The End
Here are some highlights from the final Deadlands game, for those interested.
Forget going in chronological order. This list is organized by sheer awesome. Sorry if this confuses anyone.
*Without a doubt, the end of the game was my favorite part. I'm sure you all remember how upset we all were at Eli's death. However, after thinking about it for a bit, I had come to the conclusion that had dark_towhead allowed Eli to live after all that, it would have rung false to the game. The world of Deadlands is dark and mean (though not, as theferret would have you believe, unplayable) and letting Eli live would have run counter to the story dark_towhead had been spinning, and the spirit of the game we've been playing for a year now.
This doesn't negate the possibility of a happy ending, but it's one of those things you have to work for. There are no guarantees, no hand-waving that says "Well, you guys failed, but you tried real hard, so here. You get a cookie*." We have to earn it with blood, sweat, and tears--both our own and our characters. Which, of course, makes the cookie sweeter in the end, because we can look back and see everything we had to slog through to earn it, and all the ways it could have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Well, last night, we earned ourselves a happy ending. Our happiness is shadowed by everyone and everything we lost on the way (I'm not certain it's possible to get unshadowed happiness in this game); we lost friends, we lost souls, we might even have lost the city. But the list of the lost and dead notwithstanding, we somehow pulled off an amazingly happy ending. Last week, before coming over to fight with Emily, Preacher Sam went to the nearby chapel and prayed for forgiveness and guidance. While there, he had a vision of a golden disk that spun, and occasionally looked like the sun. We players had an idea of what it might be, but the preacher was clueless. Fast forward to last night as we were escaping the great Mormon Temple as it was getting ravaged by salt rattlers (more on that later). While running, the Preacher noticed a bright flash of gold--it was Brigham Young, using the sacred Mormon artifact to hold back the rattlers. Both ddrpolaris and doompuppy independently came to the decision to save Young--they both knew that he was the best way to stop the Union Army. After much talking and harrowing adventures (again, more on that later in this post), they emerge from the collapsing building with the disk. We hop into a steamwagon, Sam Otis doesn't suck at driving for once, and we drive through Hell on Earth(tm) to get away from SLC. We drive to the chapel where we left Eli's body and an NPC, Mr. Quick (sweetest man ever!), because we're not leaving either of them behind.
Once inside the chapel, as Emily is hugging Quick and Miz Waters gathering up the body of her son, the preacher remembers his vision, and gives the disk a spin (and rolls a 20 on his Spirit roll. For scale, a Hard roll is 9 and an incredible roll is an 11). The chapel is bathed in a bright, golden light that burns, but Preacher Sam hears a voice whisper, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." The light fades, and we notice that all of our wounds have been healed. Mr. Quick (who had been blinded by an unfortunate 'mercy-killing' incident that involved Sam Otis and fire back in the third session of the game) discovered that his eyes had healed and he could see again.
There's a whole lot of thankful praying going on, but the most beautiful words spoken in that chapel?
"Jeeze, Ma, put me the fuck down," says the newly resurrected Eli Waters.
And there was much rejoicing. Miracles rule.
*ddrpolaris, in his usual fashion, was simply outstanding last night. In every game I'm in with him, I've heard GMs remark how he consistently does stuff that surprises the hell out of them. He did it again last night, while facing down the devil.
We'd gone to the orphanage to try to stop SLC from becoming a nuclear slagheap in the middle of the desert. After a pitched battle with the cybernetic Death Widow (who really, really hates the Preacher), we turned to the steampunk/evil magic equivalent of a nuke. It consisted of a large glass container, holding devil-fire (some kind of sapient fire that is part of/controlled by/whatever the devil. Hence, devil-fire. Hey--you try being creative while naming something that's trying to destroy everything!) sitting on top of this goop. The goop is all that separates the devil-fire from a barrel full of orange ghost-rock (orange ghost-rock being a new phenomenon for even our resident mad scientist), and there are barrels of TNT all around the container and a giant clock on the container's front. Should the devil-fire touch the ghost-rock, we all die. Horribly. Should the container and whatnot get tampered with, the TNT goes off, destroying the container, allowing for the devil-fire to touch the ghost-rock, and we all die. Horribly. Should someone hit the detonator, the clock on the front starts ticking down, and upon hitting zero, sets the TNT off, destroying the container...you can see where this is going, I'm sure. And when I say "we all," I mean "the entire city." Oh, and by the way, upstairs from us are a bunch of orphans, dying from radiation sickness. The people in charge of this are Not Nice.
