Arcane Background Reviews, Weird and Wasted

Ah Deadlands, a game that my group recently picked up and had a fair amount of fun with. The game is a steampunk western game set during an extended civil war where zombies talk the earth and there is all kinds of supernatural evil afoot. Overall it’s actually a good game, but there are some issues in the system. One of them has to do with the arcane backgrounds. Arcane backgrounds are somewhat like classes, the edges let you pick up certain abilities, and some of these were pretty cool but some of them…well let’s just say there were issues. Two of the big ones in my view would be the Mad Scientist and the Shaman.

The reason that I pick these two out has to do with my own experiences in game, as well as their counterparts in the later released Wasted West (which does show they learned from some of their mistakes). Now I should start out by saying that one of the things I really did like about Deadlands was that the Arcane Backgrounds in weird west Deadlands felt very distinct. Each one had its own mechanics and feel, my favorite among them being the huckster. But there were problems in each that do need to be brought up. I ran a Deadlands game for a group of players who are fairly good at finding mechanical flaws as well as quite creative. The Shaman is the one that all of us came to agree was a problem and for similar reasons so I’ll begin with that.

The basic idea behind the shaman is actually an interesting one. The shaman can potentially do just about anything, they can call lightning from the sky, become inhumanly powerful warriors, cause earthquakes, heal, etc. If it was possible a shaman could probably do it. The problem came from the mechanics involved; see the shaman had one of the clunkier systems for getting their powers to work as well as being probably the most resource intensive at character creation. The way it worked was that the shaman had to do things like dance, sing, produce music, sacrifice of their bodies, sacrifice animals, fast, make sand paintings, put on war paint, or do any number of other things to produce ‘appeasement points’. Appeasement points were spent to call for favors from the spirits, the problem was that you rarely got a lot of appeasement points and there were no rules for holding onto them until later stuff was added so you had to use them immediately. At best it meant you could buff up before a big fight if you were aware and had time, at worst it meant that a lot of your best stuff wouldn’t see use during fights. That wasn’t even the worst part, shamans also had to make rolls to use the favors of the spirits aside from spending appeasement points, and apparently the spirits are bitchy little bastards because when you tried casting the same favor more than once the number you had to roll to make it work (and in some cases the appeasement points you had to spend) climbed.

That sort of thing is obnoxious enough, but it got even worse with how they tried to fix it. In the supplement book Ghost Dancers they tried to find ways to make being a shaman easier, and I will admit that they probably didn’t want to forcibly rewrite the whole thing from the ground up (though they did pretty much do that with Martial Artists and Junkers) so they tried to figure out how to make it easier. What they did was divide the favors into different categories of medicine, they also added in a new edge called ‘guardian spirit’ it let you store some appeasement points and also gave you bonuses if you spent fate chips. Not a bad start, and each of the spirits was tied to a type of medicine, so if you spent an appeasement point for the type of medicine it now counted as 2 instead of 1. This was coupled with various relics and items that you could purchase during character creation (equivalent to various levels of the belongin’s edge) that were tied to specific types of medicine or particular favors so you could theoretically get a lot of mileage out of fewer appeasement points as well as being able to pull off some pretty nice effects. The problem was that this band-aid still left a fair number of things to be desired. One of them was this, assuming you took the full number of available flaws you had 10 points to build with, 3 points are needed to be a shaman, 5 points are needed for the guardian spirit, this leaves you with 2 points. You could take Veteran of the Weird west, that nets you another 15 so you can get some shaman relics and maybe something else independently but you’re still eating up a TON of starting character points for what boils down to being able to MATCH the other arcane backgrounds. Not to mention that Veteran of the Weird West means you have to risk what the deck of fate can throw at you, some are fairly minor (ugliness, an enemy) some are rather severe (can’t sped fate chips to negate wounds or recover wind, can’t be positively affected by the powers of blessed or shamans, infested by Gremlins) so it’s kind of a crapshoot.

