[DitV] The Sleepwell Canyon Branch

[jburneko]

Hello All,

So here's a complete writeup for the first town my new Dogs group has been through.

Town: The Sleepwell Canyon Branch

Pride:
Brother Derrick thinks his daughter, Sister Waitstill, is too good to marry any of the local men.
Injustice:
All the elegable suitors (and Brother Derrick) dote on Sister Waitstill and Sister Waitstill's sister Sister Honora gets neglected.

Sin:
For attention, and to torment her sister, Sister Honora starts sleeping around with Sister Waitstill's suitors.
Demonic Attacks:
Bandits kidnap Sister Bedelia, Brother Newton's wife.

False Doctrine:
Sister Honora believes that her sexuality should be used to ease the frustrations of men.
Corrupt Worship
Sister Honora seduces Brother Newton, and performs a divorcing ritual to divest him of responsibility for Sister Bedelia.

The PCs:
Sister Willa, played by my wife, Meghann.
Brother Caleb, played by Matt.
Brother Narcisses, played by Tyler.

The Outcome:

Upon arriving in the town, The Steward informs The Dogs about Sister Bedelia's kidnapping and also warns them about Brother Derrick going on about how anyday now his daughter, Sister Waitstill, is going to be chosen to join The Dogs.

The Dogs decide that Sister Bedelia's kidnapping is the more pressing issue and ride out to Brother Newton's farm.  I really like the image I came up with for Brother Newton's house.  I described it as leaning slightly to one side and creaking in the wind.  The Dogs discovered that all the wood had gone rotten.

Turns out, Brother Newton, is suffering from a bit of possession and this starts a chain of conflicts involving Brother Newton.

Conflict 1: Subdue Brother Newton.
Conflict 2: Kill Brother Newton -- This was instigated by Tyler who envisioned his character caught up in the moment of the previous conflict and decided to push through past trying to subdue Brother Newton straight on to just killing him.  The other two Dogs stopped him.
Conflict 3: Cast the Demon out of Brother Newton. 
Conflict 4: Convince Brother Newton to help look for his wife.  It was during this conflict that the divorcing ritual and Sister Honora's actions came to light.  So, although The Dogs succeeded it was clear that Brother Newton was coming along because "The Dogs are asking me to," and not out of any sense of obligation or responsibilty to his wife.
Conflict 5: Get Brother Newton to repent and reclaim responsibility for his wife.  This also succeeded.

Now this is the point where, I think, we as a group, moved from, "Learning the System" to "Kicking it into High Gear."  Because some very interesting things happened.

As a result of Conflict 5 above Sister Willa had some short term fallout and Meghann just decided to have her character leave the scene since Brother Newton's utter disrespect for his wife, throughout the conflict kind of sickened Willa.  The idea was that she was going to go talk to Honora while Caleb, Narcisses and Newton go track down the bandits who kidnapped Sister Bedelia.  We decided to do the bandit confrontation first.

Caleb and Narcisses found the bandits basically torturing Sister Bedelia by forcing her to drink alcohol.  Needless to say things got ugly fast.  This was also the point at which I first broke out the "group" rules and I quite enjoyed watching the horror on Matt and Tyler's face as I piled in the extra Stat dice, the extra Trait dice and the fist full o' gun dice that represented the bandit gang.  This was serious and everyone knew it just from the piles of dice on the table.  The result was a very exciting action sequence involving both fist fights and gunplay.  Two particular moments stick out in my mind.

Of the group, Tyler is the flashiest narrator.  Narcisses's coat is black and white and sown into the interiors are the Comedy and Tragedy masks.  The tragedy mask is on the same side as his gun holster, so it gets revealed whenever he has to draw his gun, which is made of silver by the way.  At one point during the battle I believe he had an opportunity to Reverse the Blow on a gunshot by the bandit leader.  So what he narrated was that he was dodging out of the way as pulled out and threw The Book of Life boomerang like in retaliation.

When the battle was over and I rolled a pile of fallout dice and it turned out that the bandit leader was dying.  The only one who wanted to save him was Narcisses.  So my first raise on that conflict was revealing that the most severe wound was the deep gash in his throat made by the flying Book of Life.  Nice look on Tyler's face for that one.  An amusing moment came when Tyler realized that he was down to the Trait, "Cries at inappropriate times," on his sheet and he just said, "Unforuntately, crying would be exrtemely appropriate."  Sadly, Eduardo, the bandit leader is no longer with us.

The second significant moment from this battle was when one of the bandits was beating the crap out of Caleb and dice were looking pretty thin on the PCs side of the table.  Meghann asked if Willa could join the conflict.  I explained how you can't come in full swing mid conflict but that you can come in as an inprovised prop to help out, she thought this was a good idea.  So Matt used her ridding out of the darkness on her horse and shooting at the guy who was on him as a Raise and rolled in her, her gun and her horse dice.  I decided to Take The Blow and narrated the guy getting shot.

When I did that I had totally forgotten about Willa's Trait, "I'm a terrible shot."  Meghann has latched onto this moment as a very significant turning point for her character.  She's decided that The King of Life must have guided her hand to save this man Caleb.  As part of her fallout she took a Relationship with Caleb.

That momentum rolled into a scene between Willa and Caleb that paralled Narcisses trying to save Eduardo.  Caleb has a Relationship with the Sin, "Drinking."  After the battle he went off into the woods to have a drink.  Meghann and Matt agreed that it might be interesting to have Willa discover Caleb and what ensued was a very interesting and intense dialogue on the nature of sin and the role of being judges.  The thing about that scene was that we didn't use the rules to resolve anything, but on reflection I think that's probably because there wasn't an actual conflict *between* the characters.  Inner conflicts, abounded, I'm sure.  The scene was about the two characters coming to an understanding about their positions, which will more than likely be fuel for a future conflict.

