Missed Settings
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Since we are talking Weird West, how about Weird West but D&D fantasy? This is a really good OSR adventure: Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier
Here’s a YouTube review of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUkPt9VcsWw&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
And here’s the creator’s blog posts on the expanded universe: https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/search/label/Crystal Frontier
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@Ominous said in Missed Settings:
Since we are talking Weird West, how about Weird West but D&D fantasy? This is a really good OSR adventure: Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier
Taking this time to plug my favorite podcast which has an episode on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0GCCgNIKbo
There’s also another recent Weird West setting out there put out by Monte Cook and using the Cypher System, which is Gunslinger Knights. It’s very much “what if The Dark Tower but RPG” but that in itself is a weird west setting.
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In the Weird West genre, I’ve heard good things about Haunted West, but I haven’t actually picked it up yet. The book is absolutely massive (800+ pages), it is written with a mechanical system that has three stages of complexity, so you can go from very narrative and story driven to a full tactical simulator of weird western life. (It also has a secret extra chapter of rules & playbooks for playing in the setting using PBTA.) I’ve heard the setting is an interesting alternate history and the selection of supernatural stuff occurring in the game is very wide and allows for a lot of diversity in setting up the antagonists of a given plot.
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With or without:
@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)
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@Gashlycrumb tbh that’s too many words for me to read but sure yes go ahead I’ll play for at least 2 months before I flake lol
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All I really want btw is the ability to ride my horse, wear a cowboy hat, and rob trains/stagecoaches and maybe fight monsters. I’d like to be a bad guy, and not a bad guy that’s really a good guy and all the bad guys are actually good and it’s only the NPCs that are actually bad!! I just want to be bad. Let me be a bad guy. Thanks.
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I just had a crazy idea to merge two flavors into one great taste.
Dark City
and
The Wild West
I’ll share more when I have it fleshed out but think: Wild West microcosm in a dome floating in space, psychic powers, secret alien schemes…
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@Roadspike said in Missed Settings:
@KarmaBum If you like FS3, I do happen to have the stats I put together from The Network’s Western series that y’all could use as a starting point.
Appreciated, but I don’t have the spoons to make fun for other people right now.
@Gashlycrumb might want this, though.
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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@KarmaBum I’m interested, but probably won’t actually do this. I mean, it’s possible, but how will I feel next week?
@bear_necessities I am all for bad guys if their players acknowledge that the PCs are bad and join the Black Hats Club.
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@KarmaBum Crossing the threads again, but now I wonder if the Wild Imaginary West set says anything about the -isms. If I am remembering it right from the videos, everything west of the Missisippi is monster country. Bleeding Kansas seems unlikely if moving to Kansas to influence its vote involves not merely the horrors of moving to Kansas, but also getting eaten by a gru.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
I wonder if the Wild Imaginary West set says anything about the -isms.
No, it doesn’t really address that at all, but instead rewrites history from 1876 forward, giving you the United States and the Uncivilized West. The implication is that things are kind of as they would be/have always been, but even the map is a little different.
The over-arching conflict is between the East (steam) vs West (electricity), peppered by Faction conflict, like the US Railroad has a lot of economic power, the Tulos Mob runs crime, etc.
The Frontier Conservation Society has a brief mention of working with Native Americans:
The Frontier Conservation Society aims to preserve nature, both its fauna and flora. While many at this time don’t believe extinction of a species is possible, Charles Darwin helped some to see that the natural competition of things can lead to the complete loss of anything. The Frontier Conservation Society was born from a group of biologists studying the West. During their travels, they especially learned from the Native Americans how to rely on the land and coexist with its creatures.
And there’s one NPC mentioned that’s half-Native American, and it’s commented that “most of the European immigrants saw him as a Native, and most of the Natives saw him as a European immigrant.”
But there’s nothing specifically addressing social issues at the time.
My take is that the Uncivilized West is a place for everyone, from all walks of life, as long as you have the mettle to survive; they have real monsters to worry about, so they don’t have time to worry about skin-color or religious views, but that these notions still exist, especially in the East.
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After reading the Wild Imaginary West quickstart, it really feels to me like the setting is just Monster Hunter in the American West. It doesn’t seem like the game really has much interest in telling other types of stories, but it does feel like it does the whole Monster Hunter thing really well.
