Re: [DL] Howdy all...

[Allan Seyberth <darious@darious.com>]

 >1. How do you really work to make a long term chronicle for players that
 >is enjoyable but continues to truly instill the fear of the Deadlands
 >and what can you do to make it better or more enjoyable?  In addition to
 >this, what time frame would it be best to start in because it seems like
 >everything happened in 1877

I ran an onion campaign.  By onion I'm referring to the layers and layers 
to be peeled off.

Some spoilers follow

For the over-plot I chose to have another bad guy of the same power level 
as Stone/Raven/Hellstromme/Grimme.  But since he wasn't a part of the 
published material, the players could take him down with disrupting the 
printed timeline.  But they still get that "title shot".

This guy's specialty was that of shadows, stealth and corruption through 
proxy.  You put Stone and him in the same room, and my villian was 
toast.  The trick was getting him into that room in the first place.  If 
Stone was hunting him then Stone would run into dead ends, and 
misdirections, and deadly traps, and more red herrings, and treachery and. 
. . until Stone found himself so wrapped up in the spider's webs that he 
couldn't move, entangled, trapped, and helpless.

This villain of mine has several plots brewing to cause chaos and fear, in 
fact he has thirteen of them, that he refers to as the 13 lost tribes.

Enter the heroes, who in typical hero sense stumble through and smash up 
one of the 13 plots.  Who then get a clue to the next plot, etc.  My 
players also got a pair of very valuable books - a rare copy of a bible and 
a rare misprint of the complete works of Shakespeare.  They also happened 
to be code books.  Agents of the 13 who knew about each other would write 
using a code based on verse or scripture, which, when looked up in one book 
would give a referent to the other book - which would come back with 
another phrase which would be the true meaning.
Okay - so it was a cheesy tactic to hand the players notes filled with 
weighty and ominous phrases.  It worked.  :)  It also helped tie the 
players to the hunt, as opposed to them just handing it off to the Agency, 
or Rangers.

The core of this was that, by using the right 13 sets of bad guys, you 
could string a whole bunch of campaigns together.  Imagine if just 6 of the 
13 were:  Baron LaCroix, the secret branch of the Masons, the Jefferson 
doppleganger, one of Dr. Gash's best students, the Royal Court, and the 
leaders of the California Independence movement.

With just those five you have major campaigns over all areas of America, 
allowing you to run several pre-published adventures and have the party 
wander across several cool areas with side plots/adventures of their 
own.  It would be easy to work in PC Death Train in the middle of all this.

And, of course, there would be the extra adventures like when the party is 
led to believe that, oh, Black River is really a member of the 13, when 
they aren't.  Hijinks ensue.

Or when the Agency is sicced on the party, at the manipulation of one of 
the tribes.
etc. etc.

I don't think that a campaign like that would end anytime soon.

 >4. In addition to all of this, I am a little lost about this
 >Pinkerton/Agency switch over because I have a player who will be playing
 >a member of the Agency but I am really unsure when the switch actually
 >took place...I am think of changing a few things since we have only had
 >one game and have some of the strange changes of the switch over from
 >the Pinkertons to the Agency be one of the few things that happen...any
 >ideas on how to implement this...

Well.  When the Doomtown CCG was coming out, WotC was sent a Cease and 
Desist letter from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, telling WotC not to use 
their name in the game.  So WotC had to come up with the Agency.

In order to keep things the standardized (and possibly to avoid a possible 
C&D themselves) PEG wrote into the storyline how the Pinkertons were 
'fired' from their government job.  But what really happened is that there 
was a split  - the Pinkerton agency went on it's own way to be the private 
investigation agency of history, and the Agency was formed, made up of 
those Pinkerton agents who were already investigating event 070363 
phenomena.  This allowed the government to be in complete control of the 
paranormal investigation side of things.


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

How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!
                 - Much Ado About Nothing