Deadlands readthrough: The Quick & the Dead

Previously on our Deadlands readthrough:

• Deadlands: the Weird West
• Marshal Law

Howdy, parrrrrdner! We’re heading back on the trail, and this time we’re going to be riding all over, because this time we’re covering the overall setting book for Deadlands, none-too-informatively titled The Quick & the Dead. It’s honestly all but required reading, because the core book was rather sparse with its setting info – in most books the introduction gives you a teaser of what the setting is like and then it gets filled in later in the book, but in the Deadlands core the teaser was all the description we ever got about the complex alternate history setting of the game. Mostly what we learned was that the Civil War is still ongoing, there’s a major gold rush in California after half of it fell into the sea, and magic and weird science are both running rampant and are powered by evil manitou. Let’s see if we can get a little more meat on our bones this time.

I am pleased to report that unlike last time, the cover art doesn’t lie to us – there really is an instance in the book of giant sand worms chasing steam cars across mountains shaped like tormented sinners. About time I got my money’s worth!

We start out with a bunch of rule tweaks and new Edges and Hindrances, presumably on the principle that they need to go somewhere. They’re okay, nothing much to talk about. I do note that there is a Hindrance called Ferner that makes you not fit in with the local culture, and there’s an Edge called Kemosabe that makes you fit in with the local culture, and I’d kind of like to know what happens if you take neither of them. Like, what’s the baseline of fitting in, here? Oh well.

There’s also an Edge called Veteran of the Weird West that gives you a bunch of extra points at the cost of a randomised effect which can be a punishing Hindrance or something even worse. So it’s basically drawing a Joker when assigning Traits, only by choice. I guess I can see how it might be used if you want to be a jaded old-timer rather than a greenhorn.

There are specific rules for revolver duels. I dunno, I thought the basic system already covered it pretty well, but okay.

We get a bunch of new premade characters, which is always nice. These seem to be a little more down to earth than the one in the core – like, you get a snake-oil salesman instead of a mad scientist, a card sharp instead of a huckster, that kind of thing. So I guess the idea is that they led with their more colourful options, and now they’re fleshing it out with some more general ones. That’s cool. I do note that while these characters are all ones that would fit into a Wild West story, they do not necessarily fit well into a group of wandering adventurers – a sheriff would be bound to a particular town, a spy would be getting specific missions, etc. Ah well. I guess you can always use the given stats and claim that they represent the job you just quit.

Now for the meat that comes with the spaghetti! The player-available section is meant to be a gazetteer written by Lacy O’Malley, last mentioned briefly in the core as one of the few men to have survived an encounter with a Hanging Judge. He writes for the Tombstone Epitath, which is a sort of tabloid that no one really believes in but are actually right about most of the crazy things going on in the Weird West. The paper’s motto is “Believe It or Else!” Heh. Anyway, every section that the players get to read has a reference to a later section that the players don’t get to read, and I’ll cover them together to make it less confusing. Here goes.

Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy launched a big offensive towards Washington in ’71, making heavy use of mad science gizmos developed in a base in Roswell, New Mexico. It had a lot of early success, but the Confederacy pushed too hard, resulting in a lot of mad scientists going crazy or deserting and the campaign petering out. The Union also raided Roswell, stealing a lot of cool crap, so Davis arranged to have the surface of Roswell wiped out by a massive explosion and the area around it covered in ever-burning ghost rock, claiming that it was an accident. The base is still active underground and the site for a lot of Confederate R&D, but now no one knows it’s there and aren’t particularly keen to go exploring through the burning inferno around it.

Following all that, both sides realised that the Civil War would be won or lost on mad science and access to ghost rock, so they started racing to establish train connections to the Great Maze in California. They have both promised huge bennies to whichever rail company can get there first, so of course a whole bunch of them are sabotaging each other like crazy, blowing up each other’s rails, robbing each other’s trains, shooting each other’s workers, and whatever other underhanded methods they can think of. A lot of trains are now sporting heavy armour and cannons as a result, for some bizarre visuals.

