Deadlands
| Deadlands | ||
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| RPG published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group |
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| Rule System | Savage Worlds | |
| Authors | Shane Lacy Hensley | |
| First Publication | 1996 | |
Gun toting Injuns? In my /tg/?
Deadlands describes both a game system and a campaign setting. The game setting is waaaay out of print, whereas the campaign setting has won a shitload of awards and ported to many other generic RPG systems, so that's what people usually mean.
Setting
The Deadlands setting is a "weird wild west" genre, set in 1876 USA in that lost generation after the American Civil War. History is the same up until an event during the war called "the Reckoning". This occurred in July of 1863 when a bunch of durty Injuns, lead by a Sioux medicine man calling himself Raven, started up some mumbo-jumbo rain-dance to get rid of all the palefaces from Europe. They appealed to otherworldly spirits that called themselves "Reckoners," who thought it was a real nice 'n purty little land you got there, y'all don't mind iffen we move in? Y'all won't mind what we make this place nicer for us and ours, 'cause we like our home a little more haunted and hellish? Shure yew won't, mighty nice of y'all to invite us.
The Reckoners are fueled by darker emotions such as hate, dread, grief, frustration and especially fear. They can use this to make the local area more like their home, twisting trees into claws, altering mesas to look like towering ogres, and even making the sunshine dimmer. This makes the people who live there creeped out, which gives them more fuel to make the area more hellish to their tastes. With enough fear/hate/dread they can animate the dead or drive madmen into violent rampages, escalating the spiral of fear. Their ultimate goal is to raise the levels of unrest and fear worldwide to allow them to bodily step over into our world and take over.
The Civil War did not end in 1865, due to the influences of the Reckoners -- most notably when the dead at the Battle of Gettysburg rose and attacked the living of both armies -- so the nation is divided into the Republic and Confederate states, with disputed territories between. Federal Marshals from the North and Texas Rangers from the South try to deal with the eldritch horrors while hoping to keep them a secret from the general public, lest widespread panic give the Reckoners an opportunity to make things even worse.
The otherworldly influences have made it easier for other spirits, called Manitou, to be dominated or negotiated with by shamans or magicians for power. These spirits may also possess the recently dead to either resurrect them into the Harrowed, walking dead under either the dead man's will or that of the Manitou. The Reckoners have also taught some men new sciences that can work in places made more like their home, sometimes fueled by an enigmatic ore known as ghost rock that burns hotter and longer than coal, giving some mad science flavour to your wild west so you can play an Artemis Gordon character if you want.
Mechanics in the Original System
Challenges were resolved using dice pools with exploding dice.
Playing cards were used often in the original game.
- Playing cards were drawn for character generation.
- Some spellcasters, called "hucksters", would make a skill roll to see how many playing cards they would draw, and the best poker hand they could make with these cards would be the power of the "hex" they were trying to cast; a metaphor for gambling with fate or spirits for the effect they want.
- Rolling for initiative determined how many cards everyone at the table would draw, which is also how many actions they can take during the exchange. The GM calls the ranks of cards from Ace of Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, king... down to deuces to determine what order actions are taken.
Players were also given poker chips as Fate Chips. You could spend them during a session to get a bonus to a roll or to prevent injury, and any left over at the end were used the same as experience points in other systems. GMs were encouraged to award Fate Chips during a session for achieving quest goals and good role-playing... and to give the players plenty of reason to spend them before they could be used as experience points.
What became of Deadlands
After winning the Origin Award for Best Role-playing Rules of 1996, there was a tabletop minis game called "The Great Rails Wars", then a collectable card game called "Doomtown", a Disk Wars spin-off called "Range Wars", a Mad-Max post-apocalypse sequel called "Hell On Earth", a sci-fi sequel called "Lost Colony", and then a genre-less generic set of rules called Savage Worlds. Yes, THAT Savage Worlds.
In 2001, Deadlands was licensed to Wizards of the Coast for a d20 System version, and to Steve Jackson Games for a GURPS version.