#toshers

[briefbestiary]

Enormous feral beasts. Hampstead's Sewer Swine were seemingly so terrifying that some toshers would carry means of defense when entering the sewer systems.

[esteemed-excellency]

Did you know that if you befriend the Precocious Tosher and the Valkyrie (respectively from The Mudlark's Lament and HOJOTOHO!) you can unlock two bonus interactive options in The Rooftops: Urchins card? You can hang out and chat with them, they reduce your nightmares and give you Certifiable Scraps.

Also, coincidentally, did you know that Hiram finally sleeps soundly every night?

[thoughtswordsaction]

The Toshers Released Debut Album "Kissing The Bottle"

Photo courtesy of the band. The Toshers formed during the Covid pandemic in 2022 and their music is characterized by driving punk rock, cleverly interwoven with traditional reels and hornpipes. The band’s lyrics reflect life in all its facets – from the first drink to one drink too many, from wanderlust and homesickness, from loss and social coldness, but also from friendship and the lust for…

[prof-ramses]

Noone going with the Ferryman in The Lonely Way was not supposed to be a triumphant middle finger to Otto, but a way to show how manipulative the Ferryman truly is.

RCG will likely have no further significance in the franchise.

VLN does the best possible job of emulating the feel of the main games within the confines of it's art and gameplay styles.

The Tosher is and underrated monster in terms of design, gimmick and personality. Jord knocked it out of the park.

Though I hope I'm wrong, I don't think the North Wind will be re-canonized.

I refuse to take a concrete stance on Six's morality

The Hideaway isn't a very good chapter.

What little nightmares opinion that will have you like this?

[theovermanln]

Thought I'd post my Tosher design here from TSON ep 5

[kordeliiius]

concerns around community members’ involvement aside, I think the tosher is a brilliant character, partially bc he was inspired by the history of the writer’s home country, and partially bc the chapter takes the series’ overarching theme of systemic abuse and flips it on its head

[inhurtandincomfort]

Oh my goodness...0.0 I would like to know about "Three Times Eldwin Attempted Suicide and One Time He Reached Out Instead" from the WIP game!

Thanks for the ask!

OKAY I really went off on a tangent here, despite my quiet nature I really can go on about my ocs apparently lol. This is longer than any fic I've written. So this was never planned to be a proper fic as it's all information that would come up in the main story anyway even if only in passing, except maybe the last section because time skip, idk. ANYWAY, it's something I really wanted to write so I did for my own gratification - that said, especially after writing all of this, I could make it a fic if people want.

TW for suicide obviously. Also talk of/references to alcohol and drug use under the cut.

But first, a TL;DR because this just turned into a character study really, I got way off track, I'm sorry, I'm a rambler.

TL;DR: Eldwin, who struggles so severely with opening up, building relationships and letting himself be vulnerable, like he would let himself die than have to confront his feelings, I really wanted to write him finally being in a place where he can reach out for help. It would be his instinct to shut himself away, bottle it up and wait for it to pass - or not. It won't come naturally to him not for a long time, but he will actively put in the effort to fight his self-destructive mindset. It would really be a sign of character growth, someone so stubbornly intent on handing everything alone finally being able to admit "Hey, I'm struggling and I need help." In my opinion it would a kinda sweet, maybe bittersweet but cathartic moment where he is still battling his mental illness, but is able to make himself reach out and put some trust in his friends to be there for him. And that will be his sign of healing. He won't magically get better. He will struggle with this for a long time, maybe the rest of his life. The bad days will, eventually, grow to be few and far between, but when they are there, he knows he doesn't have to face them alone.

Okay you clicked read-more now buckle up. I got tired writing this and everythings a wip anyway so forgive an mistakes and inconsistences, I am but a man

Eldwin has, right now, three canonical suicide attempts. The first when he was 14, the night he made a pact. He was in a very bad state of mind, obviously - they'd been told his father probably wouldn't make it to next week. Naturally his mother was distraught, she spent all the time crying and not taking care of herself, already grieving a man who hadn't yet passed. His siblings were right beside her. The eldest joined the military to earn money for the family and was away from home. As the second eldest Eldwin took it upon himself to take charge of things, managing the house, taking care of his parents and siblings, keeping it altogether for everyone elses sake. He still worked, trekking miles each day to the nearest town desperate to take on whatever work he could get, from innocent work like selling newspapers on the streets to trawling through filthy rivers and sewers looking for any dropped valuables (a real victorian job, they were known as "toshers." It was really gross, and dangerous, but surprisingly lucrative) to outright graverobbing. Unfortunately nothing he earned could bring them out of the debt they were in from medical bills - and without his father, the main breadwinner, they would lose everything.