There are six railroads who have a realistic chance of winning. Bayou Vermillion is run by a New Orleans voodoo king named Simone LaCroix. He has zombies laying rail for him, and anyone who attacks him is likely to be added to them. Black River is run by a ruthless girlboss named Mina Devlin who has an all-female bands of gunslingers called the Wichita Witches who aim for the groin. She also practices black magic on the side. Iron Dragon belongs to a Chinese warlord named Kang. He has the distinction of having made a deal with the Sioux for passage through their territory, something he got by dealing with some kind of monsters at a place called Devil’s Tower. Slightly more about that later.

Wasatch is owned by Darius Hellstromme, the Weird West’s premier mad scientist, based out of Salt Lake City. He’s less interested in winning than in getting a chance to field test some of his more sinister creations. Dixie Rails and Union Blue is the Confederate and Union company, respectively, with the former owned by former General Robert E Lee and the latter by Joshua Chamberlain. Dixie Rails does well when Lee has time to manage it himself, but he keeps having to delegate it to his idiot nephew, at which point it lags behind. Union Blue is doing worst overall, because Chamberlain is trying to be honourable and upright about the race for the west, and that’s never going to work.

Union President Ulysses Grant and Confederate President Jefferson Davis are both up for re-election. Davis is planning a major offensive to get an excuse to declare martial law and hang on to power a bit longer. Except he’s not actually Davis anymore – he’s been replaced by an evil doppelganger who just wants to cause as much death and destruction as possible. Lee is suspicious of him and is tempted to launch his own run for President, but of course if he does that Dixie Rails is definitely going to crash and burn.

There is some helpful advice about travel. Stage coaches are faster and more comfortable than riding, and taking the train is best of all where there’s a line. Just keep in mind all that stuff we just talked about where the rail companies are in a state of war, so that option might get eventful too. Paper money is iffy since no one is sure which side will win the Civil War and render the legal tender of the other worthless, so gold and silver coins are best. Telegraphs offer quick communication, but don’t trust them too much, since the Reckoning they’ve got gremlins in them that mess with the messages.

The Pinkerton Detective Agency has been tasked by the Union to investigate weird stuff and hush it up (Lacy O’Malley is understandably not happy about it). They are especially interested in Harrowed, and have a special facility in Denver where they can semi-reliably bring the human in a Harrowed to the fore and offer to recruit them. If they aren’t interested, or the attempt fails, it’s kill-it-with-fire time, of course. The Pinkertons are led by Harrowed Abraham Lincoln (yes, really), who has special, hand-picked agents called Spooks who stride around in black dusters and scowl grimly at people.

The Texas Rangers are similar to the Pinkertons, except for operating in the South instead of the North, and lacking the aforementioned special assets and colourful leadership. They still try to recruit Harrowed when they can, though.

In the Great North-West (Washington, Idaho and Oregon) you get Sasquatches, Wendigos and Wolflings. Sasquatches and Wolflings are non-supernatural abhuman races, looking like great big apes and great big humanoid wolves, respectively. Sasquatches really hate Wendigos and the two fight a bitter war in the wilderness every winter, with the Wendigos prass-ganging Wolflings as cannon fodder. You become a Wendigo by eating human flesh – a white Wendigo if the flesh belonged to your kin, a black Wendigo if it belonged to someone else. If you instead withhold food from someone who is starving, you might become a winged Wendigo. Since Sasquatches are against more Wendigos being created, if they spot someone moving through their lands looking hungry, they’ll try to sneak them some food without being seen – though if they catch someone attempting cannibalism, they’ll forego all subtlety and just kill them.

The High Plains (Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and Dakota) contain the Badlands, where you get giant bats swooping down and snatching you up. Worse than that is Worm Canyon, where there’s a cult of black magicians who worship the giant worms that live there. They have to sacrifice one victim to the worms every month, or the worms take one of their own number instead, so the cult has spread the rumour that there’s gold in the canyon. When someone gets sacrificed to the worms, one of the hills assume his tortured likeness within a few hours. See the cover picture, it’s awesome.

The High Plains are also the site of Devil’s Tower, and the Black Hills where people dig for ghost rock. Devil’s Tower, if you recall, was the place where Kang went and did something cool so that the Sioux would give him leave to lay his railroad through their lands (to carry the ghost rock from the Black Hills, natch). The book is being annoyingly coy about just what’s going on here – “tee hee, you’ll have to keep your players away from here for a little longer,” nyyyyyeeeehhhh bite me – but apparently it has something to do with mad science and giant scaly bears with machinery on their backs that controls them. Yeah, I don’t know.