During the battle, a stray bullet from the Death Widow's gatling pistol had hit the container, and the goop was spilling out, much to the devil-fire's apparent glee. Emily runs over and stopped up the hole before all of the goop could escape, and the devil-fire, quite displeased with this turn of events, exerts its evil to make the entire container start to spiderweb. Now Dawn, hntrpyanfar's character, had accidentally loosed the demon-fire in the world, but Sam Otis, doompuppy's character, had stolen some and had about two weeks to study it before it was stolen, in turn, by the evil Dr. Hellstromme. Now, we've been riding Sam (and doompuppy) pretty hard about this--if he hadn't taken some away to experiment on, Hellstromme never would have been able to get his nefarious hands on it. However, in this one instance, we were pretty damn glad Sam had had that two week study time. With the container cracking, there was no way Emma could keep the devil-fire from hitting the ghost-rock. Sam, remembering some of the experiments, yelled at her to grab some of the discarded stainless steel from the Death Widow, and shove it into the container, between the ghost-rock and devil-fire.
Em, already injured, needed an 11 to do this successfully. I rolled a 7. (My dice varied between teh awesome and teh suck last night). So what happens then? The Preacher leaps up, shoves his hand through the shattered glass, and tries to grab the demon-fire. Time stops for a moment as the devil looks at him and asks, "What will you offer for an entire city of souls?" The devil (and therefore dark_towhead) was expecting ddrpolaris to try to bargain, possibly offering up his own life or his own soul to save the people of SLC.
And what is the preacher's answer? "I offer you redemption. It is never too late to accept the love of God. You were his best, his brightest creation. Yes, you questioned and you doubted, and God loves you for that. He has never stopped loving you. It is never too late to come back to the path." (Muchly paraphrased). dark_towhead just sits there for a moment, stunned, at the preacher's audacity (and possibly at ddrpolaris's eloquence). ddrpolaris rolls his persuasion, getting a 15. dark_towhead then has doompuppy roll for the devil's...faith? Now, usually doompuppy's dice roll for crap. I'm pretty sure he rolls below statistical average on a fairly regular basis (he doesn't believe in dice faeries). Since he was rolling for evil, he rolls a 22. So, unfortunately, Preacher Sam does not redeem the devil, but it's damn close. It does make the devil pause for a moment, though, giving Em one last chance to push the metal through. This time, thankfully, my dice work.
The devil-fire decides to cut its losses, and vanishes. As it leaves it says, "I'm taking what's mine," and in the flames we see the souls of the Preacher's son, Sarah, and the nun being dragged, screaming, into hell. That kind of hurt, not being able to save them, especially since they were all innocent souls. The devil stole them by cheating. I mentioned the devil's a douche, yes? "I'll be back, Preacher Hawkins," he promises.
Still, even without the redemption or the rescue, the whole scene was like something out of a Twain story; "How Preacher Sam Sassed the Devil." We were all very impressed, and paused the game a sec to applaud ddrpolaris. He was simply amazing.
*Of course, we don't have very long to mourn their spirits/celebrate our victory, because the Nauvoo legion shows up to arrest us all as spies and saboteurs for the Union Army. The orphanage is right next to the Temple, and the sounds of a pitched battle between us and a 2-ton cybernetic monstrosity was enough to attract attention. We allow ourselves to be arrested (Sam Otis is too injured to protest, and Preacher Sam actively demands to be taken to Brigham Young, so Emma decides to go along with it), and they find all of her weapons except her tiny derringer tucked away in her bodice.
There's a brief interlude in the cell, where the Nauvoo Legion brings in Doc Yates to heal up Sam Otis--we're to be perfectly healthy before we're killed for treason (btw, dark_towhead, was that a paraphrased The Princess Bride ref? I meant to ask you last night but got distracted). While he's treating Sam, he mentions that he heard Miz Waters down here, too. Em, assuming she's going to die before very long, looks into the box Eli had entrusted to her before he died, then asked Doc to bring it and news of Eli's death to Miz Waters. "I don't know if this will be much comfort to her, but you can tell her her boy died believin' in the Lord." Doc promises to do so, and manages to bully the guards into taking him to her as soon as he's done treating Sam.
A little while later, an imposing figure, backed by a man competently wielding a shotgun, comes into our wing of the prison. We get up, assuming it's time for our mock-trial, when we hear, "Miss Elizabeth! I thought I told you that I wanted to hear any further bad news about my son from you directly! And here, take this back." It's Miz Waters and Josiah (Eli's old deputy, also a Mormon, and an all-around good guy) here to rescue us. The preacher looks like he's about to balk (he wants a big, old public trial so he can speak to the masses), but then a few artillery shells hit the Temple. It's the special shells, the ones that contain the chemical compound that summons salt-rattlers (picture a cross between Dune's sandworms and the "graboids" from Tremors) and drives them into a frenzy. However did such a compound come into existence? Why, our own dear Sam Otis invented it. doompuppy did a lot of muttering about "being hoisted by his own petard" last night.
