Deadlands!
Nov. 6th, 2006 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingOnce again, with Real True Game-Quotes!
"Ooooh. Shai-Hulud"
Following the mysterious murder of Shane The Scottish Teamster, Our Heroes were left with a mystery (why were the three men hired to kill Shane) and no leads - with the death of the man who did the hiring, and with the money involved being significant but not out of the reach of every single employed adult in the town, they didn't have much to go on.
So, with some time to spare and still keeping an eye out, they looked for distractions while trying to find some longer-term answers, like "where was Shane when the ringleader hired the other two to kill him", and, uh, other diversions.
"What the preacher looks like naked is NOT a mystery I have to solve!"
The Arizona Pirate, lacking any and all riding or animal handling skills but possessed of rapid wit and great charm, got himself a job as a cowboy. There is actually a method to his madness - working at the same ranch that formerly employed two of the three killers, he hoped to find more about how they were hired and why they wanted to kill Shane.
The Scout Of Doom took a similar position closer to town, hoping to make some spare cash and, frankly, much more willing than the other two to simply chalk the mystery up as unsolvable and unworthy of more attention.
Thewitch huckster devil-worshipper GAMBLER maintained her day job working as a cook at the restaurant of the boarding house, while trying to find out more in-town.
The second of the three killers, Willy The Drunk, is hanged for the crime and buried.
After several days of no results, the Pirate got bored and restarted his pursuit of the town schoolteacher, inviting her to dinner at, conveniently, the Huckster's restaurant. He turned on the charm, telling her stories of his past which he insisted were fictional and impressing the young lady mightily.
And that's when the last person seated for dinner collapsed in a heap, clutching his throat and choking.
"There's no sea dragons around here! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?"
The stricken diner, a wealthy man who'd rushed in *right* before the kitchen closed to get a last-minute meal, recovered rapidly due to the prompt attention of the Scout Of Doom and the town's Baptist preacher, who was in fortunate attendance to politely chaperone his sister the schoolteacher. The verdict was rapidly discovered: Poison, added to the evening's main meal - presumably immediately before his serving, since nobody else got sick and nobody had a poisoned plate except him and the cook herself, who had been about to dig in when he fell ill.
Quickly determining that the wealthy victim's presence was unforseeable and a stroke of sheerest luck, Our Heroes deduced that the poisoning target *had* to have been the Huckster herself - and were, again, immediately confronted with a lack of motive. "We must be getting too close," they cried, "but close to what?" The vector for the poison was clear: The back door to the kitchen is never kept latched, and footprints leading in from the outside presumably had to belong to the culprit. Searching the garbage outside, they found a small stoppered glass vial with traces of a thick red liquid inside.
Leaving the liquid with the town's doctor to try to figure out what it was, they attempted to trace the bottle, finding that the only person in town to receive that kind of distinctive package was.... the town doctor.
Whoops.
"I've got some pointed questions!"
"What luck! I've got a pointed OBJECT!"
The doctor freely admitted to having that kind of bottle around - but, again, lacking any motive for him to attempt to kill him, and given his enviable position as an indispensible part of the community, Our Heroes cautiously accepted his assertion that
A) he'd had nothing to do with it and
B) if he'd wanted to poison them, he'd have used something that didn't respond to treatment.
Feeling paranoid, the Huckster retired to her room to try to get some sleep.
Feeling frustrated, the Pirate retired to HIS room to get really drunk on pilfered whiskey.
Feeling exceptionally paranoid, the scout decided to keep watch on the boarding house to see if anyone made another attempt.
And that's when the rain started to fall.
"Oh, if we're playing THAT kind of game, I'm TOTALLY spreading the divine word of Dagon!"
As the storm begins in earnest, there's a screaming heard on the main street. The scout, being a heroic sort, takes off at a dead run. There's a whore on a second story balcony pointing at a figure in an alley - running to catch up, lightning illuminates the figure clearly as none other than Shane, the deceased teamster - looking hale, hearty, and far more alive than anyone buried a week should.
Holding a dripping knife.
Dodging into buildings and alleys faster than the scout can follow, Shane escapes pursuit. Rather than hunt for a dead man in the dark and rain, the Scout turns tail and returns to the boarding house, to find that someone attempted to get in the back door while he wasn't watching. The attempt having been thwarted by the fresh locks installed after the poisoning, the Scout runs around the *front* and inside. After a short wait, the would-be intruder returns with a pry bar, and, while he is trying to crack the lock off the doorjamb, the Scout circles around to get the drop on him with his rifle.