At this point Meghann described how Willa was coming back to the bandit camp to check on Sister Bedelia and fill her in on all the horrible things Brother Newton has been up to while she's been gone.  Now, moments before, Brother Newton and Narcisses had just come to understanding that because Brother Newton has truly repented there was no need to drag Sister Bedelia into his crimes.  So at this momment I thought, "CONFLICT!"  Because there's no way Brother Newton is going to stand for what Willa was doing.  This was interesting because we had trouble setting the stakes.  "Brother Newton prevents Willa from talking to Sister Bedelia" felt boring.  Tyler suggested that the stakes be, "Is Brother Newton and Sister Bedelia's marriage harmed?"  We liked that.  This was most interesting because Willa and Caleb weren't actively trying to make that happen, but we agreed that if they had the most influence on the conflict, that would be the outcome.  Narcisses and Newton won the conflict and Newton and Bedelia reconciled their love. Awwwww.

The next day The Dogs discover three young men fighting in the streets with The Steward trying to break up the fight.  They jump in and assist and The Steward explains that these are the suitors who want to marry Sister Waitstill.  The Dogs decide this warrents some attention and take everyone over to Brother Derrick's house.  They practically ignore Brother Derrick's prattling about The Dogs finally coming to take his daughter to the temple and move straight to speaking with Waitstill alone.

Waitstill explains how she doesn't really want to be a Dog but also explains how her sister has "ruined" all her suitors.  They press her a little harder and Waitstill reveals that she's very sweet on Brother Augustus and that she feels that he's a good man and would be willing to look past his indiscression.  Interesting point: The players never confront Brother Augustus about this.  They just took Waitstill's word for it.

Now comes the confrontation with Brother Derrick.  This was very emotional and involved Brother Derrick throwing furniture around and crying, and carrying on about how all his effort has been "wasted."  But he caves and agrees that Waitstill should marry Augustus.

Now that they've undone the damage The Dogs decide it's time to deal with Sister Honora.  They find her at the general store flirting with the owner.  First they force a confession of her behavior out of her but she's clearly unrepentent.  At this point there was a lot of discussion among the players as to what to do with her.  Send her back to the temple?  Give her to another family?  Hang her as a witch?  It seemed like a tough call.  I think it was Tyler who was really pushing the idea that just giving her to another family wasn't enough.  "She needs a project," were his words.  So for the final conflict we set the stakes at simply that Honora recognizes she has a problem and needs help.

And then I had Honora pull out a gun.

Man, the looks on people's faces when you do that.  Priceless.  To be specific I had her smash open a firearms display case in the store and pull one out of it.  It got to the point where Honora was hiding behind a bookshelf, screaming that she's just making life easier for the boys in this town, and taking pot shots at the dogs.  Finally, Narcisses got close enough to her and wrapped her in his arms and just hugged her.  This was his Raise and I Gave.

The Dogs stayed around long enough to marry Waitstill and Augustus.  The final decision was that they should take Sister Honora with them.

Addtional Notes:

Brother Caleb has the Trait, "Things were better in Goblin Valley."  I love the way Matt uses this Trait.  It's always this big exclamation mark hanging over the conflict.

Matt asked me, at the end, why I chose Brother Newton to be possessed and not Sister Honora.  I had planned from the get-go that Newton was possessed but I waffled all the way up until the end over Honora.  I even knew what her Manifestations were:  a dark shadow falls over her regardless of the light and her eyes reflect like a cat.  On the one hand, she was a powerful enough sinner to warrent possession and on the other hand I didn't want to over emphasize her sin.  I thought it might make her look too Evil, instead of just a teenage girl whose lost her way.  I think had Honora been introduced earlier she would have been possesed but since she was the LAST thing to be delt with, I just wanted it to be her and the Dogs without the possession complication.

Jesse

[Matt Kimball]

Interesting point: The players never confront Brother Augustus about this.  They just took Waitstill's word for it.

At this point, I was thinking "Let's go talk to Honora, that's where the really interesting stuff is.  This stuff needs to be worked out, but then we can go talk to Honora."  I wasn't really invested in the whole situation between Derrick and Waitstill and the suitors.  (Meghann sure seemed to be, though.)  If we were to revisit the same town someday, it wouldn't feel inappropriate at all to me if stuff became problematic later down the road because Brother Augustus didn't really want to marry Honora and just went along with it because everyone (including the dogs) said he had to.

Matt asked me, at the end, why I chose Brother Newton to be possessed and not Sister Honora.

The reason I asked was because I expected the confrontation to be a big supernatural event, given the tone of our initial contact with Brother Newton, and I imagine that I would have been pushing for Caleb to just shoot her, and be done with the problem.  But when she started justifying herself?  The phrases she used.  Oh, man.  That is when I realized that in the real world, I have had something of a relationship with an adult version of Honora.  And that realization, followed by the angst over what to do with her was way more rewarding for me.

[jburneko]

Matt,

The experience you had with Honora is exactly what I was going for.  As just a note, the possessed version of Honora wouldn't have been like Newton.  Rather than here's this demon that's overwritten the personality, it would have been, here's this demon that's incorporated the personality.  Another way of looking at it, would have been Honora, fueled by a demon.  So possessed Honora would have been doing and saying the exact same things but, you know, creepier.  It's the difference between what happend and what happened plus light and shadow, and film noir close ups.

Jesse

[Josh Roby]

Brother Caleb has the Trait, "Things were better in Goblin Valley."

That's awesome. :)

[lumpley]

(Goblin Valley is one of my favorite places in the whole world.)

Sweet game, Jesse, Matt, everyone! Anything I can do for you?

-Vincent