Deals With Devils

The theme of my RPG GMing in recent weeks has been "deals with the devil".

In my Savage Worlds / DramaSystem / Deadlands / Brimstone campaign, the PCs have been interacting a lot with a literal snakeoil salesman. Mr Melchizedek's Traveling Emporium of Miracle Cures, Mystic Artifacts, and Scratch-Built Devices. They met him at a crossroads, and the character wasn't on the screen for more than a minute before the players started making "Something Wicked This Way Comes" references, and trying to get him to take off his hat to check for horns. One of the PCs had an in-character reason to want to learn French, and voiced this in front of him. The next morning, when that PC woke up, he spoke perfect French, but no longer understood English.

In my Gumshoe / Night's Black Agents / Dracula Dossier campaign, one of the PCs has recently learned Goetia, the demon-summoning magic (from the Gumshoe Zoom supplement). The PCs did a mini-op to steel the Munich Manual of Demonology from the state library archives, so he can eventually do a deeper-dive into the demony fringes of the occult. Meanwhile, the PCs have also infiltrated one Vampire's web of conspiracies, and (going undercover) have begun taking missions from that Vampire against Edom and other Vampires. So there's a supernatural war going on, and the PCs are helping one particular Evil get one up on other Evils. They seemed a little too eager to get in bed with this particular darkness, so I've taken every opportunity to remind them that he's just the worst. First there was that whole blood sorcery ritual he involved them in with only the faintest nod towards concent. Then the first mission he gave them was a straight-up assassination. When the PCs asked about pay, he produced actual bars of Nazi gold... which, I should mention, he apparently magically summoned to the negotiation by butchering rats in front of the PCs. There's just nothing good about this situation... but, being PCs, they went ahead and did it anyway.

Man, I just realized that "Deals With Devils" would be a great name for an Everway character.

The Square Deal Saloon

Started a new RPG campaign just recently. The setting is more-or-less that of Shadows of Brimstone meets HBO's Deadwood. Two of the PCs collectively own a house-of-ill-repute in a boom-town, somewhere in the New Mexico Territory, just down the road from the smoking crater that is Brimstone. There's another competing saloon and gambling den in town, and a number of weird supernatural hijinks afoot. The other PC is one of their regular customers, who happens to work at the Telegraph Office.

For the first session I made some incoming Telegraph props. One was an actual message for one of the PCs, but the others are essentially plot coupons and nuggets of important information about sub-plots and opportunities, that the Telegraph Operator PC is obligated to make the rounds and deliver. It's working pretty well, as the PCs basically get to eavesdrop on everything going on in town. I made the community bustling with plotlines, colorful characters, and mysteries. It's meant to be layered and sandboxy, with the PCs getting to decide what things they want to stick their noses into, and whose pockets they wish to pick. So I've arranged all my subplots on a color-coded calendar (the first session is Wednesday, March 9th, 1887) that tracks how each storyline will progress if the players do nothing to interfere. I'm hoping they'll interfere frequently and with gusto. They seemed to love it, which is good, because I'm prepared to add a couple more Telegraphs each session for foreshadowing, character development, and clue-delivery.

The mechanics are a blend of Savage Worlds and the Drama System from Hillfolk, with some custom mechanics to emulate parts of Brimstone, and a few cool ideas lifted from other games I like. During character creation, I had the players choose from several small "fill-in-the-blank" quizzes I had prepared. Their answers to those questions let them define things in the town, name NPCs and establish relationships to them. Each of the quizzes had some mechanical benefit that it unlocked. For example, there was one that said: "There's a group of bandits causing trouble in the region. You used to ride with them, but had a falling out." It then listed two of the canonical Infamous Bandit Gangs from Shadows of Brimstone, and had the player choose which one they'd been part of. Then it said "someone in town knows your secret past. Who are they, and can you trust them?" It then gave a bonus on Guts and Riding skills, as befits someone who used to ride with a bunch of train-robbers. The player who chose this card was effectively embracing a western trope, getting a connection to something that's part of the official setting, and then given carte-blanche to invent and ally or foe in town. It worked great. We ended up with a really cool interlocking web of NPCs and plotlines.

I'm running this game at a friends' house, because one of the players is allergic to my cat. So I needed a good way to bring the game with me that doesn't involve me hauling the rulebooks to Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Hillfolk, and Shadows of Brimstone with me every week. So, I popped over to wikidot.com, and made myself a new GMing Notes wiki. It's a closed/private wiki, so I can just bring it up on my iPad.  All the most important rules are on there now, along with pages on every location, every NPC, those Telegraphs and other visual aides to show the players, and that color-coded plotline calendar that keeps me on top of what's likely to happen when. It's working pretty great thus far. I'm liking it enough I've begun adding my note files for my other two active RPG campaigns to the same wiki, so I'll have one highly-portable campaign database for all my future games.

Burning the Clocktower, Damming the Gulch

For the majority of this year, I was running a Deadlands Reloaded game, a campaign entitled "Guns of Shallow Gulch". I ended it several weeks back (has it been a month?), and to this point I haven't blogged about it, because the ending was uncomfortable*.

The plot never full resolved. Here's where it left off:

The big bad, Cobb, was temporarily defeated, but was a few days away from being able to rematerialize, and the PCs knew it. The PCs were presented with the big clocktower in the middle of town, an enormous architectural ghost trap. Cobb's wife had told the PCs they could use the tower as a weapon against Cobb, that it might be able to destroy him. However, there was the danger that whoever built the tower would be able to harness his power in the process. The PCs had already dynamited the leader of the faction who built the tower, but they didn't really know for certain if they'd killed him.

As you can see, we were using legos for miniatures in this campaign, and I made a fairly intricate model of the clocktower, complete with corrupted altars, 1,000-year-old vampire coffin, and flayed souls dangling from spectral chains.

The clocktower was eating spirits and ghosts left and right. It was even gobbling down harrowed who got too close. One harrowed the PCs were hunting had tried to take shelter in it, and was destroyed. Another harrowed that was helping the party got attacked by the tower. I had the tower make some ballsy moves. It was just a minor variation on the evil clocktower in my old "H.O.D." LARP, which most of the play group had a love/hate relationship with back in the day, from that LARP campaign. At the LARP, various people had tried to destroy the tower, but no one ever succeeded. It was too powerful, and too well defended, and the players had that pesky Masquerade to worry about.

