[Dogs in the Vineyard] Chinese immigrants from Out West
Paul T:
Quote from: Ry on April 11, 2010, 05:44:38 PM
As for Serge = Jasper, Mo's post on Sin Aesthetics is very illuminating.
...and he sure showed that. Jasper's one hell of a tough dude!
Paul T:
We just wrapped up the game. Things definitely improved as we went along and had a chance to develop the characters and their personalities as well as get used to the way this particular group approached the mechanics. Here's how it went down:
I planned to make a much more "aggressive" town, with much more hate and murder (and sorcery!). But, really, looking back, all I did
differently was give a bunch of the NPCs guns. They were just carrying them around, mind you--the Dogs ALWAYS drew first! I didn't have to do
any aggressive scene framing or any kind of "the possessed dude attacks you with an axe in the middle of the night!" It got all crazy
anyway.
(Oh, I had a lot of the people in the Town spit on the ground to underline strong statements. That might have done it, too! But one of
the players took it and ran with it, look:)
One of the Dogs was from this Town, and after a while we had a scene where he was in his father's home, sharing some food in his own home.
At a particularly emotional point in the conversation (see, he and his dad had committed the same sin--killing a Mountain Person and
considering it justified) he said, "Dad, if I weren't in your home, I'd spit on the ground!" That was classic.
It helped that every PC had something pretty intense at stake in the Town. And it was all stuff they wrote themselves, in their character
concepts/backgrounds.
One Dog met a former enemy--a woodsman who had abandoned him to die years ago. The woodsman was now a sort of "enforcer", hired by the
Territorial Authority to keep the peace in the Town, and was actually totally blameless on the Town's sin ladder front. Of course, the Dog
killed him the very moment he showed up, anyway (but the woodsman tore up his wrist with his teeth in the fight!).
A second Dog had slept with a young girl just before leaving for Bridal Falls--and while he was gone, it was discovered, she was found to be pregnant, and so she fled home and came to this Town, where the Steward (another Dog's father) put her up. Of course, you can imagine what the people in the Town thought, as this young girl living with the Steward (who was already not highly respected in the Town) starting visibly "showing" a few months after she arrived...
She was the sorceress in the Town, and we had a great conflict where her "boyfriend" convinced her that she was not Dog material. In the conflict, she Gave, but revealed that she was pregnant with his son, and that it was why she was in this Town and separated from her family in the first place. The other players noted, "You know, you won that conflict as far as the dice are concerned... but really, she won that one."
The third Dog was confronted with the Steward, a drunk (just like his own father) who was "employing" a small family to help him on his farm. But he was also giving the man of that family alcohol to keep him from complaining about his shitty work or asking for a better deal. That drunk was a man who had stabbed the Dog many years ago over the rape of his own wife, and was now looking for forgiveness. I'd decided to give him "possession" dice any time he was drunk, which I think clouded the supernatural issue nicely: is he possessed by a demon, or is he just a violent drunk?
The fourth Dog was the Steward's son, and his deal was that he had killed a Mountain Person, and thought no one knew. However, in his writeup he said something like, "I can't imagine how my father couldn't have noticed that the rifle wasn't loaded the next day after the shooting, but he never said anything to me." So, in my Town
write-up I had his father kill a Mountain Person and blame the current Steward for his death. He called in the Territorial Authority and had him strung up, which allowed him to take over the Steward's role. This bit of information also came out in the final confrontation in the middle of the Town.
There was shooting and fighting and in the end they all stood staring at each other, blame and guilt in everyone's eyes.
One of the Dogs, though, was bleeding to death. He had fought with the drunk in order to keep him from shouting out (he wanted the pregnant girl to be the Steward of the Town!), and had to kill him in order to win the Stakes--but also was wounded mortally in the process, his face scraped off by the enraged farmer.
We ended with a great little monologue from the dying Dog's player.
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