To 4th Edition

I'm going to be taking a break from Deadlands for a while, I intend to focus on D&D in its various iterations. My plan is to begin with 4th edition, both because it's the current one and also because frankly it's a fairly divisive edition and I want to offer thoughts on both sides of it. Now I will begin by saying that while I have played it my group does not use it any more. The reasons will be explained later, that being said, I do not think it is a BAD system per se but that its format does not work for me or my players in many respects. I will go into further detail in the future, hope you all enjoy it however many are reading it.

Horror in Role Playing Games

I will start this out simply, I have a great deal of respect for people who run horror games that are genuinely scary, the same to those who can make video games and the like that are genuinely creepy. I say this starting out because my topic for today is the difficulty in running a horror based game and especially in terms of trying to create one. Horror games, at least in my view, have several main issues that can often gum up the works in terms of delivering a good scare.

The first is simply whoever is running the game. I have said before and will say again, I SUCK at running horror games, maybe it’s just not my personality but I have a hard time making it work. I have been able to creep my players out occasionally but really these were the exceptions not the rule. While I recognize the truth that any system has to depend heavily on the person running it does mean that horror can be very difficult because some people are going to have a harder time than others. The second part which dovetails is the players and some groups are hard to properly creep. Again, while I admit that I suck at horror I also have a fairly jaded group of players, if they saw cthulhu they’d be more likely to walk up and shake his hand or say hello than to run in panic, but meh.

The third thing is somewhat a consequence of how the system is organized, but I think it was explained best by Ben ‘Yathzee’ Croshaw of Zero Punctuation, heavy ordinance does wonders for keeping fear at bay. This is simply to say that when players are able to reasonably threaten the various horrors of the night said horrors are a bit less scary. Some of it is simply that the danger is somewhat more abstract, while said entity might be able to hurt their characters it can also be hurt. Having a means to make the thing blink is a fairly potent security blanket and can appreciably cut down on the horror.

That being said the other way can also be a problem. Make something totally invincible and it might not elicit horror but instead either frustration or exasperation. Being totally unable to deal with something can end up creating apathy, if the players can’t do anything then they’re more likely throw up their hands if they experience it and say ‘well, that was fun’ or something more colorful and less printable. Horror requires something that might be possibly beatable but it would either be difficult or it has to represent something complex.

I think a part of it comes down to how the systems are designed but also the mindset of those involved. Fear comes from a lack of understanding but also out of a belief that the unknown thing can harm you. Suspense and tension are helpful in this but there is also the helpful element of things not feeling quite right. Horror can sometimes be achieved by having a mechanical tie, sanity checks from games like Call of Cthulhu or the guts checks in Deadlands are all good examples of things that impede a character through terror or minds falling apart. These things are bad and while they might not ‘scare’ the player they are likely to at least make them feel uneasy or nervous.

As to system design, just the way the game is weighted can do a lot to create or impede horror. Heroic systems like d20 are probably going to have to depend more on the person running than say a game like Call of Cthulhu by the nature of the systems and the mindests of the games. Games where things scale more in the players favor and bonuses to saves are easier to acquire things are likely more to lean in their favor. That being said there are other examples too, Dark Heresy is another interesting horror game that managed to sit between a heroic game and a true horror game, I hope to get into that one in the future.

I want to know what others think though, anyone out there that wants to mention their own ideas of what makes horror work in a video game are welcome to chime in. I hope to hear from people.

Weird vs. Wasted

One thing that I have been doing a lot of lately, and here at the keep, is look at the similarities and differences between Weird and Wasted west. One thing that is probably inevitable from all of this is the question of which one I prefer, and I’ll try to answer that but I will also be putting in qualifiers. When I talk about this it should be noted that both are actually very good and enjoyable and that there is a bit of unfairness in the judgement as Wasted West had a bit of time to learn from Weird West and some of the mistakes or hiccups there. In doing my comparisons and comments I will attempt to be as fair as I can, however I will admit that I have a fairly strong preference for Wasted West over Weird and I hope here to explain why.

