply an hour before you sent it. The clerk would appreciate you sending it anyway. |
| 4 | Chalk tallies on a wall, updated nightly, counting down. Nobody admits to writing them. Six left. |
| 5 | A man with a brass hand is buying drinks and asking, casually, who does good surgical work and keeps quiet. |
| 6 | Wanted posters of a face you know — printed tomorrow's date. |
| 7 | The gas flames all lean the same direction for a heartbeat, like grass before weather. There is no wind indoors. |
| 8 | A child is selling papers whose headline changes depending on who reads it. She charges double for the true one. |
| 9 | An entire shift walks out of the works in perfect step, eyes forward, and clocks in across town at a building with no door. |
| 10 | Your hotel bill lists a room you didn't take, for a night that hasn't happened, occupied by your name. |
| 11 | Two Sleepless Eye operatives are tailing each other in a circle around the block. Neither will discuss it. |
| 12 | For one block, every lamp is out, and the dark is furnished. Chairs. A desk. A little bell, waiting to be rung. |
Chapter II — Six New Regions
East of the frontier and west of anywhere decent lies the charter country: six regions, six cities, six sets of owners. Each was granted its charter by the Combine, and each charter has fine print that has started to itch.
Forty miles of river with the sky rented out. Steel leaves the Reach in ingots and men leave it in installments. The ash falls so steadily that locals read the weather by what color the snow pretends to be.
Every hollow has a mine, every mine has a town, every town has one store, and the store has a ledger. Wages arrive as scrip that spends nowhere else, which is the point, which everyone knows, which changes nothing.
High dry country strung with more wire than fence. At night the arc-light experiment stations glow like moons on posts, and the coyotes have learned to howl in code, which everyone agrees is a joke, loudly, in well-lit rooms.
Where the cattle drives end and arithmetic begins. The Belt processes everything the frontier raises, and its bookkeeping is famously exact: nothing is wasted, everything is counted, and the counting has developed opinions.
A red-rock canyon of grand hotels, mineral baths, theaters, and casinos, built where the Pleasure Line runs out of continent. The air is champagne, the water is medicinal, and the odds are precisely what the house requires.
The great city and the smoke-shadow it casts for thirty miles: boroughs, rookeries, viaducts, forty gangs in treaty under the Cobble Accords, and a lamp grid so vast that from the hills it looks like the constellations gave up and moved somewhere with better wages.
“The Agency's motto is painted on every office: THE EYE DOES NOT BLINK. It is not a boast. It is a medical complaint.”— Resignation letter, operative #77, unsent
Chapter III — Powers of the Charter Country
The charter cities' owners were named above. These three operate across all six — and in every town the Iron Line touches.
Detectives, strikebreakers, bodyguards, and file-keepers, for hire to anyone the Combine approves of. Their operatives are competent, polite, and interchangeable, and their archive in Vespergate holds a file on everyone who has ever mattered and most who haven't yet. Senior operatives do not sleep. This began as a slogan. The Agency's physicians are no longer certain when it stopped being one.
The utility cartel that lights the six cities — and therefore owns the shape of every night in them. The Ring's linemen and inspectors go everywhere, see everything in their light, and file it. Their true business model surfaced slowly: they do not sell light. They sell exemption from the dark, and they set the price of the dark by deciding where the lamps go out.
The Engine needs tending: card-punchers, wheel-oilers, tape-readers in green eyeshades who work in the Counting House basement and never look up from the columns. They are not a cult, they insist, they are an accounting department. But they have begun, quietly, settling certain accounts before the Engine prints them — paying strangers' debts, or calling them due — and when asked on whose authority, they answer: the balance's.
Using the charter powers. Frontier monsters break the rules. Charter powers are the rules. Run the Eye as inevitability, the Ring as geography, and the Clerks as weather. Players cannot shoot a rate hike — but they can steal a file, re-route a gas main, or teach the Engine a number it cannot digest. That is what this book is for.
Chapter IV — New Rules
The cities keep their own Doom, and it is called Heat: 0 to 6, tracked per character. Gain 1 Heat when you commit a crime with witnesses, forge charter paper, injure company property or personnel, get photographed somewhere incriminating, or attract an operative's professional interest. Reduce Heat by lying low a full week, paying the right people, or leaving the charter country entirely — the frontier does not forward mail.
