Re: [DL] after The Last Stop

[Allan Seyberth <darious@darious.com>]

Run a completely mundane adventure.

It's your best chance to establish a baseline normality to the Weird West, 
before starting the inevitable "weirdness" escalation.  And you only have 
to have one such adventure and it will stick in your player's minds 
throughout the campaign.

Otherwise, the party picks up the mindset of weirdness everywhere and 
everytime you tell them that they come across a "normal looking town" they 
immediately start looking under rocks for the strangeness.  When running a 
horror game, you design the villians around the characters, but you design 
everything else around the /players/.

None of this is actually helpful to you, I know.

To sum up, you have a party of four  - two of which have mojo powers, and a 
third who is at least  lightly briefed on "something being out there." And 
the entire party has been thrown headfirst into zombies and mad science. . .

Heh.

I'd recommend taking the party to Las Cruces and having them spend some 
time there - at least until the next train comes through.  Have Wilder 
explain away the zombies, et al as just a "typical" research line of the 
new science.  Be ready with pseudo-science babble of stimulating electrical 
impules and bio-kinetics and . . . go into the speech until your players' 
eyes start to glass over.
I'd probably spend an hour or so of game time playing that out - killing 
time in a small town, filling out paperwork on the attack, answering 
questions from the railway agent (probably Bayou V that far South), AND 
from a Texas Ranger.  (That ought to make the Agent very nervous, seeing as 
he is knee deep in Confederate Territory)

While mundane is not very interesting, the hook to this section should be 
establishing that the mundane exists, and building up the false depth of 
the setting via dropping bits about the background - ie - the Bayou 
Vermillion rail agent, the fact that New Mexico is Confederate (which ties 
into the ongoing Civil War), the Texas Ranger, how the populous of the town 
treats the New Science with suspicion but not necessarily with superstition.

Maybe even toss in a Catholic Priest for the Blessed, a coolie rail laborer 
for the Martial Artist, and play up Jenny for the Gunslinger.  Some good 
roleplaying bits that, if any of the players bite and strike up a 
friendship, you can have them meet the NPC again down the road - and have 
'em slaughtered off by the villain of that adventure, preferably while the 
PC is watching.  :-)

Have the party take the next train out, which is likely to come in the next 
day or two.  And then the train gets robbed - either by the Laughing Men or 
some Legionnaires up from Mexico on a raid.  Again, a bit more background 
is introduced and they get some action - but without any supernatural bits 
involved.

After all of this, it depends on you.  If you have a meta-plot or goal you 
want to try, then start working it in.  Or if you are looking towards 
another published adventure, there is Independence Day, Don't Drink the 
Water, and/or PC Death Train.  I'd hold off on PC Death Train for a bit 
though - until the party has gotten a bit of experience AND until you can 
introduce a few deserted train stops to the party.  If you can stretch that 
out over two or three adventures, it creates a better impact when they do 
encounter the Night Train.




On the train out, have it hit by bandits.  Real bandits.  It can either be 
the Laughing Men or French Legionaires raiding north of the border.

Las Cruces is just a stone's throw away from both Texas and Mexico.

At 01:29 AM 9/28/2002 -0500, you wrote:
 >> It could depend on what happened at the end of your session.
 >>
 >> (Last stop spoilers)
 >
 >Hmm, good point. O.K., here's what happened in a nutshell, preceded by the
 >dramatis personae:
 >
 >.. a gunslinger patterned lightly after Vash the Stampede, using a S&W
 >Schofield and with Pacifist 5
 >.. a near-blind fanatical preacher with a shotgun, much like Quentin
 >Tarantino in Little Nicky
 >.. an MiBD
 >.. a martial artist with a sword
 >
 >I forgot to send the sherriff/marshal/whatever with them. They followed
 >Fingers to the mine. They fight through to the bad guy and the preacher
 >makes him go bang with his shotgun. They leave.
 >
 >That's where they are right now. Ideas?
 >
 >Nick Zachariasen
 >Editor Emeritus
 >Trojan Times
 >
 >
 >
 >To unsubscribe, send a message to esquire@gamerz.net with
 >       unsubscribe deadlands@gamerz.net
 >as the BODY of the message.  The SUBJECT is ignored.

-------------------
Allan Seyberth
darious@darious.com

Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for 
instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner's Ring Cycle takes four days to 
perform while "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more 
than three minutes.
                 -P.J. O'Rourke