He had to stay strong at home. But at nights he would go to the train tracks where he could be alone, where he could cry and yell and do whatever he needed for release without anyone hearing. It became quite the routine - the old tracks became a place of sanctuary, the one place he could let go.

On this particular night, the night they'd received the news, he felt totally hopeless. Like nothing he could do would make things better. What was the point of it all? He'd tried, he'd tried so hard to make things right but it just wasn't in his power. The root cause of his fathers illness was unknown but he had it in his head it was stress related, that he caused it by being a difficult child and he should stay strong for the others but... it was so much. He was so tired. He'd tried to be good, to be strong, but he wasn't sure if he could do it anymore. That night he stole a bottle of his fathers liquor cabinet and went to the tracks where he stayed all night. He wasn't even aware of what he was doing, not really. Not until a voice dragged him from his thoughts did he come to realise he was standing at the very edge, as a train roared past close enough to touch.

The voice, he'd soon discover, belonged to a demon Vor'gol who brought with him a tempting offer. An offer that could cost him everything, but would ensure the wellbeing of his loved ones back home. Eldwin thought back to his younger siblings, imagined them growing up in the workhouse, separated from each other. Growing up to work the streets, the same jobs he did or worse, ending up imprisoned or dead because no other opportunity was afforded to those who had nothing. He thought of his mother, broken and exhausted, who had worked herself to the bone all to no avail, who did not know how to go on. His father, loving and kindhearted, an enduring pillar for his family. He thought of himself, whether he could fill that position, if he could love and protect and provide, if he could make up for the light the world could lose.

A life for a life. A life for a soul. In that moment, in the depths of despair, the demon laid out his terms. And Eldwin accepted.

-

The next time was when he was about 18. He'd been with the Black Syndicate since he'd just turned 15, so it had been a few years - long enough to be granted more freedom, but not long enough to fully settle in to his life. In some ways, he preferred the strict order of near 24/7 training; now he actually had some free time, he didn't know what to do with it.

This is the height of when he was picking fights just to have something to do. Whether or not he won was irrelevant. It was an outlet for all these feelings he didn't know how to manage, all the repressed emotions he shoved deep down so he didn't have to confront them. Fighting drunkards, pissing off lesser gang members (who knew they couldn't touch him because of who he was connected with) he made no friends and many enemies. But he did have one friend, an old friend from his childhood back home. Ancassius, who had set off on his own journey shortly after Eldwin left the village, has connections in the criminal underworld so it's not really a surprise the two ran into each other eventually. They both were very different people to who they were as children. In their youth, Eldwin was the confident, adventurous one; always quiet and reclusive, but spirited and kind whereas Ancassius was the shy, awkward child who had trouble fitting in and finding his place in this strange village in an entirely new country and culture. However while Ancassius grew to be fiery and strong willed, Eldwin seemed to regress into a shell of his former self - depressed, pessimistic and cold. As kids they were truly inseparable. As adults, they found it hard to reconcile. Ancassius stuck around for a few months, wanting to help his friend although he didn't know the full extent. He knew Eldwin was apart of the Black Syndicate, but he thought it was by choice and he never imagined what he goes through there.

Among the violent tendencies, Eldwin also took to using substances. He drinks, he smokes, he does drugs that allow him to maintain a semblance of a normal life, high-functioning in a way people may not notice he isn't sober unless they look closely. Ancassius mentioned it once or twice and got brushed off, and well, it didn't seem to be too bad so why push it?

He would come to regret it when one day he went to find Eldwin at the inn where he stayed and find him he did, passed out after a suspected overdose. He couldn't go to a normal hospital due to his being a warlock (making deals with demons is frowned upon. To say the least.) so Ancassius sought out a backstreet doctor he knew, none other than Doctor Jonathan Bell (aka Jowan's father! Isn't it heartwarming to see kids follow their parents footsteps?)

Though his morals are questionable, he was a good doctor and worked quickly to save his patient. Unfortunately healthcare isn't free and someone has to pay the bill. Doctor Bell has worked with the Black Syndicate before. He recognised Eldwin's tattoo and knew Clyde had told him about a certain warlock he'd acquired, so he went ahead and sent word to the man about what happened. Eldwin woke up thoroughly annoyed to have done so, feeling like absolute shit, and then to top it off he finds out Clyde knows. He begged the doctor not to to tell him, but the doctor claims, 1: In normal circumstances a patient would be sectioned after an attempt on their own life - especially as Eldwin had given him no reason to believe he wouldn't try again. But again, as a warlock Eldwin would just be arrested, so he won't do that. 2: Clyde is, apparently, technically Eldwin's legal guardian. "But I'm an adult" he protests. Yes, an adult who is an outlaw from society thus relinquishing all legal rights he would have had. He wants to live outside of the law, then he can't rely on the law, thems the rules. He gave up his rights the moment he betrayed his own kind. The Black Syndicate is the only thing keeping Eldwin free and… safe seems a strange word to use considering, but I mean, under the Black Syndicates ownership is the only way he's allowed to live. Effectively, he's property.

