[HOE] Coup questions

[Aaron Chusid <aaron@to-the-point.org>]

Hi all!  

Don't know if this counts as spoilers, but it's talking about some
potentially behind-the-scenes stuff, so consider yourself warned....




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Here's my situation; I'm a first-time Deadlands GM, and never have been a
player.  So I'm learning as I go.  The adventure my party is facing will
pit them against 4 servators, one for each Reckoner, before eventually
going through some version of the Unity adventure.  The posse has 3-5
players on any given week, with a fairly consistant base of 4.  One was
smart enough to buy armor, so he dominates combat, one is a very good
gunslinger who is hated by the dice and so is always the first to fall down
no matter what I do, one is a sniper who is quickly coming to regret only
having one leg, one is a snake oil selling Huckster, and one is a
fresh-off-the-farm MIB.  I can tell you more about them if need be, but my
questions are such:

1) The huckster has a very high Spirit, especially now that he's dead and
bought Supernatural Trait.  I'm concerned that everytime a Servator/nasty
beast dies, he'll be the one to count coup on it.  I don't want to
overpower him any more than an undead Huckster who rolls 6d12+2 to cast
hexes and has his Greater Manitou cowed in fear already is overpowered, and
I don't want to piss off the other players by leaving them out.  Should I
just blatantly ignore the rule here and hand out the coup as seems fit, or
is there some other trick I should know about?

2) With that, I'm having trouble thinking of appropriate coup for these
servitors.  Originally I was going to do a standard "Immunity to the powers
of this reckoner" type of thing, but the entire original posse managed to
get killed, meaning that 3 out of the 5 regulars are Harrowed and so don't
care too much about immunity to disease, freedom from hunger, or immunity
to aging.  The servitors are:
	-A snake-oil salesman with a product that really does cure disease, but he
grows a den of plague gremlins to keep business good
	-A really nice, super friendly young woman who everyone loves; no one's
figured out she's Harrowed yet.  Worse, she's mildly radioactive, and has a
nasty habit of killing all the crops in any town she vists.   Accidentally,
sure, but Famine doesn't care about her motives, really.
	-An  S-Mart Overlord style gunslinger, based on Herrod from "The Quick and
the Dead"
	-A slightly over-the-edge Syker who likes to walk around in black robes,
being all spooky, and ripping people's hearts out of their chests,
exploding their heads, or crushing their rib cages.  You know, for kicks.
He's a bit like a supernatural Stone Jr.

If they survive that, I figure they'll be ready for Los Diablos.  If they
can handle those, I'll run the Unity.  Meantime, I'm having trouble
thinking of appropriate weaknesses and coup for these fine upstanding
survivors.

3) One of my players has said the dreaded to me.  "It doesn't seem scary;
it just seems like rolling a lot of dice, to me."  Given, I'm new at this
and have been overusing the Scart Table and Guts checks, but I'm still not
happy with this.  How do you create horror, fear, and terror in an RPG?  My
prior experience is all with fantasy and swashbuckling RPG, so this is new
to me.

Thanks,

Aaron