We all start running, Miz Waters and Em easily outrunning the others. They get out back with no difficulties, and are waiting by the rescue steamwagon. Josiah, Sam Otis, and the preacher are all much slower. They have to contend with rattlers, and as they're doing so, they stumble upon Brigham Young. Otis does have one moment of dazzling heroism. Brigham is actually a floor above them, but they can see him through some of the giant holes in the walls and floor. Josiah hoists them up into the room with Young, and as he does so, the floor falls from beneath him, into the maw of the biggest rattler anyone has ever seen. By a miracle of luck and die-rolling, Otis manages to catch Josiah before he follows the floor into the rattler. That was pretty keen.
In the room proper, the sight of Sam Otis is too much for Young to bear--he assumes that Otis is a traitor and has sent the rattlers to the Temple deliberately--and he kind of loses his mind--and his faith. Ignoring the rattlers, he swings the golden disk up and into Sam's head, ignoring the flesh that is now burning off of his palms. You can't touch holy objects if you're having a crisis of faith. Again, the preacher intercedes, preventing Young from killing Otis and manages to talk him down from his rage-high--by quoting from the Book of Mormon of all things. They take the disk from Young and try to hustle him away. A HUGE rattler comes through the wall and eats Young instead. Oops. Oh well, they have the disk.
They start running through the Temple, which is literally crumbling beneath their feet. They're within feet of the door, when dark_towhead demands a "pick-up-the-pace" roll. Both rolls fail, and the floor falls out from beneath them. Here, it is Josiah who manages to catch them both and fling them to safety--by sacrificing his own life. He falls into darkness, screaming in horror and agony. He was another NPC we really liked. Unfortunately, this leaves our boys trapped...IN A HOLE.
I don't think I ever blogged about our first encounter with A HOLE. Much earlier in the campaign, the preacher, Sam, and some NPC fell into a very deep hole after a battle with a baby salt-rattler. And between the four of us (hntrpyanfar was still playing then) we managed to consistently botch our rolls to get them out. Eventually, dark_towhead stopped assigning any other difficulty to get out other than, "don't botch." It still took us a good three or four tries after that to get them out of the hole. That may have been the night we laughed the hardest during game. So it was only fitting that we'd see another hole before the end--I'd been half-expecting one, actually. And, in true style, I managed to botch my rescue roll for them. I rolled my 3d6 strength, got two 1's and a 2. The Preacher has a miracle where he can give chips to other characters, so I got a white chip. All I had to do is roll a not-1, and I wouldn't botch. Guess what I rolled.
It wouldn't have been so bad if that same exact thing hadn't happened just a few hours before.
Of course, Miz Waters was there to be awesome. She knocked Em aside so she didn't fall into the hole, too, and snatched the disk. Hey--she's a Mormon and the widow of Joseph Smith--she's got priorities. With that extra burden gone, the preacher was able to drag himself and Otis up out of the hole. But there were a few times there when it was really touch-and-go. Especially since this was a strength-based test: both men have d4's for their strength, and both of them were injured. doompuppy was ready to accept Sam Otis's death by falling, but ddrpolaris's die exploded and, even with his minuses, managed to scrape up enough successes to haul them both up out of there. Heart-in-throat moment, let me tell you.
*We actually began the game heading towards Miz Water's house. We were going to rendezvous with Tecumseh, a Pinkerton agent, and he was going to help us shadowrun the orphanage and stop the bomb. We got there to find it filled with Nauvoo Legionnaires; Tecumseh was being tortured for information about his accomplices whereabouts by the General.
We'd tangled a bit with the General before. Most memorably, he sent an innocent man to the gallows back in the second big adventure of the game. That's the one incident we kick ourselves in the ass for the most--we had opportunities to save Mr. Utter, but we failed. I think his death was the first time I cried in game (though, as you all know, certainly not the last). The General also cost Eli his job as Sheriff, and destroyed almost all hope of peace with the Union by shooting the Union soldier who had come to talk under a flag of truce. The players and Preacher Sam are pretty sure he's possessed by the devil (the devil's a busy little beaver here in SLC), Emma just thinks he's a giant ass.
