Have any of you guys run/played a game set in a Western setting? Any interesting stories come from it?Honestly I made this mainly because I'm curious about basing my first tabletop game in such a setting.
Actually yeah man, our group has just started running one using the Savage Worlds rules.
Set just after the civil war and just before the end of the golden days of the cowboy, our game so far has been pretty damn great.
As far as interesting stories go, we left off the last game on the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers.
Our characters are basically outlaws, two are straight up murderers who'll kill anyone who gets in their way, we've a preacher, and a snake oil salesman too.
We're in a town that is currently suffering from an curse supposedly afflicted on the townsfolk by the native Americans. Every night the town hears a coyotes howl, and in the morning someone is dead.
My character (The preacher) has been trying to get the two murderers to change their ways since the beginning of the game, and it's started working, they've stopped killing randomly. By force we've hassled the sherrif into letting our group investigate, but he's not happy, and insults one of the murderers characters, who is very vengeful. Fast forward a bit, we're hot on the trail of whatever is killing folk, when the vengeful one decides to up and turn around and kill the sherrif.
Shit goes south partner,
She's seen killing him, runs down the street taking shots. The other murderer is in a full on shooting mach with the town, the snake oil salesman runs for it in his cart and the preacher desperately tries to stop the fighting and heal the severely wounded teammate. We had to end the session there as it was getting really late.
But in all man, we've had murder mysteries like in hateful 8, shootouts on trains, and a ton of other amazing stuff.
Define "Wild West".
Because If you mean Wyatt Earp dealing with giant monsters and magical chinese immigrants then yeah, I made a Wild West game once.
Sadly, I am unable to do an actual historical game and every time I consider one, I remember that I can't make a good, realistic plot for shit and that I have history nerd in my group who will ALWAYS without fail call out every goddamn historical error
>>46263277
"the man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed"
>>46263883
So have the history nerd GM the Wild West game. If nothing else, it'd be funny when he calls himself out on errors he makes.
>>46263277
If your players are similarly inexperienced in RPGing have a session 0 where you detail the setting and kind of game you want to play first. No point you going "we're playing in the wild west" if nobody else is on board. Your game will fizzle out or never get started. Do chargen as well if you have decided on a system, though doing that without knowing the genre\theme of your game can be hard.
If your players have RPG'd before, do this anyway.
On topic: I did some vaguely Western stuff with bounty hunting and North American folklore (wendigoes). It was fun. Make sure you have your gunfights-at-noon resolved in a single dice roll or the tension is gone. A goofy deputy is a great foil for the serious sheriff. Never ever trsut an in'jun.
>>46263609
Sounds cool, got any more stories?
>>46263909
Best Western.
>>46263277
One of the first campaigns I ever DM'd was one of these. PCs came across a ghost town. Only person there said he was the "mayor", and that it would be safer for the boys to leave before nightfall. However, as night was soon coming, they decided to stay in a local (abandoned) saloon/inn instead.
A few relatively insignificant things happen (eg they find a survivor hiding and accidentally I'll her trying to shut her up) and then the zombies start coming. My PCs had to survive the night as zombies, dripping with black liquid instead of blood, swarmed them. They had to build barriers a la COD zombies and keep them maintained, plus they had to keep an eye on their ammo, which was a source of anxiety that made the scenario actually frightening/stressful for them.
Come morning, the zombies subside. In the end, it turns out that the mayor was really an oil baron necromancer who discovered a magical element to oil (cuz it's dead stuff) and used it to create an army of zombies from his town.
The players ended up going to a Native American tribe, where they did vision quests and learned that it was their duty to defeat the oil baron.
The oil baron ended up coming for a sacred native burial ground because it had some extra special magic oil in it. The players fought the baron's army along side the Natives and eventually "won", with the oil baron dissolving into oil and seeping into the ground. Little did they know at the time that he had actually completed his ritual...
>>46263277
Rifts New West is Best West.
>>46263277
Yes, actually. Bizarrely enough, All Flesh Must Be Eaten has an utterly hilarious Wild West setting where the players are all singing cowboys. It is the most insane thing I have ever read.
It's in a Fistful O' Zombies. The PDF is easy to find, and it's hilarious.
For a more serious Western, I've done something based off /tg/'s own Wild Cards: Sons of the Gun setting.
I wanna play in a game that is a combination of Frank Beddor's Looking Glass Wars series and the movie Wild Wild West.
Just saying.
seriously, nobody played deadlands? am i the only one sitting on a damn near complete collection?
>>46268965
All I have are GURPS books.