To discover that the intruder is Willy The Drunk, looking, again, far more hale and hearty than a man three-days-hanged should be.
Gunplay ensues, awakening the Huckster and the drunken Pirate. Struck twice in the chest, once in the leg, and once straight to the head, Willy doesn't slow a bit, running off with terrifying speed. Pursued by Our Heroes, he is lost into roughly a quarter of the town - but they're certain he could not have left the town, nor, as they first suspected, made it to the graveyard. While searching, they find a piece of his clothing, accompanied by a piece of his flesh - and a large lump of long, matted hair.
And the rain slows.
"Who's going to fall into an open grave, in the graveyard, in the middle of the night?"
"Someone who deserves it?"
Deciding, sensibly, that the best place to start looking for a dead man is where you left him last, Our Heroes proceed to the town graveyard equipped with shovels and picks.
The graves of Willy The Drunk and Shane The Teamster do not appear to have been disturbed. Since that won't do at all, they start to dig.
Exhuming Willy The Drunk's coffin takes some time, but provides one important piece of information: The coffin is full of rocks, with no body at all. At the same time, the town doctor arrives to tell them that he's finally figured where he knows that poison from.
It's embalming fluid.
And the town undertaker is also the town taxidermist.
And that lump of hair that fell from Willy after he was shot was horsehair.
"But pirates are flammable!"
They knock at the undertaker's office once, then kick the door open. The main room looks as they've seen it before - a sample coffin, a place for bodies to lay in state, furnished in red velvet. The back room, with its own entrance, is the taxidermy shop - chock full of deer heads and squirrels and fish and all manner of things with glassy reflective eyes that follow you when you move...
... but no horsehair-stuffed dead men, and no signs of a hidden door. After a startling incident with an unusually realistic deer's head falling from the wall, Our Heroes leave to find the undertaker's home.
There, they argue to see who kicks the door first, kick it open, *then* knock and begin a rapid, heavily armed search of the place - finding, again, dozens of stuffed beasts of various sorts. Arriving in the kitchen, they find the trap door down to the basement simultaneously with hearing a gurgling moan.
Infused with desire to stop the undertaker's next horrific crime, they tear open the door and charge down to find....
A series of wood-bound glass cases holding human bodies, stuffed and clearly labelled.
An empty case labelled "mixed-race southern human, female" - perfectly matching the Huckster.
An operating table, with the bleeding undertaker on it.
And Shane and Willy, disembowelling the undertaker and stuffing him.
"Is there a roll to vomit, or can I just do that on my own?"
The Scout is immediately overcome with disgust, vomiting everywhere. The Pirate nearly faints. The Huckster deals with this with surprising equanimity - seeing her two compatriots incapacitated, she unloads the big guns, a Soul Blast - which passes right through the stuffed man and out the other side without slowing him down in the slightest.
Combat ensues, with the recovering Pirate taking on Willy (engulfed in flames from a broken lantern) and the Huckster finding herself in close quarters with Shane, who was trying to kil her with a scalpel and, presumably, stuff her, too.
The Scout recovers in time to discover that Shane and Willy were not the only animate corpses around here - and that taxidermied bears don't roar before they attack.
"You're going to put out the flames by smothering them with the dead body?"
"Actually, I'm hoping he catches fire, too."
Between the discovery that bullets don't slow them down, that the stuffed people are entirely flammable, and the lighting of an uncontrollable fire in the basement, Our Heroes barely escape in advance of the entire house going up, in bad shape but surviving and mostly conscious.
Immediately arriving into the hands of the townsfolk demanding an explanation.
"Ah, on the wind I hear the dulcet tones of a mad Spaniard!"
The explanations are twofold: The Pirate explaining that zombies walk the earth and stalk the living to consume their flesh and stuff them for an unholy gallery of the undead, and the Huckster explaining that the Pirate is crazy, the undertaker *has* been stuffing and mounting the dead but that he died from being trapped in the basement by his own actions when they confronted him and he broke a lantern over the steps, and so couldn't make his way out of the basement.
In this case, the Huckster is, luckily, more believable.
And so, the Fear level is reduced by one, a madman is hoist to his own petard, and his unholy creations perish in fire.
And so Our Heroes declare victory, this time.
Or so they assume.
"Ooooh. Shai-Hulud"
Following the mysterious murder of Shane The Scottish Teamster, Our Heroes were left with a mystery (why were the three men hired to kill Shane) and no leads - with the death of the man who did the hiring, and with the money involved being significant but not out of the reach of every single employed adult in the town, they didn't have much to go on.
