Gareth Hendrix and the Bunker Bigfoot [TriCube Tales Solo][Actual Play], Introduction

Gareth Hendrix hates being called a kid but the folks in the Kai Yote Trailer Park do just that. 

• "Hey, kid, you take any more pictures?" 
• "Hey, kid, how's your dad?"
• "Hey, kid, haven't seen Stacy lately." 

Which they wouldn't have, since Gareth isn't seeing much of her, neither, not since a month ago. High school is three years back in the rearview mirror and Stacy had a stack of reasons to cut ties with Gareth despite the four years of "high school sweetheart" status. She wants to head up to Bichester Community College in the Fall. That's what he tells folks, if they get really insistent. Maybe it is true. He doesn't know. 

They ain't being mean, the Kai Yote folks. They just have their ways. Like never letting the word "Gareth" escape from their lips except by accident. At best, he ranks "Barlow's kid," which they consider a big honor. A big bad honor, even. "Barlow's kid helped Macy dig out the trash from her well. He's a good'un," and "Barlow's kid needs some meat on his bones but he'll do the Pack proud, you see." Actual quotes he overheard when people didn't realize the trailer walls were too thin to block any sounds. Not that they were whispering. That wouldn't be the Pack's way. 

The half-crooked, hand-painted sign at the end of the road says "LOTS FULL" though bird crap smeared on the O and the faded second L makes it look a bit more like.. "LØTS FUL" and there has to be a joke there. Gareth does not know exactly what it might be. Scandinavian Death Metal covers with wolves howling at blood red moons or some such. 

Either way, it's a lie. It's complicated. The exact words Stacy said when she shrugged him off and went her way with only a slight hint of regret like she was maybe teasing him to follow even though she knew he wouldn't. That is ok. Gareth did not mind having Stacy around but Gareth does not really know if he likes girls. He does not really like boys, either. He just, you know...

It's complicated. Like this place.

Certain people who know the right words and the right knocks and come from the right background can find a place here, any time. As long as they live by the rules that Barlow Hendrix sets for the Kai Yote, the rules the Pack want Barlow to enforce.

From where Gareth sips sweet tea on his decaying back porch, nailed there a decade back by his dad - the Big Bad Wolf Barlow - you go about a quarter mile and you hit Bunker. Folks in Bunker are alright. Boring. Sometimes overdramatic. But fine. Full of it, sure. Think they are better than folks who live out in the dinky Kai Yote trailers, but not bad. Just annoying. Stacy was from Bunker and had Gareth not been the way he is, maybe she'd be out here with him in their own trailer and taking sides. Probably would have expected him to move next to her parents by the lake and take her side. Gareth chuckles thinking of the shock her face when their kids pop out a bit hairy for a newborn. 

It only takes about a mile in that direction to be out the other side. Cross that other side, wade through Murder Creek, and go another four or five miles and you get Cresthill, which makes Bunker look small. Bunker is small, but Cresthill really highlights the effect. Not that Cresthill is particularly big. 

A secluded trailer park near a small town near a small big town is perfect for the Pack, trying to live a normal life while being werewolves. It's nice to have things like canned corn and cold Cokes nearby some days even if you want to run wild on others. The Kai Yotes do not run wild too much anymore. Not since the Troubles. Hence the name. 

That was Barlow Hendrix's idea of a taunt. He feels wolves need to get bloody, a bit mean, to bring back the old terrors but the Bunker Pack thinks those days are past. A few bad shootouts. A few too many hunters in the know. Too dangerous now when every Kenny and Sally can get assault rifles. Might not be silver but being shot dozens of times can slow you down and make you rethink a few things. People around here are apt to start loading up silver if some old family matron cottoned to it. Buckshot full of silver and rusty nails feels like something Bunker might dream up. Southern Alabama swings a tad to old ways of thinking. 

Gareth's people have settled. They lost some fur and call themselves Bunker folk the same way the richer kids - middle class, really - in Bunker tell other folks they are practically from Cresthill. Like a witness protection plan for ex-gangsters if those gangsters had to avoid social events when the moon is a particular amount of full. 

Dad, the Pack leader, hates it but feels it his duty to take care of them since Jeb Hendrix, grandpa, founded this Pack and brought these folks together. Barlow might be the Big Bad Wolf - with hints of some things he did back in the day hinted at by those in the know - but Jeb was the Bigger Badder Wolf. A true Were. Fenrir's very own brood.

There are streets down in Mobile where some old folk still scare kids talking about the terrors that lurk in the dark. Those murders and attacks that were never solved. Even though those terrors got old and fat and tired and really scared and moved north to Bunker. 

So Barlow made a classic Southern Dad joke: coyotes. Kai Yotes. Not wolves:, scavenger dogs, living off the scraps of civilization next to a piss pot dump of a town. Barlow would die for each and every one of his people, doubly so for his son that he can barely understand, but he still gets mad about what they lost. 

At least it was quiet. Confusing, complicated, boring, and quiet. Nice. 

