[TDM]
Handy, I´ve been struggling for some time with that one. I guess it´s time to call in the big guns and realize how little the small man can do - in the big picture. Without ending the scenario in a total party kill, I´m letting everyone off the hook. That is if they survive through February. At this time most of the UK is in serious distress. The PCs have only seen a small portion of what´s been happening.
So, it seems Kathryn Petersen will return to the US and to L.A. for some R&R. I´m not saying that the characters are thrown in the bin. Just stating that the TDM will be taken care of by a stronger force.
The two scenarios of the L.A. team have opened multiple routes for a third scenario in the future.
1. The Las Vegas money trail & occult murders. Based on
To live and die in Las Veags by Rodriguez.
2. The Mansion in the dark, outside Manaus, Brazil. Based on Shane Ivey´s
Jaundiced Eyes
These will be prepared
properly before run.
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Rancho Mirago
This scenario And I feel fine is written by G.C. Gabrowski for the RPG Unknown Armies, conversion in progress.
Permission granted by the author to run the game here.
The ancient war between good and evil continues even today. Which Way will the universe choose? How to define what is good and evil in a world with many shades of gray? Who knows what is right, what's wrong? At least one thing is certain. It is our choice. At least we have that.
The war still continues. There are sometimes conflicts worldwide, you can see on the TV news, and sometimes go completely unnoticed by most of us. But they always have influence in our world.
On this occasion one of the chapters of this war will take place on a site that would never suspect: A semi-abandoned caravan parking in the great desert of Arizona.
To set the scene a little for the upcoming adventure, most of our action will take place in or around the Rancho Mirago trailer park in the tiny, tiny High Desert hamlet known as Barkerville, Arizona. The park's name is about as close to proper Spanish as Old El Paso is to authentic Mexican cuisine, but it isn't the kind of place where people are particular about that sort of thing.
To be honest, Rancho Mirago, and Barkerville in general, are not drying up and blowing away. That happened long ago. What remains is the civic equivalent of cow skulls bleaching the sun. The trailer park itself is a wasteland of abandoned, dust-covered trailers and blowing tumbleweeds, inhabited only by debris of human wreckage carried in on the desert wind.
Barkerville
Barkerville and its surroundings are located in the middle of nowhere, off major highways, in a stretch of high desert that isn't going to be developed if they start building suburbs to Los Angeles on the moon. It is a place where things end, rather than start. This stagnation and placid decay forms
part of the overarching mood. While nothing can begin in Barkerville, it is so isolated from the world that it´s a perfect place for things to end.
Physically, the Barkerville region is high, hot, dry desert. Stunted plant growth, flat land and an almost total lack of water-induced decay make it a serene landscape of mirages and shacks deserted for decades. Only the trailer park, Rancho Mirago, the derelict town of Barkerville, and the Ames Ranch are still inhabited. (Eastwood as Mike Ames)
Rancho Mirago
The Rancho Mirago had its heyday in the early 1950s, but it's been downhill ever since. The trailer park sprang up in response to uranium prospecting in the area, but no ore was found, and the park soon entered a sort of semi-conscious half-life. There was a temporary resurgence between 1969 and 1972, when a commune briefly inhabited the park. (When Uli von Mensch arrived, here depicted by Max von Sydow) While it quickly disintegrated from internal tensions, remnants of the community, once thirty-five strong, can be seen here and there; many of the deserted trailers are festooned inside with dry-rotted cloth in tie-dyed patterns, either in tatters or seeming¬ly whole but fragile as cobwebs.
Dead cars are everywhere. Uli's last car, a recently deceased Pinto, has had the top cut off and hood and trunk removed, and the dirt-filled corpse serves as a planter for his cactus garden.
There are twenty-three trailers in the Rancho Mirago, ranging from tiny 1940s tow-trailers to a comparatively palatial 40' doublewide occupied by the Kerr Brothers. Only four are inhabited. The rest are ever-so-slowly weathering into oblivion from sand and the very occasional rain. In many of the abandoned trailers, the scattered personal effects of the last inhabitants still rest, tossed around by long-vanished looters and wearing thick coats of powdery Arizona dust.
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My idea for this game is to let the players play out the misery of the run-down state of the area. The characters have some knowledge of each other but not total insight. Secrets are best not shared.
To make it possible to choose what character to play I´m giving some information on the concerned parties. The players will have to disregard some of the information as not known to their characters. Well, that´s what makes up good role playing, right?
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Richard Dansky
Dansky was an ordinary young intellectual. He had a fairly normal childhood in Philadelphia, did well in high school and took a Masters in English Composition from Cornell. His first foray into the working world, however, led him straight into the satanic inner workings of an outplacement agency best described as non-traditionally managed. After a few years, he left. he was fed up with the academic world that wouldn't take his studies seriously, and the cynical businessmen who wanted nothing more than the bucks of desperate executives. "Fuck 'em all," he decided, and became a trailer park manager.
It seemed like such a good idea at the time. But the drunken brawls, the petty greed of the park owners, the hopeless feeling that pervaded the environment gradually wore him down. He managed as best he could. Maybe he drank too much, but at least necessary repairs were made and the cops only had to be summoned on a domestic call once or twice a month.
Then came the tornadoes. First one, then the next, just as he was rebuilding. The memories of the black winds, the howl of tearing metal and the crash of shattering wood, the screams barely audible over the storm, still haunt his dreams. After the second one, he found a child's leg, the foot still in the sneaker. That's all they found to bury of the little girl. That was it for Richard. He quit five minutes after he got back from the funeral.
Rich weren't really sure what he was going to do after that. He figured maybe he'd go live under a bridge and drink, but that didn't seem appealing after the first try. So Dansky took the next best thing, and signed on with the management company that owns Rancho Mirago. No tornadoes out here! He´s been working there for four years now, and he couldn't be happier. His parents occasionally moan about how he´s wasting his life, but what do they know? In the evenings, Richard plays chess or sits with Uli, the old timer Doc and watch the place slowly go to hell. It might not be "the life," but it's better than any other job he´s had to date. What could go wrong in the middle of the Arizona desert? Hell, they're even starting to think of Dansky as a local. Just two days ago, Mike Ames was having truck problems, and he asked Rich to take a new fuel tank for his generator out to the ranch—a couple years ago, Ames barely acknowledged Dansky´s existence. Obviously, Richard Dansky isnn't doing too badly. Maybe it´s time to get that fuel tank over to the Ames Ranch.
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Character sheets and specifics will be posted on the forum later. If enough interest is shown for this small Arizona hide-out. Four players needed, fourteen slots open.
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