It will happen tomorrow, Saturday 28th September, at 9pm Rome Italy time (3pm EST; 2pm CT) on my livestream.
This post will introduce the setting and situation and the player characters too. Because we plan to play for only about an hour tops, I am placing the situation here. it is assumed the characters already know each other and are familiar with the situation, so that (rural internet permitting) we should be able to just start off and get with it. Some players were a little scant on their character’s description, but these will be added when they send them in.
Each player should have his character in front of them, a pencil and eraser to keep track of things like health points, ammunition, or make general notes, and two six-sided dice to roll for various situations or task resolutions they will need to perform.
If you want a copy of the rules, it’s only £5 as a PDF and you can get your copy here and print it (31 pages).
Below, the map showing the area and below that, the situation as our heros find themselves in.
Area Map
The Player Characters
Jack O’Trady (aka Jack O’Trades)
Equipment: Shotgun +10 rounds, .45 Colt +12 rounds, knife, bedroll, satchel, $10
Height: 6’1″ Age: 28
Appearance: sandy blonde hair with a scraggly reddish beard. Twill pants with suspenders and a waist long coat with belt on the outside it that carries his sixgun, ammunition for it, knife and flint and steel kit. He is broad-shouldered and thick at the waist, sure footed.
Bio: A Catholic Irishman, not in search of gold, but freedom. He fled his motherland to escape the ravages of the English – “famine, me arse!” – after politely expressing his disagreement with a couple of the red-coated twats (in Old Testament fashion, anyway). He landed in New York, immediately headed West in search of purpose and modest work and hasn’t stopped for 6 months. Each town showing more disdain for his kind than the last. He’s a simple man, though not as dumb as most. He has a strong will for survival and a moral compass with a needle that could use tightening.
Leroy Gray (aka The Gray Gunner)
Equipment: Winchester rifle +15 rounds, .45 Colt +30 rounds, knife, bedroll, satchel, $10, Horse (named Whiskey)
Height: 6’4″ Age: 27
Apperance: brown hair, moustache, grey overcoat (confederate style)
Bio: Leroy fancies himself a bit of a gunslinger, having survived one duel that was deemed legal but the local sheriff a couple of months earlier and he is partial to wearing the same grey coat he had on during the civil war.
James (aka Just James)
Equipment: Rifle (Winchester) +15 rounds, .45 Colt +24 rounds, knife, bedroll, saddle bags, Horse (named Strider), $10
Height: 5′ 8″ Age: 22
Appearance: beard, the build of someone who is used to riding a horse.
Bio: born in the Shenandoah Valley and Civil War veteran (Confederate). James joined the army around the age of 16 and mustered out sometime before the official surrender at Appomattox. He had grown up around cattle but after the War, decided that rather than continue being a cowboy at home, he would try his luck out west on a ranch.
Habits: Smokes a pipe and appreciates whiskey. He always remembers to say his morning and evening prayers that his mother taught him. He’s an Anglican, but maybe he’ll start to think differently out west. He keeps a clean room but is forgetful on food, which is curious for a man who is in the saddle herding cattle. He can read.
Philo Jurament (NPC)
Equipment: Shotgun +50 rounds, Whinchester +50 rounds, pair of ivory handled converted Colt Dragoons to take ammunition in gun holster (right and Belt (left) +24 rounds in the belt and another 56 in his saddle bags, Tomahawk, Matches, Cigarillos, Saddle bags (with other basic equipment), Horse (named Horse) Bowie knife, bedroll, Small metal container with strong tequila in it, $10
Height: 6′ 2″ Age: 26
Appearance: Sandy-Brown hair, blue eyes, about 6’2″ he wears a sort of trapper jacket. One of his large .44 calibre six-guns on his right hip in its holster, and the other Mexican style in a front/left holster that is cut down so the gun basically looks as if it’s just held by the belt. He also has a bowie knife on the gun belt, on his left side.
