The latest playtest session of Cowboy World Weird:
The cast:
Ivor Oppenheimer, weird scientist
James Jones, civil war veteran and field medic.
Demas Azurio, immortal vampire hunter.
Juan Lopez, the undertaker and luchador’s player was writing exams. Luckily Juan fell on his head at the end of the last session and was still unconscious.
Significant NPC’s:
Obadiah Grimm, vampire hunter
Gordon Scurry, local businessman and crime boss. He has a mechanical prosthetic eye and a clockwork right arm.
Catherine Grimm, vampire
Mortdecay Bozeman, vampire prince, businessman and crime boss.
We find the heroes in the mortuary on Hell Street in Canyon Diablo after burning down Clabberfoot Annie’s cat house and capturing Cathy Grimm, vampire and ex wife of Obadiah Grimm, the vampire hunter, in the previous session. Cathy is bound with a silver chain on one of the mortuary tables. Grimm does not co-operate, since he is emotionally involved with the vampire. Out of desperation, James jabs him with a morphine spike. Grimm falls asleep in a chair
Some locals arrive with three corpses from the fire in the cat house. They are unceremoniously dumped on one of the mortuary tables. Jim inspects them. One has a gaping wound in the neck. As Jim inspects the wound, the corpse manifests as a vampire and bites him in the face, gashing his right cheek. Demas shoots the new vampire in the heart with his crossbow, and a crow flies in through the window to carry the evil soul off to hell.
As the PC’s discuss what to do with the bound vampire, Gordon Scurry arrives with his cowboys to get a report from Grimm, whom he had contracted to clear the town of vampires. Grimm is in a morphine induced stupor, and cannot talk coherently. The others tell Scurry what happend. He noticed the vampire bound to the mortuary table, grabs a stake and tries to push it into her chest. Because Grimm said Cathy was their only lead to the vampire prince, Demas tries to stop him. He rolls a fail, and Scurry forces the stake through the vampire’s heart. Grimm objects, but a wack against the head takes him out of the conversation.
A crow flies in through the window to take the vampire’s soul. Ivor goes weird to communicate with it, and asks where the vampire prince Mortdecay is. The crow says “South”. As the crow flies off with the soul, Demas shoots it with his Colt Peacemaker. The crow explodes in a cloud of bloody feathers, and suddenly the vampire’s soul is disembodied and free.
Demas wants to catch it in an Indian dream catcher, something I did not plan for. So I rule that he has to go Weird at 7th level, which means that he has to roll with a -5 penalty. The dream catcher wil not be able to contain the soul for longer than a few days. To safely capture the soul a week long ritual wil be needed.
So Demas rolls + Soul (0) + Weird (+1) -5. He totals 6, a fail. Then he invokes his character aspect Vampire Hunter, pays 1 Grit and adds 1 to his roll to change it to 7, a partial success. I rule that he has to roll for sanity, and he rolls a full success. Cathy’s soul is captured in a flimsy net of twine and feathers.
They need to rest for a week to recover from their wounds (all from the previous session) so Scurry puts them up in his Texas Saloon, on the promise that they will go after the vampire. During this week they perform the ritual. At some stage Cathy breaks loose and tries to possess Ivor. She freezes his heart in the process, but fortunately James succeeds in bringing him back from the brink of death with a makeshift defibrillator.
At the end of two weeks they are all healthy again (except Ivor who now has a permanent weak heart and a -1 body debility after the possession attempt) and Cathy is safely contained in a string of ancient Iroquis beads. They ride south to the meteor crater to look for Mortdecay Bozeman, meet an old Navajo skin walker, find a mine in the center of the crater worked by Empty Men (soulless men produced by strong magic) and descend into the depths of the mine.
We ended the session there.
Post mortem: The session was fun. The mechanics are solid and pretty much finalised. Where “Help or Hinder” as in Dungeon World was almost never used at our table, the new Teamwork move is often used.
The only question remaing is thematic: What weird powers should PC’s have access to?