Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[synarchist]

(( Players in my Dimestore Gospals game should stop reading now ))

Hey, all! So... a member of my posse is going to have spent time in California prior to the Reckoning. I've done a little research into the State in that time period, and it raises a few questions. "Anti-Coolie" laws were being passed all over the place to discourage Chinese immigration. Race tensions were high, with cheap Chinese mining labor driving down wages. The gold rush was pretty much over, but Chinese were also working on the Western Pacific railroad. In other words, despite a *lot* of Chinese immigrants, racism and racial tensions were high and taxes on foreign laborers made life *suck* for the Chinese.

All of which begs the question... when exactly did Kang arrive in California, and is his history/background detailed anywhere? There are five years between the Reckoning and the Great Quake, but it's difficult to imagine any infrastructure Kang might have built prior to the Quake surviving. When did he form Iron Dragon? None of this stuff seems to be detailed in any of the books I have... if it is, where do I look? All of this information will help me understand exactly when life for the Chinese started to change in the state.

Thanks as always!

[RJack]

There's some historical information in the first chapter of the Classic supplement, The Great Maze. Despite this, I'm not sure if it answers your specific questions.

Some things we do know:

Kang entered the Great Rail Wars late. It's why he had to take such a roundabout route. The start of the GRW is shortly after the Battle of Washington (1871), so maybe sometime in the period 1873-1874?

There is no Central Pacific railroad in Deadlands. It's first rails only predate the Reckoning by 2 months, so it would have been started. Why it failed is up to the Marshal, I guess.

As for Kang himself, he's something of a cipher. We know he has extensive contacts in multiple countries in the Far East, but his background is barely described. We don't even know his full name.

[synarchist]

Thanks! Looks like I'll be tracking down a copy of "The Great Maze." You know, pretty soon I'll have enough books from the Classic line to be able to consider using it instead of Reloaded lol...

[ValhallaGH]

[RJack]

Yeah Great Maze is pretty good (I consider it one of the better classic supplements, along with River o' Blood), but the vast majority of the information in it was reprinted in The Flood. A lot of that info is cut down, but what you're missing isn't super vital to running Deadlands.

What I'm saying is: but The Great Maze if you want to, and I'm sure the folks at Pinnacle don't mind you buying extra books, but if you're running reloaded then the Flood gets you all the important stuff plus a plot point campaign and savage tales.

[VonDan]

I think I heard that Kang started as an accountant for the Chinese Hip Sing Tong working in the New York office until he embezzled One million Dollars in gold from them. The Tong tracked him down and cut off both his hands in order to get him to tell ware the gold was hidden. As he would not tell they shot him in the heart, but lucky for him he had a condition called dextrocardia, in which his heart was on the right side of the body.

After he recoverd he went to medical school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and a medical degree

With the million dollars from the Tong, he purchased rare stamps in order to preserve his money against inflation; he later purchased the island of Crab Key, off the coast of Jamaica, where he re-started a defunct guano business as a cover for his proposed criminal operations. He employs Jamaican and Cuban labourers on good wages for the guano works, brutally supervised by Jamaican "Chigroes" (a portmanteau of 'Chinese' + 'Negroes', referring to their mixed ancestry). No one who comes to the island is allowed to leave.
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[iskandar]

nah, I am pretty sure he actually is a gold obsessed german ex-pat who is trying to destroy the us gold reserves by polluting it with ghost rock.