Cowboy Cultists

Fluff
"I have not been a good father to them... they are just children, strapping on six shooters and wandering out into the snow to deliver justice that has no meaning. It was harmless... harmless for so long... but one of the older boys, Aatos... oh, Aatos... what have you done?"

Barend DeBerg, sole staff of Neuer Anfang Orphanage

Aatos stood before the collection of children lying on the floor.

"Cowboys, what is best in life?"

One child jumped up, barely older than five, and, with hands on hips and chest puffed out, declared:

"To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"

''The other children giggled, for this was a line from one of the movies they rarely got to watch anymore. Before the kid had even stopped puffing out his chest, Aatos had his pistol trained firmly, and with a menacing click of the hammer he told his congregation, with a gut-turning finality:''

"The real world won't fuck about, and neither will we"

Basic Information
The Cowboy Cultists, as they have come to be known, are bred from the Neuer Anfang orphanage. Over worked and in possession of a still working video player, a beleaguered Barend DeBerg turned to the television as a source of crowd control. The children spent day after day watching anything they could get their hands on; Gene Autry, The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dynamite and other famous westerns. For a while, it kept the children entertained until one of the eldest kids, barely 17, spent almost all that the orphanage had on a bunch of old guns and some bullets. Aatos promised to make the wild, free dreams of the children become reality, and they followed his vision,taking up arms and wandering out into the snow to follow the old american way.

Now, cowboy cultists are hardly what you'd call...promising, being rarely over the age of 18 and having little practice, but they all keep a six shooter under their jackets or in their thigh holster and they're not exactly a small cadre. No matter how many of them fall in gunfights (which they tend to start a lot of), there's always more, streaming forth from the over-crowded orphanage. Only one in ten Cowboy Cultists are still cowboys past the age of 18, having either died, settled down, or gone back to the orphanage to indoctrinate more children.

While the CCs have a reputation for getting into unnecessary fights and generally being.. well, children, you can tell by just walking into a town that the Cowboy Cultists are around; Ostling thugs pretend it doesn't exist, Savos know there's no work for them there and Stagsfire men just check now and then, waiting for the cowboys to be out of town.

Aims
The Cowboy Cultists want different things, depending on their age. The youngest, between 10 and 12, are still just kids. They do as they're told by Aatos or the other older children.

The teenagers want, like all teenagers, to be adults and to rebel. Nothing makes rebellion quite as much fun as having the power to kill at whim. They're kept in line by older kids, setting themselves up as the rebellion to the elderly Barend's strict rule.

If they survive to 18, they've learnt most of the things that the world has to dispense, and are faced with the option of either joining someone with a more settled life, or joining Aatos in ruling over the other kids. The very oldest; Aatos and handful of others, keep the indoctrination going, finding new kids to join the cult and occasionally visiting local towns, where they're treated like old-time sheriffs.