You stand between God’s law and the best intentions of the weak.

You stand between God’s people and their own demons.

Sometimes it’s better for one to die than for many to suffer.
Sometimes, Dog, sometimes you have to cut off the arm to save the life.

Does the sinner deserve mercy?
Do the wicked deserve judgement?

They’re in your hands.

—

DOGS IN THE VINEYARD
roleplaying God’s Watchdogs
in a West that never quite was.

—

Dogs in the Vineyard is about God’s Watchdogs, young men and women called to preserve the Faithful in a hostile frontier territory. They travel from town to isolated town, carrying mail, news, and doctrine, healing the sick, supporting the weary, and pronouncing judgment upon the wicked. Sharpshooters, Cowboy-Priests, and Holy Horsemen alike – a town welcomes you with celebration and honor, but what you’re there to do is stir up its dirt and lay bare its sins.

The setting is a fantasy inspired by pre-statehood Utah, the Deseret Territory, toward the middle of the 19th century. Picture a landscape of high mountains, icy rivers and cedar woods, falling away westward into scrublands, deserts, buttes and swells. The summer skies are heartbreaking blue, but the winters are long and killing. “Mountain Men”, ancestors of those who properly own this land before it was ravaged from them, maintain an uneasy truce with the frontiers in some places, and outright wage war with them in others,

Picture religious pioneers, fleeing persecution and violence in the East. They’re trying to establish a society based on faith and righteousness out in this frontier. They’ve made the long trek westward but they’re still in danger: their towns are small and isolated, vulnerable to attack from without, sin and corruption within. Under pressure, their pride becomes sin, their anger becomes violence, their resentments become hate. Winter and the demons howl…

You are God’s Watchdogs, holding the Faith together.