Deadlands!
Oct. 29th, 2006 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingSince our last episode, we've had several months and a turnover in players. As such, the game has moved far out west, as the leftover from the previous posse seeks to escape her past associations and we meet two new focal pieces for the story.
The setting: Havasu Valley, Arizona, on the Colorado river near the border with the territory of the City Of Lost Angels to the west and the technocratic utopia of Deseret to the north.
The players:
Velvet,witch devil-worshipper huckster GAMBLER from the city of New Orleans, headed west to see the world and then headed much *further* west to avoid the hangman for a bunch of murders, robberies, and general badness committed by her previous fellow party members. Some without their knowledge. It's a long story, told anecdotally in my previous Deadlands posts. Oh, and she's also moving to avoid being burned as a witch for throwing Hexes in front of an audience. Can't forget that.
Inigo, the Mexican pirate. Yes, pirate. As in floppy hat, sabre, and YARRR. In Arizona. Between the Mojave Desert and the Utah Salt Flats and the Arizona Dry Bits.
He's got issues. Most of them involve making sure his ship is never captured and he's never left chained to a rock left to be eaten by sea serpents... again.
Mike, the scout and tracker. He's local, making a living as a guide and a hunter and freelance cowboy.
And now, with Real True Quotes(tm)!
"Are you just writing down stuff I say? FUCK!"
:
Inigo arrives in town figuring that his pirate enemies will never look in the middle of a desert for him, and looking for a job. He claims his most marketable skill is as a playwright, despite his illiteracy.
[When asked about why he's dressed like that]
"I be writing a play about... uh... pirates."
After meeting Velvet, the two discover that the latest mail/parcel/shipping stage has been attacked. And by "discover", I mean of course that it's headed towards town at high speed with nobody at the reins. Swashbuckling, derring-do, and a little bit of the old YARR later and the stage has been stopped. The driver has been shot and is partially conscious, and he reports that indians ambushed the stage, and the guy riding shotgun was hit, fell off, and was left behind.
Posse-ing ensues.
The shotgun-rider is found where the stage was ambushed, shot several times and then with his throat cut, and all his stuff (including boots) taken. Tracking the villainous sorts leads to a stream to lose their tracks and, a bit upstream to Velvet and Inigo confronting an indian teenager armed with a rifle. Resisting being disarmed (and not speaking the language), he pulls a knife and gets himself skewered by the pirate. The search for his compatriots is called off on account of darkness and the trail being lost.
The next day, Mike arrives on the scene and the three of them sally forth in search of clues to motivation and culprit.
"Arr, I be a playwright."
"So you're unemployed."
Investigating the jail, Velvet gives a bottle of booze to an arrested drunk to get him to shut up, then tries to help the injured and unconscious (but stable) Indian boy to wake up using a Helpin' Hand hex.
And Backlashes, causing the hex to work in reverse.
On a full house.
Scratch one brave.
Mike, investigating the brave's personal effects, discovers that his rifle is full and unfired, and that his ammo belt is full - if the Indian was one of the shooters, then he must have ditched his horse, changed rifles, and gotten new ammo between the time of the ambush and his encounter with the pirate.
Our pirate, meanwhile, has fallen deeply in lust with the town's schoolteacher and is desperately looking for ways to be in her presence. For reference, walking up to the town's general store keeper and Baptist preacher and saying "Arr, I need your twin sister for me research. Where be she?" will get you looked at funny. Just FYI.
[From a discussion wherein it is pointed out that the schoolteacher is a Baptist, and the pirate is a Catholic:]
"No, she's the hot one. YOU have to convert."
Searching the ambush site carefully turns up casing for non-standard ammunition, as well as the PCs finding the trail of the bandits back towards the camp. The motivation for the ambush couldn't possibly have been robbery of the stage, because the shooters had every chance to shoot a horse, and aimed high, for the driver and the escort.
The group splits up, with the scout trying to trace the ammo, the pirate trying to find out who might have had reason to kill the escort, and the gambler trying to talk to the driver to ask him why he might have been shot at.
