Deadlands Reloaded

A good rule of thumb I use for difficulty is to look at the damage system and the enemies you will be using. Figure out what kind of damage the players will need to be sending out in order to bring the thing down and you will be golden.

And if you forgot to factor something in when making the encounter that comes up during the encounter that would make it waaaaaay harder and much more lame then feel free to ignore it.

File: brian_blessed_hemplemans_adams230.jpg (15KB, 230x207px) Image search: [Google]

15KB, 230x207px

>>49216157
So ideally I would want to know what my players will be dishing out before I make the encounters. That seems very odd to me. Not that it doesn't make sense, I'm just used to those metrics already being figured out by the game. Plus it requires my players being ready ahead of time. [pic related]

I think I'm going to throw a gaggle of ravenous coyotes at them to kind of get everyones collective dick wet and get a scope of what to expect from monsters that can actually do something.

>>49216745

iirc Savage Worlds dmg is entirely weapon-based so it's easy to get an idea of what they can dish out. Doubly so since your setting is going to be limited to pretty much revolvers, rifles, and shotguns.

Ravenous coyotes sounds like they should work just fine. I'm mostly talking from a bad experience where the GM had us fight a bunch of zombies who had dmg resistance that made my revolver-based gunslinger completely useless.

>>49215119
Could you generate a couple characters and make them do a practice fight against each other to get a feel for it?

>>49216878
That's a great idea and I'm glad I thought of it.

>>49215119
Get the DM'S Screen. It helps!
Also the mini-adventure it comes with is pretty cool. My players liked it.
I Also love the setting. I only lost 2 players, and one was mostly due to bad luck. Also, DO NOT let anyone play one of the possesed guys whos name I forget. Not until they get more experiance with the game.

Also, EVERYBODY, if you buy the SA books, go for the hard bound ones. The paperbacks DO NOT hold up very well.

I ran a 6-month campaign of deadlands back in the day. One of the character's got their arm shot off by a cannon day 1 and everyone learned real quick to treat combat as the deadly thing it was. Probably spooked 'em a little too good, come to think of it, cause they were awful cautious thereafter, but it added a real sense of danger when shit just got crazy.

The thing that stands out in my mind the most were those big boss type encounters where you can only defeat the damn thing by using their very specific weakness - the term escapes me at the moment. Invariably those turned into brutal mutual gorefests while the party tried to get the weakness into position.

One fight, I remember, was against a black-knight-type melee-focused boss who could only be defeated by a specific sword, but none of the party members had anything even approaching melee competency, and they were terrified to get close (for good reason). Instead they spent three gory hours employing hit and run tactics to try to dismember it and lure it into explosive traps in the hopes that they could stun it (or hell, bury it) long enough that one of them could run in and stab it. It was like they were fighting the goddamn terminator. Good stuff. It took down three PCs before they finally managed to take it down - ran it over with a train and stabbed the gooey bits before it could regenerate. Players were raving about the session for weeks to come.

Er, so the moral of the story is that you shouldn't be afraid to kill a PC or three. It makes the system dangerous and fun and you can always warn them ahead of time to keep a few extra character concepts in their back pocket.

>>49217370
Why not just melt down the sword and cast it into bullets?
Or shoot it out of a cannon... Or make a Contraption to shoot it.

>>49217410
See, that's an excellent, well thought idea that would have totally worked. They'd have needed to buy themselves a bit of time, granted, and they'd be right fucked if they tried to shoot the sword out of a canon and missed, but its a good solution. My players simply did not think of it.

>>49217508
Was there a Mad with them? He could easily have whipped something up. It's a power of theirs!
And attach a chain to it so you can retrieve it.

... I wanna play with you guys!

>>49217576
Sadly no, everyone was a mundane apart from the shaman and she was the first to get decapitated. Only one of my players really seemed keen on the templates.

It was a good. Deadlands takes a little while to sort of get the feel for, but once everyone's into it it's a lot of fun. Personally I think Hell on Earth was better for crazy balls-to-the-wall reckoner-fightin', but if you really want to catch that wild west feeling its the way to go.

Oh, and GM Tip: just keep the soundtrack to good the bad and the ugly running the entire session. It will never not be appropriate.

>>49217683
The soundtrack I used was Ghoultown.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say the entire group was inspired by Deadlands.
Drink with the Living Dead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yywGI1H_oyM

>>49217683
Oh you better believe Ennio Morricone will be playing with us. I found a Wild West playlist on Spotify and I've been playing it in the background while I'm working on the campaign.

It's got to the point where my idea for the first adventure is going to be them taking up a request to help a town that is being terrorized by something. A previous group went to help and never came back. When they get to the save it's hiding in they are going to find seven magnificently mutilated bodies.

Sinning

I don't have the foggiest. Unless I'm missing something or I've got a bad pdf, it talks baout how there are penalties for sinning and gives examples of different severities of sins but that's it, nothing anywhere about what happens. Basically I want to throw in a character who didn't choose the Blessed life, the Blessed life chose him and he
s had to face one atrocity after another because of it, so I was planning on throwing on Major Alcohol Habit. Granted, I'm the gm so I cand do what I want, but how is that supposed to work? Is there no actual sinning mechanic and its to mess with players?

File: 1281257384838.jpg (97KB, 950x1050px) Image search: [Google]

97KB, 950x1050px

>>49218479
It's up to the GM what happens. Savage Worlds has this in many places.

>>49218479
What do you mean "what happens"?
You get penalties to your roll for varying amounts of time, depending on the sin level.

Maybe that's not explained in the DLR book, as I think you're still supposed to be using SW Deluxe alongside it

>>49218479
>>49221565
Right, so DLR just has the Sin table that I am seeing, no explanation of the penalties

In SWD (the core book), it says everybody who has Arcane Background(Miracles) has to make a "sin"/belief table (working with the GM), using minor/major/mortal as it is on DLR pg 77.
DLR just gives you the table for Christians.

The relevant wording from SWD, pg 103.
"Protector: Those who cast miracles are champions of their particular religions. Good priests vow to protect the innocent, fight evil, and obey all other tenets of their particular religion. Evil priests typically vow to defeat those who oppose their religion, or simply to cause as much misery and strife as possible. The player and Game Master should come up with a simple list of what is important to the character’s religion and use this as a guide.
Champions who violate their beliefs are temporarily or permanently forsaken by their chosen deity. Minor sins give the character a –2 to his Faith rolls for one week. Major sins rob him of all arcane powers for one week. Mortal sins cause the character to be forsaken until the penitent hero completes some great quest or task of atonement to regain his lost powers."

>>49221683
Sin seemed like a Deadlands specific rule so I never bothered looking in the core book to see if it was there.

I'm probably going to house rule this a bit. Make it about character's intentions rather tha actions.IE chaotic good actions, like killing an evildoer outright, won't be punished very heavily whereas letting an evildoer run rampant so his bounty increases, and then capturing him alive would be punished, probably ruling that the character is responsible for a portion of whatever sins the evildoer committed in that time.