Some players were out of town or couldn’t make it for other reasons, so we only had 4 or 5 for this session. I had decided that I wanted to get the characters out of their current situation because I had a whole other plot to get them into, and so I had the Indian leader who had kidnapped Sori’s brother (Sori is one of the characters) explain why they had kidnapped him. (Also, I named him: Standing Ox.) It was because he had a knack for finding things that they desperately needed, since the railroad was scheduled to build across their sacred lands, and the rail baron who was overseeing it had promised to reroute the tracks if they could find a certain item. It was kind of a reset button exercise, but I explained that I had figured out what I wanted to do with the plot, and they weren’t too put off.
After journeying to Standing Ox’s tribe’s sacred lands, the group split up – some going with Lance (Sori’s brother) and Standing Ox to find the item they were looking for: a piece of the Occhariad Dodecagon, a group of twelve gems all cut to have twelve sides, that when assembled in a certain pattern is said to open a pathway of the mind to the fonts of eternal knowlege. Others have said that the Occhariad is a locked door, and madness lies on the other side. (Characters who are practitioners of the Alchemical arena of magic have all heard of the Occhariad; more educated ones also know that the Golden Path of John Dee dismantled the Occhariad in 1605 to safeguard the world, distributing the gems to Britain, Spain, Russia, India, China, and other places.)
The other group of characters went to meet with the railroad baron Hammesdorf, to try to talk him into giving Standing Ox’s tribe more time to try to come up with the item. One player – the Romanian witch hunter – has given his character a lot of good talking traits, but he’s playing against type – he’s not an exceptional talker himself. So in his conflict with Hammesdorf to try to get more time, he was struggling, but the rest of the group was able to keep him on track and suggest ideas for what to say that Hammesdorf couldn’t ignore. He got the time extension, but at the expense agreeing to enter into the employ of the railroad baron so that Hammesdorf would be able to discuss the business of the Occariad with him. Then he headed off to catch up with the rest of the group.
Meanwhile, Lance was using his knack to find the gem from the Occhariad. He led the others to a place where a dry streambed formed a small waterfall, and there was a cave behind the waterfall. They went in and down a narrow passage and found that it opened into a fairly large cave. In the center of the cave was a wooden staff with a metal headpiece on it (but no, the gem was not in the center, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark). They found alchemical symbols on the headpiece, but once Lance got close to it, he became nervous, and said some things that led his companions to think he’d forgotten why he was there. He then left the cave and kept walking for about a quarter mile.
At that point he explained that he thought that there was some kind of mesmerizing compulsion put on the staff or the headpiece, because it made him think of just about anything besides what he was trying to find. The rest of the characters thought maybe they could have a conflict with the staff to see if they could disable the compulsion, and that’s what they did. They did get rid of it, and Lance went back into the cave and found the gem in a hidden part of the cave.
By this time the witch hunter had caught up with them, and they thought about whether they should actually give this artifact to the railroad baron, since they were mostly thinking that the Occhariad is not something they want to be reassembled. Someone had the idea of trying to create a copy of the gem using Alchemy, and use Phantasmagoria to make it seem like the real thing, and possibly use Mesmerism to make Hammesdorf believe it was the real thing. Because we are using the Dogs in the Vineyard mechanics, there was no check to see if they were successful in crafting the duplicate – they could only be successful in the context of whether Hammesdorf was taken in by it, so we moved quickly to that confrontation.
In fact, DitV mechanics can be thought of in relation to Dungeons & Dragons mechanics in this way: the part of a roleplaying game that is the most interesting – and, really, the only part for which it’s necessary to have mechanics - is an elaborate, roleplayed opposed check. That’s what we’re doing when we do these conflicts. It’s abstract in the sense that it’s not important *during the conflict* who is healthy, injured, dying, or dead. It’s only important who has resources left to remain in the conflict. And the mechanics reflect this: it never happens that a character dies during a conflict. Dogs in the Vineyard deals with fallout *after* the conflict. Of course it’s possible for a character to die from wounds taken during the conflict. The rules say that if your fallout total (determined with dice related to ‘Taking the Blow’) gets to 20, you have two choices: 1. Die now, or 2. Set up your death scene, during which you’ll die. This is partly giving recognition to a player whose character’s principles are so important that he or she just won’t give in during the conflict – and “giving” is always an option during a conflict.
In the conflict in which they tried to pass off their fake as the real piece of the Occhariad, the players were in over their heads. Hammesdorf is a powerful practitioner of magic, and saw through the fake pretty much right away. However, he decided to see where it would lead if he pretended to be taken in. He told them to meet him later at the railroad camp so that he could give them (as his agents, by extension of their association with the one member of the group who he had employed) their next instructions. And that’s where we left it. Next time I expect we’ll have a serious conflict on our hands as Hammesdorf reveals that he knows about the fake.
Again, my friend Conrad suggested part of this plot line, though I’ve changed the direction of his original suggestion. Still, thanks are due – plot is perhaps not my strong point, and so I’ll take all the help I can get!