They also still faced the problem of having to take hours, or in some cases days, to gather up appeasement points before doing something big or calling down some of their stuff either because they still had trouble affording some of the booster items or because they need more than the 5 appeasement points that their spirit guardian holds or they plan to spend it on something other than that guardians sphere. This meant that the shaman had to hope they would get some kind of advanced warning of a big threat and that they would get enough time to prep for it, combine this with the difficulty of doing things on the fly for them and things got a little obnoxious. There were other little things too, one of the ideas they mention is the old ways oath, you basically swear to never use ‘the white mans technology’ and in exchange you get a bonus on your rolls for favors, though you take a penalty for using the tech. In theory not terrible, bows could do decent damage and since you could add your strength a couple of favors could make those arrows better than any gun. The problem came in when being on a train, steamboat, etc. also gave the penalty. This meant that if you had a shaman in the group every time you had a chase on a train or went on a steamboat or anything like that one of the guys was now taking a hit to their abilities. I know that the player doesn’t have to take the oath but it does mean that certain adventures can really screw over someone and that can get frustrating for both the player and the person running. And yes, while they do get chips out of it, as mentioned earlier, it still seems impractical as it will also make a situation where if a Marshal wants to use trains and other things frequently they end up screwing one player. There is also the fact that because of all the extra stuff, the mini relics, the guardian spirits, etc. the shaman requires a lot of bookkeeping, moreso than any of the others with the mad scientist coming in at a moderately close second.

And speaking of the mad scientist, well we might as well go to the issues that that one had. The mad scientist is actually an arcane background I rather like, it has some neat potential and can be a lot of fun, the problem it really has is more a result of the way the system handles mad science than anything else. The Mad Scientist is simply an inventor, someone led by maddening muses to create things that seem to violate known laws of science. Helicopters, planes, gattling pistols, ray guns, body armor, magnetic bullet repellers, all kinds of stuff. One of the basic ideas in it is that you have to be able to explain it in a way that sounds reasonable even if it wouldn’t work by scientific laws (for example the bullet repellant clothing). You explained to the Marshal what you wanted, and then pulled a hand of cards based on your roll to see if it was possible, the more it flouted scientific capabilities the better the hand you pulled would have to be. The issue here was more that the player had very little guidance, they were shown some existing items, jet packs, gattling pistols, bulletproof vests and the like but because inventing things was literally a seat of your pants method with the Marshal being the final judge and as you can imagine things were problematic. Trying to come up with something can be tricky and the Marshal has to figure out if it’s acceptable and what the minimum hand should be for it. The supplements like Smith and Robards or The Collegium helped in some ways, providing more example items with required hands but again some things didn’t quite seem to match what they were capable of with what they took to make. Part of the problem was that the mad scientist didn’t get anything special with their brand of super tech, they weren’t any better at using it nor did they get some kind of special bonuses they could add to their unique creations. They did get one free mad science item starting out, which is kind of nice but that seems to be the bigger draw.

A player can use money to buy pretty much any mad science item in the books, if they take the edges to have some real spending money they can have a full plethora of mad science gear if they want it. Now you might argue ‘well during a game they can’t easily mail order mad science gear so the mad scientist is there for that.’ That sort of works until you remember that said scientist needs a work area and supplies, and given how long it can take to invent some things the players might get it from a mail order to one of the mad science consortiums just as quickly. The huckster-mad science fusion option is actually pretty nice and I do enjoy the options that one gives but it’s still kind of a problem. Some of it might also be how mad science items can lock up on you, all of them have reliability rolls and so can conk out at the worst possible times but that does help balance the power they bring to the table. I guess my issue for the mad scientist is that they don’t have anything special that they bring to the table other than that which can be purchased independently of them and they don’t have anything special they can offer with the tech that they built and are directly using.

Now some of why I mention this is because I also want to address the counterparts to these backgrounds that were introduced in Hell on Earth. Now I will admit that in some ways these comparisons are a bit unfair, Hell on Earth was built later after a lot of trial and error in the original Weird West game but I think it also helps show the evolution of the system and of what they learned from previous mistakes. The Junker and the Toxic Shaman, the Toxic Shaman was released in a supplement but I would say that it follows the spirit of the shaman quite well (it’s possible that the Doomsayers were meant to be their spiritual children but I don’t quite see the relation) and it should also be noted that the Junker supplement rewrote much of how the Junker worked and this was actually for the best as I will explain.

The Junker is the Wasted West techie, they can produce guns, vehicles, armor and just about any other technical wonder from what most people would see as garbage. This fits the post apocalypse theme nicely, but it also had a lovely feature, it actually had hard and fast rules for making stuff. The original book had you still dealing with demons and in this case you basically beat the crap out of them to make them tell you how to build stuff, not terrible exactly but the later supplement actually improved things a lot. The Supplement broke the existing Junker powers down into more distinct abilities, made the craft rules so that you had to have certain types of parts as well as size restrictions, and you also had powers called ‘tool tricks’ that you could use in and out of combat to make your equipment better, reload your guns during a fight, make a different tech item fizzle, etc. But it also did something else wonderful, it gave the Junkers a new source of inspiration, the tech spirits. It explained that the demons they were using at the beginning was because they knew nothing else, then they learned of the tech spirits and could make more versatile devices. Some of it is hard to explain without showing the books but the class felt very interesting and different, the idea behind it was good and the mechanics were quite solid. They also added the idea of ‘the taint’ which is that Junkers who build nothing but weapons start getting a little loopy from keeping in the company of the Gun Spirits. It was a nice flavor thing, but it also was a smart way to encourage players doing this to make things other than superweapons and ammo for same, to look at the other powers and consider them. Players had to think about the risk of losing their character to the Marshal because they finally became too unstable and bloodthirsty to be appropriate for play.

