Fiddler's Hollow

[Neal]

I ran this town last night, and it was a hit.  Only two players could make the game, but I had some other NPCs in mind to help them out if they needed it.  The Dogs got their butts handed to them in two very exciting conflicts, but they finally prevailed.  Here's the town...

Fiddler's Hollow Branch

1A. Pride -- Brother Jonas has been spending some time around a group of drovers passing through town, and he's grown envious of their freedom.  He's tasted a sup of whiskey, and he likes it.  He takes up drinking, and when his older brother, Bartholomew, counsels him to stop, he just hides his new habit.

1B. Injustice -- In order to keep drinking, Jonas is taking more than his share of the money he and his brother live on.  Bart notices this and confronts Jonas, but to no avail.

2A. Sin -- Finally, while the two are out alone on their land, Bart tells Jonas he's going to turn the matter of his drinking over to the Steward, something he should have done long ago.  The two argue, then scuffle.  Bart falls into the pond and strikes his head.  Jonas, already somewhat drunk and scared, watches his brother die.  It was an accident.  But instead of making a clean breast of it, he conceals the evidence.  He sinks Bart's body in the frog pond, buries his belongings out near the barn, and even pays a traveling tinker to mail a letter from another branch, to make it seem as though Bart left town.

2B. Demons Attack -- The women of the town seem to grow more shrill and nagging.  The men have trouble controlling their tempers.  All the men want someone to shut up.  All the women want to be heard.
     Little Brother Aaron, caught smoking by his younger sister, pushes her down a well when she threatens to tell on him.
     The branch Steward, Brother Isaac, begins turning away women with petty problems, complaining of being "kicked to death by crickets."
     Brother Nahum, the mousey little man who runs the dry-goods store, horsewhips his shrewish wife, Sister Elsa, and locks her in the root cellar "until she learns stillness and submission."
     All the while, a veritable plague of frogs has descended on the town, raising a chorus at night and creating a godawful stench in the streets.  They're getting into carriages, plopping fatly along sidewalks, and even finding their way into babies' cribs.  It's noisy.  It's filthy.  It's enough to make you furious.

3A. False Doctrine -- Brother Nahum was shocked at himself when he whipped Elsa, but was it really so bad?  Isn't a man the lord of his home?  Isn't it his job to discipline his wife?  And if Elsa had wanted to avoid her just punishment, all she'd have to do is shut up once in a while and show some respect.  At last, Nahum feels he's the one wearing the pants around the house.  With Elsa down in the root cellar, he is free to be a man.  He feels liberated and justified.

3B. Corrupt Worship -- Nahum feels so good about his enriched manhood that he talks with some of the other long-suffering husbands in the town.  Some of them are uncertain, but Brother Daniel, the carpenter, and Brother Esau, the clerk, feel Nahum has something here.  Maybe they haven't been doing their full duties as husbands and heads of households.  In fact, they've been subjects of a petticoat government for far too long.  The Book of Life clearly ascribes roles for the husband and the wife, and it's about time those roles were enforced.  To the letter.  Brother Nathaniel, the big farrier, questions the wisdom of Brother Nahum's ways, but he is ostracized, and the men of Nahum's circle begin to make plans for change.

[The frogs have gotten more numerous.  There are fat bullfrogs the size of pudgy housecats, and they just sit there in the sun, watching everyone, croaking their loud criticisms.  Or they get flattened in the streets.  A person has to watch his step around here, and more than one horse has already slipped and fallen when it stepped on a big frog in the street.]

4A. False Priesthood -- Brother Nahum and his closest friends know there's something going on here.  Perhaps it's the King of Life, visiting a biblical plague on this benighted town for its softness and failure to enforce gender roles.  Or perhaps, thinks Nahum, it's something else entirely.  Either way, he relishes his newfound power.  He forms a small cult with Brothers Esau and Daniel, and they begin trying to recruit the other men with the promise that solidarity among the men is the only way to keep these nattering, chattering women quiet.

4B. Sorcery -- Brother Nahum makes good on a promise to two other men.  Brother Daniel's wife, Sister Annabel, steps on a rusty nail and contracts lockjaw.  She's laid up at the doctor's place, her face a rictus grin of agony, her back arched so sharply it creaks like ship timbers whenever she hears a noise.  And Sister Eliza, wife of Brother Esau, begins to lose her voice.  Doc says she has a tumor in her throat.

