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Damned insurance
Feb. 14th, 2005 10:36 pmLast week ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymondegreen, akawil, and I went over to immlass’s and mcroft’s place to try out Vincent Baker’s hot new RPG Dogs in the Vineyard.
In Dogs you take up the roles of young traveling paladins of a faith based on early Mormonism. You travel around the frontier, from town to town, exposing sin and demons and setting things right. The game’s two really interesting features are the that the players get to decide what constitutes “setting things right”, rather than having this imposed by the GM or the game designer, and the clever dicing mechanic designed to escalate conflicts and generate consequences. But we didn’t really get to that in the first session.
What we did get to was character generation (or most of it). There’s a list of appropriate early-Mormon-style names, but since we’re playing pseudo-Mormons, not historical Mormons, I indulged my fondness for old Puritan-style phrase names and dubbed my character Pleasure-of-God Fletcher. That’s not an actual Puritan name either; it comes from a line in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, a famous sermon from the mid-18th century: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”
Pleasure’s father is Armor-of-the-Righteous, and his mother is (I think) Charity, and I stopped there. Dogs encourages you to invent new family members in play, so I figured I’d google around for some actual Puritan names for inspiration. Check these out: Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith, Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes, No-merit, Fly-fornication, and my favorite: If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned!
That last guy was the son of a preacher and member of the British Parliament, Isaac Praise-God Barebone. His son got known as “Damned Barebone” for short, and eventually changed his name to Nicholas Barbon, became a doctor, economist, and writer, and founded the first insurance company.
ladymondegreen, akawil, and I went over to immlass’smcroft’sIn Dogs you take up the roles of young traveling paladins of a faith based on early Mormonism. You travel around the frontier, from town to town, exposing sin and demons and setting things right. The game’s two really interesting features are the that the players get to decide what constitutes “setting things right”, rather than having this imposed by the GM or the game designer, and the clever dicing mechanic designed to escalate conflicts and generate consequences. But we didn’t really get to that in the first session.
What we did get to was character generation (or most of it). There’s a list of appropriate early-Mormon-style names, but since we’re playing pseudo-Mormons, not historical Mormons, I indulged my fondness for old Puritan-style phrase names and dubbed my character Pleasure-of-God Fletcher. That’s not an actual Puritan name either; it comes from a line in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, a famous sermon from the mid-18th century: “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”
Pleasure’s father is Armor-of-the-Righteous, and his mother is (I think) Charity, and I stopped there. Dogs encourages you to invent new family members in play, so I figured I’d google around for some actual Puritan names for inspiration. Check these out: Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith, Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes, No-merit, Fly-fornication, and my favorite: If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned!
That last guy was the son of a preacher and member of the British Parliament, Isaac Praise-God Barebone. His son got known as “Damned Barebone” for short, and eventually changed his name to Nicholas Barbon, became a doctor, economist, and writer, and founded the first insurance company.