Since I’m giving Cyberpunk a pause for now, I figure I might as well start writing up my thoughts on another series that I’m working my way through. Yes, I do in fact read even more series than I cover here. My lack of attention span is without end!
Anyway, Deadlands: the Weird West is a splatter-horror wild west game from the end of the 90s. It is actually only the first in a line of three games taking place in the same universe albeit in different time periods, the others being the post-apocalyptic Deadlands: Hell on Earth and the sci-fi Deadlands: Lost Colony. It’s famous for just how strange and colourful it was, and also unfortunately for how tightly it embraced the idea of unchangeable metaplot. It also has the distinction of being the mechanical origin of Savage Worlds, which is a mammoth in its own right.
The tagline promises “spaghetti western – with meat!”, so lets grab the ketchup and dig in…
The book starts with an in-character description of the setting, told by the first of infamously many uber-NPCs who you’re not allowed to shoot Because Plot, Coot “the Prospector” Jenkins. In particular, he’s sitting by an open grave, telling the revenant he just dug up what’s happened since he died. Gotta give credit for getting the ambience down early.
Now, since this is, as aforementioned, the kind of game that has DEEP SECRETS THAT THE PLAYERS AREN’T ALLOWED TO KNOW!!!!, the book is actually split into three sections: one that the players may read (“Posse Territory”), one that the players may read with the GM’s permission (“No Man’s Land”) and one that they are going to stay well clear of, doggonit! (“Marshal’s Handbook”) But seriously, no one was going to buy a book and then read half of it, and anyway, what if you were a player in some games and the GM in others? It’s stupid, basically. So I’ll try to give as complete an account as I can for any piece of the setting that comes up, even though a lot of the time the facts are scattered across the book.
The setting, then: it’s our own world to most appearances, but it used to be full of evil spirits called manitous that fed on fear and used it to create monsters to scare people even more. They all served some mysterious entities called the Reckoners who hung out in the Hunting Grounds (effectively hell) and were up to no good. But then in what was the Middle Ages in Europe, a group of wise and powerful Indian shamans called the Old Ones entered the Hunting Grounds, fought the manitous to a stand-still, and bound them to a pact whereby they could no longer interfere with the material world as long as the spirits of the Old Ones remained in the Hunting Grounds. So magic died off, mostly, and by 1863 everything was ticking along rather like in real history.
However, in ’63 a mad shaman named Raven, enraged by the destruction of his tribe at the hands of white men, entered the Hunting Grounds and destroyed the spirits of the Old Ones. The Reckoners were freed from their pact and sent their manitous out to wreak havoc again. Some of them crept into the heads of the recently dead and took partial control, turning them into “Harrowed.” Others began empowering a sort of occult card-sharp known as “hucksters,” giving them serious magic for the first time, or whispered in the ears of engineers and scientists to inspire them to create technology far beyond what should have been possible at the time. And some just went right back to cooking up monsters to go bump in the night.
The combination of mad science and the walking dead really confused the Civil War, so it’s still going on fifteen years later. Both the North and the South knows that something weird is going on, and have Pinkerton Detectives and Texas Rangers (respectively) running around unrooting supernatural mysteries and then hushing them up, on the basis that the more people know about what’s going on, the more terrified they’ll be and the more food they’ll create for the Reckoners.
That mad science is helped out by the discovery of “ghost rock,” a sort of superfuel that burns hotter and longer than coal and is needed for a lot of the wackier contraptions being built. A lot of it was discovered along the coast of California after much of it fell into the sea, leaving a “Great Maze” of free-standing mesas divided by water, the walls of which are full of gold, silver and ghost rock. There’s a major gold rush going on as a result.
What with both the North and the South being too exhausted from fighting each other to do some decent Manifest Destiny genicidin’, at least two groups of Indians have taken the opportunity to reclaim some land, creating the Sioux Nation in the North and the Coyote Confederation in the South. It helps that while the manitous are loose and that’s bad for everyone, the more chill nature spirits that Indian shamans traffick in have grown more plentiful too, so said shamans suddenly have some serious mojo to sling around.
Now, for the basic rules… Hooo boy. Settle in, this will take a while.