One of the biggest reasons that I found Wasted West to work better was that by and large they removed the ‘muggle problem’ that existed in weird west. What I mean is that using the powers of an arcane background in a town was likely to get the people to think you were a witch or monster and thus needed to die. The exceptions for this were mostly the blessed and mad scientists though those weren’t always safe bets either depending on the communities temperaments. In Wasted West supernatural abilities are a bit more widely known, trying to assault a town is likely to get you kicked in the teeth by angry townsfolk merely using the powers isn’t going to get you forcefed into a wood chipper merely for using the power in front of the locals. One of the reasons for this is probably that most people have seen undead, many people have seen or heard about the four horsemen of the apocalypse literally RIDING ACROSS THE UNITED STATES CALIFORNIA TO THE EAST. Ahem, yes as you can see the supernatural is a bit more widely understood and accepted, not to mention things like Psykers being a part of the old militaries as well as cyborgs (more on those later). In essence people might have attitudes on various arcane backgrounds or have rumors but merely using them won’t get the townspeople to either faint dead away or turn green.

I understand that part of the reason for this is a bit of the thematics, in Weird West the people weren’t supposed to know that all this stuff was going on, showing that magic existed was likely to cause panics and havoc. But it also created some problematic situations as well as being a source of some of the imbalance between arcane backgrounds. I guess some of it is also that I prefer not having to have a great big book of euphemisms when I run for the players and the few NPCs in the know to use and/or having to figure out what each side is trying to imply when the group is trying to work out how much the town sheriff or local heroes know about the more… bizarre happenings. The other reason I prefer it is on some level I think that in a lot of ways the masquerade seemed almost to just be window dressing. A good enough stealth or bluff check could let you hide what your hands were doing for hucksters, Shootists (a later introduced arcane background) only had the guns spark or look interesting which is easily covered by mad science, and as for the blessed…well they can just take unnoticeable always on abilities and even if their powers are noticed people figure you’re just righteous and a servant of (insert deity/philosophical principles here). Not to mention that if a monster/cultist/whatever decides to be more overt in an attack on a town rather than just nipping at the edges, or goes for it as a climax half the time the only way to hurt it necessitates using arcane powers which might be why later stuff seems to downplay odd appearances.

The Arcane Backgrounds are also an improvement in a lot of ways too, I brought some of this up in my earlier post when I talked about some of the best and worst arcane backgrounds but I want to go into a bit more detail here. One of the biggest changes was the near universal adoption of the Strain mechanic among the various Arcane Backgrounds, essentially getting rid of a lot of appeasement points and the like and instead simply using strain. This change was big for a few reasons, one was that it made a clear limit to how many times you could use your abilities, strain could be recovered through rest or other means depending on the arcane background but now you didn’t have people able to use their abilities nigh continuously back to back as the Blessed and Hucksters were able to do, the latter only having to worry about backlash. The powers were more codified, you could pump in more strain for greater effects in a few cases and the better a power was the more strain it required but the powers were more in line with one another, less wild and prone to surges of luck. The powers and abilities were also more focused.

Doomsayers abilities were mostly blasting and energy based with a few exceptions, and had a strong theme of radiation and mutation. Doomsayers could develop any power in the base book easily enough through spending bounty points, the ones in supplements required a teacher or an area with radiation so severe that it might kill you, and in the latter there was still a chance that you might not learn the power but still lose the bounty points. Psykers were a bit more versatile, but they had to pick a discipline, they could easily learn any power in that discipline but learning others required teaching machines, training manuals or another psyker, all of this besides spending bounty points to learn powers. Toxic shamans learned from their spirit servants, and their powers were based on the various toxic spheres. Junkers, Templars and Witches were the three arcane backgrounds that went without Strain but instead had other limitations. Junkers needed parts to build their wonders and usually needed G-rays to power them which meant having to find ghost rock. Templars had primarily self only powers that were on constantly but their powers took a lot of work to raise and their one healing ability could only be used once per person per day. Witches were fairly underdeveloped but their concept was using materials to cast spells or work magic, love potions for example or finding baseballs and human skulls to be focuses for spell blasts.

