Our project Dusthollow RPG launched two week ago. Weare about 20% funded and will need to get more support if we are going to hit our goal. Please don't wait until the last minute;head to BackerKit and pledge this weekend!
For those who have been following Dusthollow, your pledges are critical to making it a worthy RPG tome. We're leaning into the classic AD&D book style of pen & ink drawings for the QSG and Rulebook. I do not want to (won't) produce the books without illustrations (or using AI).
Meanwhile we are working on the Iron Horse Heist Quick Start Guide adventure and have finalized the Maps and illustration scenes for the Zine/Module. If all goes well this will be ready to send in October.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Below find another teaser of the Iron Horse Heist... and the introduction of the second Player Character, The Dutchman. Enjoy!
The Iron Horse Heist is a one-shot adventure where the Players are a crew put together by Rafe Calder, a former bounty hunter turned outlaw. Rafe has been hired by a mysterious patron to rob the "Iron Horse Special" - a heavily guarded train traveling through the mountains carrying $50,000 in gold and something else...
Alois Schmidt felt a wave of sickness as the train lurched forward and began to roll out of the station at Kendall. His nausea wasn’t just because he was starting the biggest and most dangerous job of his life. It was also because the car reeked of beer and body odor, most of it coming from the group of German miners who had decided to occupy not only the seat next to him, but those to his front and back. Sächsische Bergleute, Alois surmised, by the sound of their accents. Saxon miners, probably from a village in the Erzgebirge. That’s where they, and their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers all the way back to their primitive tribal ancestors learned how to dig shiny rocks out of the ground. Now some rich American had lured them over the great ocean, into these vast mountains, to dig new holes.
The smell of these men reminded Alois of his own long voyage to the New World, when he was 10 years old. It also started on a train—a much nicer one—from Munich to Bremen. In Bremen, he and his father took passage on a ship to America. They crammed into an uncomfortable hold for 5 weeks, rising and falling and throwing up in the company of Saxons, and Silesians and Prussians, and other German speakers. There were only a few other Bavarians, like them. The journey was mostly a blur, he and Papa were still dazed with grief from his mother’s recent death from a cholera outbreak. “Why do we have to go to America, father?” Alois remembered asking his dad, while his father was teaching him how to do magic tricks in the steerage section of the ship. “To start a new life,” his father told him. “I will use my skills as a watchmaker and a locksmith in one of the biggest German Cities in the world—New York!”
But looking back, Alois realized that, in spite of those hopeful words, his father had already given up. His older sister, and last remaining close relative, was in New York, having immigrated there a few years earlier. She'd already become owner of a food market in “Little Germany.” Alois suspected his father had taken him to New York to hand him off to his sister. Then he would succumb to the grief that was already overwhelming him. And so it came to pass.
After his father’s death, Alois proved hard for his aunt to control. He learned English very quickly, did well in school, and had already acquired trade skills as a watchmaker and a locksmith from his father. His aunt gave him a roof and a job in the market, but the allure of this boundless city, with all its strange peoples from every corner of the world, pulled him away from Little Germany and into the seedier parts of town. He fell in with the Bowery Boys, the notorious gang out of Five Points. His father’s instruction in sleight-of-hand helped when he and his new companions wanted to pick some drunk swell’s pocket or lift a bag from a society lady. His father’s tools also came in handy for picking locks, a skill that gave Alois a reputation throughout the criminal underworld, and quickly led to a variety of lucrative job offers.
After one of those jobs went bad—really bad—Alois skipped town. He found himself in Chicago, and again, surrounded by Germans and criminals. By now he’d left the name Alois Schmidt behind, and was known only as “The Dutchman.” He could thank American ignorance, or was it just indifference?, for this moniker, based on their confusion between “Deutsche” and “Dutch.” He didn’t care. He enjoyed the notoriety and appreciated the anonymity, which helped keep him away from the law. That is, until another botched job ended up with two dead policemen and him on the run further west, with Pinkerton agents hot on his trail.
Alois thought he’d been nabbed when two giants with thick mustaches grabbed him off the street in Omaha, where he planned to take a train to San Francisco. He was thrown into a carriage and escorted, firmly, into a hotel room where a man in the shadows interviewed him. He seemed to know everything about Alois, especially his skill in picking locks. A few months later, Alois found himself in Kendall, and a part of a new crew.
Stay tuned as we meet the other half of the crew.....
