Month: December 2025

What defines a western? That’s not really a question I’m prepared to definitively answer, but it’s an interesting question. We all have certain things we think of when we hear the word. For the purposes of a TTRPG though, one of the most important aspects is the gun. Usually a revolver, sometimes a rifle or shotgun. It’s so defining as a symbol of the genre that if a character is carrying a revolver, it’ll probably be assumed to be a western no matter what else is going on. It’s as ubiquitous in westerns as the cowboy or open frontier, if not more so. If you tell someone you’re playing a western RPG, they’re going to assume you’re going to get into a gun fight or two.

So the gun list is one of the most important parts of a western RPG. But it can get overwhelming quickly. Other games have pages of guns, with special rules for single action revolvers vs double action, different caliber ammunition, slightly different ranges or damage for slightly different models. Those games have an impressive list, but does it matter?

I argue “not really,” and, like the rest of the weapons, err on the side of simplicity. We want a wide variety of types of guns, not necessarily of the guns themselves. This fits better into the XWN framework and to my own sensibilities. Since this was originally meant to cover more eras than just the late 1800’s, we have to expand the list a little.

There’s a lot of guidelines out there for firearms in the Without Number games. The Atlas of Latter Earth covers “primitive” firearms, while both Ashes and Cities Without Number cover more modern but less futuristic weapons. So I had a pretty strong base to work with. Though of course I had to mess with it some.

One thing I did was give muzzle-loading guns a “Limited Armor Piercing” trait. It bothers me that a musket would have the same bonus against armor that a rifle 100 years later would have, so the muzzle-loaders only get armor piercing in short range. It also applies to the derringer, in an example of making mechanics work with the fiction. A derringer is supposed to be a short range weapon, it makes sense for it to work better at 10 feet than 30 ft.

I also streamlined the reloading times and definitions. There’s Muzzle Loading, which take 2 rounds to reload. Then there’s Long Reloading, which takes a full round to represent loading multiple rounds, and Slow Reloading to represent single breach-loaders and takes a Main Action. There are no firearms that do regular Reloading; that’s reserved for bows.

As I’m typing this, I’m wondering if an exception should be made for loading single shots into a Long Reloading weapon like a revolver. Pondering this now, I’m thinking there probably should be, as I can see it coming up a fair amount. To keep it simple, a single round can be loaded as a Main Action. Easy enough.

Finally, there’s dynamite, which fluctuated between here and the Artillery table. Mechanics wise it just functions as XWN grenades, but I thought it would be fun to let experienced users time the dynamite to explode when they want, and to be able to bundle single sticks together to make a bigger explosion.

Equipment is a fun building block of a RPG. Just a glance can tell you a lot about what’s important in a specific game. I’m a big fan of more abstract weapon lists. A lot of lists will have a lot of different options, but very little practical difference between them. If a long sword and a battle ax have the same stats and the game doesn’t do anything do differentiate between them (like special moves or damage types), then you don’t need to fill up your list with both. A “1-handed slashing weapon” or something similar takes care of those cases.

This is even more important depending on the genre. In Stars Without Number, where it is assumed you are mostly using laser rifles and such, the melee weapon list is generic and sparse. But in Worlds, it’s a lot more detailed because it’s assumed you are mixing it up in melee more often.

So for our frontier hack, what are our assumptions? Guns, mostly. Revolvers and rifles and cannons and the like should play a prominent part. But as I’ve said before, it’s a transition period from the past to the present, so both should be represented. As the original project was intended to cover the 18th and 19th centuries, melee weapons do play their part. So I decided to get a little more specific for melee weapons. Plus it’s fun to stat these things up.

Fortunately, between WWN, CWN, AWN, and the Atlas of Latter Earth, there’s quite an extensive list of XWN equipment out there. It would be relatively easy to just copy what I wanted. Never one to do it the easy way though, I more or less built my list from scratch, though the aforementioned games where very useful in using as reference.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that every weapon needs a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is balance, sometimes it’s just because it’s something I want there. Like it’s not probable that anyone is going to be using a great sword, but I have a mental image of someone running around with a macuahuitl (big stick lined with obsidian), so in it goes. Other times the purpose is even less important; my equipment list has a “club” because having an extra line there makes the formatting better.

With that in mind, I started with a list of weapons I wanted, stuff that is iconic in the genre. The Bowie knife. Calvary saber and rapier, for Zorro-esque adventures. Native American weapons like the tomahawk and gunstock club. Then I started statting them out. You can think of doing so as a simple point buy system. Weapons start at d4 with no traits. Each bump in damage or positive trait costs a point, a negative trait refunds a point. It’s not a perfectly balanced system, but the intention is just to get the weapons in the same ballpark, powerwise, while keeping some uniqueness. XWN has the advantage of also having Shock damage, with gives us another lever to pull for balance and individuality.

This leads to some initial ideas not making the cut. In a game without damage types, there’s really not enough difference between a calvary saber and a rapier for them to have separate listing, especially considering how rare actually using them would be. The same goes for larger weapons. While a character might want to use a giant ax or sledgehammer, it’s not going to be common enough to fill up the table with every possible large weapon, so those get grouped under “Work Tools.”

But if I could give a weapon a unique trait to put on there, I did. The Sword Cane is a Subtle sword that does less damage. The War Club, Tomahawk, and Large Knife are all d6 weapons, but have unique traits or different Shock values. I think weapons are fun, so I tried to add as many as feasible.

Apologies for formatting issues with the table, still trying to figure WordPress out.