Y'all only left them outside to fight all the vampires. Names William Pierce is doing his best, but the buggers run away when he shoots at them...

Weren't they supposed to be coming inside through the kitchen door, though?

and Jake is THRILLED about that too ... let me tell you!

In reply to The Stray (msg # 14):

Yes, but to get to the useable kitchen door one has to walk around the house and currently through the carriage house. It's a short stroll, but y'know, filled with vampires.

Ironically, if Jake accepted his Name, it wouldn't suit him so well...
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:58, Wed 07 May 2014.

Hey, this place looks as good a spot to lie low as Blackthorn:
http://www.shroud-movie.com/

After killing Jingles and leaving us all to deal with a jiang shi, did John Smith just conveniently disappear?

The player is still searching for a residence, last I heard, but I believe the character is conferring with his sifu in the library.

Also, it was not killing Jingles that left y'all with a jiang shi - if John had beaten the blind man to death in cold blood like his past self would have done, The Virus wouldn't have enough corpse to work with to resurrect.

Jingles was actually trying to get himself killed that way, since he already knew that weapons no longer worked on him, but he was too proud to beg, hence jiang shi. His soul's still trapped in there somewhere, poor bastard.

I will miss his fantastic dialog.

I'm going to bed now... In case anybody starts calling William a vampire, he'll interject with "...hunter."
Just saying. ;-)

Might want to explain to Abbie that's the context William and the other vampire were fighting over her sister in...

Oh, and Props Dept. notice, now you're together again - don't do this to Adrian. It'll be a few days before his skin smells of garlic, Harrowed metabolisim being intermittent as it is, but standing too close to William and talking might make him twitch a bit. More than usual, I mean. Adrian is garlicky!

Yes, please - none of that. For both our sakes.

Well, y'know, gotta keep up the grand ol' Storm tradition of Foe Yay somehow, now Carl & Wildcat's thread/s are stalled...

I think John Smith and Jingles have that covered.

Pfft, JohnJohn doesn't even remember his last encounter with the guy. Wildcat suggested cargo shippin' Jake with the clank waaaay back, but though they sort-of bicker there isn't that hate-hate magnetisim that makes that kind of thing juuuust plausible enough to be hilarious (via dramatic irony, naturally: if the characters ever became aware they were doing it, they'd stop). The clank tries to save Jake's soul, Jake tries to work out how the hell to get the talky bird armour into a postal crate. Vega and Pierce, however, just can't leave each other alone, from verbal sniping to actual...

The moral of this tale, of course, is that the Hollywood gender ratio that tends to crop up in Western settings is bad for one's sanity. :D

Unrelatedly, this gLammergaier in her bloody finery may have taken my mental perch from the crested caracara for what Thunderbirds look most like. Plus a 'teenage' goshawk really regretting trying to nom a raven as it gets its arse kicked.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the GM at 18:27, Tue 20 May 2014.

The gender ratio bit may not be just Western settings, but a reflection of the demographic drawn to this hobby. From in person to virtual, all gaming groups I've joined, started or interacted with have been male dominated, which tends generally to reflect the character make-up of groups as well. Not that it's necessary, but it is a tendency that I think goes beyond the genre.

And wow that is a crazy looking bird! The first one, that is.

Yeah - if ever you want some truly depressing reading, there are a lot of articles out there on how that trend perpetuates. It pretty much boils down to "guys make male-focused stuff like the stuff they grew up on because it's What You Do, women feel excluded, don't ask to play much, next generation of guys make stuff like they grew up on..."

[tangent] I found a hilarious picture the other day that gave me one of those lightbulb moments, though...you know how I said stupid woman-armour always makes me sad because y'know, a designer could have a badass character with that kind of concept, but just went with interchangeable megatits like everything else? This is what that looks like to women looking at it (WARNING: probably NSFW and frightening to Americans). [/tangent]

The thing about Westerns, though, is that it's one instance where the ratio is slightly justified: Victorian gender-segregation meant you did get a lot of mining camps, ranches, and military units where women were rare. Hell, legend has it that's where the bandana code comes from - not enough ladies in mining camps for dances of the era to be done properly, so red bandanas danced the man's part and blue bandanas danced the lady's.

It should be less pronounced and occasionally inverted in places with the long war (as it is in bits of Eastern Europe where all the men not ancient, teething, or dead in conflicts have gone elsewhere to find work) in the Deadlandsverse, but there we run into the male player bias. So I will just have fun with our theoretically-unusual two-plus-males-to-one-female gang and period-accurate touchy-feeliness (think Sam and Frodo).


