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Re: [HOE] Coup questions
Aaron Chusid wrote:
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....
.....
......
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?
The trick is this: You are the Marshal. It is your game. If you don't
want the huckster to get all the coup, you don't have to give it to him.
Feel free to spread the coup around a little if that is what you would
like. I don't think I have used the spirit roll myself, most times I
either give the coup to the person who killed the critter, or I give it
to whoever is closest to the critter when it dies.
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
You could go one of two ways. The coup could either make the character
able to create a similar curing product, or it could give them the
ability to make others sick... perhaps give the character one of the
plague gremlins as a pet?
-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.
I have to agree with the previous reply. She isn't Servitor material.
Servitors willingly serve the Reckoners. They start out just being an
evil person who is doing evil things, but once they do enough evil deeds
to become a Servitor, they know it and accept it. How about this: she
started out all sweet and nice, but in one town, someone figured out
that she was the reason the crops died. Once word spread, she was hunted
down and captured. The locals then tried to kill her by throwing her
into a radioactive sludge pit outside of town near an old reactor. Since
she is harrowed, being submerged in the sludge didn't kill her, but
mutated her horribly. She eventually got out, and went back to the town
and this time willingly destroyed all the crops, food stores, and the
people. Now, she travels the wastes using the Death Mask harrowed power
to look normal, and she still acts all sweet and nice, but that is only
so she can get into town and destroy all the crops and food stores.
-An S-Mart Overlord style gunslinger, based on Herrod from "The Quick and
the Dead"
I'm not sure which one Herrod was, but perhaps the coup could be the
gunslinger's favorite gun, which has some special power(s).
-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.
You could make the character who gets the coup a greenie syker with one of the abilities that the servitor syker had.
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.
Get ahold of one of the Deadlands/HOE dime novels. They include a story that includes plenty of horror, fear, and terror, and then the second part is an adventure where the characters play out the story. Take mental notes about how the story describes a given encounter, vs how the adventure just gives a brief description and stats. Try and run your games more like the story than a collection of critter stats that need to be defeated. Describe what the monsters look like, don't just give a name. Also, when running the combat, don't just say "you hit it in the guts and it took a heavy wound. Now it's the monster's turn", say "your shot strikes the beast in the chest, and the creature howls in pain. You can see blood dripping from the wound, but the creature shrugs off the pain and lunges at your throat". It's all in how you say it.
Hope this helped.
--David Hoff
dlhoff1@charter.net