5. Skipped...

6A. The People:
     Brother Jonas wants the Dogs to believe his brother has left town.  When they hand out the mail, he'll make a big deal about getting a letter from his brother.  He wants to be left alone with his whiskey and his shame.
     Little Brother Aaron is contrite.  He wants his sister, Charity, to get better.  When he pushed her down the well, she almost died.  He's sorry about what he did.  He is also still smoking on the sly, trading his mother's silverware to some laborers for tobacco.
     Brother Nahum wants the Dogs to declare his cult justified.  How could they not?  A man has a right to a submissive and quiet wife, and sometimes me must bear a firm hand to secure that right.  Failing this, he wants the Dogs to leave him alone.
     Brother Esau is having misgivings, but he's in this thing up to his neck.  If the Dogs can help his wife, perhaps he'll turn against the cult.  He wants some clarification, too, about the line between disciplining a wife and hurting her.  It's gotten a little blurry for him.
     Brother Nathaniel wants the cult stopped.  He's tired of these swaggering roosters striding around, lecturing other men about how to see to their wives.  He's especially tired of Brother Nahum, that jumped-up mouse in human skin, always strutting around in his shiny green waistcoat with that big bullwhip at his hip.  If something isn't done to take the wind out of these men's sails, Nathaniel is going to have to do something himself, and it won't be pretty.
     Sister Editha wants the Dogs to force the Steward to listen to her complaints about the work on her fence.  The laborer said he would return tomorrow, but that was two days ago, and anyway, the fencepoles on the south lawn aren't in straight enough, and there's a big gap on the east side where the workers fenced around a hole in the ground, and she's getting really upset with all these delays, and can't these men use a little soap if they're going to visit a lady's house, and the frogs have gotten into the butter again, and when is she going to get that catalog she ordered from back east, and...
     Sister Harriet wants the Dogs to do something about the frogs and the noisy neighbors and her shiftless husband.  He just sits around the house saying he has a headache, but he always has a headache when there's work to be done, and she thought she was marrying a man and not a little boy who had to be mothered all the time, and if she'd known it was going to be this much work raising children and a husband both, she might not have gotten married at all, and...
     Sister Grace wants the Dogs to punish Brother Nahum for locking his wife away.  Elsa is Grace's best friend, and that man had no right to do what he did, even if he is her husband, and everyone complains about Elsa's temper and the way she treats her husband, but isn't a woman allowed to make a few observations once in a while, and if she can't be heard by her husband, shouldn't she go to her friends, when after all wrong is wrong, and someone's got to say something when someone's doing something wrong, and if they want to call that gossip or shrewishness or whatever, that's just men talking, trying to pretend they have the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and women can't say anything about it, but it's not going to be that way anymore...
     Brother Isaac, the Steward, wants the Dogs to help him make all these chattering women shut up before he goes insane.

6B. The Demons...
     They want Brother Nahum's cult to grow in power, its numbers swelling and its methods sliding more and more toward the perverse and injurious.  Why silence a woman for now, when you can silence her entirely?  And why punish only the wife, when the husband's weakness is the real problem?
     They actually want the Dogs to help the steward.  A new steward would be an unpredictable element, and the one here now is overwhelmed, which is just how they like it.  Beside, if the Dogs take over some of the steward's responsibilities, then they're paying less attention to the cult and more attention to the shrill women.
     More than anything, they want the Dogs to sympathize with the husbands.  They want the women's complaints and questions to rain down on the Dogs night and day, until the Dogs begin to agree with the men just enough to leave them alone.

6C. If the Dogs Never Came...
Brother Nahum's cult will eventually turn to a more perverse and hateful doctrine, one which arrogates to the "real" men the right to discipline and punish all women.  Nahum will introduce a humiliating and deadly charivari, dressing the "weak" men of the town in petticoats and horsewhipping them in the town square.  Bloodshed and oppression follow.  Finally, the men of the cult will turn on one another, doctrinal quibbles and flare-ups of pride tearing apart their cohesion until murder finishes the demons' work and drags the whole town to hell.


I ran this town last night, and as I said, the Dogs got their butts handed to them a couple of times (once by the branch steward himself), but they finally managed to stop the cult in a violent shootout in the streets outside the dry-goods store.  The head of the cult turned out to be far tougher than I'd expected him to be, but I didn't pull any punches, and just as the rulebook said, it was all for the best.  Brother Daniel ended up a vessel for demonic possession (and wow, was that cool!); Brother Nahum was subdued in the streets and strung up by the women of the town; and Nahum's wife was rescued, only to die in the final conflict when one of the players (nearly out of dice) brought her into play to Block or Dodge a shotgun blast by Nahum.  I didn't see that last one coming, and I was very impressed.  The PCs got the aid of Brother Nathaniel, the big farrier, who ended up carrying one of the Dogs across town to the doctor's place after the final battle.  Both Dogs were hurt badly enough to require medical attention at different points, and both will probably spend some time convalescing -- preferably in a town without frogs.

Running Fiddler's Hollow, the first town I've run in DitV, gave me a real sense of how the mechanics work in play.  If I was impressed before, I'm doubly so now.  I had to keep reminding my players of the freedoms they enjoyed under this system, but I suspect that's going to be the case anytime someone comes to DitV from a more d20-style system, where actions are tightly constrained.  Other than that, though, the session went quite well.

Oh, and Brother Jonas, the spark who lit this fire, was spared.  One of the Dogs exiled him from the branch, never to return, but they stopped short of killing him.

[Mark Woodhouse]

I have very little else to say except that Fiddler's Hollow is a heck of a town, and I intend to *yoink* it at my earliest opportunity. This game really delivers.