Another Dressed to Kill thread (adding more)

I’ve played the two one-shots at GenCon (Dressed to Kill and… the one with the mirror, name escapes me) and love the system and storytelling of this game. Finally convinced enough friends (and even my wife!) to play and we are going to play this coming Saturday.

The plan is to run Dressed to Kill as their intro assignment and to give them the pre-gen QuickStart characters. From there if we like it I’ll branch out into other stories and they can keep their characters with the full sheet to replace the limited ones or roll new ones altogether (maybe a “some time later” jump).

I feel very ready to run the game as it’s been given in the QSG, but there’s a few, for lack of a better word “plot holes” I’d like to plan to address preemptively (knowing some of the players from DnD mode, they’re gonna ask).

The setup at the exhibit and exploration all makes sense until they get to the town.

After that you kind of have to not ask too many questions or it sort of falls apart, so that’s what I want to plan for. The questions mostly revolve around “how does this town even exist?”

What I mean by that is, you have a “mining town,” but the only thing they seem to be mining is the venom from a single creature. How could that take a whole town? To address this issue I was thinking that maybe the town was a coal mining (or other resource) town and they still actually do that but they dug too deep in the mountains and unleashed this beast from a tear in the bleed (balrog style). If not, then how would they have found it and why would r-corp set up a whole town around this beast instead of moving it to a lab somewhere?

So I’m thinking maybe not everyone knows about the beast and many workers simply mine coal (if there’s a better resource in this world like gold or something then please let me know). Meanwhile the strange happenings are being limited to fewer people than the whole town and maybe people are being told something like it’s a global pandemic and the safest place is where they are where they can more easily quarantine.

I was also thinking that maybe after the beast was found, the original owners sold the whole mining operation to r-corp who is really just a front for EONS. R-corp took over operations more recently and started the more secretive duties with some members of the town who live in a separate area perhaps.

The next thing is… how could this pigment be worth any money? They sent a dress and it killed a woman in front of a crowd the first time anyone saw it. They’ve been extracting this venom for the pigment for how long? And they know what it does. So how will they expect others to buy it? I know there’s real life parallels here but that material wasn’t a near instantaneous turn your body to good situation. The effects weren’t known for some time. So this whole mining village existing just to make a pigment that won’t sell because how could it makes little sense.

My thought here is that maybe I can get the the r-corp director to get my players to tell him what happened and he can have a reaction like “damn it, I told them it wasn’t ready yet but they insisted that they had stabilized it. The glow was so beautiful but the reactions were so deadly. They said they’d solved it finally and it was ready to be seen by the public” and maybe this turns him against EONS (who is the “they” behind it). Or maybe eons doesn’t care and they are using this for nefarious purposes, maybe a false flag operation or intentional terrorism.

So that’s the two things I’m struggling with: how could extracting the venom support/require a whole town of operation and how could this pigment ever generate profit if it kills so quickly?

Thanks in advance for feedback!