Wild West Campaign Update: Shootout at 20 Paces

This week's adventure featured a number of events that happened around East Vegas.

Doc Thomas was kept busy, as in one day there would end up being no less than four shooting survivors. The first two shot each other, over a saloon girl in the Goodlet & Roberts Saloon.

(a real East Vegas saloon)

The third was a guy named Baker, who was shot in the back by a mystery assailant. While he was still unconscious, a deputy came in from the town of Roswell, claiming that Baker was wanted for murder and he was under orders to bring him back dead or alive.

Doc Thomas referred the matter to Hoodoo Brown. Hoodoo was a bit torn, and waited until Baker regained consciousness, when Baker claimed that he had indeed killed a man, but it was in a fair fight. Only the man was the son of a wealthy rancher who owned the town, and if they sent him back he was bound to be executed.

Crazy Miller felt a certain sympathy for the guy and pleaded his case to Hoodoo. Hoodoo in the end said that someone had to disappear: either Baker or the Deputy, and that in either case no one in town could know.

The PCs set up a trap for the Deputy, one meant to test whether he was really here to see justice done, or to just murder Baker, as by now they suspected he was the one who shot Baker in the back in a failed murder attempt.  So they led him to think that Hoodoo wasn't going to turn over the prisoner, to see if he would try a lawful means of appeal, or if he would try to sneak into the Doc's office in the night.

Turned out the Deputy chose the latter. But he spotted the ambush when Kid Taylor botched his sneak, and made a run for it. Unfortunately for him, the PCs knew the town a lot better than the deputy, and they intercepted him at the stables. 

Other Miller's code of honor didn't sit well with just executing a man, so he decided to take the deputy out of town, and give him a gun and a fair shoot-out, which was frankly a badass thing to do. The deputy got the other PCs to give their word that if he won the fight, they'd let him go.

The shootout was tense. It was also one of the rare cases of a 'draw at 20 paces' shootout in the campaign. 

Other Miller took more care with his aim, so the deputy shot first. Both men missed their first shot. The deputy got his second shot off before miller, and landed a bullet into his right knee. But then Miller got the deputy in the head, and he was dead before hitting the ground.

They got Miller over to the clinic; unfortunately, Doc Thomas was already famous for his incompetence. So far he'd managed to not kill any of the three previous patients, but that was because two of them had relatively minor injuries (even so, he managed to make Baker's wound worse for no reason), and the third was a sheer stroke of dumb luck. Miller actually knew that Kid Taylor, who had trained a bit back in Dodge under the old and expert town doctor, was more experienced and he insisted that Kid Taylor treat him.  Unfortunately, Kid Taylor somewhat botched setting the leg, which meant that while Other Miller would survive, he would never be able to run or sprint again. Not that Doc Thomas would have done much better.

There was a whole other subplot this adventure, regarding an old but famous shootist, tired of living, who came to town looking for a gunfight worthy of him and just ended up being killed by a back-shooting piece of human garbage (who would in turn be killed by Doc Holliday, who had refused to give the shootist the fight he'd been looking for). But the PCs pretty much had nothing to do with it.  They knew it was going on, but they just decided to stay the hell away from it. 

That's pretty much just how it goes sometimes: I throw two or three possible adventure seeds into town, and let the players choose what their characters get into.

RPGPundit

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