Here's the setting:

Old West, 1878, with a moderate deviation from history (does not affect technology or major political developments).

The PCs will be running a inestigative campaign against a vaguely CoC setting. They will be Pinkerton agents. The CoC nature will be cloaked behind other legendary terminology; the investigative aspect of the game will be quite deep and techincal (I'm a police officer). I'm expecting 50-60 weekly sessions, barring a TPK, which is always possible.

Here's my problem: the skills & classes make research viable, and the setting makes it absolutely crutial.

But the West in 1878 is thinly populated and optimized for survival. Access to libraries and the like will be very minimal, and thus the opportunity for research.

Carrying a large amount of written works is out of the question-the PCs will be travelling in the hinderlands a great deal. A pack mule can only carry 225lbs, and requires a minimum of 8lbs of water and 4-6 pounds of grain a day.

So how do I work around this? Implausible gimmicks like private trains are out.

Aren't there survival and hunting and foraging sorts of skills in the game? They can be used to make short rations last a long time.

If PCs want to go into the sticks but take no survivalish skills, then they deserve the hunger pangs they get

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;249962Aren't there survival and hunting and foraging sorts of skills in the game? They can be used to make short rations last a long time.

If PCs want to go into the sticks but take no survivalish skills, then they deserve the hunger pangs they get

True, but you can't forage for grain.

You're right about water.

But could you get enough books into 225lbs to make a decent research roll?

Allow one PC to be a supernatural-like savant. The character has got all this info stored up in his/her brain - kind of like Chuck....

Regards,
David R

In 1878  if they are close enough to a town - they could send a request for information to their home office in either Chicago or St. Louis.

The telegraph should be in common use by that year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph

Only suggesting this for when the research roleplay hits the limit of character or player knowledge.

One of the earliest historical telegraph messages involved apprehending a criminal:

QuoteIn early 1845, John Tawell was apprehended following the use of a needle telegraph message from Slough to Paddington on January 1, 1845. This is thought to be the first use of the telegraph to catch a murderer. The message was:

A murder has just been committed at Salt Hill and the suspected murderer was seen to take a first class ticket to London by the train that left Slough at 7.42pm. He is in the garb of a Kwaker with a brown great coat on which reaches his feet. He is in the last compartment of the second first-class carriage

The reason for the misspelling of 'Quaker' was that the British system did not support the letter

As for the American Old West:

QuoteOn October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph system was established. Spanning North America, an existing network in the eastern United States was connected to the small network in California by a link between Omaha and Carson City via Salt Lake City. The slower Pony Express system ceased operation two days later. Carson City has another claim in the history of telegraphs for the largest and costliest transmission ever sent came from there. Union sympathizers in the American Civil War were eager to gain statehood for Nevada before the next presidential election so that Abraham Lincoln would have enough votes to win. They rushed to send the entire state constitution by telegraph to the United States Congress, which approved it and sent it to the President for signature. They did not believe sending it by train would guarantee it would arrive on time. The constitution was sent on October 31st, just 8 days before the election on November 7th, 1864.

Hope thats useful for your eventual campaign.

- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;249970In 1878  if they are close enough to a town - they could send a request for information to their home office in either Chicago or St. Louis.

Very interesting-for that matter, they could have a small library stashed at a home base, and communicate by telegraph with an NPC left to tend it.

That could work very nicely.

A certain amount of esoteric knowledge might also be gleaned from the stories of Medicine Men, cave paintings, etc...

Shoot, if you go really gonzo you could have a player piano's scroll contain cultist revelations.

Also, some medium-sized towns that had some local wealthy eccentric that might've helped start the town originally - might have their own personal libraries. . In 1878 we're talking towns and settlements that have been there maybe less than 30 years.  At the time, it was possible to send to somewhere like SEARS for designs and kits to build schools and courthopuses for towns that were just starting out.


The old TIME-LIFE series on the Old West had a whole book devoted to just the Townsmen and how they were started very quickly and they also wanted 'respectability' very quickly. Part of this would be the fact that a few towns might start a library as a status symbol to show that they were 'better' or more sopisticated than the last town along the trail or railroad line.


If you could find that particular book at a used book store like HALF-PRICE Books it would likely be a good resource for the type of campaign that you're doing. If I remember right (and these books are in a different part of the house right now) the volume on LAWMEN or GUNSLINGERS had a whole chapter on the Pinkertons.


Also, don't laugh, but GURPS: OLD WEST might be useful as a decent blbliograpy pointer and overview of the setting.