It also addressed another issue, Junker tech can be purchased in the Wasted West, but it’s harder. There are only a few large settlements, no mail order companies for the tech, and Junkers aren’t going to be in every town, nor will they necessarily know the powers to make what you’re looking for. While a player could hypothetically buy some Junker built items at character creation weapons might need unique ammo or power packs, both of which require the player to also buy a lot of the special ammo as well as the power packs. The group, if they want this stuff, is probably better off with a Junker in their group for this reason alone. But if that were it then the Junker wouldn’t be my favorite background for the Wasted West. The Junkers got two other lovely things in Wasted West, both of which were from their supplement, the aforementioned tool tricks and the browser spirits. The tool tricks had things that you could use to either have an easier time building something or stuff that could aid you in combat or in certain other situations (copying information, being able to turn random things into workable tools for repair, automatically reloading guns, improvements to the tech you were building etc.). The other one is the browser spirits, these things were part and parcel to the tech spirit concept and they fit in nicely. Browser spirits could either be purchased at character creation or earned by making things of high quality. Make enough high quality weapons and you’d get a gun browser, build more high quality weapons and the spirit gets more potent. Build enough high quality vehicles and you’d get a high quality car spirit and there were other types as well that covered the gamut of what you could build. The spirits would give you a bonus to building things of their type as well as providing you with special powers you could use in exchange for fate chips, the stronger your browser was the better the powers you could access. The gun browser could make you a master marksman, the car browser could make you a stunt driver or even take over driving the vehicle itself while you did something else, the tool browser made you a better crafter, etc.

The Junker was also nice in that while a lot of the stuff mentioned was great to take at character creation, it wasn’t necessary. You could automatically gain a browser spirit if you made enough stuff of high quality so you weren’t forced to get them unless you wanted them. Similar things could be said towards what I view the evolution of the shaman to be in Wasted West, the toxic shaman.

The toxic shaman was referenced in several books but finally came into existence in a supplement, conceptually it was pretty good. The idea was that the toxic shamans were in one of two camps, caretakers and corruptors; the former tried to remove pollution usually by feeding it to toxic spirits whereas the latter polluted to make more toxic spirits. There were 5 types, Smog, Trash, Sludge, Radiation, and Insects. If you couldn’t guess the first four were basically corrupted elements, the insects were bugs that were sick of getting stepped on and kept hearing that after a nuclear war roaches would rule the earth, they wanted that to happen and wanted the shamans they worked with to help it occur. Part of the improvement was that instead of appeasement points you had strain, strain was something used by a few other backgrounds. Strain was also simple enough to recover, rest could do it, drinking spook juice could do it, or just exposing yourself to the type of pollution that your particular patron was. The patron thing was also a bit different but it actually did fit the flavor. The concept was that you picked one of the five types as a patron, they required you to spread their type of pollution or take it from the world and ‘feed’ it to them (in the case of insects you just had to pollute in ways that would kill people) but it costs more to do stuff outside of your sphere and if you took smog you couldn’t use trash sphere powers, the same vice versa as well as between sludge and radiation. There are also toxic guardian spirits that give extra powers and more strain, I would say that these are somewhat necessary but that has more to do with the extra strain being helpful coupled with the powers they offer you could make a perfectly good toxic shaman without them but the toxic guardians are a major bonus. The toxic shaman also requires a lot less book work, it doesn’t require multiple items and boosters to be able to match others.

Looking at it they definitely seemed to learn from their previous designs, it’s also worth noting that they did keep rules for the original arcane backgrounds but added in caveats for each of them. Hucksters had the target number to cast a hex increased as well as needing one hand higher to make anything work. Their versatility was a possible threat in this much more balanced or organized setup. The blessed and other backgrounds (excepting the mad scientist) were still available but while I can’t be sure I would almost guess that people might have still eagerly grabbed the modern arcane backgrounds instead of the ones from weird west either due to them being more interesting or feeling more…dynamic for lack of a better term. I think I might explore the arcane backgrounds a bit more at a later date as well as working on comparing weird and wasted west.