By and large while the backgrounds were still pretty darn potent their limitations both in terms of sustained usage and versatility meant that it was easier or at least more workable for a mundane person to keep pace with them in a game. It could still be imperfect but the elements here did help the arcane backgrounds be more balanced against one another as well as helping make sure that the regular mortals still had practical use and a place in the group as a whole. Weird west did have this as well, but as mentioned in the comments a while back higher point levels things would swing more and more heavily to those with arcane backgrounds for varying reasons.

One other thing that I found useful was that the offense/defense ratios can scale a bit more cleanly than they do in Wasted. In Weird west a player that pours enough starting points into resources (5 points into belongin’s) can have body armor strong enough that it ignores small arms fire and can even let the wearer shrug off a shotgun slug with relatively little consequence, not to mention some nice weaponry and other defensive items. This is somewhat countered by the fact that the items are made by mad science, so they have to have their reliability tested each time they’re hit but it is fairly unlikely to kaput. Armor piercing weaponry is comparatively uncommon, and even what’s there is all mad science, subject to reliability rolls and the ammo that can punch through armor is only going to ignore one layer of armor, for regular guns it won’t work to punch through and for shotguns it only makes them a little better. In Wasted purchasable body armor that players could purchase at character creation were set up in such a way that against normal small arms a player could probably walk away fairly safe, however the minute armor piercing ammunition entered the fray much of it was negated. Armor piercing ammunition was also now ‘standard’ meaning that they didn’t need to worry about reliability and the cost for such ammunition was low enough that it was fairly easily attainable, and ubiquity among various enemies is reasonable.

Heavier armor, stuff that approached what was in Weird West, would either have to be temporarily conjured through the power of an arcane background, created by a junker, or would have to be one of the very expensive suits of power armor. The ones created through Arcane Backgrounds required spending energy to maintain, leaving them somewhat questionable for duration as well as meaning that they couldn’t do other things while the defensive field was up, or in the case of the psyker that an armor piercing bullet just tears straight through it. Junker built armor has to deal with stability rolls, it is also ridiculously heavy, even relatively low armor levels were fairly hard to lug around, a Junker that rolled ridiculously well MIGHT have been able to make a fairly potent lightweight suit of armor but there is still the issue of reliability making your suit fall apart, vanish, go flying around, vanish and leave a giant demon next to you…(the junker mishap table is odd). The third option was a suit of power armor, this was pretty damn expensive, either you poured just about all your starting points into a suit or you were a Veteran of the wasted west and had to deal with the table (and even then you had to spend a ton of points to get the suit). The power armor had some issues as well, it had excellent armor, weapons systems and even muscle and speed boosters but it also required a source of energy to recharge, as they tear through power quickly and recharging them is fairly hard. There was also the fact that the suits could get torn up pretty well, wounds meant that the armor was also damaged, so you had to spend a lot of the fate chips that would become XP in keeping yourself from being injured and the armor from getting wrecked, slowing your character advancement.

Related to armor scaling there is also the fact that it’s harder for the players to reach untouchable status. What I mean by untouchable is this, in my weird west game I had actually gotten to a point where non-supernatural opponents were practically pointless to put up against the group. The reasons were that simply put normal armaments couldn’t threaten them due to body armor and the fact that it also felt odd sending people who had dealt with a werewolf cult attacking a town, managed to fend off Stone twice, and do several other things against regular criminals. I could do things like load up bandits in mad science body armor and other gear, but given the expenses it feels a bit ridiculous if it happens more than once or twice. There are ways around it, maybe the group is backed by a mad scientist, that sort of works but mad scientists need labs and work areas as well as parts. The same sort of thing can happen with Arcane Backgrounds, there are times where it can work but there are a lot of situations where it ends up rather iffy. Supernatural opponents offer more consistent threat to established groups while more mundane ones are more likely to simply get overwhelmed and wiped out. I am however willing to admit that some of this might have also just been a mental block on my part so I am willing to concede that more of it might be me than the game.