Firstly, Deadlands is determined to be cute with its naming, so nothing is named what you’re used to even when it’s something that’s familiar in concept. Deadlands doesn’t have skills, it’s got Aptitudes; Aptitudes don’t have specialties, they have Concentrations; you don’t dodge, you vamoose; you don’t get shot in the head for extra damage, it’s always in the noggin; hell, you don’t even roll dice, you roll bones! It would probably have struck me as charming back in the day, but now I’m old and tired and it makes my brain hurt.
But anyway, each of your base stats (Traits, as they are slightly-more-traditionally called here) has both a die type and a number of dice (the Concentration). I guess the die type is your raw talent and your Concentration is how reliably you use it, or something? Anyway, when you make a Trait roll, you roll a number of the Trait’s die equal to the Concentration – thus, you might have a Strength of 4d8 (Concentration 4, die type d8). Then you pick the highest die rolled and compare it to the difficulty. If it’s equal to or higher than it, that’s a success. Each multiple of 5 over the difficulty your result was also gives you a “raise” that tend to improve the outcome in some way. Dice explode, so you can hit a difficulty that’s higher than your die type, it’s just difficult. If you didn’t succeed on a single die and most of your dice rolled were 1s, you botch… sorry, go bust.
Each Aptitude is linked to a Trait and also has an Aptitude level. Aptitude rolls work the same as Trait rolls, only you use the Aptitude level in place of the Coordination. You can make unskilled rolls for Aptitudes that you don’t have using your Coordination in the Trait, but then you halve the result.
So far, so relatively simple. Then there are the Poker chips. See, you have a bunch of red, white and blue ones on the table, and the GM can hand them out to the players as a reward for roleplaying or whenever their Hindrances bite them in the ass. Spending a white chip lets you reroll a die, spending a blue chip lets you roll an extra die and add the result to your highests previous result, and spending a red chip is like spending a blue chip but it lets the GM draw a chip and use it to do the same thing for his NPCs.
And then there are the cards. We’ll get to those in a second, but for now, let’s just note that Deadlands uses a deck of playing cards, with the red and black Jokers left in, for some randomisation. Which is, a) very flavourful and wild west-y, and b) unnecessarily complicated.
Character creation starts with choosing a concept from a long list that encompasses just about any cowboy trope you can think of – gunslinger, gambler, saloon girl, journalist, snake oil salesman, greenhorn from back east, Indian brave, brimstone preacher, you name it. Add to that mad scientists and hucksters and you’re spoiled for choices. Your concept doesn’t do anything in particular but it gives you an idea where to start.
Then it’s time to break out the cards, because we’re drawing our Traits. You have ten of those, by the way, and because this is Deadlands they all have unhelpful special-snowflake names. Five of them are mental: Cognition (perception), Mien (charisma), Smarts (quick thinking), Knowledge (deep thinking) and Spirit. Five of them are physical, sorry, corporeal: Nimbleness (agility), Deftness (manual dexterity), Quickness (initiative), Strength (self-explanatory) and Vigor (stamina).
To generate them, you draw twelve cards from the deck, and each card represents a possible die-Concentration combo. Clubs is Coordination 1, Diamonds is 2, Hearts is 3 and Spades is 4. A two is worth a d4, a three to an eight is worth a d6, a nine to a Jack is a d8, a King or a Queen is a d10 and an Ace is a d12. So for example, the Ten of Hearts would be 3d8. If you draw a Joker, that’s a d12 and you draw a second card to get the Coordination, and also the GM rolls on a special table in the back of the book to determine some kind of special, spooky backstory detail that your character may or may not be aware of. It can be anything from having a sixth sense to having someone gunning for you to being one of the Harrowed.
Next, discard two of your twelve cards. You can’t discard twos or Jokers. Then distribute the rest among your Traits. Again – big on flavour, not so big on convenience.
You have a number of Aptitude points equal to the sum of your Smarts, Cognition and Knowledge dice, so you’re looking at about 20. You can use them to buy Aptitude levels or to take Edges, and you can get more of them by taking Hindrances.
Aptitudes are your basic roleplaying selection – sneak, shoot, persuade, lie, intimidate, wilderness survival, you know the drill. However, there are some that are specific to gunfights, like Fannin’ (effectively lets you turn your revolver into a machine gun until you run out of bullets), Quick-Draw and Speed Load. Also of note are Ridicule, which lets you break people’s spirits by cracking wise about them. Think that one turned into Taunt in Savage Worlds.
