I’ve got to keep movin’,
blues fallin’ down like hail,
(…)
And the day keeps on worrin’ me,
there’s a hellhound on my trail
—Hellhound On My Trail, Robert Johnson
In 1929, the world ended. Some folks in Washington and Wall Street did something or other that meant nobody could work no more. You don’t rightly understand it. All you know is that it meant the bank foreclosed on your family farm.
Now you’re penniless, wandering the country. You’re seeking a new home, food, jobs, anything to get by. But the farmlands have turned into a desolate dust bowl. Every town you come to is haunted. And there is a malevolent force chasing you for unknown reasons. There’s evil out there in America, rotting the country to the core, and it is after your soul.
Hellhound on My Trail is a hack of Agon by John Harper and Sean Nittner. In it, you transpose the epic tales of ancient myth onto the lives of down on their luck drifters during the Great Depression. One core theme of the game is keeping the game ambiguously magical: folks might talk about ghosts, hoodoo and strange powers, but it is left unresolved if these things are really magical or merely superstition and metaphor.
You will need the base game of Agon to make any sense of this document.