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)

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*: 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."

Emperor of All Mexico

Several years back, I was the Head Storyteller of a long-running vampire/historical LARP in Albuquerque NM. The game was set in the late 1800's eventually skipping to the early 1900's. Every 3 or 4 months, when a story arc would wrap up, we'd move the game ahead 10 to 20 years. We ran story arcs: 1)just after NEW Mexico had been seized from OLD Mexico, 2)during the civil war, 3)Lincoln County "war" with Billy the Kid, 4)turn-of-the-century hysteria, and 5)just prior to the start of WWI.

Sessions alternated: every-other-session was Elysium, with the in-between sessions being built of various scenes derived from player's actions.

In addition, we started every session with "Story Time", short vignettes to illustrate plot points that might have otherwise occurred off-camera. Major NPC comes to town - herald the arrival in Story Time. Important character died where only a couple players were witness - restage it in Story Time. More craziness unleashed at the evil haunted clock tower - Story Time it is. We also let players run Story Time segments, which was a delight but also a double-edged sword.

The game was a lot of fun, and way too much work. So much work, in fact, that I have a file on my computer full of ideas for things I'd do differently should I decide to start a LARP again. The name of that file is "If I Am Ever Stupid Again". It was like a second job that only paid in Clanbooks.

One of the hallmarks of the game was that we were always throwing curveballs and willing to take the story anywhere. We intentionally transformed nearly all the secrets of the Vampire: The Masquerade setting. That way the players would never be tempted to use out-of-character info gleaned from reading every WoD book ever published.
The Salubri were the badguys, Tremere had hunted them down to stop their apocalyptic magic. The Giovanni were possessed pawns of their ghostly masters. The Camarilla and Sabbat did not exist - there was a Guild that brokered passage between city-states, but a Prince was truly King of his city. We used old-school pre-Viccissitude Tzimisce. European Werewolves were Mad Scientists and Rail Barons, laying down track to steal the Chi of the new world. Native American were-coyotes were pretty prevelant, and at war with the European weres.

The players kept disregarding the masquerade, especially around the haunted clock tower in town square. One session, after a particularly bad breach of the masquerade (involving vampires, werewolves, ghosts, a kholdunic elemental, and a machinegun), the people who actually tried to solve the problem didn't coordinate and used such conflicting methods that they just made things worse. What to do?

We didn't just send hunters after them. We'd done that before, it would have been stale.

There was no Camarilla, so there was no one to enforce the Masquerade, either. The Guild could cut all Vampiric transit to the city, but that limits the concepts available for new PCs. And it's just not as scary as Anathema and Bloodhunt, or being judged by your superiors. We needed something new, and every bit as scary as the Camarilla "breathing" down your necks. But I also wanted it to empower the PCs as much as it punished them.

Instead I interrupted their next Elysium with a pre-recorded "radio" broadcast from the Prince of Mexico City.
He said "In light of the newspapers coming from Albuquerque, there's no use pretending Vampires don't exist anymore. Therefore, I am declaring myself Emperor over all of Mexico. By the power of my blood I have raised a shroud over Mexico City. The sun will never rise on my beloved home again. People of Mexico fear not, I will protect you from the mad monsters of Albuquerque."

The one player whose character was the Ambassador from Mexico City had a very rough night.