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Winona grabs her shotgun and shouts, "I hope someone knows how to get the cows to puke up these ticks, otherwise they're gonna kill a bunch of the herd!" She starts stalking the tiny terrors, blasting them to pieces whenever she spots one, and watching for falling cows so that she can kill the tick that emerges.
"There's cuts on the inside of their lips, like they ate something that tore up their mouths. Check some of the live cattle, see if they have the same symptom. We could be in for a real bad time with the rest of the herd."
Total 10.
Sick cattle are not to be taken lightly. One sick cow could bring down the entire herd. Winona spurs her mare over toward the cow, then dismounts smoothly and kneels down to check on the creature. Bleeding? Any injures? Foaming mouth? Oozing? Pustules? Damage to the hooves?
To get someone else's attention and call for help she simply unholters her pistol and fires it into the air at a slight angle (so that the bullet eventually comes down harmlessly in a field some distance away).
Winona is a bit perkier, having gotten a good night's rest and a decent meal while in town before saddling up again. "Quite a new mess o' cattle!" she comments idly. "No wonder we needed more hands. This is gonna be quite a handful, especially if they get spooked on the trail."
"I'm curious to see if the chow is going to be better, or worse," says Winona with a wry grin. "Let's get back to camp. I wanna check on my horse, give her a good rub-down."
"Well, having some equity is a good motivator. Good reason to keep the cattle healthy and get 'em all to market," says Winona. "I wouldn't say no, personally."
"Got a backup money-maker, eh?"
I may be misremembering, but I thought there was a Harrowed edge that let you intimidate animals into submission, so you don't take the -2. I'm probably wrong though.
Harrowed usually only have to worry about two things, the smell (which you can cover with booze if you pretend to be a drunk) and their wounds, which if you're lucky are covered up once you get a shirt or hat without a hole in it. Being a chi master Harrowed means splitting your advances a lot between power sets, but you do have the advantage of being pretty hard to kill! Since Chinese rail workers are fairly common, it's not hard to have a character who came east on the rail and wound up where we are now (Colorado, I believe).
I would find it challenging to fit into backstory. Might have read something about him, in reports from the Ranger service.
We don't really have a strong face character or stealth character. I don't worry about overlap. Some good, right-in-the-middle-of-genre choices might be a huckster with some schmoozing social skills, or a martial artist with stealth skills.
We also largely suck at stealth. I am not concerned about overlap. Since you are a long-time fan of Deadlands, we don't have a huckster/witch, a mad scientist, a harrowed, or a martial artist.
"Aight. What a day. Let's head to the saloon I guess, see if we can pick up any more trailhands. I'd say we could check the blacksmith and see who's having horses shoed, but any trail hand who owns a horse probably already has a job at a local ranch."
Thank you! Working on updating. Advance 4 (Seasoned): Edge: Combat Reflexes.Advance 5 (Seasoned): Vigor d6->d8 I'm not opposed to picking up a recruit.
Winona stops by the telegraph office to send a terse report to the territorial marshal's office about what happened, just so they know what actually happened when rumors start trickling out. "Gents, let's get back to the herd, eh? I almost crave the reliability of the trail. But maybe we have a good meal in town before we leave and are back on canned beans and bacon."
Also you guys can take an advance and reset bennies This pushing us to Seasoned?
"Yeah. We'll see what the home office says. I have a feeling that I'm gonna have to come back and clean up the mess left behind at some future point," says Winona wryly as she hoists into the saddle and takes the reins. "Let's get outta here. Sooner the herd is on the move again, sooner we can get to the end o' this sordid trail tale."
"The problem isn't ghosts and goblins, it's engaging in bandit-like destructive activity. Probably gonna lose my badge."
"Dunno how I'm gonna report this..."
I guess we finished that sidequest, with an absolutely terrible resolution. Any carnies who are just folks who were dragged along are now homeless and penniless. All of their worldly possessions have been blown up. The whole landscape in the area is now a haunted Fear site that is going to have monsters and ghosts for decades to come, becoming a source of local legends about abductions, murders, and horrors. Yet it seems our characters lack the skills to have done things any other way. Real feel-bad moment.
"Should we move the unconscious people out of the remains of the blast radius? Could they wind up possessed or somethin'?"
Winona stops, shrugs, flips her knife and puts it back into her belt. She starts placing dynamite around the inside of the wagon instead.
Winona climbs into one of the wagons and holsters her pistol. She pulls out her knife and carefully removes the seal and cover from the jug to find out what the hell people are dying over.
Winona secures her bandana over her face, puts some water from her canteen on it, and advances quickly into the caravan to check on the suspicious jars that the team spotted before. As she goes she kicks weapons away from unconscious bodies, so that it will take them a little more time to respond when they do wake up.
Winona stays crouched with pistol in hand, ready to provide covering fire if needed.
I also have 3 advances listed.
Winona, conversely, stays quiet. Best to have a hidden gun in reserve in case there's resistance.
Winona lobs her improvised knock-out grenades and lands them pretty much exactly where she wants them.
"Got it."
Winona stays crouched down in the sagebrush, doing her best to remain very still until she hears a signal from one of the lads.
"Let's do it."
"Heh, now I feel like a bandito. Or bandita, I guess."
"Well this changes things. Do we hit them while they are still in town or wait until they have moved and get them in transit when we don't have to worry about hitting innocent bystanders?"
"Didn't realize they were leaving town."
"I can think of some less-than-savory uses of knockout gas. I'd rather not elucidate further," says Winona wryly in response to the shopkeeper. "In any case, it'll make a nice party trick."
Winona idly mumbles, "Y'know, I feel like there oughta be a law regulating the sale of this kinda stuff."
"All right. But we also bring a little dynamite, just in case things go really wrong."
"I think I'm gonna have a lot of explaining to do..." she grumbles.
Winona moves slowly and cautiously to see if she can get close enough to one of the wagons to see if she can spot anything noteworthy.
The Savage Worlds version addressed this by normalizing all of the characters, so while characters like the Mind Melter and the Cyber-Knight are powerful, people without magic or psionics or cybernetics like the Wilderness Scout and Rogue Scholar instead get special skill expert bonuses that let them hang with the superheroic crowd. The SW version also added an in-world faction called the Tomorrow Legion as a way to bring characters together under a common heroic umbrella, to explain how all of your freaks and weirdos became a party. There is an online character creator here for making all kinds of Savage Worlds characters, and you can make a free account and then add a new character, select Rifts for the type, and then walk through the whole process with the creator keeping track of all of the points that you have to spend and choices to make, and letting you save the character at the end.
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