Ex-Indian Scout for the Confederate army. He was raised by Apaches after being sold to them as a boy by his own alcoholic father. Generally ornery and laconic. He smokes cigarillos but only a couple a day.
The Situation
It is 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War. The small town of Silver Hole is a mining town with some small silver deposits, on the edge of the frontier. The mine is not large enough to make the town prosperous, but it nevertheless provides enough to make the place tolerable, with all the basic amenities, two hotel/saloons, a local bar, various shops, a regular stage coach that goes to snowdrift falls twice a week, passing by Fort Bellamy and Lookout point, both army outposts that keep the occasional Indian raids at bay in the general area.
Snowdrift Falls is about 400 miles by stage coach and the nearest actual town served by railway. To the North is a mountain range, the south being gradually drier and more despotic and canyon-like. The Takumseh bridge being a case in point, straddles a canyon of over a dozen metres in height and about twice that in length, in order to allow the stage coaches to cross the river on the way to Lookout point, a small army outpost that is basically an extension of Fort Bellamy, a larger and better equipped Army location.
Last night, a very strange situation took place. Emily Lightfoot, the local hat-maker, went to deliver her latest order to the farmhouse of John and Mary McMasters, but when she arrived there, a large rabid bear had broken into the farmhouse and killed some animal in it. Mary managed to run out of the house just in time for Emily to see her and get her aboard her one horse carriage. The two women rushed back to Silver Hole, abandoning John McMasters to his fate, because he had been ill with a fever upstairs.
In the morning, fearing the worst, the ladies had returned with two deputies (Jim and Bob), but when they arrived at the farmhouse, they found John still with a heavy fever upstairs, alive and otherwise unhurt. The main room of the home was half-destroyed and had a large pool of blood and blood spatter in it, where the ladies assumed the mad bear had eaten the buck they had seen it drag in. However, no part of the dead animal, or the bear, could be found. They took John back to Silver Hole in a carriage as he was delirious.
The local doctor, explained worriedly he did not have the skills to cure the man and they should immediately make for Snowdrift falls.
James, being an adept coach driver volunteered to run John to Snowdrift falls, a trip of at least three days even if one rode hard all the way. Leroy Gray also volunteered to ride shotgun in case of bandits or marauding Indians, and as Mary McMasters offered pay, so did Jack O’Trady, a recent arrival, and an irishman to boot, however he had been in town long enough for people to know aside occasionally needing a bit of “hair o’ th’ dog” in the morning, he was a good worker. As far as irishmen go anyway.
When everything was set and the men were about to set off, a young private came thundering into town to say that the Takumseh bridge had been burnt down by a band of Indians and possibly Mexican. There had been a fight with a patrol from Lookout point, and he had barely got away to this side of the bridge, before it collapsed. The route was impassable.
The local old drunk at the saloon where all this was being discussed mumbled something about the old Indian trail of Frozen Tears, that was a more direct route to snowdrift falls but had not been used by anyone in living memory as far as anyone knew. There was a number of legends that no one who tried survived it and that giants lived in the snow-capped mountains in that area. As the conversation as to what to do carried on, a man known as Philo Jurament, an Ex-Scout in the Confederate Army stood up, walked over, and said he had come to Silver Hole via that path and it was passable for a carriage. The saloon went silent as people wondered if he was just lying or if he had actually done it. The man tended to be a loner and kept to himself, he had not long been in town, and other than playing the occasional hand of poker in the saloon he didn’t mix much with the locals. Even so, Mary McMasters was desperate and offered to pay half the man’s salary on the spot, and a more generous half on the delivery of her husband to the doctors in Snowdrift falls. The man accepted and also said the trip could be done in only two days if they pushed hard, as it was only 200 miles or so by going this route. As afternoon was already fast-approaching, the men all decided to leave forthwith.
They left on a covered carriage where John was bundled into a bed in back of it, Jack rode in the back with him to ensure John was as comfortable as could be, and tending to his need for water, food and so on. James and Leroy rode up front, James driving the carriage and Leroy with his rifle across his lap. Philo out front on his grey mottled horse (which he called horse) leading the way to the path no other man had used in living memory.