- Ed C.

Pity the telegraph operators who have to rely passages from various occult texts in Morse code.

^^LOL...

Definitely enforce SAN checks for telegraph operators transmitting the Necronomicon.

You could also give one of the characters a patchwork journal/scrapbook full of little bits of esoterica on the occult. Bit's of newspapers and pages from obscure books in one big leatherbound volume.

It doesn't always have something, but it occasionally works out that it's got some information that could be useful.

Quote from: FASERIP;249981^^LOL...

Definitely enforce SAN checks for telegraph operators transmitting the Necronomicon.

Well, at least it isn't 4chan.

Quote from: OneTinSoldier;249958Carrying a large amount of written works is out of the question-the PCs will be travelling in the hinderlands a great deal. A pack mule can only carry 225lbs, and requires a minimum of 8lbs of water and 4-6 pounds of grain a day.

So how do I work around this? Implausible gimmicks like private trains are out.

Who needs all that book-learnin' anyway?

Specifically: why not make research more a matter of getting people to share the information they have locked away in their noggin, be it town rumours or Indian folklore or a terrible secret about the strange events on the McDougal ranch twenty years back that the ol'-timers still won't talk about? Dot around a few courthouses, Western Union telegraph offices, and the like - so the folks who took Library Use aren't completely boned - and for the rest of the research the PCs can use their social skills. Pinkerton investigations in the Old West aren't exactly going to require the same standards of proof as FBI investigations in the 21st century, after all; hearsay and gossip will, a lot of the time, be all you can reasonably expect to have.

Quote from: Warthur;250142Who needs all that book-learnin' anyway?

Specifically: why not make research more a matter of getting people to share the information they have locked away in their noggin, be it town rumours or Indian folklore or a terrible secret about the strange events on the McDougal ranch twenty years back that the ol'-timers still won't talk about? Dot around a few courthouses, Western Union telegraph offices, and the like - so the folks who took Library Use aren't completely boned - and for the rest of the research the PCs can use their social skills. Pinkerton investigations in the Old West aren't exactly going to require the same standards of proof as FBI investigations in the 21st century, after all; hearsay and gossip will, a lot of the time, be all you can reasonably expect to have.

There are skills for obtaining/extracting known information. That's covered.

But to operate a three or four tier deception (remember, I'm looking at 50+ weekly sessions), its going to be a great deal deeper than some weird goings-on out at the old mine. No NPC will have all or even a fraction of the information needed.

So the PCs will have to cross-reference the raw data they obtain from interview/interrogation/canvas, physical evidence found at various scenes, and link analysis of events. They will have to research the root data involved, and cross-reference the resulting data.

The skill sets are there; what I need, however, is the problem of the physical collection of reference works that the PCs will need to transform the raw data into a coherant result. In modern, or even later period settings you have libraries and other data sources to work with.

In the Old West, not so much.

But working off the suggestions made here, by adding a skill along the lines of research relevance, the PC who does the research could carry a working library with him, say 200lbs of books (a pack mule plus six day's worth of grain-figure 68-80 volumes) as a forward reference source, and then telegraph back to places such as Austin, Santa Fe, or similar places for books.

One thing I have learned from research based off Koltar's idea is that in this era, bound catalogs of books were published listing publisher data and tables of contents (books were not dispoosable in this era). With a proper collection of catalogs, a researcher could identify a short list of works that he needed, and arrange for their transport by telegraph. Delivery could be, on a rail line, a matter of days.

Expensive, but that it simply a challenge the PCs will have to overcome.

Why have them lug the books around?

Well, for a small jump, stick an occult library in Salt Lake city.  It could be a secret one owned by a collector who most people believe is an upright Mormon.  Or it could be the secret archieves of the church itself.

For a slightly larger jump you could have a wealthy gentleman's estate in the wilderness.  Having been run out of town in europe, he has used his considerable fortune to set himself up in the lawless territory of the American west, with his own personal milita.  Being a collector of oddities he finds the PCs useful as catspaws and makes his library of the obscure available to them.

For a big, nasty jump you could have a secret library brought to America by the conquistadors from Europe in order to hide it from the Inquisition.  And you could have it contain everything that was really going on with the Aztecs and their gods.  You know, the Aztec gods would make nice stand-ins for the mythos...

On a side thought the wealthy gentleman could be an arab or chinese prince if you like.  The conquistador's books could be in the hands of a mad prospector or the local navajo tribe.