The Swedish RPG Western, third edition
A few years ago my brother succeeded in bringing me over to the West. The Old West. In Sweden we have had a RPG called Western since the early 80’s, and by now the fourth edition is on its way (which is looking truly awesome). Sure, I have played it before (in the 90’s), but not much. Since then my brother’s nagging, the better rules of the third edition of this game, and all the good new Western movies and TV-series that has shown up the last decade finally brought me over. I guess the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy was the thing that secured this change of preference. I came to understand the width and potential of this old genre, that can be so much more than cowboys, Indians and the hero with the white hat.
So Western is what we have played when we have ourselves a RPG session. By now I have watched so many documentaries, movies and TV-series, and I have read a lot on the subject, so I think that my view on the period is much clearer and allows me to become a better Game Master or player than I used to. That being said, one of the advantages of the genre is that most people have at least some knowledge of it. Even people who isn’t into History knows what to expect of the technological level and what is to be expected of clothing, law and other aspects of Society. This can’t be said of other genres, such as Fantasy or Science Fiction that can vary considerably from case to case in all instances mentioned above, and I would venture to guess other historical periods too (perhaps the Middle Ages as a possible exception).
Apart from having some fun with already published scenarios and adventures for Western, I have written and gamemastered one major adventure called Ecstasy of Gold (original, huh?). EoG will probably be re-written somewhat before I try to have it published, perhaps under another title… But more about this fabulous opus in a future post. What I’m going to write about now is my current project whose working title is 13.
13
The only thing that I knew when I stared on this project was that it would be set in San Francisco, since that was where my players wanted to go in my ongoing campaign. Once i started to read about the city in this period (1870’s), interesting and perhaps cliché things turned up pretty soon. This included China Town, and all that went with that – tong wars, highbinders, chinese slave girls, rumours about underground tunnels, opium smoking, gambling dens etc. I liked it all. It would be a nice change of view from the earlier adventures, where frontier towns with a few hundred inhabitants were considered Civilization and most of the time were spent in the more or less lawless wilderness of New Mexico and Arizona. San Francisco in this period is huge after the old gold rush of 1848-49 and comparable to many cities on the East coast, measured in both inhabitants and complexity.
The sheer size of the city was one of the major challenges that first struck me when I appraised this project, but now I consider it a strength instead. I´m not going to spend much time making maps and such, the ones from the right era that I have found on the net and in books will suffice. I also suspect that San Francisco might very well be among the first campaign modules released for Western 4th Ed., so putting too much work on that will be unnecessary. And: the fact of the city’s size and swelling population will serve to block out many details – hence the work I will put on describing locations and other things in the environment will scale down to about the same amount that I put on any other adventures.
Scenes
Now, what are the scenes of the adventure? Since this is a work in progress, things will be prone to change, but this is what I have this far (aggressively shortened for practical reasons):
1. Player Characters, PC’s, get on a ship bound for San Francisco. In my campaign adventure, they will first travel down the Colorado river from Yuma on the a paddle steamer Centennial and change to the ocean-going steam frigate SS Oregon at Port Isabel on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Cortez. One of the few other passengers is a very nice and talkative Irish businessman called Doyle, who will befriend the PC’s. Anyway, by this ship they will round Baja California and head for San Francisco along the coast, perhaps with a few short stops along the way. However, any other arrangement will do for other GM’s. The point is that…
2. [Scene: Song of the Siren] The PC’s ship encounters a drifting barque by the name Nederlander the stormy night before they are to arrive in San Francisco (the date is the 13th of August 1875). Through the wind and creaking of their own ship the PC’s can hear an eery high-pitched song coming from the barque. For some reason, the Captain of the Oregon gets nervous and orders all nosy passengers below decks before he personally heads over to the Nederlander with a boarding crew in the ship’s longboat. The singing stops and a now pale-faced boarding crew returns after attaching a sturdy tow rope to the Nederlander. PC’s who wants to know what happened on the Nederlander can get one or two from the boarding crew to talk, but never the Captain, especially if they are offering something strong to drink. It turns out that all hands on the Nederlander, save the first mate, had died from typhoid fever. The hold contained opium, silks and 13 chinese slave girls – all alive and well, but looking starved. When they left the ship the first mate had also died, after saying his last words to the Captain in private. If the PC’s succeeds in getting the seaman drunk, he will let slip that he thinks that his Captain suffocated the ailing, but not dying, first mate.
3. [Scene: Babylon] SS Oregon with Nederlander in tow enters the San Francisco harbour the next day. Before any of the passengers are let of the ship they are questioned by a high-ranking police (a Police Captain) about what they know about yesterdays events. He feigns concern over possible foul play to get the PC’s to divulge if they know anything about the cargo of the Nederlander. If they say too much they will get a price on their head, much like another of the passengers – but more about him later. The rest of this scene is up to the players, but it’s function will be to set the mood of their San Francisco stay. San Francisco is a big and dirty city with a swelling population, racial hostility, economic depression and highly organized crime.