I hold as a personal standard that any collection of stuffed beasts is inferior unless it contains a lammergaier. Unfortunately they're very rare now, since as the name implies, folk used to think they ate sheep and shot them all, when in fact they're purely scavengers (they don't just eat bones, though - they eat the post-vultured remains of carcasses including bones. That is omni-nommage in action). As for weird-looking, I seem to remember your Thunderbird reference being its likely relative, the Andean condor...alas, my Google-fu can't seem to locate pictures of a dominant male doing the wattle-puff thing. I still can't decide if a male thunderbird doing that would be crying-funny or utterly, utterly terrifying.

Evenki ones would definitely go {{{GLAM!}}} like a red-hot iron satyr tragopan, though.

One thing to remember about Deadlands is that as a setting, the gender segregation (or social mores) we might have expected of that era does not necessarily need to persist in this alternative-history RPG. Of course, every game is the interpretation of the GM and what kind of universe they want to run, but the good folks at Pinnacle have always made a type of inclusiveness a part of their 'alternate history' letting characters play their concepts as males or females and as members of minority ethnic groups with more freedom than they would otherwise be allowed to do (at least without serious abuse) in a traditional Western game.

I think it was mainly the desire to take the cool and interesting parts of that time period, and discard those that are unsavory or have no place among (most) modern players (specifically, outmoded views on race and gender).

As for Thunderbirds, did I really pick that silly looking bird to represent one? That is kinda funny. I don't seem to remember it, but will take your word for it.

That's what I was on about in the 'long war' bit. I'm not denying the devs are trying, they're just starting off from the same place most devs are. The genre itself isn't terribly historical, else you'd see ethnic-mishmash-and-odd-'trash white' gangs like the Dust Adders on the big screen and in books far more often, along with female wranglers (a lot of native wranglers were female, for a start), the odd soldier, 'whiskey doctors', high-profile activists and politicians.

What I personally love the Deadlands setting/alternate history for is that it's a version of ours that hasn't lost its innocence, yet is in some way more mature - there's none of the Reconstruction damage that made lynching commonplace, the natives have some capacity to fight back, and America has actually learned that "throw soldiers at 'em 'til Johnny runs out of ammo" doesn't work. From professional ethics alone I can't stand sanitised pick-and-choose history ("we're not guilty now! Still Sore About Genocide Indian is a baddie!" is preeeetty dodgy, c'mon), but history where you can go in there at turning points and help push the world we know into something utterly strange and shiny? That incites far more glee in me than saving another not-really-equal-but-we'll-say-it-is fantasy world.

It's like...history with plus plus freedom. History you can change. Also you can have a lot of fun with period prejudices without either remotely condoning them or turning the setting into Blazing Saddles: the RPG, it's just a matter of balance.

 You said the condor resemblance was a reference to American Gods' version, which is a worthy thing to reference. I mentioned the caracaras then, too, and the prime candidate for Northwestern thunderbird sightings, the Steller's Sea Eagle. They are some biiiig birdies.

...is Adrian going to go find those jars, or what?


edit: ...I should not be let near in-text links this late and full of tea...
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:41, Tue 20 May 2014.

In reply to Alouette (msg # 30):

Now you see why I thought Sister Sarah was so interesting.  Female preachers and "miracle workers" weren't unheard of in the west, but they were rare enough to stand out.  I like strong female characters, but the hard-as-nails lady gunslinger has been done to death.  Sarah can be strong without going stereotype.

I may be alone here, but I'm actually not terribly concerned with replicating period prejudices. I run a Call of Cthulhu 1920s game once a month, and I don't feel comfortable using racial epithets and treating certain characters in the vile way they were treated back at the time just for the sake of realism. Even if I did feel comfortable with that, I don't know that all of my players would. There is definitely a sense of prejudice that I will portray (someone is denied admission to a certain place or maybe ignored by some other NPCs, who will only talk to certain types of characters), just so that I don't completely shatter immersion, but I choose to focus on the many other cool things the genre and the period have to offer.

Now, that sort of thing is a little bit easier to divorce yourself from on RPOL, since we don't see each other face to face and generally know little about one another beyond our character names and handles in some cases, and what else we choose to divulge - so we can experiment with that to some degree in a less direct way.

Heh, not at all, though Victorians did make more of a fuss about them ("what next? Baboons in the pulpit!") than female boxers, which perplexes me running alongside all the other hyper-modesty stuff. I like her 'cause she seems the type to Get Stuff Done, maybe with amusingly bendy morals but a good heart.

Amen to that...Sister! The weird representational skew in media in general means people with boobs tend to get put in a leetle box, like that kind of person only comes in "hot and strong" or "weak and milky" (have I mentioned I've had too much tea? I found out yesterday that that's also a Japanese saying for overexciteable, oddly enough...) which is, well, bollocks. Also there are so many more kinds of strength than the much-touted modern-manly-smashing sort (which is why even those hostile Iroquois or whoever the 'Skraelings' were ran away when faced with a single pregnant Viking after routing the well-armed male settlers right back to camp. She put down her ladle and is coming for you!). It's hard to capture, because English doesn't have neutral-concept words like hvatir to describe doing something specifically 'with the strength of a woman' without sounding diminuitive.

