This last Sunday, Andy Kitkowski, who you may know from the Indie RPG Awards, hosted the second YukiCon, his house-convention. We had quite a bit of good play, and I want to talk about one game in particular: our awesome game of Dogs in the Vineyard.

GM: Me, Clinton R. Nixon
Players: Andy K, Lisa Provost, Eric Provost, and Jason Morningstar
Outcome: Total party kill

You read that right: I killed an entire party of Dogs. Has this happened before, I wonder?

Our town, White River Branch, was laid out with the problems spanning 20 years. Here's what we had:

Pride: The people of the town believe they have no responsibility to manage their hunting. They have killed almost all the mule deer and antelope around the town.

Injustice: The predator animals and the local Mountain People are going hungry.

Sin: The townspeople have become proud of their hunting prowess. They decorate their walls with trophies, and even wear necklaces of teeth. They put antler chandeliers in the Temple!

Demonic Attacks: No one can leave the town. Coyotes stop them, or they might just get turned around in the woods.

False Doctrine: The King of Life has given us nature to serve us, and we bear no responsibility to it.

Corrupt Worship: (20 years past) The older spirits of nature are more powerful than the King. (See that? How I reversed the above?)

False Priesthood: (20 years past) Black Paws Running, a Mountain Person; his mother, Sun Under Moon; and a white woman, Emeline Weatherby, conspired to impregnate Emeline with a powerful hunter nature spirit.

Sorcery: (20 years past) Obviously, the birth of this foul beast. Actually, twins. (now) Sun Under Moon has called forth the demon brothers (she's their grandmother) to avenge her people.

Murder: (now) One of the demon children (now 20), Mr. Teeth, a man with a coyote's head, has murdered four local boys when they were hunting in the woods. He drug them from his cabin into town and left them there to be discovered.

So, we took this all the way up to murder for a one-shot.

What I found interesting is that everyone except Andy played their characters from their regular game of Dogs. (Andy's not in their regular group.) I've commented before, probably not on the Forge, that both Trollbabe and Dogs are interesting to me because they are games you can conceivably take your character from one group to another in without difficulty - and it's even interesting. This is a phenomenon I haven't really seen happen since early D&D, and it didn't work then.

I'm not going to detail every little thing that happened, but I'll give the quick run-down.

1. The Dogs come to town and notice the waste of wildlife.

2. The Steward does not treat them with respect. He used to be a Dog, and as soon as they start interfering with his relatively easy life, he makes sure to let them know that he was a Dog once, and he was as fool-headed back then as they are now. I actually won the conflict on this once, pretty much smashing Bro. Moses, Jason's character. (Who, by the way, was a bad-ass.)

3. After a lot of struggle with the townspeople, and a fight with some mean coyotes, one of which is obviously of the devil (the other demon brother, by the way, a coyote who can talk), the Dogs think they know the problem: these damn fool eople hunting like crazy. They make the townspeople cook a feast for the Mountain People and invite them to dinner, having a little Thanksgiving (but, you know, good) action.

4. Around this time, they meet the old man of the town, the best hunter, who isn't a bad guy. His name's Eliezer, Eliezer Weatherby. He's the brother of Emeline Weatherby, and he tells the Dogs that they might want to check out his sister's old cabin, where she and her Mountain Person husband died 20 years ago.

5. The coyotes come to Thanksgiving and confirm this. The lead devil coyote warns the Dogs that his brother stalks tonight on the full moon and they better stay away.

6. So, of course, even though the Mountain Person chief (whose sister, by the way, is Sun Under Moon, and the coyote calls him "Grand-Uncle") warns them not to, the Dogs head to an old rotted cabin in the woods, covered in vegetation and find the grave of Emeline and signs of an evil ritual under the floor-boards. Mr. Teeth, or Legend, as he calls himself, shows up and warns them to get out of his house and to let his mother be. They don't.

7. Legend leaps in the house; the door slams; the lantern goes out; and four Dogs die, killing Legend in the process by slamming him into a set of antlers that pierce his lungs.

So, about that total party kill: Legend had 5d6 Body, 4d6 Will, the traits Killer at 2d10 and Moon-crazy at 2d4, and a relationship with his dead mother at 2d10. Oh, and Viciousness (increased Fallout) and a 2d6 relationship with his own demon (he counted as possessed, as he was part human.) With 4d10 getting rolled, I put out a 20 as my opening raise that everyone had to see. It only took two turns around the table for the PCs to take out Legend, but he'd inflicted as much as 9d10 fallout on each of them.

We all - including me, with Legend - got to narrate awesome death scenes, culminating in Legend falling into his mother's grave and the old Mountain People chief torching the cabin. We decided that the episode is a future one: it's the end of those characters, but not in their regular campaign.

It was an odd game: way more supernatural than most games of DitV I've played. (Note: many of the supernatural elements were stolen from "Runoff," a comic by OddGod Press) We had a blast, though, and I can't wait to hear from the other players.

