Ages of Heroism - The Weird West/Gaslight Era

The Weird West / Gaslight Age of Heroism (c. 1800–1900)   While scholars continue to argue whether this era should properly be called the Weird West or the Gaslight Age, most modern historians agree on one point: this is the earliest traceable root of what would later be called the Age of Specials.   In the long centuries following pre-mythic catastrophes, Earth’s ley lines had remained damaged—thinned, fractured, and partially dormant. During the nineteenth century, those wounds began to reopen. Not suddenly, not cleanly, but with a slow, uneven surge that manifested as rising psionic sensitivity, paranormal disturbances, spontaneous magical phenomena, and the first reemergence of what would later be classified as super-science.   Inventors, mystics, mediums, and natural philosophers—often dismissed in their own time as eccentrics or frauds—began producing devices and theories that violated the accepted limits of contemporary science. Clockwork automata that moved without obvious power, weapons that behaved more like rituals than machines, and experimental disciplines that blurred chemistry, electricity, mesmerism, and occult practice all appeared in scattered laboratories and workshops across the world.   In parlours and salons psionic phenomena began surfacing with quiet but troubling frequency. Mediums and sensitives reported impressions and manifestations that resisted easy explanation—thoughts bleeding between minds, knowledge arriving without source, emotions shared across rooms. Most cases were weak or inconsistent, easily buried beneath accusations of fraud or self-deception, but a small number displayed abilities too precise, too repeatable, to dismiss entirely. These early psionics were rarely understood, least of all by themselves, and their existence remained largely hidden behind the era’s fascination with spectacle and skepticism.   At the same time, magic and the supernatural crept back into the world’s margins. Sightings of vampires, werewolves, restless dead, and other anomalies became more common, though rarely named as such in official records. Ghost stories attached themselves to new railways and factories, old monsters resurfaced in frontier lands and forgotten neighborhoods, and stranger entities moved through weakened boundaries unseen by most. To the wider public, these were curiosities, scandals, or superstition. In truth, they were early signs that the world’s deeper forces were stirring again, no longer content to remain entirely dormant.   It was also an age of what later generations would come to call the Bad-Ass Normal. Hardened men and women with no gifts beyond skill, nerve, and raw humanity stood against a world growing stranger by the year. Gunslingers, detectives, explorers, monster-hunters, and adventurers who relied not on powers or prophecy, but on experience, stubborn resolve, and the steel in their spines. In a time before costumes and classifications, they proved that even as magic and monsters returned to the world, human courage alone could still push back—and sometimes, change the course of history entirely.   The most dramatic event of the era occurred in the 1870s, when one of the largest recorded ley line surges in human history struck North America. These so-called ley line storms were violent, sustained, and geographically widespread. In their wake, stable rifts opened across the American frontier, depositing significant populations of Otherworld species into forests, mountains, swamps, and unsettled territories. These beings did not arrive as invaders so much as refugees, castaways, and displaced survivors of realms intersecting with a wounded Earth.   The events were quietly documented by hunters, trappers, folklorists, and fringe naturalists in works such as Strange Creatures of the Lumberwoods, though the broader public largely dismissed these accounts as exaggeration, frontier tall tales, or superstition born of isolation and hardship.   In retrospect, this dismissal proved convenient.   It was during this period that magic, psionics, and anomalous phenomena began to trickle back into human bloodlines—subtle at first, often mistaken for madness, genius, or spiritual fervor. The world did not simply become strange again. It remembered how to be strange, and it did so unevenly, violently, and without concern for human comfort.   Figures of Note (WIP will add more in time)
  The Corax by Gaslight- Gaslight Age
Duncan McEnroe - Weird West Era
Young Quincy Morris - Weird West Era