Of course now Eldwin's terrified of what's going to happen because Clyde's gonna be PISSED. So he does what any rational person would do, and lashes out at his only friend (who is, also, absolutely distraught because he found his friend nearly dead and also?? guardianship?? property??? what) and ANYWAY it leads to them having a huge fight, both of them saying things they don't really mean and it ends with Ancassius setting off on a voyage without ever making up. Sad :(

(Fun fact, Ancassius quickly regretted their heated exchange and tried to contact Eldwin for months, but never received a response. For years, Ancassius would continue to write letters he couldn't bring himself to send. He keeps them all in his cabin, getting drunk and rereading them every year on the anniversary of their friendship-breakup.)

Eldwin, for his part, was not having a very good time. That kind of sums up every whump story though lol.

-

The third attempt happens when he's… probably 22-23, sometime after he joins The Agency, which I have yet to come up with a good name for! Though he's in a much better environment it is not without its trials, and you don't just bounce back from being somewhere like the Black Syndicate for a decade. He meets Destrian (spoiler: the love interest) Ancassius (the bestie to ex-bestie to bestie again?) and of course others. It's a whole rollercoaster of ups and downs, trying to build relationships one day yet pushing people away the next, I won't get into so much detail as it'll be better read in the story… when I finally write it.

I kinda picture it like… idk if you've ever seen Bungou Stray Dogs but they work for the ADA and seem to have like, dorms? Like a block of flats owned by the boss for the employees if they need somewhere to live, so I think this Agency has something like that. Eldwin lives there, Destrian lives there, and Ancassius lives there part-time when he's not on the ship. So they're generally all in close proximity, with the main office nearby.

Perhaps people got too comfortable. He seemed to be doing okay, he was engaging with them, he seemed happy.

Ancassius couldn't quite help the nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach, but tried to brush it off. It wouldn't be the first time he's worried for nothing, he has no reason to believe anything was wrong. So he pushes it away, deciding instead to plan out a route for their next journey. Except ah, Eldwin borrowed his map. He won't mind if Cass breaks into his apartment to get it. (real Sibling energy. Hey, Eldwin would've done the same) so he does, and man does he even live here, this place seems so empty and there's like, no food in the cupboards. Oh well, the map's not here, must be in his room. And it is, along with a letter that confirms his worst fears.

The team split into groups to go search the likely places. Of course it's Destrian and Ancassius who find him, on the edge of a precarious cliff watching the sunset dip below the waves one last time. He's been drinking again. Smoking too even though he promised Destrian he doesn't anymore, and when he finally turns to look at them his pupils are massively dilated. He's not acting like himself. He's almost manic, pacing up and down as parts of the cliff slowly crumble into the sea and they beg him to step away, that they can talk just not on the edge but he doesn't listen, he's in no state to be listening. He rambles on and on about nothing in particular, growing increasingly more aggressive in his manner, one moment he's yelling, the next he's almost whispering. The sea is angry, she batters against the clifface furiously sending dirt and rock tumbling into the waves. It's dangerous, it's fenced off for a reason. Destrian and Cass are trying to stay calm and reason but they're scared, they're fucking terrified that they won't all come back from this because he's growing more erratic, his movements sloppier and nothing they say is getting through and any second the ledge is going to break-

They all make it back, of course. Eldwin probably passes out and the other two are left shaken. Everyone is. No one quite knows how to proceed, and things remain stifled and awkward for sometime - much to Eldwin's, of all people, annoyance.

All this to get to the moment we've been waiting for, the long-awaited comfort. Sometime after the main story, things have been settling down and Eldwin's doing… generally well, though things are still rocky. Ancassius is on a voyage so he is not an option, and Destrian is probably at home catching up with his family after so long (His mother worked overseas) and Eldwin really doesn't want to interrupt that and burden them with his bad moods so he tries to deal with it alone, finding non-harmful methods to distract himself; working out, taking a walk, playing with cats, meditation, anything he can think of or has been recommended. But the days draw by and the dark thoughts grow louder, and it reaches a point where he isn't sure if he'll be able to talk himself out of it much longer. So he's faced with a choice: Grant himself permission to be a burden and reach out to those he knows care, or risk doing something he'll regret, something he can't take back.