So, I kind of expected the same in this campaign. To their credit, the players really surprised me. They burned the place to the ground. It was a pretty good fight, they had to put down the ghosts who had bargained with the Tower (to be minions instead of lunch). All the PCs got away with their lives, but one lost his horse and took a bunch of wounds himself. Another got trapped inside the tower for several rounds, and had to fight his way out. In the end, they fled just as the reinforcements were arriving from the Templar Lodge that had built the tower. I really wasn't expecting them to be able to do that much damage to it - the tower was a goner.

Mind you, destroying the clocktower would have meant the PCs had to fight with Cobb again in a few days, and no good leads on ways to put him down permanently. As it was, the campaign wrapped, the gaming group disbanded, and we didn't have to deal with that.

More on the Clock Tower:
in this Deadlands campaign
in the old LARP

Lego miniatures:
The PCs
Chuckwagon

Other posts about the campaign:
starting each session with storytime
Blessed are powerhouses
every post about the campaign on a single page (includes all the above plus several more posts)

---

*: I ended the campaign for purely out-of-character reasons, which is why I've been slow to blog about it. I'd decided to end my friendship with two people - and since those two people played in the game, the game was going to have to go as well. I'm still too close to the events to write about it with wisdom. I expect I will look back at it years from now with remarkably few regrets, but for now, there's still a measure of guilt and worry that I could have done it in a less painful way. As an observer said to me about it: "Unfriending people in real life is a lot harder than on Facebook."

Crunchometer and Savage Worlds / Deadlands Reloaded

My current Deadlands Reloaded game is moving towards a storyline climax after which we will change systems, and possibly just do something else completely. I like the setting, but it's a lot more complicated than vanilla Savage-Worlds. I've been running Deadlands Reloaded every other Sunday, and a few sessions of straight Savage Worlds fantasy with a different group in-between. What I've learned is that if Savage Worlds is a c12 on the crunchometer, Deadlands Reloaded is at least a c16, and probably a c20. Even without the Adventure Deck (which we've been using), the additional fate chip options and the far less homogenous magic of Deadlands make it really hard to keep on top of the expanded system.

By contrast, in the vanilla fantasy version I spend a lot less time looking up rules, and especially charts. I can run it without opening a rule book except when we're leveling-up the characters or if a PC gets incapacitated. For the Deadlands version, I've made a different summary-sheet for each spellcaster, plus printed off combat modifier cheat-sheets for the whole group, and yet we still end up having to consult charts or text every single session.

I know there's D&D groups out there that make do with that all the time, but for me it's a real drag to pause and look things up in the middle of a session (in session after session). It's been diminishing the fun, so we're intentionally moving towards a plot resolution that will allow us to ditch the system. The group was a little divided on this. Of the 5 of us (down from 6 after one player moved out-of-state), 1 really likes the system, 1 loves her character so much she'll tolerate the system, and 3 of us detest the system enough we want to end the game. Obviously, that's not healthy or sustainable, so we're wrapping up. My plan is for 2-3 more sessions.

Absent Friends

I had no RPG this weekend. My usual Deadlands game was canceled on account of one of the players moving. At first we canceled because we thought we'd be helping him move to a new apartment. Then, surprisingly, it turned out he was leaving town for Montana. It's been a strange week. But, that's beside the point...

The question on my mind at this gaming blog is how to proceed with one fewer player? The player in question was one of 5 in the campaign. His character represents a sizable portion of the group's actual firepower. I've got about 6 subplots going on in the game, and he was the major player in 2 of them. His character was a little bit crazy, had a quasi-evil source of power (he's a Huckster), and sometimes got in conflicts with the Blessed PCs (all this on top of the 2 subplots). So it feels like the group just lost noticable shares of it's color and diversity.

What's more, this particular player was the one who suggested we play Deadlands in the first place. He's definitely the player who knows the most about the setting, and has the most excitement for it.

So, I need to consider whether or not to continue the campaign. I could make the character's exit a part of the plot, or NPC him, or head generally towards wrapping it up in a couple sessions. If we continue it, should we add another player to fill his slot? There's a lot to think about.

Recent Thoughts On Savage Worlds

A friend of mine recently stumbled across an old post from October where I lamented the dice mechanics of Savage Worlds and how there wasn't much motivation to stat yourself out with anything above a d8, maybe not even above a d6.

He pointed out, correctly, that it all depends on whether or not you have any Edges that give bonuses for Raises. To which I'll add, some GMs probably give more situational bonuses than others for getting a Raise. The rules read as just +1d6 damage or a handful of other specific benefits in specific situations. I've played with, and often try to be, the type of GM who improvises wildly, and thus could see how a GM might exist who makes something fun happen everytime someone gets a raise. In those circumstances, a d10 or d12 would be justified.

As Erik put it:

Now, exactly as you say, if you want to succeed at a standard task, ie roll a 4, you really don't gain much going above d8 until you start to get the static adds of d12+1 and d12+2. However, if you want to roll raises, ie an 8, which you might if you were say a spell caster as they get extra effect and with a certain feat reduced energy cost if they do, then things change. d4, d6 and d8 are about the same in rolling 8's but there is a significant increase when you go to d10 and d12. So oddly, if you are just interested in regular successes then moderate levels of skill, d6 or d8, are for you. If you want those raises to show just how amazing you are then a high skill, d10 or d12, is for you.

Very good points. What you want out of your gaming experience defines whether your character should be a d6 generalist or a d12 microspecialist. One nice feature of the game is that both character archetypes will feel potent.

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that I haven't really blogged much about Savage Worlds lately, other than in the context of the plotline of my Deadlands campaign. There's a few observations I'd like to make.

After a lot of waffling, I eventually decided I like the system. It's still a little more complicated than it really needs to be. Especially the Deadlands Reloaded version. I think normal Savage Worlds is 10% to 20% more crunchy than I want it to be, and Deadlands is 10% crunchier than vanilla Savage. It's very versatile though, and remains a good generic system for use in campaigns where characters should be hardy and competent but can still have some fear of being killed by an unlucky roll.

On a related note, the game has more Edges than it needs, and they don't all seem terribly well balanced. There's no game-breakers (at least none I've found so far), but some are definitely better and more popular than others. There's a few that only shine if you combo them, and I don't much care for that style of character design, since it rewards system knowledge at the expense of character concept. It's still a far cry better than Scion.