In Wasted there are a few ways that threats can scale a bit more reasonably with your group. One thing is simply that mundane guns hit harder and mundane armor isn’t quite as heavy but it can be more common so road gangs with infantry battlesuits or kevlar vests aren’t out of the question. Junkers are another handy thing on this front, in my view junkers are a gift to marshals because in addition to being able to produce some fun and potent tech they also don’t need workstations or big labs to do their thing, so junkers backing road gangs or warlords are quite reasonable, they even reference that sort of thing in some of the books. There is also the handy fact that many of the basic military weapons pack quite a wallop, giving them to a group of normal enemies can still make the players keep their heads down. One other thing is a bit more subtle, I actually missed it when I first thought about it. The walkin’ dead in weird west started to lose effectiveness after a certain point in the game, even the veteran walkin’ dead with guns still had trouble making more experienced players worried, especially since the zombies went through chips like water if they didn’t just get their melons popped immediately. In wasted west the veteran undead, the zombies from soldiers, are now wearing body armor and thick helmets, wielding machine guns with grenade launchers. To be blunt they are a fair amount more threatening, not all of them need to have the full battle armor or grenades, but the fact that they can have it, or other military equipment, makes them far harder to kill and suddenly a lot more threatening to a group of people wandering through a battlefield digging for salvage.

Some of the things in the game can be used with less work on the marshals part, the two big evil armies, Silas Rasmussens Mutant Hordes and the mechanized legions of the Combine. With the mutant hordes there are the evil doomsayers with their radiation powers as well as large groups of aggressive mutants with other abilities, and the radiation priests are while not exactly ubiquitous at least common enough to be usable in decent numbers without feeling strange. With the combine, the standard troops have fairly effective guns as well as the automatons and other advanced tech bots and cyborgs, also giving you space to create bizarre technology to give them to wield against the players. These groups fit in the wastes, they represent the mutant apocalypse or machine uprising popular in post apocalyptic fiction and can actually be faced by the players in different ways. They can be occaisional nuisances that might be run into at towns, in ruins, etc. They can be used as a growing nemesis, telling a story of a dark tyrant wanting to remake the shattered world in their own image, they are a well placed tool for a marshal and their abilities and arsenals make them workable and useful with minimal modification at many different junctures in the game.

I should also though point out that a lot of this has to do with the kind of games that I prefer running and playing in. I like more pulpy action games. A game that is more based in mystery would find an easier home in the Weird West, not to mention my view that horror is probably easier to produce in that version as well. Wasted west can also be a lot more goofy in some regards, killer tomatoes, head cases, robotic killer clowns, while these can be interesting and fun opponents they can also be rather silly for a lot of people and there are plenty who would argue that they don’t belong in Deadlands. I should also point out that Wasted West can easily be considered a more high powered game, so if you prefer lower powered games Weird West might be more for you. I should also bring up the mutation table, mutations themselves are really almost a mini arcane background, though they can make you weak just as easily as making you potent. The standard mutations from the books as well as the major ones from a later supplement could alter the person using it heavily, at best augmenting their physical stats or granting them improved healing or a few special abilities, at worst physical weakness, disgusting appearance, fraility etc. Major mutations were even more severe in swings, a bad pull from the deck could turn you into a giant slug where a good one could give you levels of armor, the ability to regenerate limbs, etc. The mutations can offer incredible things, some made strain recovery easy so long as things died around you for example. I could easily see players either crippled by their mutations or greatly augmented, which also means that some players might just throw their characters into radstorms to try to get a mutation to make themselves better at something. I can see some marshals getting uneasy about the mutation feature and wondering about power balance. I also want it to be understood that while I do find a lot of things in Wasted West to be an improvement I definitely enjoy Weird West and would easily recommend either.

