[Synopsis from pdf]
Gas lamps pour fitful light through the fog-shrouded streets of 19th century London. Menacing figures lurk in darkened alleyways; desperate men with nothing to lose and the determination to take what they can from others. Mutterings abound at the local pubs, working men who can’t even afford their daily bread wish for more and listen to radicals and anarchists preaching fire and revolution. Parentless children, called “Street Arabs” in the East End vernacular, pick pockets and snatch purses from those not Wiley enough to protect their meager funds. In these dangerous streets Saucy Jack, known to the papers as “Jack the Ripper” slew with impunity while Sherlock Holmes battled crime from petty larceny to the machinations of the mastermind Dr. James Moriarty himself. Chinese Tongs battle East End mobs for control of Opium dens and other rackets, all at the behest of their shadowy master, the Devil Doctor.
Meanwhile on the high seas Captain Nemo and his Submarine The Nautilus wage a one man war against British imperialism and perhaps war itself. In the skies Robur the Conqueror makes elaborate plans to rule the world with powerful airships, and who knows what secret powers lurk beneath the Earth’s surface or watch our globe from the sandy wastes of Mars; planning the death of Humanity itself?
All the while, the gentry and social elite live glittering lives amongst champagne and Worth gowns, silk suits and noble titles, living lives of idleness and comfort; thinking nothing of the people beyond their glittering manors and opulent mansions. Whether the Robber Barons of the United States, the Old Nobility of Europe or the teetering monarchies of the Royal Houses themselves the world at the end of the 19th century was a time fraught with change.
Compounded upon this are the emergence of the self styled “SuperMankind”; those of the far future who have found themselves stranded in a past that is and yet isn’t their own. Unable to return to their hone time of the 21st century, they attempt to make a place for themselves in this world alongside those Super Humans who are at home in the 19th century. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s Monster and others. Baba Yaga haunts the barren steppes of Russia, and ancient gods of the Near East and America rouse from their millennial slumbers to again walk as gods upon the Earth. Add to this the threats of Dracula, The Martian Invaders and prehistoric worlds and lands that time forgot, and the milieu is a rich panoply of adventure indeed!