So, with some time to spare and still keeping an eye out, they looked for distractions while trying to find some longer-term answers, like "where was Shane when the ringleader hired the other two to kill him", and, uh, other diversions.
"What the preacher looks like naked is NOT a mystery I have to solve!"
The Arizona Pirate, lacking any and all riding or animal handling skills but possessed of rapid wit and great charm, got himself a job as a cowboy. There is actually a method to his madness - working at the same ranch that formerly employed two of the three killers, he hoped to find more about how they were hired and why they wanted to kill Shane.
The Scout Of Doom took a similar position closer to town, hoping to make some spare cash and, frankly, much more willing than the other two to simply chalk the mystery up as unsolvable and unworthy of more attention.
The
The second of the three killers, Willy The Drunk, is hanged for the crime and buried.
After several days of no results, the Pirate got bored and restarted his pursuit of the town schoolteacher, inviting her to dinner at, conveniently, the Huckster's restaurant. He turned on the charm, telling her stories of his past which he insisted were fictional and impressing the young lady mightily.
And that's when the last person seated for dinner collapsed in a heap, clutching his throat and choking.
"There's no sea dragons around here! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?"
The stricken diner, a wealthy man who'd rushed in *right* before the kitchen closed to get a last-minute meal, recovered rapidly due to the prompt attention of the Scout Of Doom and the town's Baptist preacher, who was in fortunate attendance to politely chaperone his sister the schoolteacher. The verdict was rapidly discovered: Poison, added to the evening's main meal - presumably immediately before his serving, since nobody else got sick and nobody had a poisoned plate except him and the cook herself, who had been about to dig in when he fell ill.
Quickly determining that the wealthy victim's presence was unforseeable and a stroke of sheerest luck, Our Heroes deduced that the poisoning target *had* to have been the Huckster herself - and were, again, immediately confronted with a lack of motive. "We must be getting too close," they cried, "but close to what?" The vector for the poison was clear: The back door to the kitchen is never kept latched, and footprints leading in from the outside presumably had to belong to the culprit. Searching the garbage outside, they found a small stoppered glass vial with traces of a thick red liquid inside.
Leaving the liquid with the town's doctor to try to figure out what it was, they attempted to trace the bottle, finding that the only person in town to receive that kind of distinctive package was.... the town doctor.
Whoops.
"I've got some pointed questions!"
"What luck! I've got a pointed OBJECT!"
The doctor freely admitted to having that kind of bottle around - but, again, lacking any motive for him to attempt to kill him, and given his enviable position as an indispensible part of the community, Our Heroes cautiously accepted his assertion that
A) he'd had nothing to do with it and
B) if he'd wanted to poison them, he'd have used something that didn't respond to treatment.
Feeling paranoid, the Huckster retired to her room to try to get some sleep.
Feeling frustrated, the Pirate retired to HIS room to get really drunk on pilfered whiskey.
Feeling exceptionally paranoid, the scout decided to keep watch on the boarding house to see if anyone made another attempt.
And that's when the rain started to fall.
"Oh, if we're playing THAT kind of game, I'm TOTALLY spreading the divine word of Dagon!"
As the storm begins in earnest, there's a screaming heard on the main street. The scout, being a heroic sort, takes off at a dead run. There's a whore on a second story balcony pointing at a figure in an alley - running to catch up, lightning illuminates the figure clearly as none other than Shane, the deceased teamster - looking hale, hearty, and far more alive than anyone buried a week should.
Holding a dripping knife.
Dodging into buildings and alleys faster than the scout can follow, Shane escapes pursuit. Rather than hunt for a dead man in the dark and rain, the Scout turns tail and returns to the boarding house, to find that someone attempted to get in the back door while he wasn't watching. The attempt having been thwarted by the fresh locks installed after the poisoning, the Scout runs around the *front* and inside. After a short wait, the would-be intruder returns with a pry bar, and, while he is trying to crack the lock off the doorjamb, the Scout circles around to get the drop on him with his rifle.
To discover that the intruder is Willy The Drunk, looking, again, far more hale and hearty than a man three-days-hanged should be.
Gunplay ensues, awakening the Huckster and the drunken Pirate. Struck twice in the chest, once in the leg, and once straight to the head, Willy doesn't slow a bit, running off with terrifying speed. Pursued by Our Heroes, he is lost into roughly a quarter of the town - but they're certain he could not have left the town, nor, as they first suspected, made it to the graveyard. While searching, they find a piece of his clothing, accompanied by a piece of his flesh - and a large lump of long, matted hair.
And the rain slows.
"Who's going to fall into an open grave, in the graveyard, in the middle of the night?"
