Rock of Zion Hell House

We began with a flashback to Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1949. BlindJoeBiscuit sat by, helpless, as Bessie West gave birth to his son, seriously afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome and not likely to live. The white doctor had harsh words for Bessie for drinking so heavily during her pregnancy, but young DelilahWest knew better, blaming Joe's curse.

Back in the now, WaylanBeulay was roused from his hermitage by the Pinkertons' attack. He stashed MommaBeulay and met up with the SuicideKings in Memphis, telling them to meet him at BurningMan to see a claimant to the throne. Waylan also bought a trunk full of guns, Winchesters and Colts only, calling them "ghost guns."

Jere, do you want to say anything about your plans for these ghost guns or what qualities you expect them to have?

Well, I was drawing on the history of both Winchester and Colt when calling them ghost guns. They probably have no special importance and are just one of Waylan's idiosyncracies. -- Jere

Blind Joe fled the scene of the party's betrayal and summoned TheMan, but the Man refused to deal with him, saying his soul had already been squandered. Joe did keep JoeyDell from making his own deal with the Man.

The rest of the PCs, Waylan, and the Joes met up at the Rock of Zion HellHouse in Normal, Illinois. When they got to the basement, they discovered that the BlackGrail had taken over. They incapacitated or killed the Black Grailers, freed the prisoners, and went up top.

Blind Joe asked Angie to help him rewrite the Man's song, turning JudgmentDay into RedemptionDay. In the end she declined for the time being. Debate as to what the group should do with Joe was inconclusive.

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Meta: Our first session at Jess & Jere's and our second with Waylon as part of the team. I actually put the Hell House in to lighten things up, if you can believe it, to make fun of all this talk of devils and final judgments and Hell. Things got a little creepy and it occurs to me now that Hell Houses aren't really all that funny. All this real world ickiness! I'm pretty certain my next game is going to be have to be goofy pulp of some kind.

I was unhappy at the time that we didn't resolve Blind Joe's position with the group one way or the other, but in the end I'm pleased with how it all played out. John's characterization of the hellbound blues man Blind Joe Biscuit got so damn good after John decided he wanted to kill him off! He was good before, mind you, but in his later sessions everyone just kept dumping bad shit on him, and John just ran with it, in a performance that by turns funny, dark, and sad.

The Man's reneging after getting Joe to betray his friends was the kind of hose-job I imagined him pulling from the beginning, but in all these other little ways John just had a knack for playing this guy that really truly meant well but ended up doing a lot of damage to those around him. Remember all that business where he was in the gas station asking for money and directions? That was priceless. Or in Session14 when Joe was all too ready to give up on tracking down Delilah but gave his cursed guitar strings (surely a mixed blessing?) to Little Joe. Earlier in the game I was thinking that because I wasn't applying drunkenness penalties to Joe, I was letting him get his magic too easily. But this whole story line ended up being (I think) a cooler story about the price of dipsomancy than "-5% to your skills for each drink" would have been. (He said, modestly.) [Rob]

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