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.

Harrowed, the Accidental Arcane Background

I guess I'll start with addressing the point brought up in 'Badass Normal or Arcane Asskicker' (hooray, a response!). I think that the point brought up is valid but it isn't always universally applicable. The first thing to note is this, Deadlands tends to have a very high rate of turnover and there isn't much saying what happens if a new character is made, in fact the default seems to be that you start over at the base again. In games where the Marshal is a bit kinder and/or where character turnover isn't quite as fast arcane backgrounds can end up becoming far more potent, if only because after you reach a certain level of oomph as a normal it can become quite prohibitively expensive whereas the one with the Arcane Background gets to keep buying powers at 5 points a pop. This might be an area where the system breaks down a bit, but I think that in general the argument I made still stands.

I think that maybe I should bring up the Arcane Background that isn't exactly, the Harrowed. The Harrowed is a bit of an odd duck in that you don't choose it, it really does choose you, or at least it is thrust upon you. A Harrowed is a formerly living person who died, they were someone who had done enough ass kicking in life that a demon of the reckoning decided that said person would be excellent for making mischief with. They enter the person as they die, re-binding the soul to the body and then the fun starts. If you have the time the idea is to run a dream sequence, the player stumbles through their literal worst nightmare. The nightmare is a see-saw game where they and the demon in their head vie for dominion points, the values at the end are used to provide bonuses to the dominion roll (IE who's in charge). The demon might be subtle or overt but they are always hateful, always evil, and if your character is any kind of hero they will not be happy about this. Now the question that might come up is why the hero doesn't just try to end it again, after all the idea of living again is somewhat tainted by the fear of an evil being using your body to cause pain and suffering. Not to mention the obvious concerns of the suffering one is likely to endure at the hands of those wronged by the demon in your head or the risk to people you're close to. The reason is simple, and the demon will often point these out in desperation, since now if you die it faces total oblivion so self preservation is on its end.

The harrowed has some basic advantages, they ignore 3 levels of wound modifiers due to their relative inability to feel pain which is pretty handy by itself. In addition you can heal nearly any injury so long as a limb isn't blown off and you recover quicker than a normal person. Not to mention, only a headshot can take you out now, a bullet to the heart might slow the harrowed down, destroy it and they'll be stunned until they get some meat to eat but it won't keep them down forever. That alone isn't it however, the harrowed also has access to powers, some they begin with and others they can use bounty points to purchase.

These powers run the gamut, some grant further increased healing and recovery even to the poiint of regrowing limbs that were lost (though only those that were lost post mortem, if you have no arm pre mortem you still have no arm). The ability to see in the darkness, being able to call on the fire and winds to strike down enemies, control over the insects that creep over the earth. There was also the old fashioned boost to stats, letting those that chose that go beyond the normal limits of mere mortals granting them some fairly potent physical and mental prowess. There were even powers that granted extra actions or souped up existing arcane backgrounds (hucksters got extra cards for example) as well as stuff that could let you shrug off magic, walk on walls, walk through walls...there were a lot of powers. Most of them tended towards the creepy angle but that made some sense, after all you were a walking dead man animated by a pissed off demon so your powers probably weren't going to look all sweetness and light.

That alone isn't even everything, the harrowed also have the ability to 'count coup.' This has to do with the fact that the Harrowed is now a supernatural being, at least in part. In Weird West the Harrowed is the only one that can count coup, in wasted west everyone can so this one is being mentioned separately. Counting coup works like this, there are some supernatural beings that are so potent that in death they leave a bit of themselves behind, maybe it's a last curse on the earth or maybe it's just that they had so much power you get to lay claim to some of it in their death. Whatever the case you can count coup and absorb some of their essence. Now a group of harrowed has to squabble over abilities, rolling opposed spirit rolls to lay claim to the essence of the being, the winner getting it and the losers not. These powers can be minor or major, they can give small bonuses or they can grant entirely new powers and abilities. While this does depend heavily on what is faced it is arguably one of the more interesting capabilties that a harrowed has.