Those are the scenes I have right now. The rest are the sketchy, but together with the background and a little help from the Hero’s Journey concept it will be fixed shortly. There will be, in chronological order, a murder scene (Doyle gets killed after his cover has been blown), a saloon scene, a secret underground Tong warehouse/slave pit scene, a chase scene, a scene where the PC’s confront the corrupt police with their evidence and a farewell scene at the docks.
Background
THE AVENGER
During the final stages of the bloody 14 year-long Taiping Rebellion in China, a massacre took place in a village in the mountainous province of Guangxi. The massacre was ordered by a Colonel in the imperial army by the name Shen Li to set an example and to punish the Hakka people, who had almost unanimously supported the rebellion in the beginning. The inhabitants were lined up and shot. The village was then torched. A nine-year old girl named Jinghua Sun survived since her mother was killed at the first shot and fell over her. After dark she crawled out from under the pile of dead bodies to the sound of drunkenly singing soldiers who was trying to ease their conscience with rice wine.
Since that day Jinghua Sun has lived for vengeance. She kept alive by petty theft and begging, eventually ending up in Hong Kong to become one of the many street children. It didn’t take long before her talent for theft was noticed by the grassroot level of organized crime. She was taken in and learned to pick locks and how to fight using hands, feet and improvised weapons. When she turned 14 she killed her first man and at 16 she was regarded as the best fighter in her gang. At age 18 she was formally hired as an assassin by one of the Hong Kong triads, and it was then that she noticed that Colonel Shen Li was high-ranking in an opposing triad. It turned out that his rank as Colonel in the imperial army was just one of many benefits he held thanks to his contacts and position in the chinese Underworld.
Her time for revenge had come! Unfortunately she had only started to plan her move when her enemy just disappeared. Shen Li had gathered many enemies, and among them there were a few who could actually threaten his position in the triad. In fact his triad was completely erased in a bloody raid by the army, the strays taken down within a few days by the Underworld. Shen Li was never found and Jinghua Sun spent the next 18 months trying to track him down. In the end she found out that Shen Li had escaped the country by one of his sources of income . the slave trade with the United States. Shen Li had been tipped off a few hours before the government raid and simply got aboard one of his ships heading for San Francisco.
That is how it came to pass that Jinghua Sun let herself be “fooled” aboard one of the slave ships by an agent of the slave trade who promised her a good husband and riches in the promised land to the East, where the mountains were full of gold. She signed a forged marriage contract with a named chinese man living in San Francisco’s China Town and was then confined in the hold of the ship Nederlander together with twelve other girls and young women.
THE DRAGON HEAD
Shen Li showed up in San Francisco in the Spring of 1874 with all papers in order. Within the space of a few weeks he went from being an honoured guest of his relative Fong Li to becoming head of Kwong Duck Tong, one of the more hardcore tongs with it’s fingers dug in deep in protection, gambling, drugs and prostitution. The bulk of the chinese slave girls used by Kwong Duck Tong in the prostitution business had come from Shen Li’s “exports company” in Hong Kong, This, and his reputation which had preceded him, made his coup to become leader easy work with almost no bloodshed. Only his predecessor got a head shorter.
Since then Shen Li has ruled Kwong Duck Tong with an iron hand and has reshaped the organization to look much more like the old Chinese triads, with a more well-defined hierarchy, centralisation and a greater emphasis on Eastern mysticism (the latter mainly to impress the lower ranks). In the end of 1874 the tong-turned-triad annexed a lesser tongs area in China Town, killing or absorbing the leaders. The late spring of 1875 saw the same thing happening again with another lesser tong. This has made Kwong Duck Tong as big as Suey Sing Tong, the earlier dominating force in China Town. Shen Li is now openly styling himself “Dragon Head”, just like the leader of real triads back in China.
The Page Law of March 1875, who specifically prohibits the import of Chinese slave girls, has made Shen Li’s contacts within the slave trade and smuggling worth even more. The few other tongs dealing with the import of slaves have found it increasingly harder to get a supply matching the demand. Shen Li has established good contacts with a select few within San Francisco’s law and order, but also with a few private Captains owning their own ship who makes or can be made to make the cross Pacific trip (and smuggling) their business. The Pacific Mail Line, which was used before the Page Law, is judged to be to cumbersome for any real business since every Chinese girl who travels to the United States in any semblance of legality demands a lot of paperwork and forgery. So, now it is almost exclusively smuggling that is the order of the day, and in this Shen Li and the Kwong Duck Tong excels over their competitors.
THE POLICE
San Francisco Police Department was one of the most professional police forces in the United States at this time, with a structure that can be seen in modern police forces. Numbering at a little more than a hundred, including officers, sergeants, captains, a chief of police and even a handful of police detectives, they all dress in grey uniform and get a regular and fair pay. The city is divided into four precincts with substations as base. These substations are in turn in contact with the main police station in the Old City Hall on Kearny Street via telegraph wires. Officers heading out on their patrols report this to City Hall by said wire, and the telegraph net is also used for reporting in serious crimes or to call for back up.
