RE: [DL] Back on topic

["Jeff Yates" <jyates@primaryfunction.com>]

I've run my posse thru a bunch of the Dime Novels, I'll add my two cents...

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<and lots of snippage of previous posts>

OK, so this is really long, more like $1.30 than 2 cents ;-)

I have not run Skinners, Pass The Salt, nor a couple others.  I have run my
posse thru Perdition's Daughter, Worms, Adios A-Mi-Go, Forbidden God, all
three of the Werewolf crossovers, Abracadabra and an Arab Cadaver, and The
Mission.  And the one with the critter called the Husker -- back of the
Marshal's Guide?  At least that I can remember.

Perdition's Daughter, as others have pointed out, does not include an
explicit way to give the posse the weakness of the Big Badd-ette.  That
didn't slow my posse down, as they managed to cause an avalanche that
stopped the entranced cultists, put out the bonfire, and otherwise bugger up
the evil plans.  Success thru poor planning ;-)

The first train the posse wound up on was for the Husker yarn.  They
defeated the critter, but had no train engineer.  They decided to try to
pretend to be engineers.  They got the train moving, down the mountain.  At
very high speeds down a hill with a turn at the end.  They jumped, deciding
it'd cost fewer chips to survive a rolling landing out of a moving train
than the train wreck at the bottom.  This led our posse with two new Rangers
to Varney Flats.

Night Train is classic, tho I didn't manage to kill any of the posse
myself... Mostly.  There was much battling of the nosferatu, the curious
reported got ambushed and drained -- we was going to be a nearly cinematic
vampire player character with corruption points and everything.  The idiot
savant huckster got killed and had his head severed.  Then his backlash of
getting a manitou riding shotgun turned him into instant harrowed.  The
now-vampiric PC put Karl's head in a box and took it with him.  They both
died in the train wreck.  Yup, the second train the posse destroyed is the
night train.  The PC with a case of nitro (I let him have it from the Varney
Flats store) and a bunch of sticks of TNT decided that his plan was to put
the nitro on the meat car, and then get into the engine and blow it up with
the TNT.  There's the zombie and the wrestling and the busted rolls... The
Night Train leaves the station and gets a good head of steam going.  The
reporter and Karl's head are in the meat car, rather startled that the whole
thing has started moving, but are looking at the bottles in the crate...
TNT eventually ends up in the ghost rock fire box and explodes.  Six sticks
worth.  The boiler ruptures and basically explodes.  The train stops moving,
immediately, sending the reporter, Karl's head in a box, and a case of nitro
smashing into the front of the boxcar.  Boom.  Meanwhile, the Texas Ranger
that was brought in to replace Karl and the his Ranger partner that was to
replace the harrowed chi artist (that the posse didn't know was a deader)
put down the last of the nosferatu.  They find the chi artist using a
harrowed power to heal himself (really good cognition vs really bad sneak).
They both start fanning lever action rifles... Seize the pearl of death is
good, but a pair of determined Rangers can be nasty.  Finish up in Varney
with some homemade yarns.

Abracadabra was fun.  The posse took down a small Rattler (which left them a
little over confident for Worms later...), and one of the new Texas Rangers
died via a Bolt O' Doom of tremendous proportions.  Oh, and the story
involves the destruction of a train engine.  That's the third dead train!
But it was a fun adventure, and introduced the guy that gets the posse
involved in Canyon O' Doom.  Or Canyon O' Doom introduced him for use here,
depending on the order you play the yarns.

Forbidden God was entertaining.  I used it as filler to get the posse across
the Salt Flats.  Not too dangerous, except for the one cowpoke that got
possessed by an evil bowl and under the influence of the bowl disemboweled
himself.  The wife of one of the players sticks her head into the game once
in a while, and she suggested that I spend a chip on the opposed roll...
Seems no one had brought her any chocolate recently...

Somewhere along the way here one of the players introduced a character that
he decided had the loco hinderance at 5, and thought it would be interesting
to have amnesia.  I ran with that, made him from HOE and wrote up a
character sheet and some rules on how to roll spirit checks to see if he
could remember a skill or fact.  Quite fun for a long time (still kicking,
and back in HOE...)  He also had night terrors, so I started slipping him
notes about dreams about worms and being buring alive.  Then we played the
Worms! Yarn.  The first encounter with a Rattler didn't go as well as last
time.  So they raided the general store for all their mining supplies, and
made a stack of explosives next to the town jail.  Then proceeded along the
rest of the adventure.  The climax with the worm attack involved a failed
demolitions check (to learn blast radius), a lot of running, and a good
rifle shot into the pre-placed explosives pile.  Buckets of damage to the
rattler (it rained meat), four town buildings demolished, and mild
collateral damage to the posse for not being quite far enough away.

More hints to the loco PC about wolves in sheeps clothing...  And tormenting
the Blessed that had a mysterious past, which was Spittin' Image of a
baddie.  Who I decided was a werewolf.  Which led quite nicely into the
Werewolf set.  The posse nearly strung up the preacher for killing and
stealing, even the preacher's player was thinking he'd been doing it. Then I
had the real werewolf show up, in human form, just in time to reveal the
Spittin' Image aspect.  The rest of the books ran fairly straightforward.

Somewhere in there we did Adios A-Mi-Go, which was, for us, OK filler
material.  Independence Day was one of several things the posse did while in
Dodge and nominaly deputies (had them do something about the ghoul story
hook too).  No great issues with I.D., other than what you would expect from
a bunch of gun bunnies meeting a guy that only really takes damage from
knives.

Stir well with home-brew stuff (mostly with the Church of Scientology behind
it -- no relation ;-)  I'll probably call them the Order of the Cog or
something if I ever write that story up for web consumption) and add Canyon
O' Doom and Devils Tower Trilogy, plus some other published spices, and it's
fun and horror for all with a green glowing irradiated dessert that we
haven't even started yet...

Jeff Y.
Marshal for the Dynamite Gang