Note: I’m really falling behind on my posts. Expect the next few to be somewhat shorter than usual until I catch up, then a big, long one for the Sandboxes post.
**Potential Spoilers**
The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.
**You Have Been Warned**
After dealing with Carsdale and the SOSI last session, the investigators decided to follow up the connection to the Montana bank robbers in the document. Solis had already done some investigation via telegram, locating three fortune tellers that may be connected with the Fuschack-Donlands gang – one in Billings, one in Bozeman, and one in Emigrant. Seeing as Emigrant was mentioned directly in the last document, they decided to go there, first.
We played a bit with the journey to Emigrant – talking about the money it took to rent a plane to fly into Montana, then the long truck ride to Emigrant, through the sterile, denuded landscape of the state in 1936. I talked about the the barren fields, the heaps of cow carcasses every so often, and the run-down, abandoned-looking farms ((It’s nice when the actual state of the world can be used to enhance the feeling of horror in a game. Well, maybe not nice, but interesting and useful.)), giving the characters the feel that they had very much left behind their familiar stomping grounds.
The town of Emigrant was, I decided very much a remnant of the previous century, looking more like an old west town than what the characters were used to back east. There was a bar and a boarding house and a couple of churches, some houses, and a few businesses, along with a rail spur.
The investigators got rooms at the boarding house, ran into a close-lipped bartender ((He knows which side of the bread the butter’s on. If he talks to outsiders about locals, the locals will stop coming in.)), and went for a walk around town after dark ((Which allowed them to meet the sheriff, who escorted them back to their lodgings. Strangers wandering the street after dark are not wanted in this little town.)). Finally, they plied the gossipy landlady at the boarding house, and found out about the fortune teller, who had a small shop across town.
That night, Moon used the book they took from Carsdale to try and block the dreams of water and monsters from Roxy’s mind. He also suffered another time-slip, with the night seeming to last forever. Eventually, he went to Solis’s room to see if he could wake him. He did, and when Solis opened the door, he saw not Moon, but the yeti-thing that Moon had described to him previously ((When Moon was in Rot Tal, Jahraus showed him that that’s the way people look from outside the normal three dimensions.)) Cue the gunshots, wounding, and Stability checks.
I believe that’s also when the fifth set of documents turned up.
So, next morning, the trio went out to talk to the fortune teller. She denied any connection with Fuschack, but suggested that the nearby ghost town of Aldridge might be a good place for such a gang to hide out. She also told Moon’s fortune, which left him strangely comforted, it seems, despite her rather unsettling pronouncements.
That’s where we left things for the evening. I believe the plan is to go check out Aldridge next, but I may be misremembering. Oh, well. I’ll find out soon enough.