We returned to Deadlands: Reloaded for another session. We’ve been having a great deal of difficulty getting all four players together, which is making me rethink how I’ll approach the upcoming Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign I’m planning. I may have to work out a system to allow for one or more to be missing from any given session, otherwise it’ll take forever to complete.
In any case, I decided this time to go entirely off the cuff, creating an adventure from the backgrounds the player’s built up for their characters and focusing on a particular setting that had been requested – caves!
Our night caps off with the crew accompanying their rail baron on a trip into the badlands on his personal train. Unfortunately, just as the sun comes up, an explosion can be heard and the tracks have been blown up. Before anyone knows something is wrong, the train derails, throwing them from their bunks and seats, rolling the main car. They emerge to find a group of Sioux warriors circling the train, armed with rifles. They mean business.
Unfortunately for my planned encounter for the night, the gunslinger draws a Joker and decides to unload on them. He drops two, as well as the shaman with a critical-instant kill hit. Not normally a problem, but I had planned on him being the main foe for the evening. Dead on the first round. Serves me right for having him show his face in the first battle. Aw well, must roll with the punches.
While the shaman was going to be the main foe, he had already summoned a wendigo who had happily seized the rail baron in the confusion. There was a bit of a shoot out with him, but fear checks were failed and he simply floated off with the rail baron in tow. The players had some punches to roll with too.
The posse tracks the warriors to a waterfall.
In behind the waterfall, they find a cave opening.
Through that little opening, the posse enters and finds a stagnant pond and passageways.
The priest, unwisely, dips his shotgun in the pond, then slips in the pond and nearly vanishes completely. Covered in scum, he cleanses himself with a blessing, which is good, because it was nasty stuff.
The group continues on into the cave, finding a pitch dark chamber.
Before they can get very far, a couple warriors strike from the darkness, but the gunslinger again unloads his six-shooter, this time shooting his pal in the chest. Grim Servant o’ Death strikes again. They dispatch the warriors quickly and find themselves in a strange chamber with ancient carvings on the walls and a warning in Sioux across the archway warning that only death can be found beyond. A bottomless chasm stretches between them and a landing on the other side.
The priest decides to take a leap of faith.
He makes it and soon is joined by the rest of the posse.
Finally, they find their boss in a chamber with the wendigo ready to eat him. There a couple cave men with him and immediately, they all race to cut the posse to pieces.
The battle is soon over, though the scout was almost torn to shreds by the wendigo.
The gunslinger and priest manage to take down the cave men while the wendigo tries to escape through a vent in the ceiling.
But, is cut down by a double-barrelled blast from the priest who redeems his faith he had lost earlier in the evening.
Here’s the full cave that they explored.
It was an easily-pulled together session, building off the Sioux shaman that is one of their main enemies, but instead of going up against him, they went against his servant (who was terrifying in his own way). And, though he was killed quickly at the start of the session, it’s funny how evil things don’t seem to stay dead for very long in Deadlands…
We loved playing with the Dwarven Forge caverns set, it really brought the caves out. I also used Bits of Darkness: Caverns for the atmospherics. It’s an excellent product and very much complemented the physical caves that the players could see with great descriptions of the caves and passageways.
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
That sounded like fun!
I really think Deadlands is going to be our next campaign. My group has been asking for it for awhile.
Glad you enjoyed it. It’s a great setting and a fun game, so definitely check it out!