Now, I did not design Emily as a sneaky character. However, she is still the sneakiest of the bunch; sneaking and climbing fall under the nimbleness stat, which means that I'm rolling d10's. I'd also given her one point in lock picking, which is under deftness, which means I'm rolling a d12. So, even though I didn't try to make her sneaky, she's just naturally good at it (guns are deftness, which I made her primary stat, and fighting & dodge are nimbleness, which I made secondary). We can hear Tecumseh getting tortured, but we couldn't exactly go in, guns blazing, as 2 to 1 odds are not good to begin with. Add that to Sam Otis not being much of a fighter and the Preacher having a hang-up about shooting folks, and it suddenly becomes 6 to 1 odds. Since it was going to be that anyway, Em elected a quieter option.
She snuck around to the side of the house, climbed up some ivy to the second floor, and let herself into a window in a study. She was making her way down the hall when she heard footsteps heading her way, so she opened the nearest door and entered a room. It happened to belong to a very frightened young maid, who was staring wide-eyed at Em, or, more specifically, Em's guns which were pointed at her head. "Don't make any noise and we won't have a problem." Em finds out that the servants are NOT restricted to their quarters, and hatches a plan. She rents the maid's uniform (hands over $3 in case she doesn't get a chance to return the uniform), gets an idea of the layout of the house--specifically, servants' stairs, and grabs a blanket, which she carries in front of her. Nestled inside the blanket are her guns, of course. Interestingly enough, when Emma tells the maid who she is, the maid completely calms down. "Oh, I've heard of you!" "What have you heard?!" "It isn't my place to say, maam." I was temped to have Em shake the information out of the girl, but decided rescuing a friend was a bit higher on my priorities. Emily will be demanding answers from Miz Waters, though.
Anyway, Emily leaves the maid's room, and heads down the hall towards the servants' stairs. The guards in the hall don't pay her any mind, and she gets downstairs with no difficulty. The first guard she runs into gives her a hard time about her uniform (the maid was about 4 inches shorter than Emma), but she lies about not getting her laundry done in time. Since he's a lot more interested in her ankles than her conversation, he lets her pass without much opposition. She gets out to the front of the house, and sees most of the Nauvoo legion conspicuously avoiding looking at the room where the sounds of torture and agony are coming from. This is all to the good, since it means they're not paying too much attention to where she's going, and she manages to duck into the room without any of them being the wiser.
"We won't be needing your services," says the General before meeting her eyes. "You!"
"Me." Emma drops the blankets and aims her guns at him.
"Put those down or I'll kill him," the General threatens, waving his knife at Tecumseh.
"Sorry, Tecumseh, but I've been waitin' to kill this sonuvabitch for too long. You got any kin I should say goodbye to?" Her eyes remain locked with the General's.
At this point, dark_towhead and I roll for initiative. In Deadlands, you don't roll to see who goes first, you roll to see how many cards you draw. Then the Marshall counts down from aces to deuces, and you go on your card. Both of us drew queens--but my queen was the queen of hearts, the second-highest queen. The General drew a queen of spades. Spades beats hearts. I wince and prepare to say goodbye to another NPC. Then, in a moment of true dramatic suspense, dark_towhead reveals the Black Joker that he had also drawn--which meant he'd had to discard his highest card.
Leaving me holding the high card. AWESOME.
"This is for Bobby Utter."
I debate between aiming for his head, but decide that he might be better served as a hostage. The first shot hits him in the belly--for 30+ points of damage. This is the equivalent of five wounds; five wounds to a limb and it is detached. Five wounds to the guts or the head, and you are dead. Em would have auto-killed the General, except dark_towhead spent a white chip to avoid one wound. This would have left him alive (though incredibly wounded) but for one thing: Emma is two-fisted, which means she shoots two guns at a time. The second shot hits him in the belly again, doing a mere 10 points. That is a single wound, though, and dark_towhead had no intention of spending more chips on the General. Five wounds and he's down. His body bounces around a few times before falling into a bloody heap on Miz Water's parlor carpet. Em's gonna owe her a new one of those. Folks start rustling, deciding to come investigate, so Em turns and hisses "Scream!" Tecumsah obliges, and the rustling stops--they assume he's still getting tortured, and have no desire to interfere anymore than they have to.
"Babble!" she demands, "So they don't start wondering why the General ain't sayin' nothin'." As he does that, she checks the room that connects to the parlor, opens that room's window, then comes back in to cut Tecumseh free. Most of his toes are gone, so she helps him hobble into the other room, slides him feet-first out the window, and carry him back to the steamwagon where Sam Otis and the Preacher are waiting, all before anyone notices they're gone.
Win!
Unfortunately, I then botch my medicine roll on Tecumseh, and end up somehow snapping a bone out through his skin. Oops. But, y'know, other than that, Emma was pretty awesome.
So, that was our last game of Deadlands: intense, suspenseful, dramatic, heart-tugging, and ultimately joyful. Fabulous way to end a game.