Which is how he find himself at Destrians door, sopping wet from the rain. When Destrian opens it, before xe can speak Eldwin just mumbles, "I… don't think I should be alone right now…" Destrian understands immediately, and ushers him inside.

And it's nice. No one presses him, questions him or makes him feel bad for being there. For his part he's content to just sit in the same room, watching the fire flicker, half-listening to the conversations and it's nice. The night goes on and Destrian sits by his side, basically cuddling, a close proximity Eldwin never imagined he would willingly share and yet he's not just putting up with it, he's happy, and shadows still linger in his mind whispering cruel things and leading him to temptation, but he's here surrounded by people he cares for and who care for him in turn and he knows, at the end of it all, they'll all be okay.

[ganglygamer]

What do you think is the best name for TSON Epidode 5's Monster?

[briefbestiary]

A supernatural sewer-dwelling being, the reigning rat of London's Victorian sewers. A tosher was more blessed not knowing of her existence, for should they ever question and ask around, their overwhelming good luck will turn around, and they could even end up drowning on their very next trip into the sewers.

[esteemed-excellency]

💫 :D

Some urchins elected Hiram's roof as their base, to snatch as many hats as possible from his guests. They don't trust him enough, as they don't trust any adult, and they would never accept an invitation, because the house is always so full of adults, but they sneak in sometimes when the place is not crawling with people. Coincidentally, they always seem to find a warm meal waiting for them. The house staff is always nice to them, and if they're lucky they'll find a spectacled captain or an old zailor willing to spin a yarn. The Precocious Tosher seems to like Hiram's company and the others agree he's fun to be around. Still, it's better not to get too involved with him, and better to avoid the place if there's no one inside. The mirrors hiss too much. They do appreciate the attic though, it's a bit creepy and full of interesting items, the best place to hang out and tell scary stories.

Hiram finds the hats thefts hilarious and he knows about the attic visits. He always keeps the most hazardous items in his rooms to avoid unpleasant accidents with his guests. He offered to adopt a particularly tempestuous girl once, but she couldn't accept the offer, and he doesn't mind her friends running around on his roof.

[quotesfrommyreading]

It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer number. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water's edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river's edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London's streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens' unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.  Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers' daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew's pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealers, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today's postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker's impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City). The bone collector's trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers – the aluminium-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets – rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today's standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted – recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal – hadn't been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response – an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community's waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew's London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse – they were recycling it.

  —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

[mynamesink]

Ink's commission TOS

Here is my updated T.O.S. for all commissions. I will pin this as much as I can so you can find it.  I will be posting new art soon, I apologize for my hiatus.  Thank you for reading :)

Posted using PostyBirb

[gigantic-spider]

Best of "Hark! A Ghastly Serpentine"

As my ZiMo campaign for The Hauntings of Hyde Park enters the latter half of its life, I want to show off some of the writing I've done for it! Here are my favorite parts of the first Threat "Hark! A Ghastly Serpentine"

First, the title: inspired by US millenial yearbook messages from the late 00s/early 10s, yes it IS a valid acronym of HAGS. Was it ever anything else? Well it was a Ghoulish Serpentine briefly, but that sounded too undead-y to me

I had a lot of fun thinking of this eel-faced merchant on the streets of London. Does he know he looks like an eel? Has he chosen this profession because of that or despite it?

One of the Side Characters, and certainly the most British of the bunch. Cholmondeley is a real surname in the UK, and I deeply hope that anyone with it has a lot of money to help cope with that fact.

I love my toshers. Definitely stretching the bounds of historical accuracy to include them as they were more of an early to mid 1800s feature, but there really were gangs of people who fished valuables out of the sewers! And who doesn't want someone with a nosepatch to talk to?

Two of my favorite Clues. It tickles me to think of telling my players "You see a bunch of ducks circling the docks like vultures." I also love inflicting terrible things on players, and I really love those terrible things pulling double duty as Clues

Finally, I'm really proud of this Reward. Conditions can be really fun and unique in The Between, so I really like this devil's bargain you get. Supernatural powers in return for your 'health' will drive some really interesting decisions from the players

If any of this looked interesting to you, please back my campaign to get it edited and in print!

[frizz-bee-2]

I was gonna draw Richie tosher for his birthday when all my family started arguing LMAO 😨

Anyways, love you richie fucking tosher

[pupfennanet]

call me tosher, bc sir, i'd love to root around in your manhole