[Six Bullets for Vengeance] Sweet Vengeance
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 14/03/2007 - 20:15.
One of my favourite parts of Six Bullets is also one of the most innocuous – 6 little red dice that the protagonist has, called vengeance dice. Next to the mountains of other dice floating about the table (see here), they’re easy to miss. Yet they’re one of the most powerful – and coolest – elements of the game.
Vengeance dice have been in the game since the very beginning, although they’ve been dropped and brought back a few times since. They started out as an attribute that the protagonist had to have, which got reduced as the game went on, and were meant to represent the protagonist’s consumption by his quest for revenge.
Now they’re an extra pool of dice that the protagonist gets to add to a conflict whenever he wants, although they’re lost once rolled until the start of the next chapter. The idea is that they give the protagonist an edge against the antagonists who outnumber him, an extra pool of dice he can call on to even out the odds.
But they come with an almighty catch … and that’s what makes vengeance dice so cool.
The catch is this. Whenever one of those little red dice hits the table, blood and violence and pain follow in its wake. The narration of the conflict in which a vengeance die has been rolled has to include bloody violence in some capacity, to someone, anyone, in the scene.
If the protagonist wins the conflict, all well and good. Odds are he was intending violence anyway. But if the antagonist wins, the rules remain – he must narrate violence of some kind as part of his narration. To anyone. Including the protagonist, including the protagonist’s allies and companions and friends and loved ones.
They’re the moments in films when the protagonist guns down all his enemies in a blaze of bullets, or cuts down his foe in a single furious sword blow. But they’re also the moment when the protagonist takes a body blow himself, or when his staunch companions get cut down mercilessly by the bad guys.
Vengeance dice are like the ultimate escalation, and in that regard they’re a little like pulling out a gun in Dogs in the Vineyard. Sometimes they can go in your favour, sometimes they can go against you horribly.