*: This does not apply to angst-cookies, which are given freely and frequently.
Forget going in chronological order. This list is organized by sheer awesome. Sorry if this confuses anyone.
*Without a doubt, the end of the game was my favorite part. I'm sure you all remember how upset we all were at Eli's death. However, after thinking about it for a bit, I had come to the conclusion that had dark_towhead allowed Eli to live after all that, it would have rung false to the game. The world of Deadlands is dark and mean (though not, as theferret would have you believe, unplayable) and letting Eli live would have run counter to the story dark_towhead had been spinning, and the spirit of the game we've been playing for a year now.
This doesn't negate the possibility of a happy ending, but it's one of those things you have to work for. There are no guarantees, no hand-waving that says "Well, you guys failed, but you tried real hard, so here. You get a cookie*." We have to earn it with blood, sweat, and tears--both our own and our characters. Which, of course, makes the cookie sweeter in the end, because we can look back and see everything we had to slog through to earn it, and all the ways it could have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Well, last night, we earned ourselves a happy ending. Our happiness is shadowed by everyone and everything we lost on the way (I'm not certain it's possible to get unshadowed happiness in this game); we lost friends, we lost souls, we might even have lost the city. But the list of the lost and dead notwithstanding, we somehow pulled off an amazingly happy ending. Last week, before coming over to fight with Emily, Preacher Sam went to the nearby chapel and prayed for forgiveness and guidance. While there, he had a vision of a golden disk that spun, and occasionally looked like the sun. We players had an idea of what it might be, but the preacher was clueless. Fast forward to last night as we were escaping the great Mormon Temple as it was getting ravaged by salt rattlers (more on that later). While running, the Preacher noticed a bright flash of gold--it was Brigham Young, using the sacred Mormon artifact to hold back the rattlers. Both ddrpolaris and doompuppy independently came to the decision to save Young--they both knew that he was the best way to stop the Union Army. After much talking and harrowing adventures (again, more on that later in this post), they emerge from the collapsing building with the disk. We hop into a steamwagon, Sam Otis doesn't suck at driving for once, and we drive through Hell on Earth(tm) to get away from SLC. We drive to the chapel where we left Eli's body and an NPC, Mr. Quick (sweetest man ever!), because we're not leaving either of them behind.
Once inside the chapel, as Emily is hugging Quick and Miz Waters gathering up the body of her son, the preacher remembers his vision, and gives the disk a spin (and rolls a 20 on his Spirit roll. For scale, a Hard roll is 9 and an incredible roll is an 11). The chapel is bathed in a bright, golden light that burns, but Preacher Sam hears a voice whisper, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." The light fades, and we notice that all of our wounds have been healed. Mr. Quick (who had been blinded by an unfortunate 'mercy-killing' incident that involved Sam Otis and fire back in the third session of the game) discovered that his eyes had healed and he could see again.
There's a whole lot of thankful praying going on, but the most beautiful words spoken in that chapel?
"Jeeze, Ma, put me the fuck down," says the newly resurrected Eli Waters.
And there was much rejoicing. Miracles rule.
*ddrpolaris, in his usual fashion, was simply outstanding last night. In every game I'm in with him, I've heard GMs remark how he consistently does stuff that surprises the hell out of them. He did it again last night, while facing down the devil.
We'd gone to the orphanage to try to stop SLC from becoming a nuclear slagheap in the middle of the desert. After a pitched battle with the cybernetic Death Widow (who really, really hates the Preacher), we turned to the steampunk/evil magic equivalent of a nuke. It consisted of a large glass container, holding devil-fire (some kind of sapient fire that is part of/controlled by/whatever the devil. Hence, devil-fire. Hey--you try being creative while naming something that's trying to destroy everything!) sitting on top of this goop. The goop is all that separates the devil-fire from a barrel full of orange ghost-rock (orange ghost-rock being a new phenomenon for even our resident mad scientist), and there are barrels of TNT all around the container and a giant clock on the container's front. Should the devil-fire touch the ghost-rock, we all die. Horribly. Should the container and whatnot get tampered with, the TNT goes off, destroying the container, allowing for the devil-fire to touch the ghost-rock, and we all die. Horribly. Should someone hit the detonator, the clock on the front starts ticking down, and upon hitting zero, sets the TNT off, destroying the container...you can see where this is going, I'm sure. And when I say "we all," I mean "the entire city." Oh, and by the way, upstairs from us are a bunch of orphans, dying from radiation sickness. The people in charge of this are Not Nice.