Plus she has a big mule. I don't know why I like mules, but I do.

As for "replication" - that kind of accuracy's not the point and will probably be more innaccurate due to Hollywood (see above on the Western genre) than imposing our values on folk there, but acknowledging people suffered (and indeed still are suffering from the effects in our world, not magically poofed away as we so desire not to think about them) is the least courtesy we can do the dead. It is probably easier in text, true, and I do like how you go about it. But.

I'm not - really, really not, let me be super-clear as a crystally fountain on a glassy mountain of rock-candidness - saying Deadlands players or GMs should be nastier to certain folk for probably-just-as-fake/modern "realisim", just that it's only fair to acknowledge that characters have backgrounds reaching back into, well, chattel slavery and acts of genocide, and they're not going to be mindwiped of their parents' views, their own memories and/or whatever else contributes to making them people just so that 21st century folk have less to fix.

[thinks] If I played Rabbit as a cookie-cutter from-the-text "happy Asian slave"/"happy whore" (the ideas overlap, sharing a common root), say, d'you see that'd be so much more dodgy than facing up to the fact that if she's alive in her early twenties (the average lifespan of a Chinese whore from immigration being three years from the Chicago mission data, death from casual brutality, underfeeding, opiate addiction and/or disease usually occurring around 19), she must have had the 'protection' of being trafficked younger? I'm afraid of not doing the kid justice, but at least it gets me reading, thinking, paying attention to not being a colossal he-chicken, and maybe making things more interesting because there are fewer tropes and limitations on how that story's told, since it generally isn't.

I'm not saying anyone/everyone else should play on that difficulty level or would get as much out of it, only that I don't believe things are only fun if we pretend harder levels don't and didn't exist. Is all. I fear I've screwed up, but it's silly in the morning now, so I shall leave it there and hope I can make things make sense maybe later.

I certainly understand that perspective, and it's something that I do appreciate. I don't think the setting tries to write off the genocide against the native populace as a footnote, though it does try to do that with slavery unfortunately; the latter is a line I don't hold to in my games. I'm fine with living within the Deadlands canon and what happened to alter history, but not with pretending that one of the principle causes of a major war that is central to the setting and the primary motivation for the formation of an extant nation in the setting was just a minor detail that we shouldn't consider anymore.

On another subject, I've never had a "hard as nails lady gunslinger" in any of my Deadlands games that I've run, on RPOL or around the tabletop - so if it is overdone, I've yet to really experience it much. For female PCs (all from female players), I've had a Blessed and a Huckster on RPOL, and face to face games I've had a prospector and a Shaman. At least in my estimation, they've been fairly well balanced individuals.

Busy days at work, crying kids at home. Will try to post soon.

Thanks for the notice, I assumed 'twas something like that. May your work become manageable and your bairns contented.


@Thundervega - Not as much, no, though there are a couple of sourcebook pages that can only be described as...special, in terms of not thinking things through/being obliviously yet amazingly racist enough to make me laugh out loud. I realised shortly before you posted that simply put, the point I was aiming for was a belief in staying on the former side of the changing/denying history line, which I think you twigged already.

Good for them! I like to see an archetype done well then ambused by half a dozen vampire whores and utterly derailed now and then, but if we all resorted to such things'd quickly get boring. Not that Wildcat (character) slowly learning that she doesn't need to box her softer feminine self up in a mental corner to be a damn good lawdog/gunslinger isn't interesting, but that's down to well-done character development.

That aside, the canon setting/fluff is lousy with hot-and-strongs of the SFC variety, so even if you have players picking actually-sane PCs the Marshal still has to deal with either taming the canon or avoiding it. I'd love to see one of the female-dominated settlements that are theoretically out there in the post-long-war Deadlandsverse, for the mere novelty alone...as in, not the Wichita Witches or whatever other gang of sultry ladies with weaponry who talk about little else but how they're better than/sick of/short on/lusted after by men men and men, but just...ordinary farmers and shopkeepers and the local drunk and the telegraph operator and the bank clerks and the saloon owner and the road sweeper and the one-armed-mostly-deaf gal with the steam burns who was a steamship engineer once but got blown up that time...and the preacher and the poker players and the odd few whose husbands likely came in from outside the town who're raising families, and 3-5 cowgirls to every cowboy. Without it being considered odd (as it shouldn't be IC, at least not in the Disputed States where the drain on males of active service age would be similar to what Europe underwent in WWI). That sort of unusual-yet-sensical stuff makes me go 'ooo' and stare in fascination as much as Weird Beasties do.

Well, in the Stray's other game, I played Calamity Jane for a while.  As a historical figure, she's more an inspiration than a stereotype, but you get the idea.  Typically, in Westerns you see women as gunslingers or damsels, very seldom do you get something in between.