Only, that is getting flushed just like old times. Pitchforks and torches and silver bullets are brewing. A month back, some fool hunter from Cresthill got a snap of Barlow wilding it up down by the Creek where Barlow liked to howl and booze on Ms. Mac's special brew. Sold the photo to some hotshot bigfoot hunter TV show and now Bunker is slapping BIGFOOT CAPITAL OF THE SOUTH on all the town signs. There are t-shirts in three colors and caps in two. In those old days, that hunter would have been a snack but Barlow hesitated. Now everyone is all on edge listening to Bunker and Cresthill loudmouths tramp through the woods. 

Some of the Kai Yotes have even been approached. "You guys ever hear anything?" Only a matter of time before people start offering cash and some of the fools might take it. Canned corn does not pay for itself. 

Lina - Macy's grand-daughter and silver of fur - sent Gareth some screenshots. That TV Show, Bigger They Fall starring star Bigfootologist Jack Fall, is coming to town and it might only be a little bit of time before BIGFOOT CAPITAL becomes "THE TOWN WHERE THEY KILLED ALL THOSE WEREWOLVES". The Pack is nervous. Barlow is starting to grind his teeth. 

And Gareth, bless his heart, that tall skinny boy who does not know what he is and who does not really like his tea all this sweet but he does like it cold and sweaty on a summer day, realizes it might be up to him to come up with a plan. 

-- Background and Notes -- 

Pardon the creative writing dump. 

I thought it might be nice to run a session where the end goal is a lot less "campaign" and a bit more mini-series. Rather than the kind of thing where I run a session for 1-2 hours and spend 1-2 hours writing it up and analyzing it, something where I can play three or four scenes over about half an hour and then spend maybe half an hour typing it up. A maybe silly story about retired werewolves and relying on the weird kid to get some things done. 

It will be Tricube Tales, specifically the Champions of Fenrir mini-setting, though liberties will be made. Tricube Solo returns, again expanded by my own additional Framework. I've been making a couple of minor tweaks as I actually use it and will be doing some testing.

It'll be mostly a one-character story. A few side characters, Lina and Barlow and maybe some of the Bunker kids, will got a scene or two to join in but this is Gareth's story. His family has been leading the pack for two generations. His dad and granddad were the kind of werewolves that other werewolves consider to be a bit rough around the edges. Gareth, though, is softer in a not-bad way. He has to consider what type of werewolf he is. The Pack is about to be threatened in a way that is purely modern. Not (yet) by guns but by cameras. Folks from tiny towns getting a chance to be famous? You better believe that town is about to open up and secrets will be exposed.

Back in the day, one of the first editions (maybe revised? I do not recall) of Werewolf: The Apocalypse had some quick start sampler adventure that was about werewolves needing to get into a building to get some photos and negatives back to get rid of evidence of werewolves. I ran it for two different groups. The first group snuck in, avoided much of the violence, snagged the photos, and got out of the area. The second group set the building on fire and killed any security guards who ran out of the flames and tossed their bodies back in. 

There are, as the saying goes, two wolves inside of you.

Which one is Gareth? That's what we'll find out together. I actually kind of like the idea of what violence the series has might come later when things get tenser. Or not at all. Maybe this ends up being a romance or slice or life or comedy of errors. I don't know. I'll find out pretty quick in the first session or two. 

Around the time I was obsessed with Werewolf, I was living in a place very much like Bunker. Not quite, but close. House, not a trailer, but a house built by my dad while there was an old trailer in our backyard. I spent my early years using an outhouse because there wasn't a lot of running water in the house. Baths made by boiling water on the stove and pouring it in a tub. Party lines when we did have a phone and we did not always have a phone. My parents got a lot of that fixed and modernized as I hit my teens but that sense of being separated from a small town (unlike the quarter mile to Bunker in this story, Evergreen was ten miles away) that was accepting of us swampier folks but also took on airs. Cresthill, by the way, has long been a fictional town in several of my Alabama Weird stories. It's a dumb pun. The high school in Evergreen was, back then, Hillcrest. In my stories, Cresthill is a bit bigger than Evergreen ever has been: a mash-up of two or three of those southern towns, Evergreen + Brewton + Andalusia with a side of Monroeville... big enough to drop whatever I needed into it.

Several story beats are deeply based on just actual stuff from that part of the world. There's an actual Murder Creek. Apparently it has a distillery named after it. 

Evergreen really does call itself The Bigfoot Capital of Alabama (and I'm sure some upgrade it to "The South" just fine). There was a documentary made: The Town that Loved Bigfoot. Just glancing at that article or watching the trailer should give you the visuals for these sessions pretty well. Back in the day I made the joke that the bigfoot sightings were just other people spotting my kin. We might not be werewolves, but some of us are kind of tall and hairy. 

Ah, and Kai Yote is how my swampier kin say "coyote". There are a few RPGs from that 90s era that have had the werewolf types talk bad about the -dog and -coyote types (Palladium Fantasy had the "coyle" to clash against the stately majesty of the wolfen, for instance...). That's a bit unfair. I like coyotes. But a southern werewolf might consider them a true sign of a particular type of failing. 

I like the idea of one of the classic monsters just reaching a point where it is nice to sit back and enjoy the A/C. It gets hot in Southern Alabama. Real hot. Do werewolves sweat? Man I tell you, I don't know.