During the battle, a stray bullet from the Death Widow's gatling pistol had hit the container, and the goop was spilling out, much to the devil-fire's apparent glee. Emily runs over and stopped up the hole before all of the goop could escape, and the devil-fire, quite displeased with this turn of events, exerts its evil to make the entire container start to spiderweb. Now Dawn, hntrpyanfar's character, had accidentally loosed the demon-fire in the world, but Sam Otis, doompuppy's character, had stolen some and had about two weeks to study it before it was stolen, in turn, by the evil Dr. Hellstromme. Now, we've been riding Sam (and doompuppy) pretty hard about this--if he hadn't taken some away to experiment on, Hellstromme never would have been able to get his nefarious hands on it. However, in this one instance, we were pretty damn glad Sam had had that two week study time. With the container cracking, there was no way Emma could keep the devil-fire from hitting the ghost-rock. Sam, remembering some of the experiments, yelled at her to grab some of the discarded stainless steel from the Death Widow, and shove it into the container, between the ghost-rock and devil-fire.
Em, already injured, needed an 11 to do this successfully. I rolled a 7. (My dice varied between teh awesome and teh suck last night). So what happens then? The Preacher leaps up, shoves his hand through the shattered glass, and tries to grab the demon-fire. Time stops for a moment as the devil looks at him and asks, "What will you offer for an entire city of souls?" The devil (and therefore dark_towhead) was expecting ddrpolaris to try to bargain, possibly offering up his own life or his own soul to save the people of SLC.
And what is the preacher's answer? "I offer you redemption. It is never too late to accept the love of God. You were his best, his brightest creation. Yes, you questioned and you doubted, and God loves you for that. He has never stopped loving you. It is never too late to come back to the path." (Muchly paraphrased). dark_towhead just sits there for a moment, stunned, at the preacher's audacity (and possibly at ddrpolaris's eloquence). ddrpolaris rolls his persuasion, getting a 15. dark_towhead then has doompuppy roll for the devil's...faith? Now, usually doompuppy's dice roll for crap. I'm pretty sure he rolls below statistical average on a fairly regular basis (he doesn't believe in dice faeries). Since he was rolling for evil, he rolls a 22. So, unfortunately, Preacher Sam does not redeem the devil, but it's damn close. It does make the devil pause for a moment, though, giving Em one last chance to push the metal through. This time, thankfully, my dice work.
The devil-fire decides to cut its losses, and vanishes. As it leaves it says, "I'm taking what's mine," and in the flames we see the souls of the Preacher's son, Sarah, and the nun being dragged, screaming, into hell. That kind of hurt, not being able to save them, especially since they were all innocent souls. The devil stole them by cheating. I mentioned the devil's a douche, yes? "I'll be back, Preacher Hawkins," he promises.
Still, even without the redemption or the rescue, the whole scene was like something out of a Twain story; "How Preacher Sam Sassed the Devil." We were all very impressed, and paused the game a sec to applaud ddrpolaris. He was simply amazing.
*Of course, we don't have very long to mourn their spirits/celebrate our victory, because the Nauvoo legion shows up to arrest us all as spies and saboteurs for the Union Army. The orphanage is right next to the Temple, and the sounds of a pitched battle between us and a 2-ton cybernetic monstrosity was enough to attract attention. We allow ourselves to be arrested (Sam Otis is too injured to protest, and Preacher Sam actively demands to be taken to Brigham Young, so Emma decides to go along with it), and they find all of her weapons except her tiny derringer tucked away in her bodice.
There's a brief interlude in the cell, where the Nauvoo Legion brings in Doc Yates to heal up Sam Otis--we're to be perfectly healthy before we're killed for treason (btw, dark_towhead, was that a paraphrased The Princess Bride ref? I meant to ask you last night but got distracted). While he's treating Sam, he mentions that he heard Miz Waters down here, too. Em, assuming she's going to die before very long, looks into the box Eli had entrusted to her before he died, then asked Doc to bring it and news of Eli's death to Miz Waters. "I don't know if this will be much comfort to her, but you can tell her her boy died believin' in the Lord." Doc promises to do so, and manages to bully the guards into taking him to her as soon as he's done treating Sam.
A little while later, an imposing figure, backed by a man competently wielding a shotgun, comes into our wing of the prison. We get up, assuming it's time for our mock-trial, when we hear, "Miss Elizabeth! I thought I told you that I wanted to hear any further bad news about my son from you directly! And here, take this back." It's Miz Waters and Josiah (Eli's old deputy, also a Mormon, and an all-around good guy) here to rescue us. The preacher looks like he's about to balk (he wants a big, old public trial so he can speak to the masses), but then a few artillery shells hit the Temple. It's the special shells, the ones that contain the chemical compound that summons salt-rattlers (picture a cross between Dune's sandworms and the "graboids" from Tremors) and drives them into a frenzy. However did such a compound come into existence? Why, our own dear Sam Otis invented it. doompuppy did a lot of muttering about "being hoisted by his own petard" last night.
