Previously on our Deadlands readthrough:
Our Deadlands readthrough continues with the Book o’ the Dead, which goes into detail about the Harrowed, our favourite grizzled revenants. I feel like the writers were chomping at the bit to get to them, to be honest – while they’re not central to the game’s mythology per se (unless they are in some way that only becomes obvious later on), they were considered iconic enough to make the cover picture on the core rulebook and have a part of character generation devoted to even the possibility that a PC could become one. All in all, I suspect that a large part of the game’s inspiration was to have a setting where grim, tormented undead gunslingers were a thing.
The book reintroduces Coot Jenkins, the Prospector, last seen in the introduction to the core rules. There are two more of his monologues in here, one where he gives an inspiring speech to a group of no-longer-fresh-out-of-the-ground Harrowed, and one which is meant to be a more private conversation where he cautions a Harrowed against the risks of its new existence – and adds that one of the main risks is pissing him off. The GM is instructed to use the Prospector to prod, push and discipline Harrowed players as needed – he might just be an old man, but he’s an old man with a crapload of zombie badasses on speed dial who see him as their last shot at redemption.
We also get told, in a strictly-for-the-GM section, that Coot has a plan for the army of Harrowed he’s building: he ultimately wants to take them through the portal to the Hunting Grounds in Yellowstone and make them replace the Old Ones as the plug that keeps the Reckoners bottled up. He’s fine with doing that, because he’s convinced himself that Harrowed don’t actually have souls anymore, so he thinks nothing of condemning them to an eternity of torment. Oh dear.
We get new rules for representing the struggle between the Harrowed and the evil manitou animating him. I never actually went over the old rules since I knew they’d be replaced here, so never mind those. The new rules are that a Harrowed has a pool of Dominion points equal to his Spirit die. At the start of every game session, he makes a contested Spirit roll against his manitou, and whichever gets more successes and raises takes the balance in Dominion points away from the loser. At any time, the GM can spend a chip to let the manitou make a Spirit roll against a difficult of five plus the number of Dominion points the Harrowed currently has, and on a success the manitou takes over control for a brief time. If the manitou ever has all the Dominion points, it takes over indefinitely, with only special magic being able to give the Harrowed a chance to retake control.
The dream sequence that a Harrowed has upon dying, where it gets decided how many Dominion points she starts out with, gets some more direction. The main takeaway is that the Harrowed needs to act, within the dream, in such a way as to prove herself a stubborn, contrary bastard – going with the flow should almost invariably be punished. A Harrowed can be good, albeit with some difficulty, but being nice is no longer an option. The manitou eats nice people for breakfast.
We also get new rules for creating a character who’s a Harrowed right from the start, which does seem to be the more reasonable way of doing it – having someone end up playing a demon-possessed walking corpse when they didn’t sign up to play a demon-possessed walking corpse is all very artistic and all, but in practice I think it won’t be popular with any but the most mellow and open-minded of players. Anyway, the way you do it is, you have to take 5 extra points of Hindrances to represent the various baggage that the manitou has saddled you with since you rezzed, and in return you get to buy 10 points of Harrowed powers. If that seems like the game is being generous, you clearly haven’t learned how Deadlands works yet – you’re actually getting 10 points of Hindrances, the GM just isn’t going to tell you about it until later. The last 5 points is a special Hindrance which represents bad stuff that the manitou has done and which you aren’t currently aware of, but which is going to come bite you in the ass at the exact wrong moment. Heh. I like it, but again, I feel like the game is over-fond of springing things like that on the player as nasty surprises.
Speaking of Harrowed powers, there’s now a long list of them. Harrowed can learn to throw fireballs, possess people, raise undead minions, call up freezing winds, climb walls like a spider, summon clouds of vermin, and similar feats of hellish might. We’re told that when creating your own Harrowed powers, you should keep in mind to keep them within the theme of “death, the manitou, and the Hunting Grounds.” Okay, I’m down with thematic coherence, but the problem is… we don’t actually know what the Hunting Grounds are like! I mean, the Harrowed can learn to wield fire, and they can learn to wield icy cold, and if the Hunting Grounds are both hot and cold, I feel like I’m not sure what they can’t be. I mean, okay, probably they are light on fluffy bunnies and so forth, but you know what I mean…
Harrowed can also take special Harrowed Hindrances to represent problems with their undead state, like being in a state of perpetual brooding (-3 to all actions in any session before you “snap out of it” by spending a chip for the first time), looking like a withered corpse (Harrowed usually look like fairly fresh corpses – not particularly attractive, but able to walk down the street without scaring people), or having to eat nothing but living spiders. You can’t buy off Harrowed Hindrances, ever.
