Deadlands, Weird, Wasted, Reloaded and more!

I enjoy a lot of different types of RPGs, I have played Gamma World, D&D (2nd, 3rd, 4th), Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, several whitewolf games (not a big whitewolf fan, just saying), a bit of Call of Cthulhu, Mutant Future, Labyrinth Lord, Rifts, etc. Now lately my main gaming group has been doing a lot of Deadlands. Deadlands is a somewhat obscure game but quite interesting put out by the folks at Pinnacle. My group plays the classic version, IE the non Savage Worlds version.

Deadlands is one of the first games I want to talk about here both because it's a game that I'm playing right now and also because it actually taught a fair amount in terms of game design, running a game, and even about aspects of different types of gaming. The next few posts are going to focus on different aspects of the game and some of my own observations and thoughts on it, as well as things I think they did really well and things that they kind of messed up. Any fans of the game are welcome to post, as are detractors come to think of it.

I think I'll start off by talking a little about the game itself. The central game is essentially a steampunk civil war torn US with cowboys and zombies. An event known as 'the recknoning' occurred during the battle of Gettysburg and weirdness started popping up all over the place. The dead began to walk, monsters of folklore began to appear, and magical power suddenly became available or more potent. The source of this is a bit more than I want to get into right here (probably a future topic) Now the thing is that by and large most people don't know/don't believe in this sort of thing and in many respects that's how the dark forces like it. A big monster charging into town might make the populace piss their pants but then a few people either get brave or angry enough to fight back and manage to kill the thing. Suddenly the people see that the creature wasn't so scary and that they can be beaten. Instead the monsters tend to lurk on the outside, a few people here and there might disappear and sometimes people see things they don't understand but most of them try to chalk it up to hallucination, accident, or some animal.

The heroes are the exceptions, these are the people that find out about the supernatural and try to push back, defending people as best they can and spreading hope. Some of these people are shamans, some are blessed by a higher power, some have learned to pull power kicking and screaming from the spirit world and a few are guided by maddening muses to create mind bending tech, and plenty more are just normal people armed with courage and a good shooting arm. Now all of this is more true in the weird west for Deadlands but the basic principles hold. The game also deals with the idea of evil in some fairly interesting ways and points out that sometimes evil can be very grandiose and sometimes in can be very banal and in both cases it can be terrifying.

The game itself is a bit of a mix of pulpy action and horror, I tend more towards the pulpy action side but that's more because I absolutely suck at running horror. That's about all I can say for now, hope to see you all again soon.