Hindrances are special weaknesses that give you more points to spend on Aptitudes, depending on their severity, and also rewards you with chips when they come up in play. Ones that stand out are Ailin’ (lets you have some sort of sickness; the highest one lets you play a Doc Holliday type who is gonna die, it’s just a matter of when), Tinhorn which makes you an unpopular nerd, and Ferner that makes you some kind of even-more-unpopular minority. Most of them are just what you’d expect from a disavantage system, but a lot of them have cutesy names that make them a little hard to keep track of. I guess I can figure out from the name what Kid or Heroic mean, but I keep having to look up that Hankerin’ is an addiction, Yeller means you’re cowardly, and One-Armed Bandit means that, well, you’ve got one arm.
Edges are the opposite, giving you special powers. The naming is even more annoying here. We have Dinero, Purdy, “The Stare”… Look, I’m not saying I can’t figure them out with some thinking, but it’d be a lot easier to parse an NPC statblock at a glance if they were called things like Wealth, Attractive and Frightening Appearance, all right? One Edge of particular note is Arcane Background, which lets you start as a huckster, mad scientist, shaman or religious miracle-worker (yes, those exist too, and every religion is apparently true all at once, in addition to the whole nature spirits / Hunting Grounds / Reckoners mythology).
Finally, you’re instructed to write down your character’s worst nightmare. We’re not told why here, but it’s actually because if he dies, he might come back as a Harrowed, and then his manitou will put him through that worst nightmare to try to usurp control of his body.
Combat is… amazingly involved. First, at the start of every round you make a Quickness roll, and you draw a card for each success and raise, plus one card. If you go bust you get no cards at all. Each card is one action you can take in the round. The GM counts down from Aces to Twos, and when one of your cards comes up you get to take an action. If more than one character has a card of the same number, ties are broken by colour, with Spades going first and Clubs going last. You can also choose to stuff a card “up your sleeve” when you would normally act on it, in which case you can play it at any time from then on and take an immediate action. You can only have one card up your sleeve at the time. If you draw a red Joker, you can use it to go at any time in that round, though you can’t put it up your sleeve. If you draw a black Joker, it’s not worth an action and you immediately lose your highest other card.
You can move a number of meters equal to your Nimbleness die over the course of an entire round without spending an action on it, though you have to break it up as evenly as possible across your number of actions. So if you have Nimbleness d8 and you’ve drawn three cards that round, you can move 3 meters on one action, 3 on a second action, and 2 on a third. You can also run twice that far by accepting a -4 penalty to your actions, or “pick up the pace” to go that far plus 1d4 at the cost of 1 Wind.
Oh yeah, about that – you have a stat called Wind that is basically your endurance, and your maximum Wind is your Vigor die plus your Spirit die, so something along the lines of 12. It’s not quite hit points because that’d be too simple. We’ll get to it.
You can perform “tests of will” against enemies by scaring, bluff, or mocking them. That lets you roll Bluff, Overawe or Ridicule against their Scrutinize, Guts or Ridicule respectively. Count your successes and raises and subtract his from yours; if you win by one he gets -4 on his next action, if you win by two he also loses his highest current card, and if you win by three or more you also get to draw a chip. Okay, I admit it, I’m actually hearing that “bararararam – baam baam baam” revolver duel music in my head now…
Attacking has a lot of special rules – shotguns, gatling guns, spin-reloading rifles with one hand, fanning, drawin’ a bead (also known as aiming, guys!) and so on and so forth – but what it mostly comes down to is that you roll Shootin’: specific weapon against a regular target number and if you succeed you hit and do damage. Melee is the same, only there the opponent can add his Aptitude in fighting’: whatever melee weapon he’s wielding to the target number. The opponent can always discard his highest currently held card to “vamoose” (I swear…), in which case he gets to roll dodge (the Aptitude is called dodge even though you use it to “vamoose,” just to make it more obnoxious!) and his result becomes the target number to hitting him if that would be higher than the regular one.