Becoming a Harrowed though is tricky, it isn't just a matter of dying, if that were all then whole groups of players would have their characters in suicide pacts. The truth is that first of all the character has to die and the head must be intact in death, no gray matter, no harrowed. The next step is that the player draws cards from a shuffled deck (jokers included), they get 1 card base then one extra card for each point of grit earned, grit is capped at 5 for guts checks at least but some Marshals let it keep accumulating for the sake of becoming harrowed. If the player draws a black or red joker a manitou thought they were worth using and decided to make themselves at home. There are other things that can be done and used as well, the dead mans boots net 3 more cards, there is a huckster hex that grants a greater chance of returning but also gives the demon more a chance to stay in charge after the trainsformation, shamans with ghost medicine get an extra card for every ghost medicine favor they have, and even the blessed have a gift which can allow them a better chance to return harrowed.

The harrowed is fairly potent, but there are downsides that the player and group have to deal with. A basic one is distrust, if they discover what their comrade has become they now have to wonder what or who is looking at them from behind those literally dead eyes. There is also the problem that the demon has the ability to randomly try to grab for the reigns and can royally fuck up the group if it grabs at the right time. When the player is in control the demon sees and remembers everything done, when the demon is in control the player has no bloody clue what went on which only makes for more fun. There is also the meta fact that the marshal gets an extra chip that they can use to keep various villains alive or give them better rolls, or just to use to try to help the demon grab the reigns and screw the posse over.

The big advantage the harrowed faces is that most of their powers are fairly cheap considering what they do, a new power costs 10 bounty points and then advancing it costs double the level of the power. With some of these powers you quite get your moneys worth. The other thing to recognize is that this can offer quite a bit to any character, a gunslinger can suddenly become so fast that they can't be beaten on the draw by any mortal. Or perhaps a treasured weapon suddenly becomes infused with arcane power making it stronger, far more potent and maybe adding some abilities to it that didn't exist before. A huckster can suddenly do far more with their hexes, a mad scientist can gain far greater inspiration for creating their devices, in short there are a fair number of interesting options available here for anyone.

Tricking you into Roleplaying

One thing that some people complain about in RPGs is a lack of roleplaying in their games, IE the players just want to fight or they don't seem to know how to 'play' their characters. Encouraging players that are either disinterested in it or inexperienced can be tricky. They might fear causing trouble in a game or they might not see a point to it. There are little ways, give players some kind of incentive to write backstories or roleplay but of course this can be imperfect as well. Do you reward someone for playing a jerk and how do you avoid players trying to 'game' their histories to justify overpowered things?

Believe it or not Deadlands came up with a way to deal with this again and evne managed to make it integral to the game. It starts in character creation, if you want any of the edges (including arcane backgrounds) you need to take flaws. These flaws offer ways to define a character, are you a drunk, unlucky? Maybe your character is a hero, someone who can't turn down a call for help. Perhaps they're utterly loyal to those around them, willing to follow a close friend to the gates of hell and back. Maybe they have an oath they took to do something or not to do it. In short the flaws represent traits of a character and end up either being a handle that someone can yank or a mechanical risk. There are a few exceptions, Death Wish and arguably Grim Servant o' Death being among them.

The big reason it works is this, it manages to actually sidestep many of the traditional problems in games where flaws exist. Consider games that have flaws, frequently players will either take flaws that are very unlikely to come up (IE the archer sucking at melee or spellcasting), have little impact, or the character might sidestep/ignore some of the social flaws. In Deadlands though things work a little differently, see in Deadlands your flaws can actually be a bit more important than any of your edges, and far more valuable.