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@MisterBoring I don’t actually know anything about Monster Hunters, but - based on the name - that’s probably a fair assumption.
Most of the material is focused on the mechanics of forstalls, weapons, monster abilities, hunting grounds, etc. And the whole thing came out of episodic YT content that was basically a guy describing a Monster of the Week.
There’s more to the world when you get into the goals of different factions, but the TTRPG is very much designed around groups going out and hunting monsters.
If a person was trying to set up a western sandbox, I wouldn’t recommend this IP at all. But if a person was interested in having focused or episodic adventures, this is a great place to start.
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
Wild West microcosm in a dome floating in space, psychic powers, secret alien schemes…
This doesn’t excite me the same way. I love Dark City. I love cowboys. I don’t love them combined. But it’s a “different strokes for different folks” situation.
A Dark City game would be dope, though.
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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@Solstice said in Missed Settings:
I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.
Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?
It would so be my jam, right about now.
There’s an actual RPG for this. I haven’t looked into it cause I’m in the middle of the series and I don’t want spoilers, but this was also on the top of my list for settings/games I’d love to play.
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@KarmaBum said in Missed Settings:
A Dark City game would be dope, though.
You could easily do a Dark City themed game really using any system that had mechanics for horror and psychic powers in it, and just sort of handwave the abilities of the actual aliens.
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@Warma-Sheen said in Missed Settings:
There’s an actual RPG for this. I haven’t looked into it cause I’m in the middle of the series and I don’t want spoilers, but this was also on the top of my list for settings/games I’d love to play.
Having just finished playing in a short run (6 games) of the Cosmere RPG (GMed by someone who regularly rereads the novels) with my tabletop group, I can say the following non-spoiler critique of the game:
It really really requires you to have a very good working knowledge of the novels or you’re just going to be confused a lot. Our group had a wide range of familiarity with the Cosmere setting ranging from never read anything Sanderson has written to people that have read all of his books multiple times at this point, and the takeaway was that only the people with the most working knowledge of the setting actually enjoyed it the most. Most of us stumbled through the cultural aspects of the story and just chose to focus on finding and defeating the bad guys and the mechanics of combat rather than trying to be part of the world.
(My knowledge of Cosmere is next to none, and I made a character that was super useful but mechanically monotonous.)
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@Warma-Sheen said in Missed Settings:
@Solstice said in Missed Settings:
I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.
Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?
It would so be my jam, right about now.
There’s an actual RPG for this. I haven’t looked into it cause I’m in the middle of the series and I don’t want spoilers, but this was also on the top of my list for settings/games I’d love to play.
There’s actually two! One that came out after Mistborn Era 1 finished and is kind of FATE-lite (if memory serves, you only get +1 for every aspect you tag, but they are automatically tagged, you don’t have to spend points on them? I haven’t read it in a while because…) and the new Cosmere RPG that the kickstarter will finish delivering to me any day now, I’m sure.
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
It really really requires you to have a very good working knowledge of the novels or you’re just going to be confused a lot.
I mean, sure, but that’s also the thing with any setting. I tried to dump Shadowrun players on an Astral Quest into the Codex Alera and everyone was also confused. Play Star Wars with any
Grey Jedi Enjoyerchild whose never seen it, and they will boggle at why Force Lightning is bad if all you’re doing is using it to charge a battery.Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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i miss superhero games that were, like, actually using comics and the Marvel or DC or, whatever universe and not just a really vague idea of comics but mostly movies plus thirty different cartoons from 40 years ago and maybe this book i read and what about this one video game and and and and
anyway there’s a dumb comic i love called IDES OF BLOOD and it’s about Julius Caesar conquering Dacia because vampires are real and then there are openly vampires everywhere in Rome and that should be a WoD game
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@Prototart said in Missed Settings:
anyway there’s a dumb comic i love called IDES OF BLOOD and it’s about Julius Caesar conquering Dacia because vampires are real and then there are openly vampires everywhere in Rome and that should be a WoD game
You mean this?
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no in this Caesar returns from the dead as the reborn Dracula and fights a Praetorian vampire by turning into a werewolf-werebat-weresnake and stakes him by throwing a crucified prisoner, it’s definitely oWoD