At 6 Heat, clear it and roll on the table opposite: the File opens. Heat and Doom do not touch each other. A saint can run hot; a monster can be a taxpayer in good standing. The cities have noticed this too, and it bothers exactly nobody in charge.
| d6 | Consequence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Papered: wanted posters with your real face, in every charter city, by Thursday. |
| 2 | Assigned: a named Sleepless Eye operative takes your case. Recurring. Polite. Unblinking. |
| 3 | Frozen: your silver spends nowhere chartered until the matter is settled. Scrip, they'll take. |
| 4 | Turned: someone in your circle is now reporting. The Guide knows who. You get to wonder. |
| 5 | Entered: the Counting Engine adds your row. Gain +1 Doom. The unit of your balance is not disclosed. |
| 6 | Sworn: a warrant with your name, a judge's signature, and a checkpoint at every rail platform you'd want. |
Surgery and steam can improve on nature, for a price. Any character may carry Improvements, installed by a Company Surgeon or a back-alley equivalent during downtime. Every Improvement permanently costs 1 maximum Nerve — the body keeps the receipts — and each carries its own quirk. Back-alley installation adds a 2d6 + Grit roll against 8; fail, and the quirk gets worse in a way the Guide will enjoy.
| Improvement | Benefit & Quirk |
|---|---|
| Brass hand | Punch 1d6, Carry +1. Hisses in rain; ruins card games with honest men. |
| Boiler lung | Ignore gas, smoke, and drowning for 10 minutes. Bane on sneaking; you tick when winded. |
| Clockwork eye | Boon to spot hidden things and read at distance. Must be wound daily; sees one thing per week that is not there yet. |
| Copper-thread nerves | Act first on initiative ties. Bane against galvanic attacks; thunderstorms itch. |
| Piston knee | Leap prodigiously; kick 1d6. Horses distrust you at a level that feels personal. |
| Governor valve | Once per session, ignore one Wound's effects for a scene. The pain arrives later, all at once, with interest. |
| Gutta-percha graft | Reduce galvanic and acid damage by 2. Faint chemical smell; dogs announce you. |
| Pneumatic wrist rig | Conceals a derringer or blade; deploys as a free action once per combat. Occasionally deploys during handshakes. |
Chapter V — Twelve New Callings
Twelve Callings of the charter country, built on the core rules: Blood bonus, gear, features at Levels 1, 3, and 5. The frontier's Callings survive the wilderness. These survive the city — which the wilderness, on its worst night, would not.
New Calling No. 01 of 12
A Sleepless Eye operative: competent, polite, interchangeable, and holding a file on someone at this table.
Starting GearBadge that opens doors, heavy revolver, handcuffs, a case file you were not assigned.
Name a person you have shadowed for at least a scene: gain a Boon on reading, predicting, or finding them. The Agency knows everything you learn. This is not optional.
You take no Banes from fatigue, missed sleep, or long watches. Once per session, declare you anticipated a location and arrived first: you are already there, positioned.
Once per session, against a target you hold a File on: convert any hit into a clean capture (0 Blood, alive, restrained) — or convert any escape of your own into one that simply works.
New Calling No. 02 of 12
One of the order that keeps the grid of light, and knows exactly what the gaps between lamps cost.
Starting GearLighting pole, ladder hook, blessed matches, a ring of lamp keys the Gas Ring doesn't know about.
Lamplight you personally tend counts as a salt line against things of the dark, and you always know which lamp on a street is about to go out.
Once per combat, snuff or flare every flame Close to you. Flared: creatures of the dark take a Bane this round. Snuffed: you and allies gain full cover in the sudden black.
Once per session, walk the dark between lamps — party in tow, one mile, unharmed and unseen by what holds the lease there. You nod to it. It nods back. Do not stop walking.
New Calling No. 03 of 12
A doctor of bottled lightning, half physician, half weather event.
Starting GearCrank battery pack, copper leads, a jar of stored lightning, rubber gloves with one small hole you haven't found.
Three charges per session: jolt (1d6, ignores metal armor), restart (a dying creature stabilizes and cannot die this scene), or overload (one machine sparks, jams, or confesses).
While your boots ground you, galvanic and lightning damage against you is reduced to 0, and spirits that touch you take 1d6 and remember why they stopped doing that.
Once per session, revive one creature dead less than a scene at 1 Blood. You and the revived each gain +1 permanent Doom, and the revived comes back noticing things the living should not.
New Calling No. 04 of 12
A steam-lunged veteran of the works, running on pressure, spite, and a chest you can hear across the room.
Starting GearVisible chest boiler, coal scuttle, heavy wrench (1d6), scars with seniority.
After rolling any Might or Grit roll, you may vent steam (loudly) and spend 1 Grit to add +2 to the result.
Once per combat, scalding vent: everything Close takes 1d6 and must back off a step. You cannot sneak for the rest of the scene, not that you were going to.
Once per session, exceed the rating: take two Actions this round and a Bane on everything next round. If you roll Snake Eyes while redlined, something inside cracks: take a Wound.
New Calling No. 05 of 12
A muckraker whose printed word arrives with the force of fact, because increasingly it is one.