Likewise, the Magic system is losing a bit of it's luster for me. Again, the powers aren't well balanced, and since a new power requires the New Power Edge, you also have to consider them against the rest of the Edges as well. Some are much better than most Edges, others are really weak. Throw in trappings, and that gets even wonkier. Despite the problem-solving freedom of being a Mad Scientist and a Gadgeteer, Kevin finds himself wanting to buy a big attack power, and I can't blame him. The Blessed have found that the Barrier and Raise/Lower Attribute outperform everything else in their arsenal. The Huckster and Mad Scientist can't compete with them in any arena but damage (which is why Kevin wants the attack Ryan already has). Probably, this is a trouble-spot specific to Deadlands, not all of Savage Worlds. If I'd made my own campaign setting from the ground-up, I wouldn't be having this trouble. In a setting with less magic, or fewer flavors of magic, or smaller spell-lists for each variety of magic and no overlap between schools, this would be less of a problem.

Lastly, I've dumped my 1 hit = 1 wound house rule. I'm no longer using it in my Deadlands game. On paper, it was great, and may still be of good use in speeding up combat and preventing anticlimactic character death in some other game down the road. However, I found that I give out so many bennies, it's pointless. Especially in Deadlands Reloaded with its special Red, Blue, and Legend bennies. Soaking damage became too easy, and there wasn't enough challenge in my fights. I waived the rule for the climactic showdown with Finnegan Cobb, and found that the resulting fight was much more enjoyable. It even drained the PCs of bennies for once, whereas the session prior everyone finished with 4 or more bennies in reserve (you start with 3). If I didn't give the darned things out like water, then the 1 hit = 1 wound rule would be helpful. At the rate I award bennies, the house-rule becomes a tiny shaving of time at the cost of reducing dramatic tension. It's going by the wayside starting next session.

Familiar Territory

Yet another post about my current Deadlands campaign.

Given my druthers, I'd have been happy to have the answer to "Where is Shallow Gulch?" be answered with no greater level of detail than "In the (Weird) Wild West". After all, when you watch a bunch of westerns, you realize one town is pretty much like another. If a western isn't in Deadwood or Tombstone, it's set in Generic Western Town #187. And that's just fine with me.

One of my players, however, appeared to need more detail than that in order to enable willing suspension of disbelief. During character creation and the first session, he kept asking questions about where Shallow Gulch was, what the nearest big city or army post was, etc. I tried to dodge such questions at first, but it would have been a mistake to ignore his repeated requests for verisimilitude, especially in a game with a chase plotline where knowing the terrain ahead can be beneficial. So, Shallow Gulch was placed in the Dakota Territory, rather West of Fargo. Cobb's trail was leading into Indian Territory.

Somewhere along the way, a card got played (by a player) that turned an old Indian burial site into some sort of spatial portal. Cobbs trail lead into it, and following in his wake meant the PCs didn't lose the time the NPCs had spent cracking open the gate. It being a magical portal, I wanted things to feel like they'd gone a good distance, which meant environmental changes. That left 3 options. We could leave the Wild West completely. We could end up at the shore, still within the Wild West, but now in California or the like. Or we could end up in the desert of the American Southwest.

So I start describing cactus and hot sun, 'cause I know that kind of terrain better than California, and because I didn't want to stop the game while I read up on what The Big One did to Cali in the official setting. I'm relying on visual cues from the area around Albuquerque, 'cause I used to live there and can improvise it well enough.

Players see Cobb from a distance, a card gets played that makes him mistake them for someone else and set up a parley. Two sessions ago, that's where we ended. The next scene was pregnant with possibility. There was a good chance a fight would happen, and a very good chance that fight would result in one or more players needing new characters. Which meant I needed to be prepared for how they'd draft new PCs. The existing ones lacked the money to hire mercenaries. They were chasing after death himself, which takes a particular breed of character to do. I didn't want to just wreck another town to make more embittered survivors. So I needed a place where fearless monster-hunters would logically congregate.

Conveniently, I'd just described visuals based off Albuquerque, and I used to run a LARP set in Albuquerque over a 60 year arc (from 20 years before to 40 years after the Deadlands era). A version of Albuquerque frequented by monsters and monster hunters. Familiarity with that Alb on the part of 4 out 5 players meant if things went badly, they'd be able to easily whip up replacement characters with established backgrounds by just referencing the old campaign. No need to pull my punches when Cobb regrows his body and round two of the showdown starts up. The benefits go beyond that...

When Sapphirra Cobb's last words were "the Clock Tower might be able to stop him" my players didn't stand around scratching their heads. They knew that old LARP had a creepy magic Clock Tower (which the real Albuquerque lacks) that was known for sucking souls, entrapping ghosts, harboring a torpored Salubri Methuselah, etc. Instant recognition, even though they'd only ridden through the tower's shadow but briefly in Deadlands.

Likewise, they knew the names Jean Luc Martell and Cristos D'Anconia. Both bore the same weight as if I'd told them "On behalf of Lord Dracula, Mayor Renfield welcomes you to Albuquerque, affectionately known as Little-Transylvania-On-The-Rio-Grande".

Things were just falling into place, and I am pretty pleased with myself. There is, of course, some danger involved, as I mentioned in the previous post. That old LARP:

• Was set in the World Of Darkness (well, an alternate World of Darkness), not the Weird West. Deadlands Vampires are far less numerous, but also more powerful than caitiff neonates. The political system will be rather less complicated here.
• Had two thirds of it's plot set after the 1870s. The players may make assumptions based on things that haven't happened yet, and/or which likely won't in Deadlands.
• Lacked many details that Pinnacle's Weird West brings along. New Mexico is part of the Confederacy. House Iron Horse was a big player in the Railroads of HOD LARP, but it's not one of the major lines in Deadlands. Fear and rumors manifest, and a place like Albuquerque's gotta have a pretty hefty horror level.

So, yes, this alternate-alternate-Albuquerque has got some drawbacks. From a certain point of view, however, those drawbacks are advantages. I get to try out elements of an old campaign a second time, and do differently the things I made mistakes on in the first pass.

It also means that I have my answer to "What do I do when and if they beat Cobb, and the main plot of the campaign is resolved?" They don't have to wander the wilderness anymore, as they've stumbled across a place that has a two campaigns full of evil for them to put down.

Albuquirky Resonances

In my Deadlands game, the PCs are currently in Albuquerque, where they met a feller named Jean Luc Martell who works for another feller named Cristos D'Anconia. They passed through the shadow of a clock tower on their way across town.