Friendly reminder to never, EVER trust:
>Englishman
>Chinaman
>Mexican
>Indian
>>46266294
Looking up the Wild Cards setting, it sounds pretty cool!
I think I might use some of it's ideas actually.
>>46268965
Deadlands is great. Played a preacher with the 'Doubting Thomas' flaw; he didn't believe in God or the supernatural. Which made it pretty hilarious when he later, somehow, called on God to strike down the giant spiders we were fighting, and God destroyed them with divine lightning.
Great game. Lots of fun, and you can play it in a lot of different ways.
>>46263277
>>46266294
I ended up making a homebrew loosely based of the Wild Cards setting, turned out quite well. Players were fleeing a slave uprising (slaves enhanced by powerful magic making giving them speed and stamina). Each time they slowed down to loot something they had to worry about the omnipresent threat of the hoard catching up.
Game only lasted a few sessions because while my players enjoyed the system, there were some major errors in it that needed overhauling.
>>46272885
Or Jews. Or colored folk. Or natives, now that you mention it... Catholics. Can't stand them neither. Nor women, Fabians, Socialists, homosexuals, Asians, or British.
>>46263971
One or two more.
Our first session we were all prisoners in a cart heading to fort smith i think. Before we got there we were stopped and a law-man told us all we'd be set free if he help protect him while he sends some incriminating evidence that will help him catch a notorious outlaw.
Just so no-one will suspect the party as who we really are, he requires us all wear ponchos, fake mustaches and sombreros. We were to pretend to be the four bandito brothers (Minor criminals), chained up in his custody.
Skip forward a while, old law man inside an office sending the evidence, when outside a mexican guy sidles up to us and begins telling us that he and his friends will "spring" us and kill the law man holding us custody.
We really can't allow that to happen, so in very broken Spanish we try to convince the Mexican guy to wait. He picks up on the fake accent and becomes suspicious as his other Mexican friends walk on over. Eventually the jigs up, and they pull guns on us, luckily we had guns too, and pulled ours.
The scene is quiet for a moment before one of the players says "well this is ironic". I fucking shit you not, we were in a Mexican stand off, with one side being fake Mexicans that the other side was up until a moment ago trying to free.
fucking DM'S face when
How magical you wanna get? I have a whole folder of western art.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is the best western ever filmed and I will fight you over that,
I'm in the process of putting the final touches on a western themed Pathfinder adventure, as part of a long adventure chain designed to change genres every couple of levels, going on the slow experince path. This is plotted for generally levels 1-3.
After escaping being experimented on by a mad scientist, the PCs drift into an iron mine boom town/cattle crossroad penny less but armed, and will need to make ends meet. Fortunately the town is filled with problems, including three bandit groups stealing iron shipments, though the town only knows about the goblin tribe, and while they steal cattle they haven't touched the iron carts, since their leader is a leprechaun, failed attempts to establish crops that could succeed if a spring holding cave was cleared of morlocks, and aliens stealing cattle.
All these sub quests are happening in the background as Crawling Claws are being raised from the boneyard to murder people in their sleep at random, animated by a necromancer sent by a big company that wants to run everyone out of the town to buy it cheap.
It's also got a bit of bloody Gothic Horror element to, with the morlocks stalking through the caves, the Bugbear bandit chief sending a ratling to force a caravan accountant to give information on the iron shipments or have his daughter killed in her sleep, which has slowly eroded his sanity, and the corrupt big game hunter who is foreman of the mines willing to lure the party into the deep woods and hunt them like animals if they discover his corruption. Hopefully I will be running it soon!
Crazy no one's mentioned Dogs in the Vineyard.
>>46263883
>>46280978
As long as it's set in the frontier, is full of settlers and has the usual trappings in a Western story it's Wild West enough for me.
Weird or not.
>>46282064
I loved running Deadlands myself.
>>46282101
Haven't had the chance to play a tabletop western game yet, let alone try playing Deadlands.
But I liked the setting Hard West had. I'm guessing Deadlands has a weird west setting as well?
>>46281760
Dogs in the Vineyard runs a great Western, I think, though I love its default setting of ersatz-Mormon lawkeepers too. But we've used it to run Stephen King's The Dark Tower and it was pretty fantastic for that.
DitV works well for any situation in which the players have some sort of authority that the people they deal with are, on average, likely to listen to. Eventually.
>>46282245
VERY weird west. Everything from monsters and magic to steampunk and zombies to cowboys and Indians.
I love me some westerns. Throw in some sci fi and you have gold.
>>46282245
Weird West do the degree of having magic and a limited amount of steampunk and tesla stuff.
Deadlands is pretty much to the Wild West as Shadowrun is to the Cyberpunk genre.