We all start running, Miz Waters and Em easily outrunning the others. They get out back with no difficulties, and are waiting by the rescue steamwagon. Josiah, Sam Otis, and the preacher are all much slower. They have to contend with rattlers, and as they're doing so, they stumble upon Brigham Young. Otis does have one moment of dazzling heroism. Brigham is actually a floor above them, but they can see him through some of the giant holes in the walls and floor. Josiah hoists them up into the room with Young, and as he does so, the floor falls from beneath him, into the maw of the biggest rattler anyone has ever seen. By a miracle of luck and die-rolling, Otis manages to catch Josiah before he follows the floor into the rattler. That was pretty keen.
In the room proper, the sight of Sam Otis is too much for Young to bear--he assumes that Otis is a traitor and has sent the rattlers to the Temple deliberately--and he kind of loses his mind--and his faith. Ignoring the rattlers, he swings the golden disk up and into Sam's head, ignoring the flesh that is now burning off of his palms. You can't touch holy objects if you're having a crisis of faith. Again, the preacher intercedes, preventing Young from killing Otis and manages to talk him down from his rage-high--by quoting from the Book of Mormon of all things. They take the disk from Young and try to hustle him away. A HUGE rattler comes through the wall and eats Young instead. Oops. Oh well, they have the disk.
They start running through the Temple, which is literally crumbling beneath their feet. They're within feet of the door, when dark_towhead demands a "pick-up-the-pace" roll. Both rolls fail, and the floor falls out from beneath them. Here, it is Josiah who manages to catch them both and fling them to safety--by sacrificing his own life. He falls into darkness, screaming in horror and agony. He was another NPC we really liked. Unfortunately, this leaves our boys trapped...IN A HOLE.
I don't think I ever blogged about our first encounter with A HOLE. Much earlier in the campaign, the preacher, Sam, and some NPC fell into a very deep hole after a battle with a baby salt-rattler. And between the four of us (hntrpyanfar was still playing then) we managed to consistently botch our rolls to get them out. Eventually, dark_towhead stopped assigning any other difficulty to get out other than, "don't botch." It still took us a good three or four tries after that to get them out of the hole. That may have been the night we laughed the hardest during game. So it was only fitting that we'd see another hole before the end--I'd been half-expecting one, actually. And, in true style, I managed to botch my rescue roll for them. I rolled my 3d6 strength, got two 1's and a 2. The Preacher has a miracle where he can give chips to other characters, so I got a white chip. All I had to do is roll a not-1, and I wouldn't botch. Guess what I rolled.
It wouldn't have been so bad if that same exact thing hadn't happened just a few hours before.
Of course, Miz Waters was there to be awesome. She knocked Em aside so she didn't fall into the hole, too, and snatched the disk. Hey--she's a Mormon and the widow of Joseph Smith--she's got priorities. With that extra burden gone, the preacher was able to drag himself and Otis up out of the hole. But there were a few times there when it was really touch-and-go. Especially since this was a strength-based test: both men have d4's for their strength, and both of them were injured. doompuppy was ready to accept Sam Otis's death by falling, but ddrpolaris's die exploded and, even with his minuses, managed to scrape up enough successes to haul them both up out of there. Heart-in-throat moment, let me tell you.
*We actually began the game heading towards Miz Water's house. We were going to rendezvous with Tecumseh, a Pinkerton agent, and he was going to help us shadowrun the orphanage and stop the bomb. We got there to find it filled with Nauvoo Legionnaires; Tecumseh was being tortured for information about his accomplices whereabouts by the General.
We'd tangled a bit with the General before. Most memorably, he sent an innocent man to the gallows back in the second big adventure of the game. That's the one incident we kick ourselves in the ass for the most--we had opportunities to save Mr. Utter, but we failed. I think his death was the first time I cried in game (though, as you all know, certainly not the last). The General also cost Eli his job as Sheriff, and destroyed almost all hope of peace with the Union by shooting the Union soldier who had come to talk under a flag of truce. The players and Preacher Sam are pretty sure he's possessed by the devil (the devil's a busy little beaver here in SLC), Emma just thinks he's a giant ass.
Now, I did not design Emily as a sneaky character. However, she is still the sneakiest of the bunch; sneaking and climbing fall under the nimbleness stat, which means that I'm rolling d10's. I'd also given her one point in lock picking, which is under deftness, which means I'm rolling a d12. So, even though I didn't try to make her sneaky, she's just naturally good at it (guns are deftness, which I made her primary stat, and fighting & dodge are nimbleness, which I made secondary). We can hear Tecumseh getting tortured, but we couldn't exactly go in, guns blazing, as 2 to 1 odds are not good to begin with. Add that to Sam Otis not being much of a fighter and the Preacher having a hang-up about shooting folks, and it suddenly becomes 6 to 1 odds. Since it was going to be that anyway, Em elected a quieter option.