My readers here who played in my old HOD LARP will recognize some of that. In that campaign, D'Anconia was the first PC Vampire Prince of Albuquerque. Martell was his right-hand ghoul. The Clock Tower was a major location / plot point. 4 of the 5 players in this campaign played at that LARP. I think John (the one Player who didn't play in that LARP) has the advantage, as I've already noticed the others being blinded by the parallels. This isn't the same world / setting as that game, even if certain elements are reflected.

For that matter, I made a reference in-character during storytime yesterday to The Gun being a Spikard, but we clearly aren't in Amber.

Deputized by Adventure Cards

Okay, that headline's neither fair nor accurate. The players in my Deadlands campaign did an astounding job of deputizing themselves yesterday. They were relentless in their pursuit of Finnegan Cobb, regardless of how many diversions, distractions, red herrings, and "wandering encounters" I dragged across the path. They were single-minded bloodhounds, even before the Adventure Deck came through with perfectly timed hole-card aces to every dilemma.

It's just that three Adventure Cards got played, and each one put a hard 112-degree turn into my prepared narrative.

My main plan was to tie them up in a complicated situation. I often throw "Kobayashi Maru" scenes at players, where there is no right course of action, and a high likelihood of misery and trouble no matter what they do. The idea being that you great roleplaying and memorably intense scenes, at the small cost of bogging down the plotline for several hours. In this case, the prepared scene could easily devolve into inter-party feuding (or even one PC arresting another), a very bloody 3-way battle with cowboys and a witch, curses on the whole group, death by evil tumbleweed, and a knife-fight with the peg-legged cook.

Yesterday, though, the PCs were able to sidestep everything easily, thanks partly to the Adventure Deck. Everybody drew real powerhouse cards. One got played that made peace break out. It took most of the wind out of my sails, diffusing the tension, and the players thought and acted quickly in its wake. Problem solved (about 2 hours early) without any bloodshed.

All of two minutes later they played a card that gave them an additional supernatural advantage in chasing after Cobb. I had easy ways to counter this, and would have felt justified, since no one card should short-circuit the plot. However, I really wanted to reward the PCs for handling things so well and being so determined. So I gave them a glimpse of Cobb high on a ridge before them, now only a few hours ride ahead of them (minutes if they left their horses behind and piled into Dr Immelman's flying machine). Cobb spots them, and starts testing the wind, like he expects his pistol to have the range of a modern sniper rifle (it is The Gun, afterall).

Down comes another Adventure card. This one causes a case of mistaken identity, to the players benefit. Cobb thinks they're someone else. So he shoots a bird, reanimates it, and sends it flying to the PCs. It lands in a tree, and it's beak twitches with Cobb's voice. "Which one of you is Hoyle?"

An aside: In Deadlands, the laws of magic were codified and "popularized" by Edmond Hoyle, author of the book of rules to card games. Officially, he's been dead 100 years, but then, Cobb's got several slugs lodged in his eye, so it's not impossible Hoyle might be up and about, too.

The session ended with the PCs bluffing a bit to their intentions, and arranging to meet up with Cobb and "posse up" together.

For the record, I'd planned on having the chase for Cobb last about 8 sessions (and I tend to over-prep, so 8 could easily become 10 or 12), but between determination, cleverness, and good cards, it looks like the PCs will be in pistol range on session 4. (We'd been playing once a month, due to scheduling conflicts, but that's cleared up a bit, and the next session will be two weeks from yesterday.) I'm excited, as much fun as the chase has been - the confrontation should be far better.

Power to the Players

In my Deadlands campaign, the PCs have a lot of power.

• 3 of them started out with the Veteran O' The Weird West edge.
• We're using the fate chip rules, so Bennies have a bit more power than vanilla Savage Worlds. What's more, I hand out the bennies like drama dice were goin' out of style.
• Two of the PCs are Blessed, the arcane background with unlimited power (as long as you don't sin).
• We're using the Adventure Deck*, which really empowers the players. I'm using some house-rules on damage that favor the posse, too.
• During story time (the start of every session) they can improvise elements into the setting or back story with really no restriction.

Honestly, I have zero control over this campaign - all the power is in the Player's Hands. It's a hoot!

Of course, that'll change a bit when they catch up to Cobb. [Evil Laughter] I have plans for that session (or sessions, 'cause it might involve a cliff-hanger).

* = The Adventure Cards are a downloadable PDF (available at Drive Thru RPG for like $5 or $10) that you print off on cardstock. The cards have various one-time-use benefits. Some are bonus dice, some are plot elements, etc. Each player gets one at the start of each session. The players can trade them if they get something that doesn't fit their character, or if one player hates his card but the others like it. They go away if unused by the end of the session, so you can't horde them.

Four example cards to give you a feel for what they can do:

• Villainous Verbosity - play to make an NPC lose his next action by gloating or talking about his master plan.
• Love Interest - the player plays this card to create a romantic connection between them and the target NPC.
• Backstab - add +1d20 (!) to any single trait roll or damage roll vs any allied character, including PCs.
• Folk Hero - play after you save a group of people from dire circumstances. The community adopts you and your party as local heros, and you can always find aid there.

The cards give a lot of power to the players, but in really narrow and unpredictable ways - there's around 50 in the basic deck, IIRC. I love how they spice up the game. I put my in opaque-backed sleeves, and deal them out face-down, so the PCs can surprise me. Shakes things up nicely.

Git along, little undead doggies!

I was very pleased with Sunday's session of Deadlands. We're settling in pretty good, and the mechanics were less of a burden this time. I'm taking some liberty with the setting, but I think it's all for the best.

• Campaign Backstory

As the PCs have chased after Finnegan Cobb, I've established a few important trends. He's leaving some very peculiar undead in his wake. They've put down a Vampire, a skeletal coachman, 3 zombies, and some sort of pedophile werewolf miner. All of them have defied gravity to one extent or another - even those that resembled zombies were able to float in three dimensions - and they've got some insanely gory regenerative capabilities. When a PC uses a fate chip to soak a wound, we describe how they were just barely grazed, or some lucky break protected them. When I spend a fate chip to soak for one of Cobb's undead, however, I describe the awful wound the player definitely gave them, and then put some eerie twist on how it heals up. Blood baths, bone fragments, whirling revolver cylinders where the internal organs should have been, fleshy masses and flayed skulls, etc. The players have to overwhelm the monsters regenerative powers, and then burn the still quivering remains.

