[DitV] Fort Lemon Ate My Dogs!

[ptikachu]

Total Party Kill. And the players all pushed for it. They never Gave. It was awesome.

This was a couple of weeks ago. I was actually short for time, and hadn't prepared a new town after a pretty entertaining, low-action run through my Tribulation Branch. I had been reading Fort Lemon and trying to steal ideas from it, but now it occured to me that I had to run it for my players, so I did.

Ivan (Brother Josh) and Chen (Brother Bill) were the veterans, having both played once before. Ivan is an old-schooler who scoffs at Narrativism, but likes Dogs enough to give it a try, while Chen had only been exposed to D&D before this, and was having a little trouble letting go of his preconceptions.

The new guy, Eric (Brother Abel) is a Shadowrun fiend, through and through, with a reputation for powergaming at the FLGS. He remarked later that Dogs was "The only game I've ever seen where it's impossible to powergame." I would actually disagree since the wrong kind of attitude can break any system, including Dogs, but it means something coming from an inveterate powergamer like Eric. :)

I thought we were a bit short on time, so I threw the Dogs into the situation in medias res. I told them the last party of pilgrims was long past due through the mountain passes to Fort Lemon, and a rescue party led by a veteran Dog, Brother Jeremiah, had been sent out. They never came back, so the PCs are sent. I set the first scene in a howling blizzard on the road up to Fort Lemon, and a gruesome tableau of frozen bodies lies before the camera. Six men and their horses, all shot at point-blank range, lying twisted in frozen puddles of their own blood. That got their attention, and then I asked them to narrate their characters coming out of the swirling snowstorm, coming upon the scene. Worked real well.

Basically, if you've read Fort Lemon, the pilgrims were rescued by Brother Jeremiah's party, but then when they rode out of Fort Lemon to buy supplies from a nearby town (and request help in dealing with Sharon's cult) Sharon sent out her demon riders to ambush them in the snow.

So now the Dogs rode into Fort Lemon, already knowing that the stakes were about as high as they could be. Frostbitten old women, crying babies, and a refugee camp huddled messily in the middle of the fort... They were immediately approached by followers of Sister Sharon, the heretic, as well as followers of Steward Asher. Ivan and Eric saw right away the split among the refugees, and they split up to find the two leaders.

After about two hours, the Dogs had met with both rival leaders of the congregation as well as with the corrupt William Lemon, and the cannibals, Hannah and Samuel. Brother Josh had a plan to feed the refugees and pay off Lemon, while Abel started to get worried that they were in over their heads, and offered to ride back out through the storm to get help from the nearest Faithful town. Josh was against it but Bill supported Abel and even lent him his mustang.

While Abel was sneaking out by the back of the fort, Josh and Bill had a little intervention session with Hannah to get her to confess her sins. This ultimately left Samuel unconscious from a brawl, Hannah in labor and the barn they were in on fire. At first they called for a conflict to put out the fire, but about halfway through, they asked to change it to "drag Hannah and Samuel out" instead. I fudged it and grudgingly let them do that, although in retrospect it would have been okay to rule that they Gave on the firefighting and started a new conflict to escape the barn. The shortage of dice on hand and the insane dice pools Chen had (11d6 Heart for talking and noncombat conflicts!) were what made me take the shortcut.

Also, it was getting late and I wanted to wrap it all up in one session. We did in fact wrap it up in one, though in a surprising fashion.

Sister Hannah showed up with her flock and helped to stabilise Bill, who'd taken a lot of Fallout from the fire. I was actually applying the Demonic Influence on his side during the healing because Sharon and her friends wanted to put Bill in her debt, but this got dropped by the wayside in the confusion shortly after.

Hannah gave birth and Josh called for the Steward to name the baby boy, which would simultaneously help to redeem the cannibal couple and cement the Steward's authority in the community. Sharon and her cult tried to stop the Steward, so we had the second biggest conflict of the game, with Sharon and her mob of followers shouting down the Steward and the two Dogs (Three In Authority was a cool image to evoke) as they baptised the baby with holy clay. This broke Sharon's authority and the community started to swing back to the Steward.

Then Josh and Bill found out from Tamar (one of Sharon's repentant followers) that the three sinister cavalrymen who were Sharon's enforcers had ridden out into the snowstorm after Abel. So Josh and Bill made the momentous decision to ride out to try and save their fellow Dog.

We had a three-way conflict with Abel trying to get the high ground on the Demonic cavalrymen while the other Dogs chased them, and ultimately the Dogs won, managing to regroup before taking on the cavalrymen in a ferocious gunfight at short range in the roaring blizzard. Unfortunately, this is where the dice completely hosed them. First, they took a lot of Fallout against all that Demonic Influence (I rolled 4d10 for each cavalryman, so that was a total of 12d10!) so the bad guys had a lot of bonus dice for the follow-up conflict. Then, the bad guys took the first shots and loaded each Dog with between 3 and 7 d10s of gunshot Fallout! It was a close thing and some of the Dogs had to resort to riding up close and tackling their opponents, but in the end the Demonic riders were vanquished, ridding Sharon of all her supernatural power in the process.

Then we rolled for Fallout, and everyone got between 17 and 19. Which meant that without medical assistance, they would die. And they did, because it was the only appropriate ending, slumped over dying side-by-side in the snow, brother Dogs who had ridden out to fight together rather than abandon one of their own to an ambush.

It was right, and it was good. The players weren't too much for narrating, so I narrated how Stewart Asher put his community back together and rode out of Fort Lemon a day later when the storm ended, only to find the bodies of our heroes lying together with the slain villains. And so to this very day, three lonely gravestones mark the place where Brothers Josh, Bill and Abel died to save the Faithful stranded in Fort Lemon...

Rock. The players never felt the deaths to be arbitrary or unfair (until I told them I'd given each foe the benefit of Demonic Influence, then I got some good-natured grousing). And they had a great time. And they solved Fort Lemon in one session! Yay!

[sirogit]

You did soup up the NPCs above what I reckon the book intends, by not defining them as a group which allowed them to multiply their Demonic influence.

Not that I think the results were undesirable at all. I think its a fine test of the system's claim for the outcomes it generates being good even encompassing the usual gaming bugaboos like TPK.

Kind of sad to see a bunch of puppies drowned before they really get their legs, though. Now I know how Vincent feels at KPfS demos.

[Jason Morningstar]

Wow, that's cool as hell.  

Very interesting to see how it turned out.  When I posted Fort Lemon, a lot of the feedback I got was "this is murderous and over the top", and your session definitely reinforces that.  I posted my play experience in Actual Play a while ago - very different outcome.  

I love the fact that everyone died.  I live for those kinds of moments - the doomed last stand is so very dramatic, and Dogs supports it flawlessly.

[ptikachu]

You did soup up the NPCs above what I reckon the book intends, by not defining them as a group which allowed them to multiply their Demonic influence.

Not that I think the results were undesirable at all. I think its a fine test of the system's claim for the outcomes it generates being good even encompassing the usual gaming bugaboos like TPK.

Kind of sad to see a bunch of puppies drowned before they really get their legs, though. Now I know how Vincent feels at KPfS demos.

Well I originally had TWICE the number of players coming for the game, and the other guys had some pretty powerful characters - one guy with "I am a Dog like my grandfather before me 3d10" and two other experienced Dogs - but they all failed to turn up. Which I guess was good since we would never have been able to finish play in such a short time with so many players.

I statted each cavalryman separately so the three ended up pairing off against one Dog each, in one-on-one duels. It was cooler that way, though also much tougher. I ran out of dice and had to roll them all one at a time, writing down their results on paper. :)