Hit locations are determined randomly unless something has been specifically targeted, with some modifiers to make certain results more probable in certain situations (melee attacks are less likely to hit the legs and more likely to hit the head, eh, noggin, for instance). A hit to the noggin or the gizzards (vitals; located somewhere in the middle of the range) does extra damage.
Certain parts of you may be in cover, like if you’re ducking behind a corner. If an attack hits an area that’s in cover, then there’s a 50% chance that it’ll be deflected entirely, 50% chance that it will have its damage die reduced by a number of steps determined by the cover’s type and material, possibly negating it entirely. So find something to put between you and any bullets flying your way, basically.
If you do get hit, you roll damage for the weapon and compare it to your Size, which is 6 for a regular adults. Every multiple of your Size in damage causes a level of wound in the part you were injured in. You take a penalty to all actions determined by the highest wound level you are currently suffering from. Five levels in any body part means that it’s irrepairably destroyed – you lose a limb or die, depending on where it is.
When you take a wound, you have to roll Vigor to avoid being stunned and unable to take any actions until you can succeed at another Vigor roll. In addition, each wound level you take costs you 1d6 Wind, and if you reach 0 Wind you pass out. When you take a Serious (three levels) wound anywhere, you also start losing 1 point of Wind per round until someone can administer some first aid.
Wind comes back automatically within a few minutes, but recovering from wounds (absent magical healing, which is not what you’d call readily available in this setting) takes five days and a Vigor roll against a target number determined by how serious the wound was. If you get shot, you’ll be out of comission for a while, basically.
All in all, I am impressed by this system in theory, but I whimper at the thought of actually running it. The card-based initiative, in particular, looks like it could lend itself to some tactics that just aren’t possible in a one-action-per-turn system – for instance, you could use one action to put your opponent in a disadvantage, then pull a card from your sleeve and take another to press your advantage before he could recover. And dear lord, they have certainly gone all out to include rules for every Western trope there is! You could have some fun with this one, definitely… once you’d spent the better part of six months really internalising the whole thing so you didn’t have to keep looking things up, that is. I’m… unsurprised that Savage Worlds took the basic ideas and simplified them within an inch of their lives.
Hucksters! They cast spells by playing Poker in their head against manitous. No, really, that’s literally what they do. This is represented by them having to make first a roll for the particular spell they want to cast (each one is a separate Aptitude) and then, if they succeed, drawing five cards, plus one per raise on the roll. Then they build the best Poker hand they can from them, and it determines how well the spell worked (which can still be “not at all” if they didn’t get a good enough hand). Jokers can stand in for any other card, but also when you draw one something bad happens, and the bad thing that happens can also include the spell failing.
So basically, what it looks like to me is that huckster spells usually fails, and even when they succeed they either have very weak effects (like being able to teleport five yards to a position you can see and which is shrouded in shadow… yeah, I can think of some uses for that, but none that are worth risking my immortal soul for, you know?) or come at the cost of going insane. Yeah… this is kind of weak, frankly. I mean, I’m sure the justification is, “well, the bad odds is what makes it a gamble, see?”, but with the odds that bad, you’d be a fool to play. Too bad, because it’s a really cool magic system in theory, but meh.
Mad scientists aren’t much better off. They can invent just about anything you can think of, in theory, but in practice it takes a very long time and they have the same card-based system that hucksters do, and you need a pretty good hand to build anything that isn’t just “a slightly better gun.” And again, if you draw a Joker – and you almost have to draw a Joker to build a decent hand – you got insane in the membrane. Which is, admittedly, what makes you a mad scientist, but still, you’re going to need to play for a really long time if you want to come up with any sort of worthwhile invention.
Anyway, some examples of gizmos that exist in the Weird West already are flamethrowers, steam wagons, rocket packs and bullet-proof wests. I think I’d rather just save up and buy some of this stuff than try to be someone who builds it, though.
The blessed – religious miracleworkers – are more solid. They have a single skill called Faith that lets them learn and use miracles. Miracles are fairly decent, doing things like healing, buffing and granting protection. The only catch is that the blessed must always adhere to their religion or their powers might go away, but still, these guys seem to have a magic system that’s actually worth the effort.
Shamans are a bit quirkier. Their craft breaks down into rituals and favours. By performing rituals they build up spiritual goodwill that they can then use to fuel one of their favours. The favour usually has to be invoked immediately, except there is a special favour that lets you bind it in a fetish and invoke it at your leisure.