I've also been having the hunt grow larger. Cobb's apparently chasing his wife, but is in turn being followed by the undead he's created. There's also a ghost (or crazy man?) in a 100 year old British Officer's uniform, a creepy family from Back East, and the Necronomicon somehow tied up in everything. Eventually I'll reveal more here, but at the moment I don't want to spoil surprises for my players. It's not just random, I've got an arc planned out.

Every session starts with "story time", the tales told round the campfire. I have one prepped for each session, and the players are free to add their own. So far, I've given them tales from the point of view of Ol' Smokey, the ghost of a man who burned to death in the drunk tank when Shallow Gulch got put to the torch by Cobb. This has let me hint plot elements and character details in anticipation of the sessions, and the players have followed those leads quite nicely. Very much enjoying the avenues this opens up for the game. Finnegan and Sapphira Cobb have yet to appear "on screen", but it feels like the PCs have a real good sense of who they are from Ol' Smokey's terror-striken anecdotes and the clues they've puzzled out on the trail.

Two small hurdles with Deadlands

The second actual session (not counting character creation) of my Deadlands: Reloaded campaign is scheduled for this weekend. There's two snags, though:

1. One of the players is out of town this weekend. Later in the campaign, that wouldn't be an issue - his character has the hindrance Ailin', so I could just say he's too sick to help. It's the second session, though, and in the first session we downplayed the illness, and the PC may not be intending to let the others know he's sick yet. The characters aren't established as fully as we'd like, and the backstory is still being fleshed out as we go - so that makes me a little nervous about playing without someone at this stage.
2. Deadlands: Reloaded is a little more complicated than I like. Love the setting, but I'm not completely enamored with the mechanics, just yet. It's based on Savage Worlds, which is a game I like, but Savage Worlds occupies a niche just shy of the upper limit of the complexity I'm willing to put up with. If you were to get much more complicated than Savage Worlds, I'd probably say "no thank you". So, of course, Deadlands Reloaded is more complicated than vanilla Savage Worlds - the subsystems for magic and dueling are both much more fiddly than SW normally is, but they're also dripping with flavor and would be a shame to lose them. What I'm not sure of yet, is whether Reloaded is at, above, or just below the actual maximum complexity I'm willing to put up with. I need to decide whether to run it as-is, trim it down a little, or replace the system completely.
   

The obvious thought there is, I could solve both problems by delaying the session. If I waited till John got back in town to run session #2, I'd be buying myself the time to figure out what I wanted to do with the rules. Of course, taking a month off from a game comes with a certain danger of it's own, and I don't want to hamstring the campaign just as it's getting going. After all, I really like the setting and the characters we've seen so far.

Another option would be to try it again with the current rules-set and a notebook. This way I could get more feedback from the players on where to trim the rules fat. Problem with that is that the most vocal detractor (of the rules complexity) in our group is also the person who's out of town. He's also the only person without a spellcasting character. So, everyone else would be focused on streamlining parts of the rules that don't even apply to him. I'd hate to get feedback, make a bunch of changes, and then discover that we'd missed something vital to making it the sort of game he'll most enjoy.

When I started my last post, I nearly wrote "maybe I'll swap over Deadlands to F#" since it's super light and I need to do some serious playtesting for my friend that wrote F#.

But then I thought about that a bit more: I like F#, I'm excited to play/run F#, but I don't think it's a good match for the setting. With it's Western roots, and really nasty Supernatural villainy, the Deadlands setting needs a solid, semi-crunchy, tactical ruleset, where forgetting to take cover gets your hat (or head) shot off. While I house-ruled the potential for one-hit-kills right out of Savage Worlds, I still want a significant threat of death should the players decide to hunt Finnegan before they're ready. This is a game where characters can afford to be brave, but not brave and stupid.

F# is a lot more freeform - it gives players a lot of narrative freedom, coupled with very little chance of death. While I think that's a great match to my style of GMing, I don't think it's quite right for a game with the feel of "The Devil came to the Old West". I probably wouldn't be likely to run Wushu for Deadlands, either, for that matter. My ideal level of crunch is a little less than normal Savage Worlds, say 80% to 90% of SW's complexity, whereas Deadlands Reloaded runs about 115% of Savage Worlds, and F# is (to it's credit) only about 10-15% as crunchy as Savage Worlds.

If possible, I'd also like to keep to a system that uses playing cards and poker chips, since those mechanics are very flavorful. I'd also like the system to be at least semi-compatible with miniatures (since I bought some Lego injuns), and use the gamut of dice (since two of my players only had d6s and d10s before buying a 7-set expressly for this campaign).

Yeah, what I need is clearly Savage Worlds lite. I could probably create such a thing, if it's not out on the web already. However, I'm a little scared to do so.

I learned two things from running Scion:

1. If the game system is more complicated than I want to run, I won't enjoy the game nearly as much. (On a related note, if I'm not enjoying the game, the quality of the campaign will suffer, and no one will enjoy it as much).
2. Adding a bunch of spot-rules doesn't make a game less complicated, even if the individual rules you're adding are less complicated than the things they replace. (In other words, it's better to start over from the ground up then to apply more than a couple of simple patches.)

It's that second part that could foul up a Savage Worlds lite. A large number of houserules just mucks things up as you try to keep everything straight, and renders the published books almost dangerous to the players. I'll let you know if I find a solution.

GM set to overload

That whistling sound you hear in the background is just me, not a Phaser set on self-destruct / overload. Close enough, though.

• Sunday: 1st Session of Deadlands Reloaded, which I'd never run before. It's a big step up in complexity from vanilla Savage Worlds.
  
• Monday: Wrote a rough draft of a Robot Chicken RPG. Later that day, an old friend sent me a copy of his new RPG, F#, asking for feedback (and eventually a playtest). [By the way: F# reads pretty damn sweet. I'll let you know more when I've actually played it, which I'm definitely looking forward too.]
• Late Tuesday: realized I might just run Robot Chicken the next day, which would mean a bunch more "adventure" prep the next morning.
  
• Wednesday: Ran Robot Chicken RPG at my own birthday party.
• Thursday: Ran Og for the weekly coffeeshop group. It was my second time doing so, and the first time was way back in October. I had to reread the rules before running it.
  