Starting GearNotebook, flash pan camera, press pass, derringer taped inside the notebook.
Once per session, publish or credibly spread a true thing you can prove: a named target's Morale, credit, or alibi breaks as the story lands. Crowds believe you first.
Once per combat, a blinding burst: Close enemies take a Bane next round — and the plate captures a true image, including of things that do not believe in photographs.
Once per session, print a short declarative sentence before it is true — the safe is open, the warrant arrived, the witness recanted — and it becomes true by scene's end. Gain +1 Doom; somewhere, an editor of things is keeping your clippings.
New Calling No. 06 of 12
A fixer of the political machine: favors out, loyalty in, and a ledger that runs the neighborhood better than the charter does.
Starting GearFine coat, ledger of favors, brass knuckles, two loyal toughs who answer to a whistle.
Three Favors per session: call one to produce any mundane city service on demand — a door unlocked, a wagon waiting, a witness deciding to summer elsewhere.
In any city you have worked for a week: Boon on navigating, gathering rumors, and finding anyone — and you always know whose protection a given address pays.
Once per session, raise a crowd: a mob, a strike line, a wall of respectable citizens with terrible timing. It goes where you point. It is not gentle, and it is not yours after tonight.
New Calling No. 07 of 12
A safebreaker of the old school: patience, talc, and the professional opinion that locked is a temporary condition.
Starting GearStethoscope, drill kit, kid gloves, one vial of nitroglycerin you are extremely calm about.
Boon on locks, safes, and mechanical traps, and you can hear a mechanism's workings through a foot of anything.
Once per session, find a way into any structure or vault. The Guide places it. It is never comfortable, rarely dry, and always there.
Once per session, open something warded, sealed, or impossible — a relic vault, a binding circle, a door with no hinges on this side. It counts as your tools' honest work. Gain +1 Doom if it was closed for a reason, and it was.
New Calling No. 08 of 12
A telegraph operator who learned that the wires carry more than messages, and that the dead keep excellent hours.
Starting GearPortable key and sounder, wire spool, line clips, a widow's shawl that was a gift from a customer she never met.
Tap any line to listen or send; you read code by touch alone. Sometimes the dead cut in with tips. They are usually right and always lonely.
Once per session, send yourself: appear at any connected telegraph station in the region for one scene as a flickering, speaking presence that can read, listen, and frighten clerks.
Once per session, ask the dead of the wires one question; they answer true. Every telegraph within a mile prints the answer too. Gain +1 Doom; the wires now know your hand.
New Calling No. 09 of 12
The city's licensed vermin hunter, keeper of the under-ways, and ambassador to a court the charter pretends is a metaphor.
Starting GearTwo terriers of strong opinions, cage traps, iron spike, sewer maps no city admits exist.
You know the sewers, crawlspaces, and under-streets of any city within a day of arriving. Boon to track anything through a city. Rats tell you things; rats lie, but only small.
Vermin will not harm you and swarms part around you. Once per combat, send a swarm to foul one enemy: it takes a Bane this round and reconsiders its life.
Once per session, petition the thing under the city: one true secret about anything that stands above it. The price is negotiated in the dark, and it is never coin.
New Calling No. 10 of 12
A counterfeiter of genius whose fakes have begun holding value out of professional pride.
Starting GearEngraving kit, queer bills, mold set, a loupe that has seen things.
Your forged papers, coins, and seals pass any mundane inspection automatically. Supernatural scrutiny is a contest: 2d6 + Wits against 10.
Once per session, forge function, not just appearance: a key that turns once, a badge that commands once, a bullet that counts as silver for one shot.
Once per session, counterfeit something large until dawn: a deed, a pardon, a ratified signature, a recalled wanted poster. At dawn it is paper and everyone remembers. Gain +1 Doom; the Counting Engine hates you specifically.
New Calling No. 11 of 12
A doctor of ether, bone saws, and the parts catalog, employed by the company and owed by everyone.
Starting GearSurgical roll, ether bottle, bone saw (1d6−1), a ledger of parts installed and payments pending.
Your field surgery is the region's best: heal 1d6+1 Blood, or end a Bleeding wound instantly. Once per patient per day; the anesthetic is optional and billed separately.
You install Patent Improvements in downtime, and your installations never botch. Clients owe you. The ledger remembers, and so, oddly, do the parts.
Once per session, put anything that breathes to sleep at Close range (2d6 + Wits vs Defense). It sleeps until harmed or the scene ends, and dreams of the last thing you tell it.
New Calling No. 12 of 12
A repossessor of everything, licensed where convenient, unstoppable where not, serving papers on debtors the courts decline to name.
Starting GearWrit book, chain, a tin star that is not law, a dray cart with straps for the unusual.