The scout finds that the ammo is expensive and unusual stuff from a factory Back East - they make a rifle with a quadruple-wide magazine that holds more than 30 shots, and this is the only ammo it takes. That kind of gun is not standard around here - getting new ammo would take weeks for delivery.
The gambler and the pirate strike out finding out why the pair might have been shot at - no enemies, no debts, no bad business deals, not even any friendly business deals. While they're looking, though, they find that there are some people around who've been paying off old debts and spending money like water, since the night before. Tracking the first one down (a compulsive gambler whose debts are normally difficult to collect on, who paid 'em all off the night before) leads to a tense confrontation before he walks away without sharing any information.
Meanwhile, the scout has gone to the town Sheriff to ask about the ammo. *He* recognises the gun it's from - only one person in town has a gun like that, a scuzzy cowboy who'd be termed a "survivalist" if he lived a hundred years later, or maybe found an anti-government militia.
Conveniently, the second suspicious suddenly-moneyed character is the drunk in the jail - upon waking him up and threatening him, he caves completely and confesses that he, the indebted gambler, and the gun nut did, indeed, ambush the stage, and that the gun nut was the one who arranged it and paid them - $50 each - to kill the escort. The objective was never to rob the stage at all, and the driver was just hit by accident as the three of them bushwacked the guy riding shotgun.
"He seems prone to the prejudices of the villanous and the shamefully ignorant."
"You mean common sense?"
Our Heroes and the Sheriff's rather large deputy travel to the home of the gun nut, looking to confront him. Forewarned, he does not answer the front door, and the scout moves to watch the back while the deputy checks the house's attached stable to see if there are any horses. Impatient, wielding sabre and six-gun, the pirate kicks in the front door, prompting a hail of gunfire from the prepared resident.
Conceding the frontal assault as a bad plan, the pirate dives for the dirt and keeps his head down as rifle fire at extremely short range tears holes through the wall inches above his prone form. The scout bursts through the back door, getting the drop on the shooter and, in turn, having the drop gotten on him by the shooter's angry wife with a cleaver.
Velvet, being armed with a perfectly functional gun, naturally joins the fight by throwing a flower pot at the wife.
Driven back by a screeching harridan looking to turn him into cutlets and bleeding from several small cuts already, the scout gives up the idea of less-injurious solutions and just fires on the wife, killing her almost instantly. Tired of this undramatic hiding, the pirate leaps to his feet, charges into the house, absorbs a rifle bullet to his sensitive vital organs without noticing through the miracle of spending XP to avoid incoming damage, and gets himself at point-blank range against our culprit.
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
uh...
I mean, he decapitated the villain with a single good swing of his cutlass.
And, as if that wasn't good enough, apparently decided that he needed style points.
"With my last spare action, I shoot the severed head before it hits the ground!"
Finding the strange rifle is obviously not hard - it was just being fired at them, after all. As well, the dead body has far more money than it should.
What they're missing, however, is the motive: Despite having one culprit in custody and killing another, they still have no motivation for the murder, no reason *why* these three should have killed the escort - and no explanation for where the money came from. The total amount, while large in immediate terms, is not much more than the price of a good horse, meaning that it's the kind of thing that anyone *could* have paid if they had a reason. The reason is, then, the obvious place to proceed.
The answer might lie with the third culprit, but checking on him revealed that he left town almost immediately after his confrontation with Inigo and Velvet, in a right royal hurry - obviously considering that the possibility of his discovery was too close. The road he took leads to Tucson, but also to a half-dozen other places, and tracking a single horse on a hard-packed road is impossible - especially at night, when you wouldn't even be able to tell if he left the road. Sending word ahead of the man's crime by telegram, putting a price on his head for murder, seems the only immediate course of action.
Finally, now knowing that he was innocent all along, the PCs deliver the body of the Indian boy to his family.
"You do realise that your story is that you're a playwright, and now you're asking her to read stuff for you."
"I'll tell her I just don't read ENGLISH."
The setting: Havasu Valley, Arizona, on the Colorado river near the border with the territory of the City Of Lost Angels to the west and the technocratic utopia of Deseret to the north.