• Saturday: I'll be running Trail of Cthulhu for the second time ever. It uses the very prep-intensive GUMSHOE mystery system.
  

Feeling spread a little thin at the moment... I know, I know, it's a pretty good problem to have.

Blessed Be

Sunday afternoon was the first session of my Deadlands Reloaded campaign. A few observations:

• Blessed freakin' rock. I knew that they were pretty buff on paper, but I really wasn't prepared for just how potent they were. In theory, they're kept in check by not being able to sin, and getting penalties for attempting miracles that aren't direly needed. Given the questy nature of the campaign -the PCs are hunting supernatural evil- that second restriction isn't going to factor in as often as the rules may be assuming. This session, for example, the two Blessed in the party were the dominating force in the game, and the penalties I applied weren't even effective speedbumps. Who'd a thunk Clerics would be such powerhouses? This will take some getting used to.
  
• Savage Worlds is "Fast! Furious! Fun!", but Deadlands Reloaded definitely notches up the complexity. Poker hands, magic rules, and 3 flavors of fate chips seem to be the tangled roots of it. It's a little more fiddly than I'd like, to be honest.
• One player maintained it was more complicated than d20, but I have to strongly disagree there. What the player wasn't taking into account was that this wasn't the equivalent of a 1st-level d20 game. The Blessed each cast multiple of what would be a 5th level spell in d20, and the nasty they were battling was a pretty huge challenge. If 3 out of 5 players have no previous d20 experience, and you handed them 9th level D&D spellcasters to play, and then threw them up against a CR13 vampire, I dare say your first session would be rather painful. (Especially if the GM had never run D&D and had only 20 hours of d20 Modern GMing to handle things - which is roughly my situation, except in regards to Deadlands Reloaded and Savage Worlds.) Compared to that, this was a pleasant walk in the shade while a comforting breeze blew at my back.
• Next time, I'm carrying the lego minis to the game in a hard-sided tub, not a cloth bag. Within that tub, everything will be ziplock-bagged. When the fight started, I was shocked to discover I had to fish for pieces and put my pre-made terrain back together, which rather sucked. Once that delay had been solved, things went pretty smoothly, but the rocky start to combat had me scared for a bit.
• Blessed kick butt. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating. I'm gonna have to play hardball when enforcing the sinnin' rules, as that's the only easy way to maintain/restore balance. If I don't, then Blessed are the best character archetype, no contest.
  

Meet the Posse

Shallow Gulch has been destroyed by Finnegan Cobb and his damned gun. Only a handful of folks survived.
From left to right:

• Jebediah Hunt, semi-retired Texas Ranger
• Sister Josephine, Blue Nun
• Natalie Bliss, the sunday school teacher and town gossip
• Dr. Immelmann, creator of an amazing flying stagecoach
• Baucum Pike, Hexslinger and schitzophrenic drifter

Some changes may still happen. Our lego collection only included one body that you'd really call feminine, so it went to the school teacher, as the Nun didn't need to be winning any beauty pageants. However, it is a blue body, and she is supposed to be a Blue Nun of Texas. So, I bit the bullet and ordered up a couple of females on Brick Link. Not only will that allow the ladyfolk PCs to be a bit more distinct at a glance, it'll also get me some proper saloon girl attire for NPCs. ;)

Dr. Immelmann's flying coach may also undergo some modifications. I built it to Kevin's rough specifications of size and shape, but he hasn't seen it yet as of this writting. Since it's a vital part of his character concept, I certainly won't give him any grief if he chooses to rebuild it some. He'll have to come over to my place between sessions to do so, though, 'cause I know what a disaster it would be to just pop open the lego collection while we're trying to roleplay. Everyone, me included, would be distracted.

Relearning How To Breathe

When I ran Continuum, I had to largely give up the notion of controlling the pacing of the game. Players were time-travellers, and could bop over to whatever moment caught their interest. There were things I could do to provide direction, but if they really wanted to focus in on a moment, or span over the slow bits, they could do that themselves, and as long as they didn't frag themselves in the process I couldn't stop them. This made for a game that was very player driven, and every moment was entertainly pregnant with opportunity. It was a great campaign.

That "I've got ADD, lets span" dynamic made me a little lazy, though, and thus when I ran the Amber campaign that started the week after my Continuum campaign dropped curtain, I did a poor job of pacing. Instead of grabbing the reigns and cutting scenes, I spent too much time waiting for players to do things in the first 6 sessions. I sort of blame Continuum, because it required I take such concise notes, and left me really wanting to prep and record absolutely nothing. One campaigns success contributed to another campaigns failure.

When I ran Scion, I definitely got the pacing back under control - at least outside of combat. The combat system was pretty volatile, however, and the game rules had ugly tattered seams. I started house-ruling to mend them, bit by bit. As the campaign progressed, and the basic math of the system fell apart, I had to compensate by getting much more aggressive in my house-ruling. When the second chapter of the Scion companion released in PDF, I tore into it, leveling harsh criticism and pre-emptively houseruling like a man possessed. I don't regret that, in and of itself. White Wolf composes beautiful settings, but their "too many cooks" approach to authorship results in sloppy, even contradictory, rules with holes you could drive a mac truck through. Scion is, hands down, the worst perpetrator of White Wolf's signature flaw that I've read. The game is desperately in need of a revised edition, but they'll probably never make one and I'll probably be too jaded to buy it if they did. End result was a game my players are still talking lovingly about the setting and plot, but which I hated to run. Too much hard work and frustration.

So now I'm running Deadlands Reloaded. It's "rules medium-light", meaning a little lighter than D&D 4th, but a step heavier than vanilla Savage Worlds. It's got some extra complexity (beyond Savage Worlds) in the Magic system, Dueling rules, a few other card draws, and the way Bennies work. The first printing had some rough edges. They weren't nearly as tattered as Scion's rules, and Pinnacle released a nice little FAQ that mended 95% of the fraying. It's still not perfect, but it's more than playable.

Problem is, the campaign that went before is casting a shadow on the various games that follow. Just as Continuum allowed me to focus on flavor and PC freedom at the cost of pacing, Scion has inclined me to focus on niggling rules flaws at the cost of... well, I'm not sure at the cost of what (beyond perhaps my peace of mind), since we've only done character creation. I am noticing, however, that my gut instinct has become to bitch here and then house-rule. It's kinda sad how quickly I jump to fix what ain't necessarily broke.

