The Metal Monster of the Slot Canyon

A couple players in my ongoing Friday night Krevborna game gave me "nights off" by running something in usual campaign's stead. One of those games was Deadlands. My character was Frances D., aka Frances Donner, who survived the Donner Party ordeal but came away from the experience haunted by the ghosts of the eaten and charged with fighting supernatural evil by way of survivor's guilt.

Ironically, when the game started she was working as a camp cook.

The other characters were Alpeena (a conspiracy-theory obsessed gunslinger), Aloysius (a muck-raking journalist), and Sassafras (a kindly ranch hand).

We were headed through Deseret on a stagecoach when we stopped to see the twisted metal wreckage of a train crash. But we observed more than we bargained for; three tied-up folks were being menaced by gun-brandishing villains. Nearby the villains stood a large crate. Well, we couldn't stand idly by and watch these people get killed, so we took on the villains. During the course of the fight the leader of the villains blew a whistle, which caused a gosh-dang nosferatu to break out of the crate and join the melee. The gunluggers were easy enough to take down, but the nosferatu required some teamwork to dig the heart out of its chest.

One of the defeated toughs tried to make a run for it, but I knocked him out and dragged him back by the boots for questioning. After a few threats and a little interrogation, we learned that the group had been hired to steal a pile of ghost rock from the train. They were under the employ of One-Eye Abbie, whose hideout was somewhere in a nearby canyon.

We went into town and gathered more information. We learned that some sort of professor was holed up in the canyon as well. The town's blacksmith was particularly helpful; from the parts he had been asked to make for the boffin, we figured that the professor was building some sort of big metal automaton. That sounded like bad business, so we snuck out there to put an end to it.

We took Abbie and her hooligans by surprise. Aloysius distracted the goons while Alpeena dropped a boulder onto them from above in the canyon. When Aloysius came under fire, I came charging in with cleaver and pistol at the ready. We tried to get Abbie on-side, but she proved truculent and had to be killed as well.

There was some funny business with a big weird tuning fork, but I can't rightly say what that was all about.

However, when we found the professor, he had a sad tale to tell. Apparently the big metal contraption he was building was meant to be a kind of ambulatory life support for his wife--without it she'd die. The big metal body was also intended to be a weapon of revenge against the man who got her in such a sorry state. So, even though we had gone out there to stop him, we had a change of heart. Maybe we're soft-hearted fools--I guess we'll find out when the professor and his wife's deed makes the headlines one way or another.

Through the Eyes of a Dead Man

Way back in the heady days of G+, I accepted a challenge: watch the movie version of Wild Wild West and come up with something gameable to justify the time spent watching a movie generally held in low regard. What I came up with is a piece of equipment that would be right at home in Deadlands.

The Final Projector

As it turns out, the commonly-held belief that the last image a person sees is burned onto their retina as the die is true. The Final Projector can be used to unlock that last image: it bores a hole into the back of the deceased person’s head and shines a light through their eyes, which projects the last image they saw.

Deadlands: Grim Prairie Tales

Savage Worlds has never been a game with a dedicated series of "monster manuals" meant for general use with the system; rather, bestiaries are largely setting-specific or exist as chapters in the various Savage Worlds genre companions. Grim Prairie Trails (whose name is surely an allusion to the classic horror western anthology film Grim Prairie Tales) is a hybrid book for Deadlands: Reloaded that presents a heapin' helping of monster stats within the context of short adventures that showcase how a GM might use the new adversaries found within its pages.

Included within the book are "generic" monsters and unique, named villains. General monsters include:

• Bloat: an animate, waterlogged corpse
• Clockwork Demoler: a robotic vermin-hunter
• Death Cloud: a sentient mist created by the fallout from experimental weapons
• Doomsower: blood roses that spread disease
• Fever Phantom: a specter of someone who succumbed to ghost rock fever
• Gluttonous Ogre: Asian-flavored ogre
• Hodag: a demon-possessed, undead ox
• Javeraha: a tusked beast
• Lyncher: the animate corpse of an innocent who met their end at the hands of mob justice
• Minikin: a murderous porcelain doll
• Raven Mocker: a vampiric being with avian talons
• Swarm Man: man-shaped thing formed from masses of beetles
• Terrormental: a corrupt elemental
• Weaver: a giant spider who can control people like puppets with its webs

Among the unique named villains are: 

• Agatha Leeds: a black magician of the Whateley family
• Jebediah Nightlinger: the proprietor of a supernatural carnival
• Redcap Morris: an undead bounty hunter
• The Squatpump Gang: inbred hillbillies
• Wilton’s Head: a head in a jar with malicious powers

The book is rounded-out by a selection of useful "regular folk" and animal stats. Excepting the regular folk and generic critters, each of the above monsters is accompanied with a briefly-sketched adventure. This has become one of my favored ways to present monsters; by giving you both the stats for a new monster and an example of what you could do with those stats you get an incredible amount of utility from the book. 

Overall, the variety of foes presented in Grim Prairie Trails is wide, ranging from undead, beasts, and even weirder tangents. The art is nice throughout, and having a varied selection of one-shot adventures with monsters the players aren't expecting is never a bad thing. This is a great little book for people running Deadlands: Reloaded, and the conversion work to bring it in-line with the current edition of Deadlands: The Weird West is minimal. The conversion work for other "weird west" games, such as Owl Hoot Trail or Haunted West, will be more arduous the further the system ranges from Savage Worlds' baseline assumptions, but it still might be worth picking up on the cheap as a source of ideas and adventure sketches.