Frontier Scum mini-campaign

session 1

I am starting a mini campaign of Frontier Scum with 3 of my friends. Only 2 players made it for the first session. Here’s a quick summary of our game.

I was planning to run The Bark Witch of Carcass Country but figured it would be something I needed to plan more for as knowing my players would just kind of run through it fairly quickly.

Anyway, I started them with a prompt from that adventure. They are on the run from some regulators and the party is on their way to find a place to lay low.

They started off at sunset traveling through the hillside when they find a two story home. It’s the Family of Carcass County adventure.

They decided to just walk up and knock on the door. The father of the family answered the door and as soon as I described his face being ‘long in the tooth’ they shot him in the chest. So needless to say from here on out they just found themselves fighting the entire family. Which ended up going well for them. Never had to roll on the death/drop table.

After exploring most of the house they went into the last room where they all got bed bugs. They stripped naked, set the house on fire, and were back on the trail.

After getting enough distance from them and the house they set up camp for the night, still naked except their boots. The following morning Ol’ Skrumpy from the Bark Witch adventure came across their camp. Immediately they got the upper hand on him and took his clothes. They tied him up and told him to lead them safely to Sickwater Oasis. They got into a fight with a Trog, found the derelict boxcar and are a few days from Sickwater Oasis still.

Friday we’ll see if they can survive their next encounters.

first time running Frontier Scum

 

Tomorrow I’m running my first session of Frontier Scum. The plan is to make a short campaign of it that lasts 5 sessions or so. One player who does awesome design work for TTRPGs may not be able to make the game tomorrow so we decided to run a quick 1 on 1 game.

I decided to use a little zine I’ve wanted to play a while now called Swine. It’s available in a few places. You can find a physical copy at Exalted Funeral, here on Blark’s itch page, and from Spear Witch in the the Violence TTRPG jam zine.

We started the game in middle of the action. Fire Bug, the nick name of the player, was robbing a pig farmer of his whole head of 18 pigs.

After failing to make any type of negotiations with the rancher Fire Bug shot him dead. He realized after the fact that moving 18 pigs to be sold to a man 4 days away on horseback might be harder than he had originally anticipated. So he went to the neighbor to try to convince them to lend a hand.

For the neighbor I used Loraine Moody, from The Family of Carcass County entry that was submitted to the Frontier Scum Jam happening right now on itch.

Obviously hearing the gunshot from earlier and knowing that the pig rancher doesn’t usually have outsiders as guests she set her large dog on Fire Bug. She tried to run into the house but took a shot to the back first.

Fire Bug got into a whipping fight with the dog and rolled a natural 20 so he gained a skill in whip fighting. Oh and he rolled a 1 in this encounter too and lost his ace.

After a real nasty bite from the large dog Fire Bug retreated back to the pig ranch to heal up using the whiskey bottles he found in the man’s house.

Now ready to get the 18 pigs to the buyer I asked the player if he wanted to take the hills or the road. It turned the 4 days journey into a 5 day ride. Course he wanted to take the hills. He’s a wanted man. Wanted dead for arson I think it was.

I decided to roll 3 encounters a day.

The first one was “1d3 pigs have been led astray by a hill witch’s song deeper into the wood. It will take time to find and retrieve them.” Fire bug tried to whip at the single pig that was following the song but it ran off and he still had 17 to worry about.

Further down into the woods the next encounter was “the pigs get into fermenting barrels buried in the earth, becoming too drunk to walk. They need 1 day to recover fully.” Fire Bug decided to set up camp for the night. He looked for tracks in the area for bears or wolves but failed his wits check. I asked the player if he was going to try and keep watch or anything like that but he said he was just going to sleep. I had them roll a difficult Wits check to see if he would wake up in the night but he didn’t. 3 bandits ended up coming through his site and stealing 6 pigs.

In the morning Fire Bug successfully rolled a WITS test and found tracks of the men and the pigs. It lead to the road.

He passed by to witchy looking older ladies and they offered to trade their talisman for a pig but Fire Bug wasn’t interested.

Further down the trail Fire Bug came across some hastily buried graves but kept moving.

Oh, I kept rolling a d6 when I rolled each encounter the second day. On a 1 he would find the pig bandits.

Right before sundown he saw the 3 men and his 6 pigs up a ways. He tried to rustle up all his pigs and have them stampede the men. I decided he would need to pass a difficult luck test. Fire Bug failed that and the men heard him coming. They turn away and see him. We roll initiative.

Fire Bug was able to take out the only bandit that had a rifle from a distance. When he rode in to attack the other two men who only had melee weapons it went real bad real fast. They clubbed him real good and he fell off his horse. Fire Bug was at -1 HP and rolled on the drop check table. The bandits took all he had and left him for dead but Fire Bug was still hanging in there.

We ended the session there. I realized after he should have rolled d4 at the end of the scuffle which would have at least brought him to zero HP. He was out of food, drink, dip, and smoke though so he probably would have ended up having to crawl his way back, somewhere, somehow.

R.I.P. Fire Bug.

When I asked the player about the session a few hours later he said Frontier Scum was like GTA and he wants a better goal next game, like robbing a bank.