Wild West Campaign: The Town of Rebel

Thinking I'd start things off small, I decided to begin play in the small town of Rebel.  It's found on the eastern portion of the Rosewood Territory campaign map.  Even a small town like this there was quite a bit going on.

Rebel is a small tough mining town on the main road west just south of Beggars Canyon  It was founded by Harlow Cox after the Civil War before he moved further west and sunk roots in the more prosperous Harlow Junction.  Cox, however, still runs the Rebel though Sheriff Slade.  Slade keeps tabs on the town for Cox.  The sheriff and his deputies help protect the tin-pans working in Beggars Canyon from Angus Young. The Mormon from Bronson has sent his band of ruffians lead by Barton Clay and are trying to run the miners out so that they can stake the claim.

The Canyon Creek Saloon is the towns main gathering place run by Boon Johnson, close friend with the Sheriff and Harlow Cox.  He's always got his ear open to the goings on in Rebel and feeds that back to Cox directly.  His 'Scarlet Ladies' help keep the clientele drunk and satisfied.  At the Canyon Creek Saloon you'll usually see a number of tin-pans celebrating their strikes or drowning their sorrows, ranchers, a few buffalo hunters and weary travelers heading west whetting their whistles.  You'll also find the hard drinking Doc Anderson always willing to deal someone's inebriated, gold heavy, pockets into his infamous poker games.

Now during this process I created a 'map' of the connections of the general folks in this town.  As you can see the connections get a little crazy but it should be enough to get started.

I'm using the concept posted on the Boot Hill OD&D boards about using the people as rooms and connections as corridors for the players to 'explore'.  There's a few love-triangles, illicit affairs, a couple of rival gangs and indebted tin-pans to keep things flowing.  And there's a few connections to the larger campaign area and the bigger power-players in the territory.  I'm hoping that the players stories should evolve fairly organically within the environment without too much instigating on my part, but we'll see.  I'll have a few nuggets to toss  in there if necessary.

Planning The Western Sandbox

I've been putting some thought into a Western session(s)/campaign using the Go Fer Yer Guns RPG rules.  The more I think about it the more I agree with the general conclusion that a western RPG is quite a bit different than a FRPG such as Swords & Wizardy (or the million other FRPGs out there).  They're so different, in fact, that there needs to be a whole different process of planning the game.

In a FRPG, it's natural that a group of PCs come together to form a party to go explore a ruin to fill their pockets with gold and trinkets.  The more you have in the party and the more diverse the group the better chance you have to survive.  You can pull any number of pre-made dungeons, take a half and hour to roll up some characters and in you go, you're playing a game.

A western, on the other hand, is quite a bit different.  Most characters would essentially be loners and quite separate.  Their goals and desires would be quite different and rarely would they cross paths except, perhaps, in conflict as their goals crossed.  Keep in mind, I'm looking at this as an open ended sandbox setting, my preferred method of play - but can a sandbox work in a wild west game or, by necessity, are we looking at a more linear style of game play?

My initial feeling is that it would need to be a combination of both.  That can be accomplished with a couple additions to the western game, both of which I found over at he OD&D boards under their Boot Hill section.

The first is character motivation and this comes from Avalon Hill's Gunslinger game (mentioned in the OD&D thread).  I don't own the Gunslinger game so I'm just going by the information in the post.  Basically a character chooses three out of six motivation for their character (Settle Down, Money, Comfort, Respect, Fear, Outlaw).  I would disagree with the post by calling it an alignment system in that both good and evil, lawful and chaotic characters can achieve those goals by different means with the exception of Outlaw.  Perhaps I would add another one called Honor to balance out Outlaw.  These 'motivations' would give general direction and drive for the character and help the GM (Game Marshal) corral and challenge the players in a sandbox environment.  Rewards can be given for characters staying within their desired motivations.  Remember, and this is important, these goals can be achieved by being lawful or unlawful - that is up to the character's actions and the GM's interactions.

Second, a western game is driven more by characters and their interaction and less by exploration and killing things and taking their stuff.  A great idea in the OD&D post was Mapping out the Adventure based on the NPC's much like how you would map out a dungeon.  With the rooms being the NPC's and their connections (relationships) being the corridors players can be 'guided' from one interaction to the next depending upon their goals.  To flesh out the NPC's each one would have attributes such as fears (what he will do everything to avoid), desires (what he will do everything to get), and duties (what he feels he must do).  These attributes would regulate the NPC and give the PC and GM and idea of what to expect from these characters.

Both of these ideas would aid in getting the western game moving but there's still the issue of what would bring your players together.

When running any RPG it's always a challenge when just a single character splits from the party to go interacting with NPC's by themselves.  In a western game it seems that you would have quite a bit more of that.  We have about 9 players in our gaming  group.  I feel that that would be quite a challenge to keep everyone engaged once everyone goes off on their own.  Would face to face tabletop play be the best avenue for a western game?  Or would something like a play-by-post work a bit better where the players can separate and the GM can interact with all of them individually?

Finally, one solution to that would be to discuss with your players what type of game they would want to play and plan the game play around that.  For example, perhaps they all want to be part of a single gang?  Well, now they're all together and a session can be planned accordingly.  Or perhaps they all want to be part of a posse?  Good start, they're all together.  Perhaps they are a group of magnificent gunslingers coming together to save a town from bandits?  But breaking away from these archetypes in group play may be difficult especially since there would tend to be less 'action' and more 'role-playing' involved.

Apparently there was one more point I wanted to make but had forgotten what it was by the time I got down to the bottom of this post.  Oh well, it's Friday.  Just enjoy this....