The players:
Velvet,
Inigo, the Mexican pirate. Yes, pirate. As in floppy hat, sabre, and YARRR. In Arizona. Between the Mojave Desert and the Utah Salt Flats and the Arizona Dry Bits.
He's got issues. Most of them involve making sure his ship is never captured and he's never left chained to a rock left to be eaten by sea serpents... again.
Mike, the scout and tracker. He's local, making a living as a guide and a hunter and freelance cowboy.
And now, with Real True Quotes(tm)!
"Are you just writing down stuff I say? FUCK!"
:
Inigo arrives in town figuring that his pirate enemies will never look in the middle of a desert for him, and looking for a job. He claims his most marketable skill is as a playwright, despite his illiteracy.
[When asked about why he's dressed like that]
"I be writing a play about... uh... pirates."
After meeting Velvet, the two discover that the latest mail/parcel/shipping stage has been attacked. And by "discover", I mean of course that it's headed towards town at high speed with nobody at the reins. Swashbuckling, derring-do, and a little bit of the old YARR later and the stage has been stopped. The driver has been shot and is partially conscious, and he reports that indians ambushed the stage, and the guy riding shotgun was hit, fell off, and was left behind.
Posse-ing ensues.
The shotgun-rider is found where the stage was ambushed, shot several times and then with his throat cut, and all his stuff (including boots) taken. Tracking the villainous sorts leads to a stream to lose their tracks and, a bit upstream to Velvet and Inigo confronting an indian teenager armed with a rifle. Resisting being disarmed (and not speaking the language), he pulls a knife and gets himself skewered by the pirate. The search for his compatriots is called off on account of darkness and the trail being lost.
The next day, Mike arrives on the scene and the three of them sally forth in search of clues to motivation and culprit.
"Arr, I be a playwright."
"So you're unemployed."
Investigating the jail, Velvet gives a bottle of booze to an arrested drunk to get him to shut up, then tries to help the injured and unconscious (but stable) Indian boy to wake up using a Helpin' Hand hex.
And Backlashes, causing the hex to work in reverse.
On a full house.
Scratch one brave.
Mike, investigating the brave's personal effects, discovers that his rifle is full and unfired, and that his ammo belt is full - if the Indian was one of the shooters, then he must have ditched his horse, changed rifles, and gotten new ammo between the time of the ambush and his encounter with the pirate.
Our pirate, meanwhile, has fallen deeply in lust with the town's schoolteacher and is desperately looking for ways to be in her presence. For reference, walking up to the town's general store keeper and Baptist preacher and saying "Arr, I need your twin sister for me research. Where be she?" will get you looked at funny. Just FYI.
[From a discussion wherein it is pointed out that the schoolteacher is a Baptist, and the pirate is a Catholic:]
"No, she's the hot one. YOU have to convert."
Searching the ambush site carefully turns up casing for non-standard ammunition, as well as the PCs finding the trail of the bandits back towards the camp. The motivation for the ambush couldn't possibly have been robbery of the stage, because the shooters had every chance to shoot a horse, and aimed high, for the driver and the escort.
The group splits up, with the scout trying to trace the ammo, the pirate trying to find out who might have had reason to kill the escort, and the gambler trying to talk to the driver to ask him why he might have been shot at.
The scout finds that the ammo is expensive and unusual stuff from a factory Back East - they make a rifle with a quadruple-wide magazine that holds more than 30 shots, and this is the only ammo it takes. That kind of gun is not standard around here - getting new ammo would take weeks for delivery.
The gambler and the pirate strike out finding out why the pair might have been shot at - no enemies, no debts, no bad business deals, not even any friendly business deals. While they're looking, though, they find that there are some people around who've been paying off old debts and spending money like water, since the night before. Tracking the first one down (a compulsive gambler whose debts are normally difficult to collect on, who paid 'em all off the night before) leads to a tense confrontation before he walks away without sharing any information.
Meanwhile, the scout has gone to the town Sheriff to ask about the ammo. *He* recognises the gun it's from - only one person in town has a gun like that, a scuzzy cowboy who'd be termed a "survivalist" if he lived a hundred years later, or maybe found an anti-government militia.
