010: Boom II (Reset)

The ending of the Donner Party reminded me of the ending of A Man Called Sarge:

Leslie Browning: "Thank God we got those twenty-one bombs disarmed in time."
Sarge: "Twenty-ONE bombs?"
*fuel dump explodes in a spectacular fireball*
Sarge: Oh swell.
Narrator: Did we mention that this was not an important story?
*the end*

(We've lately been watching a lot of the old big-budget World War II films which that one parodied, but it's been ages since I've actually seen AMCS, and I can't find any of the better parts on youtube.)

Anyway, I devoted more research than I probably should have into finding out just how long it would take for a 40 foot boxcar loaded with cold-weather clothing, barley, small arms and ammunition, truck and helicopter parts, avgas, two X-ray machines, searchlights and guided missiles to go up in flames. Not very long, actually.

So… train car go boom. And so did the rest of the train. And so did absolutely everything else in the gorge. We could have run at the first sign of smoke and it still wouldn't have mattered; we would have just died tired.

We did pretty good, all things considered: destroyed millions of dollars of enemy equipment, killed a full platoon of highly-trained enemy soldiers, probably forced them to redraw the map of western Pincher County... it would have been a very auspicious first strike if it hadn't also been our last.


I asked my players whether or not they wanted to roll up a whole new Donner Party or simply go back and redo some of their previous decisions, and they chose to do the latter.

So, we'll go back in time to the 5th of September and decide to attack police patrols instead of supply trains. We won't contact the Henderson Gang (yet) but apart from that very little of our activity changes. We still go on our thieving spree, Kate still gets to have her gunfight. Steve and Maria spend their time running recce on police units, learning their procedures and looking for weaknesses in their operation. We're going to take things slower this time; I think being repeatedly massacred did a lot to teach my players about the dangers of trying to bite off more than they can chew.