In Deadlands you got fate chips three ways. One was simply that everyone drew 3 fate chips from the pot of fate (sometimes more or less depending on edges and flaws). The second was as a reward for defeating challenges based on the difficulty thereof. The final bit, and this is probably the most important, is from having your flaws cause you trouble. See, the more your flaws caused you and your friends trouble the more that fate rewarded you. Get a bit inconvenienced, white chip, get in some trouble you got a red chip, end up in a situation where you nearly died or blew an investigation because of your flaw, blue chip.

This actually did a few things, my own group wasn't huge into roleplay but roleplay, especially roleplay where your flaws got you in trouble, got you more chips that could feed powers, negate wounds, restore wind, or just get turned in for bounty points. Your flaws were a means to grow, sure feel free to take flaws that will rarely ever come up, fine with me, it just means that you won't advance as fast as the other players and that you might run out of chips when you're fighting a group of trigger happy bandits or facing down some hell-spawned abomination. Now on the other hand, maybe someone would take flaws that would make trouble for the group, earn a good chunk of chips but make things terrible for the rest of the group. Well at that point maybe they decide to fit your character with a hemp necktie or just bury them in the desert near an anthill with a trail of honey leading to their mouth. Flaws, and having the flaws affect your character, meant you had to roleplay them, had to take consequences but that you also could get some nice stuff out of it.

The second thing that helps bring roleplay in for the game is simply the Veteran edge. Veterans of the Weird and Wasted West (Or Way Out if you play Lost Colony) had to write a 1-3 page backstory for their character, what they faced, what they learned and generally what they did to earn those extra character points. Now it also comes with a random set of kicks to the head on a special table (but the Marshal is encouraged to come up with something unique if they get an idea that fits better or is more interesting than the stuff on the chart.) The backstory helps them ground themselves a bit in their character, get an idea for who the character is and where they came from. It also helps the Marshal out because they can take elements from the writeup and use it to help make the characters feel more a part of the world. In fact one of my favorite things from the campaign that I'm wrapping up was an enemy of one of the players, an enemy that in fact caused him to start on the path to becoming a Texas Ranger and ultimately to be taken down by the posse (with disturbing ease, I have one helluva tough group)

All of this together makes situations where the players will probably WANT to roleplay. And even if it starts out more as them trying to acquire chips they can come to enjoy interacting with the people that populate the game world. At least that's my view of the whole thing. Many other games I have played that use flaws and similar things have trouble on this front, I think this is part of why I'm such a fan of the classic Deadlands games but any other systems out there that offer this are of interest. Have fun and may you rarely fumble.

Badass normal or Arcane asskicker?

One of the big things that intrigued me with Deadlands was the character creation setup where you had the option of grabbing some fairly sweet powers. One of the options was taking an 'Arcane Background' these let you tap into a bit of supernatural mojo you could wield against the creatures of darkness. In Weird west there were a few different options available, the main book gave us the Mad Scientist, the Huckster, the Blessed, and the Shaman.

The Mad Scientist is a brilliant inventor, able to build things that bend or outright break the laws of science and reason, in part because their muses are in fact carrion breathed horrors that sometimes twist the poor scientists mind too much when offering inspiration and cause delusions, paranoia, etc. (to say nothing of crazy hair). The Huckster was a spellcaster that might have had the slogan 'with great power comes great randomness.' The concept was that you had learned to tap the spirit world for power, requiring you to play a hand of poker against a powerful denizen there, if you won you got their power to cast a spell, if you lost you didn't. However if you rolled badly or pulled a black joker you risked the hex going wild, power tearing you apart or your gray matter being kicked around. The Blessed kick ass for the lord, and for other high powers, Christians were the most common but there were also rules for Jews, Taoists, and Muslims. The Blessed were probably the strongest of the arcane backgrounds, if only because they had a collection of 'always on' abilities to choose from as well as invokable miracles, they had some other advantages as well but I'll get to those later. The last core option was the Shaman, in theory it was a fairly potent arcane background available only to those with native american characters. In practice... given enough time to prepare and enough relics and totems to amp your appeasement points and all that and you could have a group of guys in loincloths with clubs destroy a platoon of soldiers in body armor with gattling guns and steam powered tanks while not losing anyone. However they are probably the weakest of the arcane backgrounds, due to both the heavy amount of character resources consumed as well as the far clunkier and problematic system for using effects.