The rituals range from the extremely convenient (promise to honour Nature – which it is noted that you’re probably already doing, so it’s essentially a freebie) to the once-in-a-lifetime desperate measures (cut off a limb). You can only use a ritual once to try to build up mojo for a particular casting, but you can use several rituals on the same casting, so you can e.g. dance, fast and scar yourself in sequence and then invoke a favour drawing on it.
The favours are handy but not overwhelming – they let you do things like heal wounds, sense-ride a nearby bird of prey, buff a projectile attack, or make lightning strike during a rainstorm. Some of them you almost need the save-for-later favour to make full use of, others might be more viable to spend some time preparing.
All in all, I think you’d need to be a little tactical with shamanism, but it’s certainly doable. You do take a penalty if you ever use technological or manufactured items, though, so there’s a cost.
The Harrowed! When someone of sufficient will and strength dies, you draw a few cards, and if one is a Joker, he comes back as a Harrowed. That means that he’s an icky walking corpse and he’s sharing his head with a manitou that keeps trying to take over. The Harrowed and the manitou compete over a pool of Dominion points, and whichever has the majority is in control of the body. Harrowed aren’t aware of what’s going on when the manitou is in charge, but the manitou sees and hears everything the Harrowed does. The manitou is basically evil incarnate and enjoys killing and torturing things, and is only kept in check by not wanting to be burned at the stake.
Harrowed do get access to cool powers like the ability to grow slashing claws, walking through walls, or sucking someone’s Wind out of them. They are also incredibly hard to kill – you need to inflict five wound levels on the (sigh) noggin, or else they’ll eventually regenerate. In addition, when they are present at the death of a supernatural monster they can “count coup” and absorb some of the monster’s power to gain some specially tailored abilities.
I must admit that the White Wolf fanboy in me is attracted by the idea of playing a theoretically noble monster with cool dark powers that occasionally loses control and turns evil…
Fear! Every area in the setting has a Fear Level between 0 and 6. The higher than Fear Level, the more powerful monsters are, and the harder it is to resist the shock of seeing something horrific. Monsters lurk around in the shadows and try to spread some subtle fear and dread so that the Fear Level rises. Killing the monster and spreading a compelling a story about it lowers the Fear Level and also permanently puts a special chip in the pot that can be spent for extra effects when you happen to draw it. Screwing up the story makes the Fear Level worse, though, which is why Pinkertons and Texas Rangers are against that sort of thing.
We get a musty collection of monsters. There are giant bats and sea dragons! There are totally-not-Tremours-graboids and totally-not-Star-Wars-sarlacs! There are demon bulls who hunt heroes; when someone gets too used to fighting evil, he starts hearing rumbling in the distance over successive nights, and eventually the demon bulls turn up at the head of a herd of ghost cattle and tries to trample the hero and his friends. If they succeed, the hero becomes a new demon bull forced to serve the Reckoners for eternity. There are ticks the size of baseballs that cram themselves down your throat and then burst out of your chest when they get big enough (the only cure is to drink a ton of castor oil before it gets to that point, which causes the tick to come crawling out again, because no one likes castor oil). There is something called a Hanging Judge who goes around sentencing random people to death and then attacking them with revolvers with axe blades on them. It’s glorious.
That’s about it. There are some directions for handing out XP, except of course it’s not XP, it’s bounty points. There’s a system for simplified handling of NPCs, which let’s be honest, is probably something that will be desperately needed. And that’s about it.
So what do I think? Eh. I admire it in theory. Clearly, someone put a lot of love, effort and enthusiasm into making it the sort of off-the-wall cowboys-fighting-gross-monsters game they wanted, with a ton of imagination and in-depth inspiration from the genre. And the rules, for the most part, seem very solid. At the same time, it’s all just way too complicated, and the way it keeps trying to be flavourful just makes it harder to navigate than it already is. Half of the magic system, as near as I can tell, is also nearly useless – an especial shame, since it’s got a ton of personality and seem like it would be fun to play if you could just occasionally succeed at something in it.
Still, it’s interesting enough to keep going with. Stay tuned for the first couple of published adventures in Marshal Law.