That was the scariest, creepiest, coolest freaking .. [Shudders.] TPK is always a rush. Your Something's Wrong is really solid. And inspired. Reminds me of the Dunwich Horror but with a Western flair. The demonic tells are so simple (i.e. a coyote head and one that talks) yet more than enough. We have coyotes on the fringe of a lot of subdivisions going up in the DFW metroplex. I hear stories all the time of cats going missing and their owner finding nothing but the head in a field.

I'm jealous of your Fallout. That'd be a fun way to play Dogs: go for maximum Fallout. It'd be a way to exercise away phantom reticence. Probably a more appropriate prescription for the "take no chances" type of player. Less so for the "get your massacre on" types.

We were all commited to resolving the problem come what may, and we were all cool with the amount of fallout we were taking.  Everybody knew that the odds of *all four of us* exceeding 17 was pretty unlikely, particularly Lisa and I, who were rolling 3D10 and 4D10 respectively.  Of course we were the two who got a pair of tens, guaranteeing our deaths.  I could not have been happier - it was a great way to end the session. 

In retrospect, I wonder if the elements of this town were too well defined - would it have been a problem if the King of Life had told us, for example, that wasteful hunting wasn't the problem but the proximity of the Mountain People encampment was?  Or that the hunting was fine but just the pride needed to stop?  That sort of washes out everything until you get to corrupt worship, which seems strange.  What do you think?

I really liked the way you played the Steward, Clinton - I could see in him a man who *knew better* than the Dogs and was committed to his community.  He didn't just roll over when we started issuing mandates from Heaven.  More Stewards should be that way!

--Jason

Jason wrote:
In retrospect, I wonder if the elements of this town were too well defined - would it have been a problem if the King of Life had told us, for example, that wasteful hunting wasn't the problem but the proximity of the Mountain People encampment was?  Or that the hunting was fine but just the pride needed to stop?  That sort of washes out everything until you get to corrupt worship, which seems strange.  What do you think?

I really liked the way you played the Steward, Clinton - I could see in him a man who *knew better* than the Dogs and was committed to his community.  He didn't just roll over when we started issuing mandates from Heaven.  More Stewards should be that way!

Clinton,

When you worked up Legend, did you have in mind him being a complete bad ass that could fuck everyone up or did it just turn out that way as the game progressed?  I've found in a lot of games I've run the biggest bads turned out to be guys I had no intention on making that way.

Keith

Bob wrote:
When you worked up Legend, did you have in mind him being a complete bad ass that could fuck everyone up or did it just turn out that way as the game progressed?  I've found in a lot of games I've run the biggest bads turned out to be guys I had no intention on making that way.

Legend had 5d6 Body, 4d6 Will, the traits Killer at 2d10 and Moon-crazy at 2d4, and a relationship with his dead mother at 2d10.

Great session.  I enjoyed it muchly.

Ya know, I never actually saw the Steward as a bad guy.  I just saw him as incorrect.  In need of a little re-education.  That's why B. Divid took down all his trophies for him.  And I was eager.... eager for him to come home and find Divid and Temperance on his porch, busy taking the skin and fur from his precious trophies and crushing the skulls into powder.

I was actually a little surprised that I won the conflict to get the necklace of teeth from the Steward.  I knew that there was just no way Divid would raise a gun on the steward for it.  Heck, I would have been hard pressed to throw a punch.  

I was going to mention the Lovecraftian feel too.  After talking cyotes I was psyched for the high-supernatural.  I can't even remember how the info dropped in our lap, but I remember thinking; "There's a haunted shack in the woods?  Oh, I'm so there!"

In the interest of ever-improving gaming, I'm gonna be just a tad critical of the session.  Constructively I hope.  There was a bit of time where I felt like there wasn't enough dropped in our laps to deal with.  Not enough of; "Here's the problem, smack dab in your face.  Whatcha gonna do 'bout it?"  That feeling was coupled with an occational sensation of clue-following.  It's guess-work, because I've only played the single session with Clinton as GM, but I thought I could see the corners of OldSpeak GMing styles filting through the game.

Don't get me wrong, Clinton did a bang-up job.  He threw that town together in the time it took us to get our seats arranged and our drinks transported to the ultra-comfy outdoor gaming table.  I doubt I could have done half as well.

Oh!

I nearly forgot my favorite scene.  See, I wrote up B. Divid for our first ever Dogs session quite a while back, and only got to play him in two sessions since.  I'd authored this trait Artistic - 1d10, but could never figure out how to use the dang thing.  So it just sat there.  During the game, as the Thanksgiving dinner was wrapping up and we were expecting the cyotes to return in force, I narrated Divid drawing a HUGE tree of life across the road into town.  When they approached, I used ceremony, invoking the tree of life, narrating how the bone dust I'd used to draw the tree sprang up, blinding the cyotes as they approached (as a See to block some advancing & growling), and then the earth shaking and trembling, throwing them to the ground (as a Raise).  Which led to something that was a little like this:

Clinton:  Cool, they take *counting* 6 dice of Fallout.
Me:  Hey, don't forget that's d6s, not d4s.  It's Ceremony.
Clinton:  Doh!