Yellowstone, also on the High Plains, has a portal to the Hunting Grounds in it. Manitou and nature spirit sometimes wander out, making things around there very strange. It appears not to be the same portal that Raven used to enter the Hunting Grounds to slay the Old Ones and cause the Reckoning, so I guess there’s more than one.

The Disputed Lands (Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Utah) are the borderlands between the North and the South and thus the site of much bitter fighting – not just between the regular armies, but between outlaws and militias who claim to stand with one side or the other. Famous outlaw Bill Quantrill (never heard of him, but I guess he’s famous?) has come back as a Harrowed with the ability to summon a band of spectral warriors. When his human side takes over, he flees from them and tries to find his old pal Jesse James, who he hopes can help him. When the manitou takes over, he rejoins them and they go on a rampage again. There is also a mysterious gunslinger called the Revenant who rides into town and calls out the foremost lawman there, shoots him, and leaves. The Revenant is actually a sort of embodiment of lawlessness and crime, can only be killed by being shot in the heart by a lawman, and has stats up through the stratosphere.

Salt Lake City has become “the City of Gloom” from all the pollution caused by factories built by the mad scientists who congregate there. The foremost one is, again, Darius Hellstromme, who has figured out that the Weird West runs on fear and is doing horrific experiments with it. In one notable instance, he elminated a monster infestation of a town, and then created a new one to replace it, to see what would happen with the fear level if the source of it get exchanged. He’s got labs all along the rails of his company, Wasatch, and scary things occasionally escape from them. A bunch of Mormons have figured out that he’s a jerk, but since he’s considered the city’s great benefactor – he invented the steam wagons that lets people outrun the sand worms in the desert when entering and leaving the city – they have to keep it quiet for now. They have formed an organisation called the Danites to work against Hellstromme in secret. Also, some people are hunting those sand worms by dropping dynamite on them from flying contraptions, which I felt deserved to be mentioned.

California is even more disputed than those other states – both the Union and the Confederacy claim it, especially since the Great Maze by the coast has a ton of gold, silver and ghost rock in it. Both of them have armies in the area and fleets in the sea outside, and in addition to that, there are Chinese warlords (like the aforementioned Kang) and a Mexican armada raiding back and forth. General Santa Anna has also come up from Mexico at the head of an army, most of which consists of zombies run by an immortal Aztec wizards he’s somehow befriended.

Perched just off the Great Maze is the City of Lost Angels, ruled by a mad preacher named Ezekiah Grimme. He’s actually an abomination in human form who uses black magic to cause a famine throughout the region and then has his goons snatch up people no one will miss (and in the middle of a gold rush with plenty of transients and down-and-outs, there are always plenty of those) and cook them into a feast after his weekly sermons, making sure that all the serving people in the area remain pathetically grateful to him. Urk. His inner circle have the power to throw specially consecrated bones on the ground and have them transform into half-skeletal slaves called Bloody Ones. Even more urk. Also, Grimme’s magic prevents people who attend his feasts from becoming Wendigos, since otherwise it’d get a little obvious.

The Great Basin consists of southern California and Nevada. It holds Death Valley, which is haunted by a band of specters consisting of skulls with glowing eyes clad in black cloaks. A prospector named Pogo Joe had his entire team wiped out by them, but he managed to bounce away from them on his titular mad science contraption. There is also the Devil’s Postpiles, where people you bury have an enhanced chance of coming back as Harrowed, but they always come back with the manitou in full control. Also, all the people who were buried there but didn’t become Harrowed rise temporarily along with a new Harrowed and join it in slaughtering whomever buried it.

Fort 51 is where the Union’s colourful 10th Cavalry Regiment, “the Flying Buffalos.” They use mad science rocket packs in battle, and weird lights seen above Fort 51 at night is supposedly them training. In actuality, Fort 51 is the Union’s equivalent of Roswell, where they develop all their craziest crap. The Flying Buffalos really are stationed there as security, though.