We get more detail on the suckier aspects of being a Harrowed, and some roleplaying directions. Everyone is out to get you, especially those bastard Pinkertons and Texas Rangers. Your manitou is just waiting for the most inopportune time to take control and make everyone sorry they ever came near you – it can be kept in line with fear, because it has no intention of dying to a headshot and getting sent to the nastiest parts of the Hunting Grounds, but it’ll pounce on any opportunity to do evil safely. Even people who like you feel queasy around you to the point where their Grit is considered 1 point lower than otherwise. Your nightmares have a nasty tendency to take corporeal form and run off and do nasty stuff (they fade away by morning, thankfully). Also, you smell bad. No, really, you have a charnel stench around you, and you’re advised to either slather on perfume or drink a lot of strong hooch to cover it up.
All in all, the impression I get is that the designers did want people to play Harrowed – they put in too many cool widgets not to – but they sure wanted it to be a gross, dark, demoralising experience. Which, let’s face it… I absolutely love. Look, I’m an old-school White Wolf fanboy at heart! I love it when games give me awesome powers and make me feel deeply unclean at the same time!
The book concludes with an adventure called The Dark Canyon. The players wake up in a cabin, not remembering what happened. They’re all either Harrowed or (for those players the GM thinks won’t like it) possessed by manitous in a way that temporarily gives them the abilities of Harrowed, but they have all blacked out the events of their death and so think they’re still alive.
Wandering out of the cabin into the Arizona wilderness, they first come upon a small town where everyone has been butchered. The descriptions are ghoulishly vivid, with things like the local newsman crushed in his own printing press and a bartender with so many broken bottles jammed into him that he looks like a porcupine. Someone has scratched out the number of residents from the sign outside the town and written a 0 after it. And at one spot, there is a half-full bottle of booze of one PC’s favourite brand left on a table. Hmmmmmmm.
The players further stumble on a cavalry fort that’s been similarly massacred, leaving one traumatised survivor in the form of an officer’s wife who’s spent her time painting horrific pictures of the atrocity. The killers’ faces are too distorted to make out. Hmmmmmm again.
Finally, the players find Coot Jenkins, who’s been kidnapped by some Apache while he was out acquiring some barrels of gunpowder. After they free him, he directs them to a creepy canyon with a creepy pool of bubbling green liquid in it (they have to flee from the cavalry along the way – they came back from patrol to find the fort sacked and are not happy). As he sets up the barrels to blow the pool to Kingdom Come, he drops the truth on the players.
Who has been going around committing horrific acts of mass murder?
They have.
That’s right. The players got killed by a bunch of outlaws and dropped near the dark evil pool, which has the special property that any recently dead body near it becomes Harrowed, with the manitou in full control (any living body gets possessed by a manitou as per above). The players rose and went on a rampage until Coot tracked them down, bushwhacked them and poured some of his special potion down their throat, then left them to wake back up as themselves while he went to fetch the gunpowder. Now he demands their help in blowing the pool and ending its evil.
This takes some doing, because the pool can defend itself. It first splashes the barrels, soaking the gunpowder, and then spawns an infinite number of skeletons that attack anyone in the area. The solution to the problem is that one of the players has to run up to the barrels, stick a gun straight into one, and pull the trigger – nothing else will get it to blow. A Harrowed might just barely survive that, but no guarantees.
Anyway, the players hopefully conduct themselves as heroes, thus taking the first step towards making up for what their manitous have used their bodies to do. Those who were only possessed are cured once the pool goes up; those actually Harrowed stays the way they are.
Again, I kind of love this, which probably makes me some kind of sadomasochist. The only problem I have with the scenario is that I find myself increasingly annoyed with Coot Jenkins himself. I mean, let’s face it, the man is a bit of an annoying Fixer Sue, running around and setting things up juuuust the way the designers thinks it ought to be set up. The fact that he’s ultimately planning to betray the Harrowed and condemn them to hell helps a little, but not much (and it’s questionable to what extent it is a betrayal – it’s not stated whether he’ll come clean with his Harrowed troops while it’s still possible for them to back out, for instance). And I just don’t see how he’s so awesome and capable of raising and directing an army of the dead – from his description, he really is just some prospector, someone who’s presumably good at surviving in the wilderness and panning for gold and maybe shooting straight to defend his claims, but who should have no particular skill at strategy and psychology. And the writers always have him talking in this folksy aw-hell-an’-buckshot style that they can’t quite manage to make sound natural.
Still, I like this book a lot, which is unsurprising since it panders to all my usual weak spots. Next up is The Great Maze, where we join the Californian gold rush.