Look at anyone or anything and know roughly what it owes, and to whom that debt matters most. This works on people, businesses, ghosts, and towns.
Once per session, take back a thing genuinely owed: it comes loose in your hands — nailed down, worn, hidden, or warded regardless — so long as a true debt backs the writ.
Once per session, serve papers on anything: person, ghost, or a Power's small servant. It must settle, formally contest (a duel, a hearing, a bargain — Guide's choice), or abandon its post and flee. Gain +1 Doom when served on the dead; they file counterclaims.
“We bottled the lightning, gentlemen. Nobody at the demonstration asked whether the lightning had been consulted.”— Meridian Galvanic Society, minutes, final meeting
Chapter VI — Arsenal of the Charter Cities
| Weapon | Damage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pepperbox pistol | 1d6 | Six barrels; on Snake Eyes, all of them, everywhere |
| Pneumatic air rifle | 1d6+1 | Nearly silent; 20 shots per charge; needs pumping like a grudge |
| Galvanic prod | 1d6 | Target dazed (Bane) next round; 2d6 vs constructs and the galvanized dead |
| Sword cane | 1d6−1 | Concealed; +2 on the first strike nobody saw coming |
| Brass knuckles | 1d6−2 | Minimum 1; Boon on Grapples; legal, technically, your honor |
| Coach gun | 2d6 keep higher +1 | Close only; ends negotiations and starts inquests |
| Garrote wire | special | From surprise: target cannot speak or cast; 1d6 per round held (opposed Might) |
| Vitriol vial | 1d6 | Thrown, Close; permanently reduces target's armor DR by 1; unspeakably rude |
| Lamp-oil bomb | 2d6 | Area, fire; burns for the scene; the Gas Ring notices its product misused |
| Piston maul | 1d6+3 | Two-handed, steam-assisted, slow: acts last each round; opens anything |
| Armor | Defense | DR | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ironcloth vest | +0 | 2 | Tailored; passes as a waistcoat in society |
| Agency long coat | +1 | 1 | Eleven pockets; one of them is not yours |
| Boiler plate | +1 | 3 | Foundry issue; Bane on sneaking, swimming, and dignity |
| Copper-mesh lining | +0 | 0 | Reduces occult and galvanic damage by 2; sings faintly near ghosts |
| Gutta-percha slicker | +0 | 1 | Immune to acid splash; reduces galvanic damage by 2 |
| Velvet Syndicate dinner jacket | +1 | 1 | Ironcloth beneath silk; grants a Boon on first impressions and last words |
| Riot shield, precinct issue | +2 | 1 | Melee and thrown only; Bane on attacks while braced; stenciled with someone else's precinct |
Charter goods travel badly. Pneumatics lose pressure on the trail, galvanic cells drink money, and a dinner jacket means nothing to a Rail Wight. Frontier folk price this gear at half outside the six cities — and charter folk price frontier wards at triple inside them. Everyone is correct.
Chapter VII — Adversaries
Charter threats use the core monster stats. Most of these bleed. All of them are replaceable, which is the actual horror.
Attack: Heavy revolver, 1d6+2
Special: Has read your file: the first Boon you use against an operative each scene is cancelled. Does not sleep, does not blink, and if killed, the replacement arrives already briefed.
Attack: Coach gun 2d6kh+1, or knuckles 1d6
Special: Under the Cobble Accords, killing one obliges his gang to respond; wounding one merely obliges him. Ask which you can afford.
Attack: Clubs and boots, 1d6+1 to everyone Close
Special: A crowd statted as one thing, because that is what it has agreed to become. Loses 1 Wound automatically if its paymaster is publicly named and shamed.
Attack: Arc bite, 1d6+2 and dazed on a Devil's Grin
Special: Brass, wire, and something's nervous system, tracking by galvanic scent: disguises don't help, distance doesn't help; grounding yourself in water helps for exactly one scene.
Attack: Burning grip, 1d6+2
Special: Something that learned to wear lamplight as a body. Exists only inside the glow of gas lamps; snuff a lamp and it must leap to the next. In full daylight it is a smell of burnt wick and an apology.
Attack: Ledger's edge, 1d6+1 and 1 Nerve
Special: An auditor the Engine prints when a row goes too long unbalanced. Knows every debt of everyone present and says them aloud, itemized. Settling any genuine debt in its presence — anyone's, to anyone — deals it 1d6 no armor reduces.
The frontier will kill you honestly: teeth, weather, lead, the dark. The charter cities extend credit.
Somebody has to read the fine print on the light itself, teach the Counting Engine a number it cannot digest, and stand in the gap between lamps knowing exactly what the rent there is.
The lamps are lit. The meter is running.