The Mojave Desert! It has sand worms (“Mojave Rattlers” – they don’t rattle, but anyone who sees them soon start quivering) in it. That’s about it. I feel like those critters are more interestingly used in the last two places we saw them…

The Grand Canyon is haunted by the Crushed Man, who’s the ghost of a white man who ran off with an Indian girl but got captured and thrown off a cliff by the warrior she was promised to. Now he roams around, grabs hold of travelers and jumps off a cliff with them in his arms. The only way to kill him is with an arrow made from the bones of his murderer, feathered by a scrap of the dress of his beloved. Oh, and there’s also a gang of outlaws called the Laughing Men, but they kind of pale in comparison, I feel.

The dead of a small Texan town recently rose from the dead and staged a localised zombie apocalypse. It was actually due to a Bayou Vermillion train crashing and spilling its cargo of zombie juice. This is bound to happen again sooner or later.

Remember those prairie ticks from the core? To those you can add the Texas Tummy Twisters, which are a parasite infection that you get from drinking tainted water. They grow in your stomach and then hijack your spinal cord, making you stagger around as a puppet and trying to infect other people. They can kinda-sorta see through your eyes, but they prefer opening a discreet hole in your belly and peeking out through it. I think I am permanently traumatised by the whole idea and I love it.

The Sioux Nation, covering parts of the High Plains, is ruled by the four wicasas, representing the four prominent tribes of the Nation. Three of them want peace with the white man and a return to “the Old Ways” of pleasing the nature spirits and using absolutely no technology. The fourth is Sitting Bull, who is spoiling for a fight and very willing to use the white man’s weapons against him. He was the one who made the deal with Kang to allow him to lay rail through the Sioux Nation, with the secret agreement that Kang would also covertly deliver weapons to Bull. Bull’s followers call themselves the Order of the Raven, which is a not-particularly-subtle hint that Raven is around, whispering in Bull’s ear. Bull is waiting for the presence of the Deadwood mining camp and the mining in the Black Hills to result in an inevitable diplomatic incident between white men and Indians, and then he’ll use that to start his war.

The Sioux don’t let any white men roam around freely – they can only come and go by the Iron Dragon railroad, and they can only mine in parts of the hills they’ve been approved for. Anyone caught trespassing gets nailed to a spear along the road to Deadwood. Also, on rainy nights the corpses get down from their spears and go hunting for more white men to add to their number, which is a nice touch.

The Coyote Confederation in Oklahoma is the southern equivalent of the Sioux Nation. It’s ruled by a mysterious shaman known as Coyote, advised by tribal chieftains Quanah Parker and Satanta. Coyote and Satanta follow the Old Ways, while Parker has taken to guns in a big way. The Confederation is chummy with the Confederacy and keeps raiding Union sympathisers in the Disputed Lands.

Coyote (or Isatai, as his mother called him) hides his face inside a red hood and his name behind the Coyote title, because he had a vision from the mythical trickster Coyote saying that he’d lead the people to greatness by doing so. The vision was actually from Raven, and the mystery act is to make it easier for Raven to assassinate Isatai and take his place as Coyote if he started getting difficult. Man. Raven is kind of an asshole.

The Apaches under Geronimo are harassing Confederate ghost rock shipments in Arizona. They are assisted by the fact that the previous war leader, Conchise, has mentally entered the Hunting Grounds and bound a powerful nature spirit to his service, granting the Apache preternatural stealth skills for as long as his physical body remains alive, after which he’ll serve the spirit for eternity. That’s kind of poignant.

Deadwood, Tombstone and Dodge City get special writeups – not because they are the most significant of places, the book admits, but because they’re the Wild-Westiest. Deadwood, in Dakota, is in the middle of the Sioux Nation but connected to the outside by the Iron Dragon railroad and exists to service miners digging for ghost rock in the Black Hills. A big ghost rock vein to the south was accidentally ignited at some point, and it’s still burning – the smoke is ever-present, and on days when the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the wail of burning ghost rock. Oooh, creepy. Just generally, everyone in town is in a state of nervous frenzy from knowing that the Sioux could decide to wipe it off the map at any time.

Frontier legend Wild Bill Hickok was recently bushwacked by a no-good skunk, and has risen as a Harrowed (seriously, do any famous people just die in this game?!) and is looking to reclaim his six-shooters with the help of his old friend Calamity Jane. Kang is smuggling opium into Deadwood on his railroad. A bunch of ne’er-do-wells loyal to General Custer are sneaking around the woods killing Sioux.

Having seen all three seasons of HBO’s Deadwood, I’ll admit that I’m somewhat amused at the idea of having Al Svearingen turn up and rant about how much he hates these rotting Harrowed COCKSUCKERS!!!!

