Character: Captain Henry Edward Mission
Jun. 22nd, 2004 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberWe join our hero, Captain Mission, returning home after an evening spent saving Abilene from burning down after a mob screwed up their attempt to smoke out a were-coyote. In the morning, he plans to get together with the other protectors of the town and track the blood trail left by the critter; as such, he's borrowed a pair of hounds. The hounds are actin' mighty uneasy as they approach his house.
"Susan?" he calls with trepidation.
"You'll wake the baby--" his wife replies through the door, interrupted with "Mwaaaa! Mwaaaa! Mwaaa!" joined by the hounds "Howoooooo! Howooooo!"
She hushes the baby, he quiets the hounds, and they discuss the situation. He checks the house to make sure it's clear, and she prevails on him to get his friends before looking through the caves where they hangar their airship. She closes herself up in the house again, and covers over the baby's ears, but even so:
"Boom!" goes the rifleshot, to be heard in town.
"Mwaaaaa! Mwaaaaa! Mwaaaaa!"
"Howoooooo! Howoooooo!"
And Captain Misson, who helped win the Civil War, who's bested zombies and cultists and firebreathing badger-frogs, puts his head in his hands and quietly groans...
I'm getting to really love Deadlands. It's a sort of Steampunk/Old West/Horror game; got a picture of a skeleton in a duster with a six-gun on the cover. I love the entrepreneurial spirit, the feeling that you can go anywhere in the US and you'll find weird stuff. I love the mechanics... It uses every die from d4 to d12, with a bit of d20, in great wads, with playing cards to boot. I love the trimmings of the setting: Saloons, gunfights, poker games, railroads, airships...
First time my ftf group ran it, I listened to the description, and said, "So, are there airships?" And then I did what was necessary to make a guy who owned an airship, and it turned out really neat. See, the South won the Civil War because when "ghost rock," which fuels weird contraptions, began turning up, they quickly grabbed onto it, inventing (for one thing) airships. To own an airship, I pretty much would have to be a Confederate, but I needed a reason to not be in the army anymore... And also, I didn't really have the points to be able to both run and fix the airship. So I got a wife as a sidekick... Hee. A Northern lady, mechanically inclined. Très romantic.
So we have Captain Henry Edward Mission (named after one of the exits off 880 on the way to gaming) and his wife, Susan... Mission was from wealth, but was cheated out of the bulk of his inheritance by his 1 point enemy brother while he was away at war... Took what was left to him, put pretty much all of it into buying his way out of the army with the airship, and came out West.
Mission lucked out when it came to character creation, getting two stats where he rolled d12s, and mostly high dice for the rest. There was, however, one stat that would have to be represented by a 1d4... And I figured it was Smarts, which covers things like Ridicule and Gamblin'. Mission: good leader, courageous, very observant, can't be lied to or conned... But not the brightest object in the sky. I think of him as a good-natured decent county squire sort. Fortunately, he's married, and Susan is the brains of their operation. I really love the way that relationship worked out...
Last time our group played Deadlands, I'd lost his character sheet in a stack on my desk, so I figured he'd missed that session because he'd just had a baby. On the way down to gaming I decided that the baby was a girl, since then I wouldn't have to think about whether it'd be a Junior, and hopefully it would inherit Susan's cleverness...
But I realized I was seriously lacking for names of the 1870s. I mean, "Mary" works for all eras, but it didn't set me alight. Canvassing the rest of the group didn't catch anything... Next step:
I was kind of distressesed that I couldn't name a single one of the women who pried suffrage out of Wilson's cold ivory fingers.
Fortunately for baby purposes, Jeff (who GMs Deadlands) hit on the name "Nellie," which I liked a lot, and which sounded right.
Back to the Deadlands: The best sound effect moment of the evening was probably when the airship got cut free of its moorings, with Our Heroes aboard, and a wounded were-coyote hiding in the engine room. Mission had no desire to shoot up the complex mechanism, with the wounded critter thrashing around and breaking even more stuff he couldn't fix... But having the ship floating around in the cave-hangar running into things wasn't any good, and the chance of the critter jumping ship and going after his family was to terrible to contemplate. So he drops down just inside the engine room, covered by the sharpshooter, to flip the three big Frankenstinian switches to start the ship up...
