We had to make one character in the beginning, and one character in the middle, and several players were late, and so it was a bit chaotic, but things went pretty well despite that.
The characters overheard George Smith in a saloon telling the story of a French Foreign Legion unit defending almost to the last man in a battle in Mexico. George (not a Foreign Legion member) was knocked out but regained consciousness in time to see the climax and aftermath of the battle. Six soldiers remained at the end, out of ammunition but refusing to surrender. A bayonet charge killed three, including the last surviving officer, Capitaine Danjou. Billy noticed that as the officer’s body was taken from the field with the honor guard assigned by the Mexican general, Danjou’s wooden left hand was already missing.
Armand Fontaine, one of the three FFL survivors, has contacted George, after searching for the missing hand for many years. Now, hearing that the hand may still be in Mexico, he has decided to come back to find it, and George needs volunteers to guide and protect the mission into Mexico. The characters jumped at the chance for a job.
They set out south and reached the battlefield. I realized along the way that I’ve got NPCs in charge of the group, which makes the players look to them for instruction; I needed to change that. Armand and George started looking around the battlefield together, and the characters smelled a strange scent and went to investigate. Over a ridge they saw a small house with smoke coming out of the chimney. They approached, knocked, and were greeted by a small, tattooed bald man speaking French. He answered a couple of questions and slammed the door again. After spending a couple of minutes trying to get him to come to the door again, 10 corpses rose out of the earth behind the group and moved to attack.
The half vampire and the dynamite chuckin’ character took care of the revenants. At this point the late characters rode up with a delivery for the small house, and were filled in on what’s going on (gunfire and dynamite explosions). Armand and George came over as well, and filled in the newcomers on their current mission.
On trying to find the tattooed guy again, the group only found an empty house. Armand Fontaine looked at the contents of what the tattooed man was cooking over his fire and looked very solemn as he informs the characters that this person must be a practitioner of voudoun. (Which manifests itself in game terms as Mesmerism; no, that religion is not about mind control – or no more so than other religions – I’m just trying to put things into a context; any of the arenas of magic in my game can be used for good or evil, and this is just a story.)
The characters talked the dynamite chuckin’ guy out of blowing up the house, as there might be a clue to his whereabouts inside.
Fontaine wondered whether there is any way to track the voudoun priest, and they started trying to figure it out. I decided that everyone would be able to contribute one trait’s dice to the conflict of searching for the bald tattooed guy. On reflection, I should have allowed them to choose a stat instead, if they thought that would be a better help, since some of the traits they were contributing were kind of sketchy. Still, it worked well for determining a baseline strength for the conflict. But that’s where we ended the session, except for doing fallout and experience.
Thanks and recognition go to my friend Conrad, who suggested this plot line (which I’m calling “The Dead Man’s Hand”) after reading about the story of the Battle of Camaron and Capitaine Danjou’s wooden hand.