Supplements added some rather unique and interesting new ideas, the voodoo priest, the martial artist, the shootist, and the metal mage (a fusion of mad science and hucksterism). These were a fair amount different but I also have relatively little experience with them save the metal mage and that one is a fusion result, requiring both arcane backgrounds be taken as well as a few unique features. The shootist was essentially a variant of the Huckster, except in this case you channeled arcane energy through your guns. The interesting thing was that arcane backgrounds didn't quite define the character so much as the way they were used did. One person could easily play a Huckster loaded to the gills with various hexes and take edges built around being a better caster while someone else might only have a few hexes that they use to make themselves a more effective detective or gunslinger. A blessed could be a wandering preacher dispensing miracles to various lost souls, a monster hunter that kicks ass for the lord, or someone of faith that a higher power smiles on every now and again. The Mad Scientist is a bit more inevitably required to have a focus with their skills, as they have no real powers to speak of other than their inventing prowess. The Shamans are in a bit of a bind, while they can be many different types of shaman they are unfortunately strongly tied to their background moreso than others, but that might fit the theme.

This is not to assume, however, that everyone is or even should have an arcane background. In fact it is quite easy to make a very potent character that has no knowledge or use for such powers. You could easily build a gunslinger that can draw quicker than lightning, stare down a grizzly, and see a horde of death and terror and do little more than give a sigh of vexation that you might not have enough ammo. This is one of the advantages in Deadlands came from, there is actually an argument that could be made that the mundane characters were stronger than the magically powered ones, or at the very least were their rough equals.

One reason for this is simply a matter of the nature of the world. By and large the 'normals' had no bloody clue about the supernatural other than a few vague rumors here and there. Using supernatural powers in a public place is a major no-no, the lone exceptions to this would probably be the Blessed and the Shamans, though the Shamans only really count within tribal lands. The Blessed powers frequently either didn't get noticed or are the equivalent to modern faith healers (except in this case they would actually work!) Huckster powers are usually quite flashy and fairly destructive, a huckster that used his powers to drive off some bandits would probably end up lynched by a terrified town that they tried to save or they'd end up being threatened, press ganged, imprisoned or killed by either the Agency or the Texas Rangers depending on which side of the border they happened to be on. There is also the fact that the Huckster powers show flashing cards in the hand of the huckster using the hex, and remember this is in addition to the normal risks of their hexes backlashing and tearing their bodies or minds apart. A gunslinger on the other hand can just raise a pair of pistols and stare down the enemy with nothing more than a bit of cussed willpower and a good shooting arm and get a much better result from the town.

There is also a more basic principal in play, advancing with arcane backgrounds eats up character points. Raising casting skills cost bounty points, buying new powers costs bounty points, buying new edges to augment your arcane background eats bounty points. Remember that odds are they also need to augment existing skills or pick up new ones too, unless they either have an 'acceptable' background or they plan to avoid towns and heavily populated areas like the plague. Conversely the normal just needs to buy up a new regular edge or kick up skills, giving them a better chance to hit and in some cases making it harder for them to be affected. There is also a secondary edge here, though it's a bit debatable. Players get bounty points by turning in fate chips at the end of a session, fate chips can be used to restore wind, negate wounds, power abilities, etc. A player with an arcane background is likely to burn chips on powers, as well as needing more points to keep building up their armada so they have to either accept being wounded more often or advance more slowly. 5 bounty points might buy one power for someone with an arcane background but for a normal that can be more skills or a new edge. They can get more with fewer points, this also means that they can be a bit freer during battles and when they do use points they'll tend to stretch further.

I want to get more into Arcane Backgrounds in the future, both in classic and wasted west.