Choonk. Choonk. Choonk. uuuuvvvvVVVVVMMMM....
Returns to the bridge, throws the ship into forward motion, and starts it out of the cave. I hadn't realized, but it's apparently pretty deafening. There's the engine: Whoog whoog whoog whoog.
And then there's the ghost rock, which wails as it burns: HOWoooooooHowwl...
And then there's the hounds, tied up on the ground: Howoooooo! Howoooooo!
And then there's the baby. Mwaaaa! Mwaaaa! Mwaaa! Mwaaa!
Quite a send-off. Heh.
Eventually, it came down to fighting the were-coyote in the cabin, far out above the desert somewhere, in which scuffle Mission was participating with gusto until he realized that if it ever hit him no one else would be able to fly the ship... (Clever ain't his strong suit.) (Brave is, though; he just switched from the rifle to the saber, the better to defend himself.)
They capture the critter and bring it back to town in the morning, human again.
Which was a really neat experience... Advancement. I mean, it's been years since I've had a character where advancement was something that happened. Could be I never have had such a character... I mean, Amber, you're eternal, why advance? And most other games I haven't played for long stretches. It's so neat to see someone you like get better and more useful in the game.
I was particularly happy with this because I was able to buy off "Intolerant to Blacks." When I built Mission, I figured it was necessary for the character... I mean, he was a high-society Confederate officer from Georgia! But it was incredibly embarrassing to play, and Bernie wouldn't shut up about the mocking of it. I guess I can see his point. Good people who do one thoroughly rotten thing... No longer, really, good people.
But advancement can cure that. Mwa-ha!
(That evening, my mind finally hunted down the name of Margaret Sanger, and Monday the web hunted down the names of Carrie Nation and Nelly Bly.)
"Susan?" he calls with trepidation.
"You'll wake the baby--" his wife replies through the door, interrupted with "Mwaaaa! Mwaaaa! Mwaaa!" joined by the hounds "Howoooooo! Howooooo!"
She hushes the baby, he quiets the hounds, and they discuss the situation. He checks the house to make sure it's clear, and she prevails on him to get his friends before looking through the caves where they hangar their airship. She closes herself up in the house again, and covers over the baby's ears, but even so:
"Boom!" goes the rifleshot, to be heard in town.
"Mwaaaaa! Mwaaaaa! Mwaaaaa!"
"Howoooooo! Howoooooo!"
And Captain Misson, who helped win the Civil War, who's bested zombies and cultists and firebreathing badger-frogs, puts his head in his hands and quietly groans...
I'm getting to really love Deadlands. It's a sort of Steampunk/Old West/Horror game; got a picture of a skeleton in a duster with a six-gun on the cover. I love the entrepreneurial spirit, the feeling that you can go anywhere in the US and you'll find weird stuff. I love the mechanics... It uses every die from d4 to d12, with a bit of d20, in great wads, with playing cards to boot. I love the trimmings of the setting: Saloons, gunfights, poker games, railroads, airships...
First time my ftf group ran it, I listened to the description, and said, "So, are there airships?" And then I did what was necessary to make a guy who owned an airship, and it turned out really neat. See, the South won the Civil War because when "ghost rock," which fuels weird contraptions, began turning up, they quickly grabbed onto it, inventing (for one thing) airships. To own an airship, I pretty much would have to be a Confederate, but I needed a reason to not be in the army anymore... And also, I didn't really have the points to be able to both run and fix the airship. So I got a wife as a sidekick... Hee. A Northern lady, mechanically inclined. Très romantic.
So we have Captain Henry Edward Mission (named after one of the exits off 880 on the way to gaming) and his wife, Susan... Mission was from wealth, but was cheated out of the bulk of his inheritance by his 1 point enemy brother while he was away at war... Took what was left to him, put pretty much all of it into buying his way out of the army with the airship, and came out West.