They had basic equipment, bedrolls, food and water for four days journey, although they expected to be able to make it in two by keeping up a blistering pace throughout.
What Next?
There are three paths I can go down with respect to the next book I write.
NAZI MOON (linked) is now available at least in the US and CANADA and should be available soon in other countries too.
I have been asked to do the relationship book by friends and men in general for years; at least 20 of them. I resisted the impulse* for at least a couple of decades, primarily because, as one of my alter egos/nicknames —given to me by friends in Italy over 20 years ago— said in one of the graphic novels he appears in: “Any man that says he has understood all there is to know about women, is either a liar or insane.” And it’s close enough to the truth in some ways. Nevertheless, I feel that after two divorces, a lot of women in between, and finally a proper Catholic marriage, not to mention 4 children I fathered, I have probably made —and persevered!— and (one hopes), learnt enough that it is probably acceptable to pass on a few pointers to younger men; at least on those issues I feel I have now got enough experience to retroactively note when I did the right thing (regardless of outcome), and when I did the wrong thing (again, regardless of outcome). I mention this, because as I say, there have been a lot of people asking me for this for a long time.
With regard to my non-fiction, each book I have written so far, is really mostly a compilation of my theories and conclusions formed with many years of experience.
The Face on Mars was the result of a lifelong interest in Astronomy from very early childhood. I understood what a light-year was at age four, thanks to an uncle who was, and remains, a total geek to this day. He also sent me a telescope in my early teens, with which I observed the mountains of the moon, and how the moon itself moved. I also saw Haley’s comet with it, from our home in Africa at the time. And to this day the concepts I put forth in that book were then, and for the most part continue to remain today, unique. Some have badly plagiarised aspects of it (hello Graham Hancock) but the overall main issue had not been understood by anyone I am aware of before I saw it. And most remain totally ignorant of it, despite the predictions and theories I made back in 1995, playing out as correct in the intervening time. The update in 2014 also added a new dimension to the reality of my ideas, which is partly expanded on a lot more in my fiction work.
Systema was similarly, a book I wrote after I had personally spend decades in the martial arts world. And I wanted to demystify a LOT of the nonsense that goes with many martial art “concepts” and their related egos, and which —in particular— seemed to have a vortex of “mystic ninjas” concerning the Russian system. Which is an impression many martial artists might have if they have not experience of it firsthand. By merely watching YouTube videos or hearing “fantastic” stories of almost magical ability, they are most likely going to assume it is some woo-woo nonsensical “martial art”. That thought is disabused within minutes of confronting any of the top exponents of it. Unfortunately, as always, along with the really good practitioners, there were also a lot of “mystic ninjas” and some of the practitioners did nothing to demystify the situation, so I did it. I have been doing martial arts since I was a very small child, thanks to my dad, so I had pretty extensive knowledge of it before I put hand-to-keyboard after almost four decades of it.
Reclaiming the Catholic Church was in some ways the “odd man out” because I had a road to Damascus Event in 2013 and the book came out in 2020, that is, only 7 years later. However, I had been reading different books on all the main religions, mysticism, “spiritual” and even New Age stuff, again, since my teens, and literally infiltrating various cults as a hobby, in order to see if anyone had anything that was demonstrably true, real, or worthwhile. I had settled on a basic Zen-Agnosticism, with a clear understanding there must be an intelligence behind creation (the math, astronomy, biology and physics, as well as logic, pretty much confirms it many, many, many times over) but no sense of a God as such that was specifically interested in us mere mortals, much less me specifically. That changed in a radical, unexpected and utterly surprising way, that while “subjective” in the sense that I cannot prove it to anyone else, was absolutely objective and very much so for me. The other part that helped was that because the Catholic Church has ALL of its rules and dogmas written down, it was fairly easy to follow the thread of its history and see the astonishing truth it is founded on. As it was, to see that the current inhabitants of the Vatican are, without putting too fine a point on it, flat out Satanists.