For example, in Deadlands Reloaded, I find that the Poker Hands chart isn't perfectly to my liking:

• it isn't terribly clear whether "Jacks of Better" counts as a whole hand rank above a mundane pair when you're dueling, or if that's just for spellcasting. (Same vagueness with Ace High - is it just a tie breaker in a duel or does it count as a hand rank above slop?)
• the system ranks Straight Flush above 5 of a Kind - despite 5 of a kind requiring a Joker. Jokers burn the PC a little, so I'd think you'd wanna make the best possible hand require them.
• they didn't make the Dead Man's Hand special. The hand is both black aces, both black eights, and whatever you believe the 5th card Wild Bill Hickock drew - I lean towards Jack of Diamonds myself - seconds before he died.

For those incredibly minor "flaws", I nearly house-ruled it to duplicate the hand ranks of Doomtown, the old Deadlands CCG. That would have been silly and pointless, since I'm the only person in the group who played Doomtown, and the vagueness about a pair of jacks in a duel will hardly ever come up. If and when it does, I can rule on it. The other two complaints are just flavorful things, and functional (playtested!) mechanics is probably more important than cramming just a little bit more flavor into an already zesty rule set.

As I look through the Deadlands Reloaded book, lots of little things like that keep popping up. What can I say? Scion made me gun shy. I need to learn to just "go with the flow" again, instead of riding hard to head off potential rules-flaws at the pass. I need to relearn how to relax and breathe.

Cop-Out on page 173

Savage Worlds is a great system, and Deadlands is a great setting, and both are great games. In general, they're very well written. That said, the sidebar on page 173 of Deadlands Reloaded is an egregious cop-out. I'm gonna give 'em some hell here, because that sidebar really got under my skin. It's the most frustrating part of the Deadlands Reloaded rulebook.

The first three paragraphs of said sidebar explain how they won't make any efforts to indicate what rank of PC while find any particular monster / NPC appropriately challenging. The game has this nice ranking structure for characters, Novice/Seasoned/Veteran/Heroic/Legendary, which corresponds to how many XP advances you've had, and dictates what level of Powers and Edges you have access to. Sure, two Veteran characters are gonna be very different, but they'll both be serious badasses at whatever it is they chose to specialize in, and they certainly won't have a Parry of 2. So the framework is there to have given monsters a ballpark rating. They chose not to use it for the monster section.

They claim it's for mostly philosophical reasons. They say it's more realistic for the Weird West to be populated by variable threats that don't conveniently correspond to the experience level of the party. They thumb their noses at D&D's challenge ratings and balanced encounters. Sometimes the PCs will massacre the baddies, and sometimes the PCs better just turn tales and run.

On one level, I agree with this sand-box approach, as it leads to far greater verisimilitude - the world is unfair and some challenges have no easy solutions. On the other hand, it seems kinda out of place - since so much of Deadlands is about capturing the feel of Western movies (admittedly, flavored with some supernatural evil) and random encounters of variable power is antithetical to that genre. Nearly every damn Western I've ever seen escalates to a gloriously violent climax. The heroes do sometimes get left for dead in scene one, but that's always set up for a revenge tale that ends with a fairer (but still challenging) fight in the final reel. It's never "That random encounter nearly killed us, we'd better not go back for round two!" No Western hero would ever do that.

But, if they really meant to go full-blown-oldschool-sandbox-and-random-encounter mode, I could respect it. Instead, come paragraph four, the sidebar undoes itself:

"All that said, the GM should tweak encounters to fit the nature of his party. You'll have a good handle on what your party can manage after a few sessions, without the need for some sort of formula."

WTF? So, realism trumps balance, except really you should balance it after all, and we aren't gonna help. I suspect the truth is that laziness trumps realism and balance both.

Oh, sure, I'll get the hang of it, at the cost of my first few sessions being clumsy and poorly balanced. Great. If this preceeded a 4-page monster section, I'd understand that you could eyeball the easier encounters quickly, and something akin to Challenge Rating isn't necessary. But no, the antagonist section it heads up is 77 pages long. Sure, there's several things in there I can push off till later in the campaign by means o' knee jerk reaction to their stat line, but I really don't want to have to read 77 pages in order to start planning my first session.

Why not include a short list of, say, the 6 monsters most appropriate to Novice characters. That would have saved the new GM a lot of trouble, and been pretty damn easy to fit in the book. Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 or 4 paragraphs they could have taken out to shoehorn it in.

1 hit = 1 wound, except for duels and drops

I want my Deadlands Reloaded campaign to feel cinematic, with PCs only dying at dramatically appropriate moments, not random first round of combat just 'cause of a lucky roll. So, I was considering using the 1 hit = 1 wound houserule. That, however, may be a little too cinematic as originally proposed, and it completely underplays the tension of duels at high noon and holding someone at gunpoint.

Duh, that has a simple solution. Here's what I'm running with. Any hit only does at most 1 wound, except in the following circumstances:

• During a duel, when the poker-hand mechanism is in play. That way it's entirely possible that the first shot of a duel can result in death or disability against your stationary target. After the first shot, the 1 hit = 1 wound rule kicks back in for the rest of the fight.
• When someone has The Drop on another character, their attacks ignore the rule, in addition to getting the +4 bonus to attack and damage. Stick a gun to someone's head, and they better play along.
• Get caught in a "Mexican standoff" (my apologies for the racism-laced term, but it's a trope of the setting) - that's probably gonna use the duel rules unless there's a threeway (or more) standoff, then it'll be counted as everyone having The Drop. Roll the final scene of Reservoir Dogs... and get ready to make some new characters.
  
• Anytime The Gun is present, as it's a harbinger of supernatural disaster. This will likely just be during the Season Finale, and players should have a good idea a few scenes ahead of when that's happening.

Note that Heavy Weapons are NOT on that list (unlike my previous version of this rule). Deadlands isn't military-heavy, so PCs won't be packing LAW rockets, and jumping away from a stick of dynamite unscathed fits the setting plenty well. I may however make exceptions for big nasty monsters that can't engage in a duel. Say - if there were a T-Rex attacking the party, I might suspend the rule. That sort of thing shouldn't come up often, though, and will be foreshadowed/announced while avoiding the combat is still an option. Just don't let ol' T-Rex get The Drop on you.

Other than those situations, no single attack can do more than 1 point of damage, and a Soak roll of a 4 will suck up the one and only wound. Not only does this protect PCs from random anticlimactic death, it also really reduces the math in the game, thus speeding up combat. "Fast! Furious! Fun!"