"Someone who deserves it?"
Deciding, sensibly, that the best place to start looking for a dead man is where you left him last, Our Heroes proceed to the town graveyard equipped with shovels and picks.
The graves of Willy The Drunk and Shane The Teamster do not appear to have been disturbed. Since that won't do at all, they start to dig.
Exhuming Willy The Drunk's coffin takes some time, but provides one important piece of information: The coffin is full of rocks, with no body at all. At the same time, the town doctor arrives to tell them that he's finally figured where he knows that poison from.
It's embalming fluid.
And the town undertaker is also the town taxidermist.
And that lump of hair that fell from Willy after he was shot was horsehair.
"But pirates are flammable!"
They knock at the undertaker's office once, then kick the door open. The main room looks as they've seen it before - a sample coffin, a place for bodies to lay in state, furnished in red velvet. The back room, with its own entrance, is the taxidermy shop - chock full of deer heads and squirrels and fish and all manner of things with glassy reflective eyes that follow you when you move...
... but no horsehair-stuffed dead men, and no signs of a hidden door. After a startling incident with an unusually realistic deer's head falling from the wall, Our Heroes leave to find the undertaker's home.
There, they argue to see who kicks the door first, kick it open, *then* knock and begin a rapid, heavily armed search of the place - finding, again, dozens of stuffed beasts of various sorts. Arriving in the kitchen, they find the trap door down to the basement simultaneously with hearing a gurgling moan.
Infused with desire to stop the undertaker's next horrific crime, they tear open the door and charge down to find....
A series of wood-bound glass cases holding human bodies, stuffed and clearly labelled.
An empty case labelled "mixed-race southern human, female" - perfectly matching the Huckster.
An operating table, with the bleeding undertaker on it.
And Shane and Willy, disembowelling the undertaker and stuffing him.
"Is there a roll to vomit, or can I just do that on my own?"
The Scout is immediately overcome with disgust, vomiting everywhere. The Pirate nearly faints. The Huckster deals with this with surprising equanimity - seeing her two compatriots incapacitated, she unloads the big guns, a Soul Blast - which passes right through the stuffed man and out the other side without slowing him down in the slightest.
Combat ensues, with the recovering Pirate taking on Willy (engulfed in flames from a broken lantern) and the Huckster finding herself in close quarters with Shane, who was trying to kil her with a scalpel and, presumably, stuff her, too.
The Scout recovers in time to discover that Shane and Willy were not the only animate corpses around here - and that taxidermied bears don't roar before they attack.
"You're going to put out the flames by smothering them with the dead body?"
"Actually, I'm hoping he catches fire, too."
Between the discovery that bullets don't slow them down, that the stuffed people are entirely flammable, and the lighting of an uncontrollable fire in the basement, Our Heroes barely escape in advance of the entire house going up, in bad shape but surviving and mostly conscious.
Immediately arriving into the hands of the townsfolk demanding an explanation.
"Ah, on the wind I hear the dulcet tones of a mad Spaniard!"
The explanations are twofold: The Pirate explaining that zombies walk the earth and stalk the living to consume their flesh and stuff them for an unholy gallery of the undead, and the Huckster explaining that the Pirate is crazy, the undertaker *has* been stuffing and mounting the dead but that he died from being trapped in the basement by his own actions when they confronted him and he broke a lantern over the steps, and so couldn't make his way out of the basement.
In this case, the Huckster is, luckily, more believable.
And so, the Fear level is reduced by one, a madman is hoist to his own petard, and his unholy creations perish in fire.
And so Our Heroes declare victory, this time.
Or so they assume.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 04:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 04:53 am (UTC)(Even though we gave him directions. The zombie. Not the rail scientist.)
(I confess I was not thinking of the Flaming Cross of Justice, though I definitely see parallels now.)
Horsehair. Bloody horsehair.
*shudders*
That is so *profoundly* wrong.
(Fscking manitou.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 06:00 am (UTC)It's also the first major story for Our Current Crop Of Heroes.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 06:19 am (UTC)I think my Dagon quote needs more context, but...oh well.
If all goes well, there will be MORE heroes next week, just in time for the new "doesn't suck with large combats" game system.
Also, the Pirate is NOT from Arizona, he's from Cancun, thank you very much.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 06:34 am (UTC)Isn't it lovely? All that dry land, as far as the eye can see? ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 07:53 am (UTC)Right. Havasu. Thats a big lake...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 11:22 am (UTC)Got a very In Dreams vibe to it, you know?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 08:26 pm (UTC)And won't *be* made until the mid-20th Century.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 03:55 pm (UTC)