"'Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,' The shade replied, 'if you seek for El Dorado'." -- From Eldorado by Edgar Alan Poe.

Introduction

Warning: this article contains plot details which some people might consider spoilers.  If you're not the Marshal, you probably shouldn't be reading this.

Alan Bourdillion Traherne is an altogether unusual boy, apparently of about thirteen years of age. Just as his nickname suggests, he was born on a flatboat in the middle of the Mississippi River.  His parents died while he was still young, and he was taken in and cared for by a man named Johnny Diamond.  Johnny taught the boy all he knew about the art of gambling, before getting himself killed over a disputed card game.

Drifting west on the trails of Johnny Diamond's killers, Traherne found himself in the company of a man by the name of Enoch Shaw.  Shaw took young Mississippi under his wing and taught him how to use the cards for something other than just making money. Who would have thought that a boy the tender age of thirteen would be a card-carrying wizard?

About the Character

Mississippi found himself drawn into the Posse's adventures from the outset. When one of my players came and told me they wanted to revive a character from another Marshall's campaign, I was somewhat hesitant, but I had heard good things about him. I mean, any Mad Scientist who nearly kills his entire Posse because he is carrying a bandoleer full of Nitroglycerin while using a cunningly devised, back-pack sized weapon that hurls bits of flaming Ghost Rock (think the Ghostbusters' Unlicensed Particle Accelerator Packs) that, for the first time in all the long sessions of play, has finally failed a reliability check (and in the worst possible way), and then himself walks away nearly unharmed, can't be all bad can he?  OK, maybe your definition of "All Bad" and mine differ, but that's the difference between a player and Marshall, isn't it?

So I allowed Professor Armitage to be revived, (figuratively speaking as it were), but I knew he would need a foil. The good Professor was drastically overpowered compared to the rest of the group, and I knew that the first adventure I had in mind would likely only make the divide even worse. There was, after all, an entire Ghost Rock Mine to be had, for a person suitably devious enough to grab it.

Fortunately, I had just finished watching John Wayne's "El Dorado" for about the fifteenth billion time in my life, and I thought, Man, all those characters are really good, but Mississippi is probably the best one out of the lot. Needless to say, I put Mississippi to work immediately.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Whith Deadlands being a Pen and Paper Game, most of a character is left up to the player's imagination, but I've found you can direct the players imagination with a good picture of the NPC.  Now I'm no artist, so I turned to the Internet for most of my character pictures.  When dealing with Mississippi, I wanted a picture that would reminde the player of the movie, but look younger than James Caan actually looked in the film.  Naturally, just doing a search on Google for "Alan Bourdillion Trahern" turned up quite a number of pictures of Mr. Caan as the character, but I didn't want just a screenshot.

I sat and thought for a while about the character that I saw in this version of Mississippi.  The lines that struck me the as the most telling for Alan in El Dorado came from an exchange with Cole Thornton after a villian had just escaped from a gunfight:

Thornton: Did you get him?

Mississippi: Who?

Thorton: The fellow who ran out of the church.

Mississippi: Well, yes and no.

Thornton: What do ya mean? Did you or didn’t you?

Mississippi: I hit the sign, and the sign hit him.

Thornton: [Heavy Sarcasm] That’s great.

Mississippi: He was limping when he left!

Thornton: He was limping when he got here!

While the exchange speaks to Mississippi's defensiveness over being somewhat ineffective with his new scattergun, to me it also hints at some mischievousness on his part. After all, what would a man raised by a career gambler be like as a child?  Well, seems to me he'd be like another character of which I am very fond, Mat Cauthon from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  So with this thought in mind I expanded my search of images to the new character, and sure enough I found a picture that seems to just sum everything up perfectly on Sarah Ellerton's site http://www.arts-angel.com.  Doesn't that Picture look like a young rouge?

Mississippi's hook

Of course, finding that picture helped me really solidify my image of this incarnation of Alan Bourdillion Traherne.  But there was still one problem, how would Mississippi be involved with the posse?  Every good adventure starts off with a hook, something that gets the Posse intrested in going along with what the Marshal has in mind.  But a good storyteller should also consider what's in it for the NPC's; they should never go against character. So what was in it for Mississippi?

