I'm going to run Dogs tommorow for a couple of my players. I'm hoping to be able to get through chargen, initiation, and run a small town. Any suggestions (the samples in the book look like good possibilities).

Frank

Kettle Lake is good and straightforward.  "Short" sort of depends on a lot of variables.

It should come as no surprise that I'd recommend Tower Creek from the book for a first town (see my lengthy ode to it a few days ago for why), but the other towns are good too.

To keep it short, follow the GM advice in the book: Reveal the town aggressively in play, Say yes or roll dice, and escalate, escalate, escalate. And if you're stuck for a raise, give! Giving isn't losing [1], plus in 2nd edition you get to keep your biggest die for the followup conflict.

Default GM behavior in other games is to make players drag every bit of info kicking and screaming into the open, but that just slows things down.  The Dogs are the hand of the King, they can give you what you want, but you have to ask them!  Don't hide, show!

I still have the fault that I spend too much time on the early going, so the ending is rushed. Learn from my bad example and emulate Judd instead, who I believe gets everything out in the open really quickly, to leave more time for the juicy judgement.

And if you're running Tower Creek, print out a copy of Jason Morningstar's wonderful Book of Names (linked to from the Dogs homepage) -- best prop EVER for that town.

Kettle Lake looks good too.

--Carl

[1] If you give you lose the stakes, but if the stakes were set proper it's interesting either way.  Lots of fast short conflicts are better than huge long drawn-out ones that make folks gunshy about future conflicts because they'll take so much time, plus give more opportunities for fallout and thus character change and growth.  A lesson I'm still learning.

My only advice is to make it simple. For the first town, make it blatantly obvious what's wrong and who's responsible. Then dump the whole mess in the players' collective lap and say, "Now fix it." Kettle Lake was one of my the first towns I'd played in, and I had a really hard time with it, because there was no obvious "here's the bad thing what needs fixin."

Yea, I was looking at Tower Creek also.

Andrew - I think the key is that the GM has to reveal things quick enough for the players to figure things out. Kettle Lake is really pretty simple, but if things don't come tumbling out fast, I could see the players stumbling around.

Frank

Judd "Paka" Karlman's New Gidea makes a nice first town, particularly for a low-supernatural setting. It's got One Big Problem and it's likely to get violent.

Best,

Jim

I looked at New Gidea last night, and it looks interesting, but I think it's also not written up quite right. There's more than a pride there, it goes all the way up to murder. If I had some time, I might re-write the sin ladder for it.

Frank

I dunno. The New Gidea killings read like garden-variety homicide to me - Injustice or at most Demonic-Attacks level. As I read Dogs, "Hate and Murder" is a grisly, sectarian, often-ritualized subset of shooty. I think Judd's coding of the New Gidea killings makes sense. You could make the case that the town's ladder actually goes up to Sin, though, or maybe False Doctrine. (When I ran it, one Dog thought, Hey, maybe this guy's onto something!)

Judd's around here from time to time; maybe he'd like to weigh in.

There's an interesting exercise, though: make a grabby town that only goes up to Pride.

Best,

Jim

Jim, when I ran New Gidea, I had it going so far as False Doctrine. "The King of Life Guides my Gun" or something. What was awesome was that one of the Dogs - who had failed his shooting classes, badly - chased him down, shot the gun out of his hand by some fluke or miracle, and then took "The King of Life Guides my Gun" as his reflection fallout for the town.

(Warren, if you still lurk here - yes, I still cannot get over how awesome that was.)

It was one of the longer towns I've done - took almost 3 hours for my group. There's a more complete writeup of it at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?t=12548.