Having read through the impressively detailed if somewhat intimidating core rulebook of Deadlands: the Weird West, today we delve into the first published adventures. Strap on your six shooters and fix your grim gunslinger scowl on your face, because it’s off to the frontier to gun down some varmints!
I am sorry to say that nothing as cool as the cover art is going to happen… Anyway, the book is divided into two stand-alone adventures, This Harrowed Ground and Ghostriders in the Sky.
In This Harrowed Ground the party… sorry, posse (yes, still a bit exasperated by Deadlands’ insistence of having cutesy Wild West names for everything) are working as guards for a gold-and-silver collection for a major bank, and find themselves in the town of Pawnee Rock that’s gearing up for a celebration. Some years ago, the townsfolk, led by five heroic citizens and with the aid of a Union cavalry troop led by one Captain Linkous, fought off an attack by a Confederate defector named Slate, and the anniversary is coming up. The town has since made good from silver found in the hills, and the heroes of the past battle have also had the fortune of finding gold, though it’s a little strange that their gold vein is seemingly the only one to be found.
Then those five worthies start dying under mysterious circumstances, killed by what seems to be some kind of spectral figure. The players are expected to start investigating on their own accord – there isn’t anything really pulling them in, which I think might be a problem. Still, more and more of the five die, and Slate also arrives in town, apparently to settle the score.
However, all is not what it seems! Captain Linkous and his men were carrying a fortune in gold meant to fund rebels against the Confederacy, and the five “heroes” actually tipped Slate off to their presence so he and his men would attack and kill them, leaving them to steal all the gold. They’ve been living off the proceeds ever since, pretending that it’s mined from the hills (if the players examine the “nuggets” from the mine, they can discover that they are all suspiciously uniform in shape). Captain Linkous restless ghost has gotten so pissed off by the idea of his betrayers being celebrated that he’s risen from the grave and started killing them. Slate has nothing to do with anything and is really just a red herring and a possible source of information, but Linkous will take the opportunity to kill him too since he happens to be around (he gets a very badass death scene where he swears that if that wuss Linkous can come back from the dead, then the players have certainly not seen the last of him, either!).
If Linkous reaches the end of his list, he’ll raise the ghosts of his dead soldiers and storm the town to kill every living thing there. He can only be killed with his own weapons, which he will retrieve from the five traitors one by one.
In Ghostriders in the Sky, the posse arrives in a Mormon community called Planterstown. Here they might actually have a reason for getting involved, because there’s been a bounty posted for a gang called the Ghostriders who keep robbing banks and then disappearing, their tracks just ending some distance away when people try to follow them.
The Ghostriders actually used to be a traveling freak show under the patronage of a mad scientist named Higgabottom. They tried to settle in Planterstown but were driven out for being creepy and weird, so instead they created a hidden sanctuary for themselves in the mountains called Tomorrie Town, trading with some of the more pragmatic Planterstown folk on the sly. Higgabottom died in the course of an experiment and came back as a Harrowed, now looking to do as much damage as possible, and he’s been developing a horrific superweapon that will let him rain acid over entire towns. He needs funds, so he’s got his still-faithful people to rob banks for him. They “disappear” because they have a high-tech balloon kitted out to lift entire groups of horses, and they use that to make their escape as soon as night falls after a heist.
The Ghostriders will hit the bank in Planterstown in short order, making use of a dwarf named Petunia who used to be one of them but who stayed in Planterstown, which she has now come to regret. The players can run into her getting hassled by the townsfolk before the heist, and they may find one of her shoes on the scene if the Ghostriders’ disappearing tracks later. Likewise, they can run into another member of the crew buying some supplies at the general store, giving them another hint of who might know something of where Tomorrie Town is located.
How they end up resolving the situation is left undecided. The Ghostriders aren’t evil per se – they are bitter from their mistreatment and loyal to Higgabottom, since he’s always played fair with them in a world where few people do, but left to their own devices they’d have no inclination to harm anyone. All the same, Higgabottom is firmly under the control of his manitou and needs to be stopped, or he’ll start committing mass murder once his acid weapon is perfected. There is room for both deft negotiation skills resulting in a happy ending, or a grim outcome where innocents die for the crimes of the guilty.
All in all, the adventures aren’t bad. The NPCs (I forget if they’re called something special in Deadlands and frankly I can’t be bothered to check!) get sketched out quickly and efficiently, in a way that makes them feel human and nuanced without being overly complicated to portray. The towns are lovingly detailed and there’s plenty of corners for the players to look into and people who know varying amount of information about the situation, and might reveal it under certain conditions.
Still… I must admit to being a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping for a little more splatter and a little less Western, if you see what I mean? I thought there’d be more hunting down some of the colourful monsters in the book, but this is all about gritty detective work in a realistic frontier setting, with just a slight supernatural element to give it some taste. Again, I am not that into cowboy stuff. I wanted giant sand worms! And I don’t see how I was wrong to expect it, given that the cover picture is of some dude firing at a giant mutant gargoyle thing with a gatling pistol!
Still, it’s decent for what it is. Next up is a more thorough look at the setting in The Quick and the Dead.