Or something like that.  Heh.

-Eric

I saw the Steward as a man that had just fallen into the same rut that other faithless men fall into.  It was nothing he couldn't be pulled from.  Having been a Dog himself, Sister Temperance was sure he could be returned to the ways of the Faith easily.  It's one of the reasons I was all over having Sister Temperance help Brother Divid with pulling the animal trophies off the wall and properly disposing of them.  I dug that a lot. :)

Jason wrote:
We were all commited to resolving the problem come what may, and we were all cool with the amount of fallout we were taking. Everybody knew that the odds of *all four of us* exceeding 17 was pretty unlikely, particularly Lisa and I, who were rolling 3D10 and 4D10 respectively. Of course we were the two who got a pair of tens, guaranteeing our deaths. I could not have been happier - it was a great way to end the session.

Eric wrote: I was going to mention the Lovecraftian feel too.  After talking cyotes I was psyched for the high-supernatural.  I can't even remember how the info dropped in our lap, but I remember thinking; "There's a haunted shack in the woods?  Oh, I'm so there!

Clinton wrote: What I didn't expect was to kill four Dogs, but it was pretty fun.

We decided that the episode is a future one: it's the end of those characters, but not in their regular campaign.

Mike wrote:

We decided that the episode is a future one: it's the end of those characters, but not in their regular campaign.

I'm wondering what this means, precisely. Are you saying that you intend to play the characters again? Or merely that in remembering the story that they were characters who'd done lots before this one - this wasn't their first town? Or do you mean something else?

Because, well, if it were me, I wouldn't play the character again, not even saying that it was a previous episode. Because that takes away the option to have the character die in those episodes (unless you want to get sort post-modern about things and allow the character to die several times). I'd just make up a new character at this point.

If it's that you want to remember this as an end to a long career, well, I think the game probably stands on it's own without the extra explanation. If this were a movie would you put on an epilogue at the end that says that they had done a lot before this? I think their amount of experience can be left unstated.

So I'm thinking that, perhaps you're talking about something else? Or am I over-reading a throw-away sentence?

Why are telling people how to play their game? I'm curious.

Thanks for bringing this up - I had not considered it.  Happily, I don't need to, since I made up my character on the spot.  Now Eric and Lisa, well, that's another story.  But my guess would be that they will keep on truckin', and if Divid and Temperance die before they are supposed to die, well, the King works in mysterious ways.  Hell, Divid had already died once by the time we played last Sunday!  Maybe it was all a dream.  I don't think it is a big deal, but it is an interesting conundrum. 

Personally, and for what little it's worth, I think the "we're dead no we aren't when did we die and how many times?" thing is awesome.

How many different origins has Batman had? A zillion? Any given Dog can have a zillion deaths too, as far as I'm concerned.

-Vincent

Jason wrote:
Hell, Divid had already died once by the time we played last Sunday!  Maybe it was all a dream.  I don't think it is a big deal, but it is an interesting conundrum. 

Bro. Divid;

I've been dead twice. - 1d10

-Eric

Hiya Mike,

After some deep contemplation on your post, at least partially inspired by a boring hotel room in Huston, I thought I'd come back in to address it from my own point of view.

I think that the possibility of playing multiple deaths of the same character is a viable and highly entertaining option.  Especially if you turn those supernatural dials to 11.  Imagine the ever-returning, ever vigilant, yet tortured angel of the King.  Imagine the hill of graves devoted to the same soul.

Groovy.

I mean, maybe not as an epilogue to a movie.  But hell, how about a prequel or two?

But I get your point.  It's not the story for every character.  Especially not any characters with their dials set to the low-end of the supernatural.  Hell, it's not even for Brother Divid.  The 'death' he'd had before was narration during the follow-up conflict that saved his life.  I lost track of the other fallout that he'd taken, but I do recall the 17d10 and the insane viceral narration that accompanied taking that fallout.  When Lisa insisted that Sister Temperance would try to save Divid's life I just sat back and watched.  He was as good as dead in my mind.  When the dice turned her way and Divid survived I was just surprised.  I took the gun of the man that dealt me the deadly blow as my Experience Fallout; "The Gun that Killed Me 1d8+1d4"

Brother Divid died in that shack in the woods trying to save Sister Temperance's life.  He failed.  Died after she did, so he knew he failed.  Now his story is over.  There won't be any prequels for Divid. 

And I can't wait to author a new Dog.

-Eric

Clinton wrote:
You read that right: I killed an entire party of Dogs. Has this happened before, I wonder?

Eric, I'm starting to get what you're talking about with the supernatural part looking at what everyone said. Not that I have a lot of experience with the system, but it seemed a lot less out there from my experience, and I'm seeing that the game Clinton ran really took to those elements. So, given that context, and perhaps a context of playing more games like that (as Lisa talks about), it makes a lot more sense to play a character who might die more than once. I'm still pretty sure that it wouldn't work for me - probably because I just like making up new characters. But I can see how it could work and the character not lose any thematic potential for a player who wanted to play the same character again.

Mike