Deadlands Reloaded - Boarding the Train
After a longer than usual summer hiatus we've started our new campaign. This time I'm indulging a long hedged desire to try the Western genre, so we're using Savage Worlds and Deadlands Reloaded as our system and setting of choice. It's time to saddle up and head out into the Weird West!
The Posse
The following heroes have been created to face the dangers and horrors of the Great Northwest. I'm using the Trail Guide: The Great Northwest as the basis for the game, because I'm a fan of the Pacific Northwest and I quite like the included mini Plot Point campaign.
Antonia "Toni" Morani is a young and ambitious Chicago muckraker who's stirred up so much dirt on meat packing entrepreneur Pierpont Mauler and his connections to the political machine, that she decided a change of scenery was good for her health.
Tyler W. Thorne (W is for Washington) is also on the run - perhaps hunted by more dangerous people. An ex-recruit of the Agency, he stumbled upon a secret he was not meant to know and has been fleeing from his former colleagues ever since. The Pacific Northwest seems to be just the out-of-the-way corner of the country where he can lie low for a while.
Gustav Adolf "Gus" Boll has just arrived in the new world as an evangelist missionary. He's eager, enthusiastic, friendly, and completely clueless. He's on his way to spread the word of God among the heathens of the Northwest. So far his frequent inquiries of "Do you know Ingelheim?" haven't produced anyone able to chat with about his beloved little hometown.
Jack "Hunter" Torrance is another fugitive boarding the train to Seattle, a bounty hunter who's hunted the wrong bounty and been framed with a murder he hasn't committed. The murder he DID commit didn't help the issue either.
The Huckster With No Name remained on the sidelines for now, as his player couldn't make it for the first session.
Opening Scene - Iron Dragon Station
We started off with the beginning of a journey - or the beginning of many journeys in fact - as the heroes all came to Chicago's Iron Dragon Station to board the Transcontinental train to Seattle. Gus helped out a twelve-year boy trying to buy a ticket by claiming he was his guardian and blithely ignored the fact that this unaccompanied orphan boy just forked over $80 without so much as blinking.
No big surprise then that shortly thereafter an angry Chinese "gentleman" by the name of "Toothless Wu" showed up and demanded the surrender of little "Chris" and his purse of $100. As he didn't settle for "No" or "Call the Police" a scuffle broke out between Wu and his five henchmen on one side and Gus and Hunter on the other. Before long the brawl turned ugly (and bloody) when Wu's henchmen produced knifes and clubs and Wu himself proved a fairly accomplished martial artist.
Toni and Tyler would have gotten involved too, if a mysterious assailant hadn't attacked Toni and the ex-Agent felt required to intervene. The gunman - who latter turned our to be an assassin hired by "Boss" Mauler to silence the pesky muckraker for good - proved to be a deadly shot who was repeatedly foiled by bad luck (two Adventure cards where played to cancel his exploding d10 Shooting rolls).
So while Gus put down Toothless Wu, Hunter rescued the boy Chris from being kidnapped. Toni and Tyler struggled to put down the shootist until he finally fled the hall after his gun malfunctioned. The Chicago police arrived late on the scene and put the whole incident down to a failed robbery attempt by a Chinese criminal gang. Tyler had to flash his - illegal - Agency badge to get Toni's photo plates back which were being confiscated as evidence.
First encounter with the West
Finally on board the train and steaming out of Chicago the group learned that Chris hat indeed stolen the money for his ticket from Toothless Wu. But it had been intended to buy the boy from his foster parents, and Chris was now determined to to head west and find his own people, the Klickitat, from whom he'd been taken as a baby and placed in a white man's orphanage.
During an overnight stop at Bismarck Junction Tyler took a closer look at the train because some kind of strange new-fangled freight cars hat caught his eye. He learned that they were supposedly refrigeration cars used to transport beef out to the west coast because of food shortages there. This seemed a really absurd idea to him.
A short distance beyond Bismarck Junction the train entered the Sioux Nation territory and was stopped by an Sioux war party which settled down for some kind of negotiation with Iron Dragon officials. A few of the bored younger braves started showing off, rode back and forth along the train whooping and hollering war cries and made fake attacks on the train. Gus tried to impress them with a rousing hymn on his harmonium (yes, he's lugging a harmonium along), which only served to incite them further. As the train passengers grew more nervous a shot was fired, felling one brave from his horse.
Only Gus' quick and brave intervention prevented a full-scale battle to break out, as he strode towards the badly injured warrior and healed him with a miracle. Still angry and suspicious but also impressed and somewhat mollified, the Indians retreated and let the train resume its journey.
Technical Details
I ran the encounter in the railways station on a self-made battlemat with miniatures and the Sioux encounter more loosely. Both worked equally well. The first combat was set up to test the rules and get a feeling for what kind of opposition I can throw at the player characters. I already hit a pretty sweet spot. Toothless Wu was a minor wild card, but actually proved less of a challenge than the shootist (a modified veteran gunman, but not a wild card). The Adventure Deck worked very nicely, saving the PCs from two extremely lucky high-rolls on my part. One of those might well have resulted in a very early PC death.
Using miniatures is rare for our group and we'll see how often we'll actually break out the battlemat. So far it's been fun. Unfortunately another break is coming up due to vacations and Spiel in Essen. The next session will probably be in late October.