Enliven Your Yellow King Game With Belle Époque Mug Shots

Along with many other historical figures of 1895 Paris, characters in The Yellow King Roleplaying Game can meet Alphonse Bertillon, who pioneered both the scientific and pseudoscientific strains of criminal forensics. He appears in the Paris book; we also discuss him in this episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff.

The mug shot remains his most credible lasting contribution to criminology. His effort to increase the reliability of police identification left behind a historical record you can now access via the Metropolitan Museum’s open access collection.

In other words, Bertillon left YKRPG GMs a rich trove of handouts for their Paris games. Obligingly, he took these in the exact historical era the game focuses on. As you’d imagine from a photographic record of arrests, many of the folks pictured clearly hail from the hardscrabble side of life. However you also see a number of dapper individuals, because many of the shots are of suspected anarchists. Given the era, they might indeed have been involved in deadly bombing plots—or were rounded up simply for their radical views or connections.

In some cases you might want to leave on the framing matter, and present the players with actual mug shots—perhaps provided to them by Bertillon himself. I’ve left on the frame for the first of the examples below.

To use them as images of GMCs the art students talk with during their investigations, simply crop off the frames.

As their arrests took place nearly a 130 years ago, I’m sure the subjects won’t mind being recast as fictional figures in your game. You could invent characters and then search for a mug shot to match. Some tantalizing historical details remain attached to the images. You can use them as the basis of your GMCs. With these as starting inspiration, you might flesh out your characters and then build a scenario around them.

This fashionable fellow was Alphonse Grégoire, a 27 year old mechanic arrested as an anarchist. The naive observer would attribute his dazed expression to the flash of a late 19th century camera. We know better: obviously he recently read the forbidden play, and sees visions of Carcosa behind the lens.

Men outnumber women in the mug shots, as they do in any lock-up. Again the political arrests help us out here, as in the case of accused anarchist Caroline Herman, a 33 year old couturier. You could cast her as any middle class woman of formidable aspect.

Okay, clearly a player character snuck into the mix here. I kid you not that this is a 19 year old sculptor named Minna Schrader, charged for “associating with malefactors.” What investigator hasn’t been booked by the gendarmes while gathering scuttlebutt in the wrong cafe? As a seasoned occult-buster, she knew to blink during the shot, rendering it less useful to police.

Images of working class folks also abound. House painter Émile Barbier might have seen something unwholesome from high up on scaffolding. He also looks like he could take care of himself in a dust-up, and might be anything from a henchman or mastermind in a Yellow Sign conspiracy.

The collection gives you some selection of older characters. This 72 year old mattress maker gave the surnames Guelle, or Guelle, but was also known as St. Denis. He looks like he’s been drinking away his hallucinations after glimpsing the shores of Lake Hali.

These are just a quick sampling, so be sure to check out the full assortment.


The Yellow King Roleplaying Game takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines, pitting characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. When read, this suppressed play invites madness, and remolds our world into a colony of the alien planet Carcosa. Four core books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront layers with an epic journey into horror in four alternate-reality settings: Belle Epoque Paris, The Wars, Aftermath, and This Is Normal Now. Purchase The Yellow King Roleplaying Game in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.

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