Card-Based Character Creation in Deadlands

Classic Deadlands had this cool, though admittedly sometimes frustrating, character creation system. You drew a handful of playing cards, and they determined what you had available for stats and skills, and certain elements of your background. I don't remember exactly how it worked, as I only ever made one Deadlands PC, that for a campaign that never materialized. What I do recall is that I'd started out wanting to play a bad hombre gunslinger or huckster, and drew such miserable cards I had to settle for a one-trick-pony/grizzled-old-coot.

In prepping for my Deadlands Reloaded campaign, I briefly flirted with the simplified version of that system which is presented as a free PDF download on Pinnacles site. Two of my players had actually sort of requested that build method, and I'm generally very open to player requests going into a game. It was a stylish enough concept that I first I was willing to overlook the chance of very unbalanced character builds - one player drawing all deuces and threes cards while another got face cards and jokers would have complications I was willing to deal with if it was fun and cool and made for a memorable game.

Ultimately, though, I decided it was a bad match for this campaign at this time. Two factors stopped me:

• My lack of experience GMing Deadlands. I already have one pretty big house-rule I plan to implement, and I've only GM'd about 20 hours of Savage Worlds. Deadlands Reloaded has far more complicated magic systems than straight-up Savage Worlds, so why make it even less familiar? Choosing to err on the side of caution. Maybe if character creation were several weeks from now, I'd have time to smooth down the rough edges, but this afternoon's my last chance at prepwork before we dive in, and I don't want to spend that time fixing something that ain't broke.
  
• Deadlands already has a very effective Hindrance system. On top of that there's the Veteran O' The Weird West Edge. If someone wants to play a "been there, killed that, covered in Grits" character, that Edge will do it for them. If they want to play a PC that's a Tenderfoot, Elderly, or Young, the game already has provisions for that. Worse, what if someone gets the crap cards, decides to play a kid because of it, and then gets hosed by stacking the Hindrance on top of it. Again, with a few weeks to tweak it, we'd be golden, but today's the day I finalize things.

So, no card draws for character creation - except as provided in the default rules, such as if you take the Veteran O' The Weird West edge.

The Gun

Here's the framework of my Deadlands campaign: The Gun.

• The PCs backstory is fairly open, but they must have settled in a particular town and been livin' there for at least a couple of years. Then the town burnt down, and they lost everything. The PCs (and any NPCs suggested by their Edges or Hindrances) are the only survivors. More about that in a bit.


• One extra step in character creation will be to document what you lost when the town burned down. Could be family, could be your ranch that was finally starting to turn a prophet, could be that gal you was a courtin' and about to ask fer the hand o'. Obviously, there's a revenge motif comin' up. Not only what did you lose, but how, and how did it spring from The Gun.
  
  Tangent to that, you'll be documenting what, other than revenge, motivates your quest for The Gun. Could be you want to stop it from churning up a swath o' destruction all the way to Back East, could be you wanna save the life of the innocent girl The Gun is hunting, could be you think there's an extra special irony if you use The Gun to put Finnegan Cobb back in the ground, could be yer a Whateley and you covet the awesome supernatural power of The Gun.


• I'll be using "Story Time" similar to what I did back in my old Vampire LARP. At the start of every session, each player has the option of taking a minute or two to tell a short tale. You can share your character's backstory, legends about The Gun, or rumors you've heard of what's coming up ahead. If I like your tales, I'll work them into upcoming sessions. The context is these are tales being told round the fire on the trail - so you can make up any detail you want, and we'll determine the level of veracity later.


• The Gun is cursed. Ever since Finnegan Cobb got his hands on it, he started acting ...different. Prior to that, he'd been a mousy little man, barely able to keep a roof over himself and his wife. The Gun made him cocky, fiery, vengeful. He pistol whipped a man to death in town square, over something inconsequential. Cobb shot one of the Deputies in the back, then stared the Sheriff down cold.
  
  He was never without the gun - he slept with his holster on. He'd started cheatin' on his wife, and beatin' her too, so one night, she tried to slip it out and bury it. He woke up when she lifted it. She swares she doesn't remember pulling the trigger, but his corpse had six slugs in the head. She hocked the gun at the General Store, went to Confessional, and then headed out of town. Her hand was bandaged and bloody as she left - the Priest said she chopped off her trigger finger because he couldn't drive the devil out of it. Three days later, Finnegan Cobb clawed his way up from Potter's Field. By sunup the next morning, the town was burning, and any number of supernatural things were on the loose. The details of the Town's destruction will remain mercurial to fit whatever gets filled in at storytime.



• The players are on the trail of The Gun, Finnegan Cobb, and/or his Wife. Every session involves them arriving in another town on the trail. Someone in that town has been touched by The Gun. There's a standard place to start - askin' round 'bout strangers who come through a couple days before, an' whether or not said strangers shot anyone. The Gun has transformative properties on those it comes in contact with, and on those it shoots - this will provide Episodic diversions. There's a pursuit subplot, but it's more of a story conceit - and I'm being upfront about it with the Players. Catchin' up with Finnegan is the sort of thing to happen in a season finale, not some random mid-season episode just cause a PC got a lucky Tracking roll. In the meantime, the players are passing in Finnegan's wake :) putting down the beasts he done stirred up.



• I cracked out my old Doomtown CCG cards, and sorted out all the Deeds. I figure I'll need a way to lay out the towns they head to in the campaign, and I don't want to sweat trying to make a bunch of believable maps. Instead (and I'm stealin' a page here from my wife's Cyberpunk campaign) each town is lain out via a dozen random draws from the Deed Deck. This is very much gonna be a "seat of your pants" game, most likely featuring "monster of the week" if you hadn't figured that out yet.



• Deadlands (and Savage Worlds in general) rewards the use of miniatures (indeed, any game involving gunfights benefits from knowing who can draw a bead on whom), and normally that makes me happy. I've got tons of minis. But, upon looking through my stash, I realized there's not much in terms of Western minis on my shelves - and certainly nothing becoming of a Huckster. I searched high and low for Western minis, which is a tale for another day. Eventually, I settled on Legos. I've got some old Western lego sets, and I'll have the Players build representations of their characters from those bits. Lego minifigs on a map made of Doomtown Deed cards... looks like I'll be abstracting the movement rules a bit.