She snuck around to the side of the house, climbed up some ivy to the second floor, and let herself into a window in a study. She was making her way down the hall when she heard footsteps heading her way, so she opened the nearest door and entered a room. It happened to belong to a very frightened young maid, who was staring wide-eyed at Em, or, more specifically, Em's guns which were pointed at her head. "Don't make any noise and we won't have a problem." Em finds out that the servants are NOT restricted to their quarters, and hatches a plan. She rents the maid's uniform (hands over $3 in case she doesn't get a chance to return the uniform), gets an idea of the layout of the house--specifically, servants' stairs, and grabs a blanket, which she carries in front of her. Nestled inside the blanket are her guns, of course. Interestingly enough, when Emma tells the maid who she is, the maid completely calms down. "Oh, I've heard of you!" "What have you heard?!" "It isn't my place to say, maam." I was temped to have Em shake the information out of the girl, but decided rescuing a friend was a bit higher on my priorities. Emily will be demanding answers from Miz Waters, though.
Anyway, Emily leaves the maid's room, and heads down the hall towards the servants' stairs. The guards in the hall don't pay her any mind, and she gets downstairs with no difficulty. The first guard she runs into gives her a hard time about her uniform (the maid was about 4 inches shorter than Emma), but she lies about not getting her laundry done in time. Since he's a lot more interested in her ankles than her conversation, he lets her pass without much opposition. She gets out to the front of the house, and sees most of the Nauvoo legion conspicuously avoiding looking at the room where the sounds of torture and agony are coming from. This is all to the good, since it means they're not paying too much attention to where she's going, and she manages to duck into the room without any of them being the wiser.
"We won't be needing your services," says the General before meeting her eyes. "You!"
"Me." Emma drops the blankets and aims her guns at him.
"Put those down or I'll kill him," the General threatens, waving his knife at Tecumseh.
"Sorry, Tecumseh, but I've been waitin' to kill this sonuvabitch for too long. You got any kin I should say goodbye to?" Her eyes remain locked with the General's.
At this point, dark_towhead and I roll for initiative. In Deadlands, you don't roll to see who goes first, you roll to see how many cards you draw. Then the Marshall counts down from aces to deuces, and you go on your card. Both of us drew queens--but my queen was the queen of hearts, the second-highest queen. The General drew a queen of spades. Spades beats hearts. I wince and prepare to say goodbye to another NPC. Then, in a moment of true dramatic suspense, dark_towhead reveals the Black Joker that he had also drawn--which meant he'd had to discard his highest card.
Leaving me holding the high card. AWESOME.
"This is for Bobby Utter."
I debate between aiming for his head, but decide that he might be better served as a hostage. The first shot hits him in the belly--for 30+ points of damage. This is the equivalent of five wounds; five wounds to a limb and it is detached. Five wounds to the guts or the head, and you are dead. Em would have auto-killed the General, except dark_towhead spent a white chip to avoid one wound. This would have left him alive (though incredibly wounded) but for one thing: Emma is two-fisted, which means she shoots two guns at a time. The second shot hits him in the belly again, doing a mere 10 points. That is a single wound, though, and dark_towhead had no intention of spending more chips on the General. Five wounds and he's down. His body bounces around a few times before falling into a bloody heap on Miz Water's parlor carpet. Em's gonna owe her a new one of those. Folks start rustling, deciding to come investigate, so Em turns and hisses "Scream!" Tecumsah obliges, and the rustling stops--they assume he's still getting tortured, and have no desire to interfere anymore than they have to.
"Babble!" she demands, "So they don't start wondering why the General ain't sayin' nothin'." As he does that, she checks the room that connects to the parlor, opens that room's window, then comes back in to cut Tecumseh free. Most of his toes are gone, so she helps him hobble into the other room, slides him feet-first out the window, and carry him back to the steamwagon where Sam Otis and the Preacher are waiting, all before anyone notices they're gone.
Win!
Unfortunately, I then botch my medicine roll on Tecumseh, and end up somehow snapping a bone out through his skin. Oops. But, y'know, other than that, Emma was pretty awesome.
So, that was our last game of Deadlands: intense, suspenseful, dramatic, heart-tugging, and ultimately joyful. Fabulous way to end a game.
*: This does not apply to angst-cookies, which are given freely and frequently.