Dodge City in Kansas is composed of equal parts North and South loyalists, all there to get rich by hunting buffalo, and is about as terminally exciting a place as you might imagine from that (running joke: why is the town called “Dodge”? Because if you want to survive there, better get used to doing it!). Also, the Union Blue and Black River railroads have both reached Dodge and is working to proceed west from it while fighting each other relentlessly, the Union and the Confederacy both have a ton of spies here scheming against each other, and the Coyote Confederation is right next door and strongly disapprove of white men over-hunting buffalo. There’s a lot of ways to get killed here, is what I’m saying. On the bright side, Wyatt Earp and his giant moustache is working as a deputy and determined to Clean Up Dodge.

It’s kind of light on supernatural menaces, though – the only thing mentioned is that there are ghouls living in caves who come out at night to eat corpses. They’re too chicken to be dangerous to the living, unless you try to follow them home.

Tombstone in Arizona is connected to the Bayou Vermillion railroad and is the eastern endpoint for the “Ghost Trail” to the Great Maze. It’s hassled by the Apache and the French Foreign Legion (working out of Mexico) alike, and the closest thing to a law in town comes from a gang called the Cowboys. They’re opposed by Doc Holliday, who freaks them out because he’s dying anyway so he doesn’t give a shit, and also if they shot him his mate Wyatt Earp would hear about it and might be mad enough to get over there and raise a fuss.

Tombstone also houses the home office of the Tombstone Epitath, covering such weird occurrences as a group of undead conquistadores who keep trying to rob travelers of their “stolen silver” around town. The reason being that they were cursed by an Indian shaman whose people they’d enslaved to mine silver for them, and now they can’t rest until they’ve replaced as much silver as they extorted from the Indians. They can’t actually attack anyone who doesn’t carry silver, so that’s a plus.

The in-character section ends with a mention that America isn’t the only place where everything has gone wonky – all other parts of the world are seeing monsters and magic arise too.

After that, we get the “No Man’s Land” of semi-secrets. First off is Knacks, which you can take like Edges at character creation, but never after that since they represent some occult circumstance at your birth or early childhood (like being born with a caul across your face). They all give you some reasonably nifty ability that you can activate by spending a chip, with varying effects depending on the colour chip you spend (like ignoring some amount of fall damage for a white chip, seeing in the dark for a red chip, and negating all damage taken from an attack for a blue chip).

After that we get relics, which are supernatural items that seem to have been charged with some kind of strange energy from their legendary history. They are generally weapons for good rather than being secretly powered by the Reckoners like most other magic, though some can be decidedly creepy – for instance, the Sword of Cortez does a ton of damage, but the more you use it, the more your right arm starts oozing blood until you’re dripping it everywhere you go. Mmm, cool, I guess, but I am not much for extra-special magic items – it’s so hard to figure out how often, and in what way, you should give the players a chance to get hold of them.

The final chapter in the super-secret part of the book (remember, we went through most of it at the same time as the player-facing ones!) concerns black magic, which is special powers that only baddies can have. What, the magic that players can get wasn’t skeevy enough?! Anyway, it’s super-easy to use because the Reckoners want it to work, and also it’s a cheaty NPC thing so of course it’s going to be better than anything the players get. The kind of powers it provides are fairly standard magic stuff, like dealing damage or making you invisible. Somewhat interestingly, the powers are described purely mechanically and the GM is instructed to supply “trappings” that explain just what form it takes for a particular villain (e.g., whether a damage-dealing spell creates a blast of black lightning or causes the target’s internal blood vessels to burst). So this is the origin of that idea for Savage Worlds, I guess.

So that’s it. Okay, pretty decent stuff. Not very easy to get an overview of, though – even with me mushing the IC and OOC information together, you probably noticed that I had to go back over past information a lot. For example, I had to explain Kang once as relating to the railroads, once as relating to the Great Maze, once as relating to Dakota in general and then again as relating to Deadwood in particular. Now, double that for the IC-OOC split, and you can see that you have to skip back and forth like crazy to get some sort of overview on Mr. Kang.

But, that aside, I feel like we have a better idea of the setting now. Next time we’ll delve into Book o’ the Dead, which detail the Harrowed.