SFPD’s professionalism put aside, the police corps unfortunately contains a few rotten apples. Captain Gerard Van Horn is in charge of the 2nd Precinct, which covers China Town, the Barbary Coast and the Eastern Docks . He is an intelligent and unscrupulous careerist who uses his rank and position in society to amass wealth and power. He collects a percentage from several tongs on their business to look the other way and has a very good partnership with Kwong Duck Tong since Shen Li’s takeover. It is thanks to Captain Van Horn, a few officers on his payroll and the controller Ed Fielding from the Immigration Agency that the slave traffic can go on with almost undiminished strength since the Page Law was enforced. All these goings on is for the moment totally unknown by the Chief of Police Theodore G. Cockrill, and the SFPD has its hands full with the general deteriorating situation in the city.
PINKERTON
There are those who is keeping an eye on things however, and it is the never sleeping eye of the Pinkerton Agency. The initiator and father of the Page Law, Horace F. Page, is suspecting that things are business as usual with the Chinese immigration to San Francisco, even though his law was designed to restrict this. Page is not upset by the slave trade as such – he is a full-blown racist that hates all non-whites and the Chinese in particular. In his way of seeing things they pollute American values and steal jobs from the real Americans. The law of March 1875 puts the spotlight on Chinese slave trade and prostitution, but by doing this it makes all Chinese immigration look bad. He also rightly thought that limiting the amount of Chinese women would make San Francisco less attractive for Chinese men, who are a overwhelming majority in China Town.
Since the Page law seems toothless, he has hired the Pinkerton’s to look into this problem. Are Chinese slave girls still arriving? How? Why don’t the Police stop it? Who is to blame? The initial reports he has received didn’t soothe his temper. Now he is looking for blood, but still needs proof. The Pinkerton’s continue their investigation, but the funds they receive from Page only covers the wages of two agents. One of them is aboard a ship heading for Hong Kong to investigate closer to the source of the slave trade, while the other, Brendan Doyle, works in San Francisco. Doyle has some interesting leads already, and has taken the risk of signing on as a passenger on one of the suspected slave ships. The ship is the SS Oregon, and the trip is San Francisco-Port Isabel and back again. Maybe the slaves are taken on in Mexico?
THE CITY
San Francisco in 1875 is a city in deep social deprivation, and it looks like it is getting worse. Since 1869, when the transcontinental railway was finished, hordes of the unemployed has flocked to the city. But this is not all. This is in the middle of “The Long Depression” of 1873-1879 which was felt all over the developed world. Only in the United States 18000 companies went bankrupt, including ten banks and ten states. This has contributed to a huge increase in crime in San Francisco and the Police is having problems with large gangs of hoodlums, who damages property, commit thefts and assaults both citizens and the Police. Especially crimes motivated by race hate is getting more and more common. The Chinese, who are the ones suffering the worst of the Depression, gets to be scape goats for unemployed white labourers. Chinese ex-railroad workers have nowhere to go but to the tongs… Sooner or later things will boil over and result in riots and mass murder if the SFPD can’t find a way to defuse the situation.
Then what?
Well, there is some work to do be done on this project obviously. But some more could be said about plot, theme and title.
The title sounds good, doesn’t it? Is the adventure called 13 because it is Friday the 13th when the PC’s get their Call to Adventure by encountering the Nederlander? Or is it because Jinghua Sun is the thirteenth girl aboard the ship? Or has it got something to do with the 13th Amendment to the American Constitution?
The theme of the adventure is at least partly revenge, since that is what drives Jinghua Sun. But from the PC’s point of view it will be more about corruption and greed. During the first night in the San Francisco’s harbour Jinghua Sun jumps ship under cover of darkness and will cross paths with the PC’s a few times during the adventure. She will track down Shen Li eventually, and doing that by working a bloody way up the command chain of the Kwong Duck Tong.
The PC’s get really involved when their friend Brendan Doyle, the travelling businessman from the SS Oregon, turns up dead in his hotel room. He also turns out to be a Pinkerton agent whose real name is Kieran Murray. Moreover, the find out a thing or two about his mission by studying his notes that can be found on his body (the killers didn’t have time to search him). It turns out that he was on the SS Oregon to investigate if Captain Severin, who was known to go to Hong Kong from time to time, had anything to do with the slave trade. This, together with what the PC’s might have seen and heard, will draw them into the adventure. They will probably want to know who killed their friend, and by extension, who is running the Chinese slave trade in San Francisco. The answer to both questions will be Shen Li, since he ordered the killing of Doyle/Murray after being tipped off by Captain Van Horn.
Will the PC’s expose Captain Van Horn to the authorities? Will the slave trade be stopped? Will Jinghua Sun get her revenge (by working together with the PC’s)?
Since blogging is not writing, I will now get back to work on this. Wish me luck.
Niklas' quest 