The greatest question I always have as a gamemaster is “What’s next?” There are so many systems I want to run, so many settings I want to play in, and so much of my own stuff I want to try. Narrowing the options down, while keeping in mind the preferences for my group of players, is always a hard task.
But it’s one that must be done. So when our Stars Without Number space adventure came to its end, polls were conducted and questions were asked, and we narrowed it down to alt-history fantasy western, or as it’s more usually known, the “Weird West.” And while I would be happy to run most any game, I’d be lying if I said this sort of thing wasn’t right up my alley.
There are more options to this rather limited genre than you might think. Several worthy weird west games were released over the past few years alone. But for most of us in the TTRPG space, I think one name springs immediately to mind.
Deadlands
First published in 1996, Deadlands was emblematic of its time. Its rules are overly complicated, it deals heavily in meta-plots, it has some uncomfortable stereotypes. It’s also completely awesome. What other game out there is teaming card-playing mages with steampunk scientists, fire and brimstone preachers with agents in black dusters, all to fight some of the greatest Evils imagined?
Deadlands was one of the first RPG’s I really got into when I started branching out from D&D. It’s been something I’ve wanted to run for a long time. But it was going to need some tweaks. The original setting has some unfortunate parts that have not aged well. Some Lost Cause narratives, some casually racist stereotypes, these things just don’t fly with me or my players. The newest edition eliminates some of these, but I admit I prefer the overall tone of the original. Since each new edition advances the timeline by several years, the vibes of the first and second edition, when the magic and tech is still fairly new, just feel better to me. So my goal has been to combine the best of both, along with my own concepts.
One of the convenient things I don’t want to mess with is, because there’s 30 year’s worth of material, nearly everywhere has something written about it. This provides a nice base that I can then change around at my leisure. But if a player asks “What’s going on in Wichita,” I at least have a general idea.
The next question was, how was I going to run it?
X Without Number
The Without Number games, by Kevin Crawford, have become my go to TTRPG. They hit the perfect middle ground of old-school sensibilities and modern design. They’re easy to GM for but provide players enough complexity to stay engaged (without being overwhelming). Ever since I read and then ran Worlds Without Number, I’ve been a big fan.
There are two other things going for XWN that makes it the system to pick. First, I had already done a “Frontiers Without Number” western hack, or at least most of one. Hacking/adapting games is something I often do for fun. It’s enjoyable to find the things that fit, the things that need to be changed, and the things that need to be discarded entirely.
Secondly, Ashes Without Number was released, and its default setting is the Albuquerque Death Zone, a Fallout New Vegas-inspired post-apocalyptic wasteland. And while it doesn’t entirely fit what I’m going for, the proof of concept that this could work is there.
So that’s where I’m at. I started this, I guess you can call it a “developer’s blog,” in order to share bits and pieces of this project as I work on it. Quite a bit is done already, so asking people to read through 60 plus pages or a dozen Google documents for feedback is a bit much. I’ll start sharing things here instead. The game starts sometime next year (depending on how the holidays go), so I got about a month to get things to a playable state.