Threads: Your Mutant Future Prelude

Most of us old school gamers grew up during the final decade of the cold war.  With Ronald Raygun's Hollywood style of politics towards the Soviet Union in it's final throws, us kids had at our disposal not only D&D but thrilling post apocalyptic visions of Mad Max, Thundar the Barbarian and Judge Dredd.

The end of the world didn't seem so bad and fit our fantasy filled brains with mutants and magic and the ruins of humanity's society.

But the reality, no doubt, would have been much more grim than that and I think we all knew that.

Or would it be...?

In the mid-eighties, both here in the states and in Great Britian, the powers that be released two movies aimed to show the horrors of a nuclear war; the American television drama called "The Day After" and the BBC drama called "Threads".

I'll briefly talk about The Day After first then get in to the BBC's more disturbing Threads. (some great additional commentary on The Day After can be found here).

In America, radiation sickness isn't too bad.

In The Day After, you get the star studded cast of Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, John Lithgow, and Steve Guttenburg living their lives before and after a nuclear attack in Lawrence Kansas.  The TV movie was hyped up to be a horrifying look at the affects of a nuclear war with parental discretion advised.

Perhaps it was horrifying.  But having grown up playing war games and fantasy rpgs and reading comics, I knew the affects to be much more dramatic than a few Hollywood stars loosing their hair due to radiation sickness.  I wasn't impressed at the time and felt it was a sugar coated, over expositioned version of the realities of a nuclear war so as not to strike any real fear into the populous, but only to get them to chat about seeing the movie around the water cooler for a day or two but being a catalyst for no real change.

The last shot in The Day After as America doesn't
loose it's humanity.

What do you expect from the country that brought you Duck and Cover?  In fact, the movie has only moved a few steps from the Duck and Cover days.  The whole things come off as a disaster movie and, IMHO, melodramatic and a bit lacking.

To their credit, the producers display a disclaimer after the film that says that things will actually be much worse than those depicted.  So why not show the worst?

That was left to the BBC.

Now Threads on the other-hand...

If you want to see a provocative, disturbing realistic portrait of a nuclear war I urge you to check out this film from the BBC released roughly during the same time as the US version.

There were no big stars (at least that Americans would recognize), or doctors or heroes.  Threads portrays just regular folks going about their seemingly mundane lives as political forces outside their control bring the world to destruction, all of which gave an incredible foundation of normalcy which the every-man can connect with.  The viewer can place themselves into any one of these characters plus with it's almost documentary feel gives the whole thing a great sense of non-hyped realism.  As in the American The Day After, the first hour counts down to d-day.

Starving survivors acting like it's a Zombie Walk

The attack itself is brutal and horrific but that would just be the start and the city of Sheffield, where the story takes place, takes a direct hit.  No punch is held back in the depiction of the immediate aftermath; the firestorm and death and suffering.  It is not a glossed over depiction of the after-affects of a nuclear war.  The suffering is depicted as quite real, both physical and especially psychological. And as the days and weeks go by things only get worse and more barbaric as the threads of society and humanity break down.  In fact, almost the entire second hour of the movie is depicted without dialogue - a stark contrast to the American spoon-fed version of the aftermath.

But what does this all have to do with a prelude to a Mutant Future (Gamma World) game?

Well, keep reading.....


***********SPOILERS***********

I urge you to watch the movie Threads before reading further.

Only one character that we meet in the beginning of Threads survives to carry us through to the many years after the war.

The woman Ruth, who becomes pregnant at the beginning of the story carries her baby to term in the months after the war.  Though the brief narration mentions the dismal future of having a successful birth, Ruth manages to birth her baby on her own in a shed while a barking dog watches.

Here is where the Mutant Future begins...

The contents of the basket of this street vendor contains
literal rats-on-a-stick.

In the film, after the birth, ten years pass and the immediate affects of the war lessen.  The population of Britain is down to per-medieval levels.  Agriculture, though attempting to make a comeback is still a pretty dismal prospect, but some folks are tilling the soil. It is here that Ruth succumbs  to 10 years of radiation poisoning leaving her daughter of 10 to fend on her own.  There is a scene where this girl and other children born after the war are being educated by a television with a children's program on video tape while an old crone watches on.

Eventually leaving this small society, this girl is on her own.  Scrounging and scavenging she eventually hooks up with two other boys possibly also born after the war.  A new generation born into this Mutant Future / Gamma World.  Together they loot the ruins for food but one of them is shot as a looter.  The girl and one boy escape.  The girl, now thirteen, becomes pregnant from the surviving boy and eventually is on her own again.  In labor, she finds shelter in some broken down 'medical center' where some old woman is helping a sick dying man.  It is here that the girl gives birth.  The 'nurse' gives the wrapped baby to the young girl and as this girl removes the swaths to view the face of her baby she begins to scream (the film ends in a freeze frame before the scream is actually heard).

This last moment is where we can be thrust into the beginnings of our post-apocalyptic game.  You initially think that the baby may be still-born but with the look on the mother's face at the very end tends to push the thought that the baby is indeed alive but in some horrible mutant state.  Realistically, I am sure this Mutant baby would either eventually die or live a pretty horrible brutal life, but in games terms, using Threads and a prelude to a post-apocalyptic game, you get the beginnings of a mutant race.

Now I don't mean to make lite of an incredibly serious subject.  I was shocked and moved by this movie as a whole, even thirty years after it was made but this is what our games represent.  Though Gamma World is just a fantasy RPG it's foundation is based on some pretty grim and brutal realities as this movie shows.  Why not explore that, feel that and make it part of your game.  It will definitely set a realistic foundation to a fantastical game setting.

Anyways, just thought I'd share...

A hopeless mutant character or a role playing opportunity?