Toronto Dogs In The Vineyard:Inspirations

My Agenda

By your referee, Erik Weissengruber

I have been running Sorcerer and HeroQuest pretty heavily. The latter game I have run with a boodthirsty, Conanesqe slant and the former I have been running as a dark horror game in the manner of Clive Barker.

I have had enough darkness.

So I was looking for a game that would have honest-to-god heroes in it. Dogs in the Vineyard (DitV) is this game. You are like the early Moslems or the Mormons: you have been given a revelation and must build a godly community strong enough to resist the assaults of the outer world and to spread the gospel.

An athiest and a pragmatist, I have never had to wrestle with the burden of bringing an absolute morality into the world. It's easy to sneer at the the religious and the devout, but harder to understand their trials. Do I want to be a Jesuit, or a Samurai trying to live by the code of Bushido, or a Mafioso trying to live up to the code? No. But I wonder what it would be like. Is there are way to stay humane while serving the Absolute? That is the question I hope to explore.

Player Agendas

• Mark signalled his interest in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. So I will include a few dark conspiracies and supra-human horrors in the mix
• Shawn wanted more opportunity to explore the setting and control player actions rather than following the referee's agenda. That's the style of gaming that I seek to encourage.
• I want to tackle the myth of the New World. The American frontier has been depicted as a "tabula rasa" where the American people were to create a new society, free from the corruptions of old Europe. But anthropologists, pulp fiction writers, and intellectuals alike have pointed out that the Americas are not a "virgin land" but a land marked by history, some of which is pretty bloody and horrible by anyone's standards. So our community of the Faithful will have to deal with the legacies of the ancient history that preceeded them.

New World or Old World?

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
- a bit of the old darkness coming in ...

"Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated cops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.

Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practised, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt...."

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