Conveniently, the second suspicious suddenly-moneyed character is the drunk in the jail - upon waking him up and threatening him, he caves completely and confesses that he, the indebted gambler, and the gun nut did, indeed, ambush the stage, and that the gun nut was the one who arranged it and paid them - $50 each - to kill the escort. The objective was never to rob the stage at all, and the driver was just hit by accident as the three of them bushwacked the guy riding shotgun.
"He seems prone to the prejudices of the villanous and the shamefully ignorant."
"You mean common sense?"
Our Heroes and the Sheriff's rather large deputy travel to the home of the gun nut, looking to confront him. Forewarned, he does not answer the front door, and the scout moves to watch the back while the deputy checks the house's attached stable to see if there are any horses. Impatient, wielding sabre and six-gun, the pirate kicks in the front door, prompting a hail of gunfire from the prepared resident.
Conceding the frontal assault as a bad plan, the pirate dives for the dirt and keeps his head down as rifle fire at extremely short range tears holes through the wall inches above his prone form. The scout bursts through the back door, getting the drop on the shooter and, in turn, having the drop gotten on him by the shooter's angry wife with a cleaver.
Velvet, being armed with a perfectly functional gun, naturally joins the fight by throwing a flower pot at the wife.
Driven back by a screeching harridan looking to turn him into cutlets and bleeding from several small cuts already, the scout gives up the idea of less-injurious solutions and just fires on the wife, killing her almost instantly. Tired of this undramatic hiding, the pirate leaps to his feet, charges into the house, absorbs a rifle bullet to his sensitive vital organs without noticing through the miracle of spending XP to avoid incoming damage, and gets himself at point-blank range against our culprit.
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
uh...
I mean, he decapitated the villain with a single good swing of his cutlass.
And, as if that wasn't good enough, apparently decided that he needed style points.
"With my last spare action, I shoot the severed head before it hits the ground!"
Finding the strange rifle is obviously not hard - it was just being fired at them, after all. As well, the dead body has far more money than it should.
What they're missing, however, is the motive: Despite having one culprit in custody and killing another, they still have no motivation for the murder, no reason *why* these three should have killed the escort - and no explanation for where the money came from. The total amount, while large in immediate terms, is not much more than the price of a good horse, meaning that it's the kind of thing that anyone *could* have paid if they had a reason. The reason is, then, the obvious place to proceed.
The answer might lie with the third culprit, but checking on him revealed that he left town almost immediately after his confrontation with Inigo and Velvet, in a right royal hurry - obviously considering that the possibility of his discovery was too close. The road he took leads to Tucson, but also to a half-dozen other places, and tracking a single horse on a hard-packed road is impossible - especially at night, when you wouldn't even be able to tell if he left the road. Sending word ahead of the man's crime by telegram, putting a price on his head for murder, seems the only immediate course of action.
Finally, now knowing that he was innocent all along, the PCs deliver the body of the Indian boy to his family.
"You do realise that your story is that you're a playwright, and now you're asking her to read stuff for you."
"I'll tell her I just don't read ENGLISH."
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-30 03:46 am (UTC)[*] "Our" being my usual gaming group.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-30 04:20 am (UTC)And Backlashes, causing the hex to work in reverse.
On a full house.
Scratch one brave.
I actually laughed out loud. GO TEAM HUCKSTER.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-30 05:12 am (UTC)Velvet's gonna be guiltin' about that for a month.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-30 05:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-30 05:41 am (UTC)It's not the concept so much as the execution.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-30 05:43 am (UTC)Another is that of the three people injured so far, nonlethal methods were tried first and failed on two of them before an injurious method did far more damage than expected[1], and the third was a crazy dude who'd already put multiple .44 caliber holes in Danny before catching a sword to the nose.
[1]: And, really, having your hex Backlash when you're trying to heal the dude is just extra harsh. As I warned Kevin long ago, relying on the huckster for healing magic *really is* a bad idea, because *eventually* she's going to pull a joker on Helpin' Hand and have it go in reverse.