BELIEVE! Instead, published a year before RTCC, was a much smaller work, putting out my new, or updated, basic outline philosophy. For those who have read both books, you will notice that BELIEVE! is not even a fifth of the size of RTCC, at just under 100 pages, and is a lot more open with respect to overall views and concepts. RTCC was the follow up that basically said, “OK, so that’s sort of where I am with respect to religion as a whole (BELIEVE!) now let’s take a look at this one path that I state is the best one I can see so far, and in this book, (RTCC), I went full autist, covering every aspect of Sedevacantism (i.e. the actual, current, only Catholicism left) and demonstrating it in a manner that no one has so far even attempted to refute, much less succeeded. The result is that RTCC is the foundation on which BELIVE! is really sitting on, which is probably why even if a much smaller and less detailed book, BELIEVE! has resulted in now over 100 people converting to Sedevacantist Catholicism (aka simply: Catholicism).
The reason I point all this out, is because in these last two non-fiction books, it becomes obvious that even my overall looser and more generic ideas, as expressed in BELIEVE!, for example, clearly have had a lot of genuinely positive effects on people who read them. And we know it was this that sparked the results, because BELIEVE! came first, and yet, even without all the details (presented in RTCC), it had a serious impact on people’s lives.
I see a LOT of confusion, struggles and heartache among young men today concerning intimate relationships and finding the right woman.
I literally get questions, emails, or messages on the topic to a frequency that is starting to become hard to keep up with. And as anyone that reads my blog knows, I have a rather low opinions of PUAs, and would very much hate to be mistaken for one. That said, I know for a demonstrable fact that my advice benefits these younger men, because they are getting married, having babies, and resolving issues they had for many years of their lives. I have literally had everything from friends, neighbours and even strangers, asking for advice, on an ad hoc basis, to hypnosis sessions with people that were under clinical care as supposedly paranoid schizophrenics under medication that went on to stop the medication (yes with doctor approval and full knowledge of my sessions with them) and go on to have a productive life with a functioning relationship, when prior they were 29 year old virgins. And I have been doing this for at least 15 years, with positive results.
So, perhaps, there is some utility in putting together some of the baseline concepts concerning male-female interactions and so on.
The other options (SF saga continuation) or YA SF books are, respectively, more a divertimento for myself and, a less fun, but I think helpful addition to the current dearth of adventure stories for boys mostly. I am not aware of anything like the Hardy Boys and so on coming along anytime recently, which is why Castalia House is doing well printing old classics. I would not enjoy writing such books as much as my own adult Science Fiction, but it would not be too difficult to do and they should be able to be produced fairly quickly. Although, I am not likely to be acclaimed as a children’s author anytime soon, or even long after I am dust, so the effort might not be worth it.
Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter, so please feel free to leave comments after you vote, thanks.
* Vox, on this post, referring to someone else, Taleb, in this case, said something that holds true for most of us. Personally I have always genuinely tried to resist the temptation, and often people have been quite “deflated” when trying to make me their “guru”, when, after being asked something I know little or nothing about or at least I don’t feel qualified to take a stand on, I simply say “I have no idea”. Some were quite insistent nevertheless and I always consciously dissuaded that, as I explained in some detail in my book Systema: The Russian Martial System.
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By G | 12 December 2023 | Posted in Ancient Technology, Believe, Books, Brazilian Ju Jitsu, Catholicism, Christianity, Face on Mars, Hypnosis, Increasing Happiness, Karate-Do, Martial Arts, Nazi Conspiracies, NAZI MOON, Overlords of Mars - 1, Overlords of Mars - 2, Poll, Reclaiming the Catholic Church, Relationships, Relationships, RPGs, Sedeprivationism, Sedevacantism, Social Commentary, StCZA - Module 0, StCZA - Q.O.R.G., Systema, Systema, The Dirty Old West, Writing