My original intent was to have him tracking down the killers of his mentor, Johnny Diamond, finding the first in Bonasco.  From there, the scene would play out just as it had in the movie.  But that was unsatisfying creatively.  Plus, at least one member whould have seen it coming from a mile away, since he likse John Wayne just as much as I do.  Then too there was the fact that while that would definitly get Mississippi involved with the party, it wouldn't necesary server his primary purpose of being a foil to the good Professor.

The next idea I had was for him to be the prime target of the abomination that was at the heart of the first adventure, a town-sized creature named Kangee (Boomtowns, p 56).  This was better, because it put Mississippi in the thick of things, but it still didn't explain why Mississippi was in Bonasco in the first place.  Was he there for the gambling, or maybe he was there for something more sinister. Hmm.  What could be sinister about a thirteen year old boy?  What could be sinster about a thirteen year old boy, capable of magic?  Maybe He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was out to get him... Nah, that's been done to death.

So if he was there for a sinister purpose, what would it be?  How about Kangee himself?  Kangee was eating people whenever he was hungry, so what if he ate the wrong person?  Maybe he had eaten a Ranger, or an Agent.  But I rejected that idea.  The posse was too new to be running into that kind of trouble from the begining.  Besides, why would the Rangers or the Men in Black Dusters send a boy to a man's job?

This led me down another line of thought:

Mississippi is a huckster, right?

Um, yeah, so?

So? There's a whole 'nother group deadicated to keeping hucksters in line right?

Um, right.

So what if...

They were hunting him?

No no no.  That would just be silly.

Would it?

Oh yes, very silly.

You mean like having a 13 year old boy being a wizard more powerful than your most powerful player in the Posse? That kind of silly?

Um... Yes.

OK... go on then, pull the other one.  It has bells on.

So what would happen if Mississippi were a member of the Lady Luck Society?  Maybe not just a member, but one of Enoch Shaw's confidants.  A boy could move through many places unnoticed and snoop around, and most of the time the worst he'd get is a hide-tanin' for being where he shouldn't.

Dingle Dingle.

See, there's the bell...

So it sounds like a silly idea, but it actually works.  Bonasco is a gambling town.  Hucksters like to gamble.  Members of the Society really like to gamble, so much so they have a tournament every year.  What would happen if a couple of Society members went and dissapered while investigating strange occurences where Hucksters where hanging out?  They'd send in someone really over-powered.

Of course, this involved reconcieving some of Mississippi's past.  (Frankly, I went back and reconsidered all of it.)  And I came up with the notion that Mississippi, sometime after Johnny Diamond's death, met up with Enoch Shaw, who took him in as his apprentice.  Of course, this still presents several logic holes, but I have already considered them, and stuffed them full of cloth.  Unfortunatly, since my Posse might be reading this, I'm not going to mention what the holes are, or what I plugged them with...

The First Meeting

The Posse's first exposure to Mississippi was on the train, as they were bound for Bonasco, New Mexico.  Professor Armitage, under the auspices of the newly formed independent State of California, was heading to Bonasco to secure the Ghost Rock mine for a proposed Ghost Rock Cartel.  (In our campaign, California and the Sioux have entered into an agreement to "Ensure the Value of the precious mineral," and the Halbert Mining Company of Bonasco was the last major producer yet to sign up.)  With him travels the Reverend T.L. Waggoner, a one-time Law Dog of some renown turned Blessed Baptist Minister.  Rev. Waggoner is in charge of security for the trip, but he is also along to investigate some mysterious happenings reported to him by his friend, Sheriff Garrett Cole.

Also travailing on the train are Roman O'mally, a dual-fisted gunslinger, and Miss Samantha Dawson, a pretty, young thing, seeking employment at one of the many Casinos or Saloons in Bonasco.  The good Reverend and O'mally have met before, and the Reverend recommends to the Professor that a temporary employment might be in order.  The Professor defers to the Reverend's advice and admits O'mally into the detail.  O'mally immediately sets to work identifying potential threats, and his well trained eyes roam the car.

Besides Miss Dawson, he spots two men who appear to be of the gambling persuasion, a rather stunning red-haired woman, and a thirteen year old travailing alone with his dog.  Years of training and practice tell him what to do next... He talks to the redhead.  The redhead's name is Miss Phoebe Sinclair, a performer by trade, who works as the Belle of the Jakeman Theater in Bonasco.  O'mally spends most of the train ride chatting up the Beautiful Miss Phoebe.  No one seems to notice the somewhat shabilly dressed boy and his dog.  They certainly don't notice the paper he's reading, or the fact that he's not really reading it at all...