Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[Waxahachie]

I'm thinking of running Night Train soon as a standalone play-by-post game, and I thought I'd turn here and see if anyone that had any experience with it could answer a couple of questions about it.

(1) What kinda power level are we talking? I know this is a pretty high powered adventure from what I've read, so starting Deadlands characters might not be well equipped to handle it. I thought I'd power them up a little bit. They'll probably still die, but they should at least have a fighting chance at it.

(2) How many PCs in the posse? I was thinking maybe 4-5, though I thought I'd get some input from these quarters first.

Thanks!

[ValhallaGH]

1) The adventure itself is ... rough. Grizzled characters with 5+ Grit can die by the wagon-load, and a single nose ferret is a mean hombre that can challenge a posse. Having dozens of them is just terrifying.
That said, there are ways that starting heroes can succeed brilliantly. Characters with 0 Grit and 0 Bounty can make it look easy, as long as the players have good ideas and the dice treat them tolerably well.

No other adventure showcases the Deadlands attitude of "this is the world. It's very dangerous. Deal with it," the way that Night Train does.

2) Whatever. The Dime Novel example had 3, but you could run it with anywhere from 1 to 8. Though posses greater than six become a real pain in the neck to Marshal for; really any more than four gets to be annoying, but stop long before you get to a dozen. Don't repeat my mistakes.


Good luck!
_________________
"Got a problem? I've got the solution: Rocket Launcher."
"Not against a Servitor."
"... We're all gonna die."

[Waxahachie]

Thanks! Good to know. I think I'll be looking at a posse of 5, and I'm going to experiment with empowering them a little bit to start and see how that plays out. Either way, this kind of gives me a bearing on how hard it'll be.

[Snate56]

You might foreshadow a little bit, show them a ranch that's been overrun with dozens of shell casings but no bodies, barn doors that have been pried off, a dead horse up on the roof, etc.



SteveN
_________________
"We've got a blind date with destiny... and it looks like she's ordered the lobster." <The Shoveller>

[iamfanboy]

I actually dropped several hints along the way while planning to run Night Train, and it was more suspenseful because of that - I'd introduced Varney Flats before the adventure, had an abandoned town, etcetera.

They didn't have a GREAT deal of trouble, mostly because the nosferatu panicked after the PCs used dynamite to blow up the train, their shelter, in the middle of the Colorado plain with daylight approaching.

But this was in Reloaded, where the PCs made good Knowledge (Occult) rolls to know what the Nosferatu's weaknesses were, made GREAT rolls to pierce their hearts (Seriously, I've never seen a 6-sided dice Ace IN ANY GAME 5 times in a row before), and had no real problems handling them. Nosferatu don't seem all that scary in terms of Reloaded stats, aside from the half-damage of piercing weapons.

...in Classic, though, pretty frightening.

[catalac]

ah yeah fan boy i know how you feel... except maybe i don't because my mind didn't even compute my record. my party got 5 aces with a d12. and they got extra damage for each raise because of the home rules we were playing with... well you know it was sort of funny because the bad guy was invulnerable.

[ValhallaGH]

[iamfanboy]

[ValhallaGH]

It is. They're still Invulnerable and Undead, so they cannot be more than Shaken (barring attacks to their Weakness) and get a +2 to recover from shaken.
That crappy spirit is the only thing that slows them down when they try to eat the posse alive - which is why they can't be mindlessly aggressive. They need to use their Stealth skill to creep up on the victi- I mean heroes, lest they spend so long "regenerating" that their prey manages to vanish.
They strike me as being about as mean as their Classic predecessors. You just happened to run across a posse that lucked into knowing how to handle them, and then handled them quite brilliantly. (Dynamite the engine, derail the train, and blow up their hide out? Hank Ketchum would only disapprove of their failure to rescue the kidnapped victims.)

Aside: I always saw vampiric Invulnerability as a kind of fast healing. The creature regenerates so quickly that they can't actually be wounded. Remaining Shaken for any length of time represents an especially troublesome injury, and may incur fanged wrath.
_________________
"Got a problem? I've got the solution: Rocket Launcher."
"Not against a Servitor."
"... We're all gonna die."