Monster Hunter 1855

[Steve]

My new campaign is an adaptation of the MHI setting, moving the timeframe back into the year 1855, so it shares a bit in the feel of the Deadlands RPG without taking all of its lore and backstory.

 

In this setting, PUFF bounties for monsters exist, only their origin goes back to nearer the founding of the country. In the frontier regions, the US Army administers the payment of bounties, but only officers of Colonel level and above are aware of this.

 

The campaign opens in 1855, Fort Yuma, at the trailing end of the Gold Rush.

[Steve]

The party consists of three characters, each built as Powerful Heroes (225 points and 50 Complication points).

 

1) US Marshall Daniel Doyle (character image is Clint Eastwood from one of his early westerns): A revenant that keeps this a secret and is dedicated to hunting evil. Talented with a gun and durable.

2) Sergio Cortez: (character image is Antonio Banderas from the Mariachi movie): A bounty hunter of both men and monsters. A thrillseeking womanizer who is in this for the money. A prototype of Zorro without a secret ID who is very handy with a sword and very stealthy.

3) Samuel Smith (character image is Bruce Campbell from The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr): A cowboy with immense gun skills who is a weirdness magnet rather than an actual hunter.

 

Two of the characters are armed with cap and ball handguns except for Marshall Doyle, who is armed with one of the earliest brass cartridge weapons available as of 1855 (a French-made Lefaucheux M1854).

 

In the first session, Doyle and Cortez are tracking something heading west, which they think is a werewolf. They discover that both a small nest of vampires and at least one werewolf are in Fort Yuma. During the session, Sam is bitten once by a vampire and later by a werewolf, injured but not badly so.

[Steve]

After some delays due to holidays, illnesses and personal business, we had another session of the campaign.

 

Sam achieved the trifecta by getting bitten by a zombie, in addition to his previous bites by a vampire and werewolf. The trio intercepted a message to ‘Lord Black’ and ended up accepting a bounty from him when he confronted them the next morning. He had some Pinkerton goons with him at the time, and he was quite put out because someone burned down the eucalyptus trees he was growing to provide railroad ties for his planned railroad from Texas to California.

 

Most of the session was spent dealing with Bella Rosa, a headless witch with a sizable collection of severed heads she can use as her own. Her favorites were kept in a closet in her room.

 

The womanizing Cortez gets quite willingly seduced by her, and he ends up increasingly enthralled by her witchcraft. Doyle and Sam tried to figure out what to do about the creepy but beautiful witch and Doyle ended up using a quantity of dynamite to blow up her hacienda, and himself. Fortunately, he is a revenant and will eventually recover his missing BOD and regrow his lost body parts.

 

It is uncertain if the witch survived, but there was no body found in the ruins.