[center][img]https://www.peginc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/DL.png[/img][/center] The year is 1879 but in the world of Deadlands it is a very different 1879. In both of our worlds the year of 1863 saw the United States at war with itself but in this world things went very differently. For one thing, the war did not end two years later. For another rumors persist...persistently...enough that many have good reason, though oddly little evidence, to believe something else quite important happened that day. The dead of Gettysburg rose and beset the living, Blue or Grey making no difference whatsoever. That's ancient history now though. Well 16 years, but much has changed in those years. Slavery has been abolished. A new natural resource, known as Ghost Rock, has been found that burns Five Times Hotter and One Hundred Times Longer than Coal. California has, in large part, been reclaimed by the Pacific leaving a broken land known as The Great Maze. Utah has been taken over and renamed The Republic of Deseret. What's more Manifest Destiny has been considerably delayed with the founding of two separate large Indian nations, The Coyote Confederacy and the Sioux Nations. Amid all this chaos, Ghost Rock has dropped the nations into an Industrial Age. [u][b][color=darkorange]What Is This?[/color][/b][/u] This RP is an attempt to combine the freedom of collaborative non-linear roleplay with some linear storytelling, incorporating as much as possible actual Pen and Paper rules to ensure a dangerous engaging experience. Hopefully it works. It's a fairly short story with a start and a finish, though leaving things open to play or encounter our characters again. For this story we will all be either living in or making our way toward a small town in Kansas called Selina. Selina is a small town North East of Dodge. Kansas is known as Bloody Kansas in this setting. Selina is rather basic, consisting of a respectable if quite bare bones Bed and Breakfast run by one Father O’Flanagan, the monastery where O’Flanagan works, a General Store run by a ex-miner who once hit it big, a taxidermist by the name of Zeke, and a small three man operation Sheriff's Department. Selina is more friendly than most toward the various Indian tribes as there has been in large part an unofficial policy of live and let live. Most inhabitants of Selina get by by being as self sufficient as possible and selling any food or goods beyond what very little they truly need in Dodge. [center][u][b][color=darkorange]Our Party[/color][/b][/u] 2sky11 - Rick Matthews, Union Cavalryman Dragonbud - Aveline, Blessed ElGappa - Constantin LeBlanc, French Soldier of Fortune Lewis - John Blackburn, Investigator Wampower - Franz Kaufman, Austrian Gunsmith and Ex-Soldier [/center] [u][b][color=darkorange]About The Setting[/color][/b][/u] While this adventure won't explore most of the world or many of the themes here is a bit, fresh from the Player's Guide, to explain the setting and where it differs from the world we all live in. Bloody Kansas and Dodge [hider]Kansas has been the site of 25 years of guerilla warfare, and shows no signs of calming down any time soon. According to the original Kansas-Nebraska act, which opened Kansas to settlement back in 1854, the people of the territory would vote on whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or slave state. One can guess what kind of conflict this caused. For a while, Kansas had been fighting its very own Civil War, well before the Blues and Grays ran into their little problem. “Border ruffians” from Missouri filtered across the border and tried to ensure Kansas became a slave state, while abolitionists called “Jayhawkers” tried to counter their efforts. Neither group shied from violence to influence the decision of Kansas’ citizens. Kansas wound up joining the Union as a free state only a few months before the Civil War broke out. While no major military campaigns have been fought here, the long tradition of guerilla warfare and intimidation continues to this day. Diehard Rebs and staunch Unionists often live side by side in some Kansas towns. The fact that regular military units are pretty much prohibited in Kansas only allows these tensions to boil out of control, sometimes even erupting into “Territorial Wars” between towns loyal to differing nations. The fire of the Civil War may only be embers and coals, but Kansas is a powder keg, and the fuse is still burning. Dodge meanwhile, though we’re not going there in this story, is a large bustling trade center thanks to it being a stop on two major rail lines and an area with a plentiful buffalo population. Between all the trade, all the buffalo hunters, and the general tensions of Kansas it’s a hell of a dangerous city. Fortunately Deputy Wyatt Earp has the constitution necessary to enforce a law requiring the temporary confiscation of firearms upon entrance into town.[/hider] An Ugly Past [hider]Let’s get this out of the way early— whether in the North, South, West, or somewhere in between, slavery is a thing of the past. While it was a divisive issue in 19th Century America, and many on both sides of the Civil War cited it as a moral motivation to prosecute the war, the real causes of the Civil War were quite a bit more complicated. In any event, it rapidly became clear to Confederate leadership that in order for the fledgling nation to gain international recognition, the “Peculiar Institution” must be discarded. In 1864, Generals Robert E. Lee and Patrick R. Cleburne proposed a plan to offer slaves their freedom in exchange for military service. President Davis quickly endorsed the plan in a Congressional address. This helped convert the British Empire’s passive sympathy toward the Confederate cause into formal recognition of its independence, and French Emperor Napoleon III soon followed suit. In exchange for the aid of England and France in breaking the Union blockade of Southern ports, and an agreement with England to fix the Confederate dollar to the British pound at a very favorable rate, the British asked the Confederacy to abolish slavery altogether. The Davis administration complied, and on April 9, 1865, all slaves in the Confederate States of America were freed. Fearful of losing the moral high ground (and “naturally anti­ slavery” himself), United States President Abraham Lincoln quickly followed the earlier Emancipation Proclamation (which only abolished slavery in states in rebellion against the United States) with the proposed 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which would end slavery in America. The Amend­ ment was ratified by the end of the year. By 1879, racism is becoming a thing of the past in the Weird West. Progress has been made, and more will come as peace returns and folks resume their normal lives. The prospect of further integration of Confederate society is aided by a greater sense of community and shared values than in actual history. Circumstances are similar in the North. Just as in the real West, folks are willing to overlook the color of a person’s skin in favor of the content of his or her character. Bottom line: just as in our own lives, bigoted and outright racist attitudes are the province of villains and the shamefully ignorant.[/hider]