Non-Fiction Review: The Devil in the White City
A few years back I ran a brief Cthulhu by Gaslight campaign. It kicked off, as one might expect, in 1890's London. I was somewhat surprised when the game wound up relocating itself to New York City. Though I had some familiarity with late Victorian-era Britain, I discovered I did not know very much about the United States of that same period, typically referred to the Gilded Age. Having done a bit of homework as a result I found it to be an incredibly interesting era and one largely untapped in gaming. If an RPG takes place in the 1890's it is usually safe to assume it takes place in Britain (or is a globetrotting game with Britain as its base.) An excellent work of fiction detailing 1890's New York is Jack Finney's Time and Again , a novel I reviewed back in 2013. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City is a work of non-fiction about the construction and realization of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair - the Columbian Exposition, commemorating the 400t...