Mission lucked out when it came to character creation, getting two stats where he rolled d12s, and mostly high dice for the rest. There was, however, one stat that would have to be represented by a 1d4... And I figured it was Smarts, which covers things like Ridicule and Gamblin'. Mission: good leader, courageous, very observant, can't be lied to or conned... But not the brightest object in the sky. I think of him as a good-natured decent county squire sort. Fortunately, he's married, and Susan is the brains of their operation. I really love the way that relationship worked out...
Last time our group played Deadlands, I'd lost his character sheet in a stack on my desk, so I figured he'd missed that session because he'd just had a baby. On the way down to gaming I decided that the baby was a girl, since then I wouldn't have to think about whether it'd be a Junior, and hopefully it would inherit Susan's cleverness...
But I realized I was seriously lacking for names of the 1870s. I mean, "Mary" works for all eras, but it didn't set me alight. Canvassing the rest of the group didn't catch anything... Next step:
Me: "So, all those women at the turn of the century who worked for suffrage and temperance, they must have been born around now... What was that one, first one who really talked about contraception, founded Planned Parenthood...?"I was at a loss. The one who carried around a hatchet and chopped down apple trees for temperance? The one who got herself committed to a nuthouse so she could report accurately on the conditions?
I was kind of distressesed that I couldn't name a single one of the women who pried suffrage out of Wilson's cold ivory fingers.
Fortunately for baby purposes, Jeff (who GMs Deadlands) hit on the name "Nellie," which I liked a lot, and which sounded right.
Back to the Deadlands: The best sound effect moment of the evening was probably when the airship got cut free of its moorings, with Our Heroes aboard, and a wounded were-coyote hiding in the engine room. Mission had no desire to shoot up the complex mechanism, with the wounded critter thrashing around and breaking even more stuff he couldn't fix... But having the ship floating around in the cave-hangar running into things wasn't any good, and the chance of the critter jumping ship and going after his family was to terrible to contemplate. So he drops down just inside the engine room, covered by the sharpshooter, to flip the three big Frankenstinian switches to start the ship up...
Choonk. Choonk. Choonk. uuuuvvvvVVVVVMMMM....
Returns to the bridge, throws the ship into forward motion, and starts it out of the cave. I hadn't realized, but it's apparently pretty deafening. There's the engine: Whoog whoog whoog whoog.
And then there's the ghost rock, which wails as it burns: HOWoooooooHowwl...
And then there's the hounds, tied up on the ground: Howoooooo! Howoooooo!
And then there's the baby. Mwaaaa! Mwaaaa! Mwaaa! Mwaaa!
Quite a send-off. Heh.
Eventually, it came down to fighting the were-coyote in the cabin, far out above the desert somewhere, in which scuffle Mission was participating with gusto until he realized that if it ever hit him no one else would be able to fly the ship... (Clever ain't his strong suit.) (Brave is, though; he just switched from the rifle to the saber, the better to defend himself.)
They capture the critter and bring it back to town in the morning, human again.
Me: Whoog whoog whoog whoog HOWoooooooHowwl...The adventure wrapped up with a couple hangings, we told the tale, everyone was happy, and for that matter, rich in XP, since we'd managed to take down the critter without much danger to ourselves.
Jeff: You really like doing the airship sound effects, don't you?
Me: What's the point in having an airship if you can't do the sound
effects?
Which was a really neat experience... Advancement. I mean, it's been years since I've had a character where advancement was something that happened. Could be I never have had such a character... I mean, Amber, you're eternal, why advance? And most other games I haven't played for long stretches. It's so neat to see someone you like get better and more useful in the game.
I was particularly happy with this because I was able to buy off "Intolerant to Blacks." When I built Mission, I figured it was necessary for the character... I mean, he was a high-society Confederate officer from Georgia! But it was incredibly embarrassing to play, and Bernie wouldn't shut up about the mocking of it. I guess I can see his point. Good people who do one thoroughly rotten thing... No longer, really, good people.
But advancement can cure that. Mwa-ha!
(That evening, my mind finally hunted down the name of Margaret Sanger, and Monday the web hunted down the names of Carrie Nation and Nelly Bly.)