A whole new world o’ hurt
While there are some well-known and even good Wild West RPGs to choose from, there is no single game with the same ubiquity that, say, Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller or Call of Cthulhu bring to their respective genres. Until now?
From the 1880’s travelling sideshows of Buffalo Bill to the height of the Hollywood Western, the myths of the Wild West have been reinvented again and again, dragged from cliche into brutal realism. In gaming, the genere is often mashed up into the Weird West of aliens and tentacles, which is fine. But I was excited to stumble across the Effekt team’s podcast, which for the past few years, in their charmingly shambolic fashion, has diarised their efforts to create a realistic Wild West RPG system with modern sensibilities. And that game is Tales of the Old West. No vampires or robot horses here. Just iron and syphilis. When the Kickstarter launched I was all in, like a drunken prospector falling down a mine shaft.
Now it’s arrived, here’s some first impressions after playing one game.
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Published under Free League’s Year Zero Engine Free Tabletop Licence, Tales stretches this lovely rules engine into both new and familiar shapes. Lifted from Coreolis, re-rolling or ‘pushing’ a roll requires spending from a limited pool of Faith points. This up-front cost makes choosing whether to push a tough decision, particularly when combined with Tale’s fiendish Trouble Table. As standard in Year Zero, sixes are successes and ones usually have no effect, but on choosing to push a roll any ones already rolled become locked, on up to five of your original dice. Then, along with any additional ones from the pushed roll, they are used to consult the Trouble Table for consequences to your efforts – even if the push results in a success!
Handily reproduced on the GM screen, the Trouble Table has a big job to do. It has to randomly generate inspiration for a mounting series of problems, stuff ups, clusterfucks and careening shitshows, with prompts the GM must be able to apply to every diabolical situation the players get themselves into.
Anyone familiar with Year Zero will find the rest of the rules mostly intuitive. Getting used to the limitations of the era’s firearms will take a session or two – remembering that single action revolvers and lever action rifles require preparation as a fast action before being fired as a slow action. This limitation initially seems to be balanced against no action being needed for movement in combat. This would seem to be a good idea, but could be open to abuse.
The setting chapters are enormously detailed and though presented as ‘the New Mexico campaign’, this is a sandbox game, festooned with story hooks while leaving enough room for the players to shape their own destiny. Players are given the tools to build their own town, like Deadwood, and it’s the players’ ambitions that will also drive the narrative. There are comprehensive rules for determining your town’s fortunes through the ‘Turn of a Season’, similar to Pendragon’s Winter Phase. A bad harvest could have devastating effects, or a sudden influx of cash could attract the wrong kind of attention. You might think this makes Tales a glorified farming simulator and you’d be right, but it’s bigger than that and there’s no obligation to play that way should you choose differently.
A particularly impressive feature is Effekt’s efforts to portray the Wild West’s true cultural diversity, by foregrounding Native American, Mexican, African American and female stories as playable characters with compelling backstories. They do this with an incredible lifepath character generator that I can’t wait to use at the table.
For my first play, there’s some pregens that come with a free ‘Quickdraw’ starter set on DriveThru, but I felt that story came frontloaded with too much background for a group that just wanted to get cracking. Whereas the introductory scenario from the core book presents an initially simpler story of a kidnapped girl who needs rescuin’.
Bellies primed with whiskey, my players began by deployed some truly horrendous American accents that rapidly degenerated into sheer nonsense, but this was quickly contrasted with the moral twists in the tale. A few hours later, they presided over an absolute blood bath, which included the bare-handed slaughter of a dog and the murder of three unarmed men who, while clearly up to no good, had not actually been witnessed committing any crime. A late night forced an abridged session, otherwise there would have been a shitstorm of consequence for these murder hobos.
The game’s default ‘build-you-own-town’ setting would likely prevent this kind of behaviour in regular play, as the sandbox reacts to the player’s choices. And therein lies what I suspect will be this game’s real challenge. Tales of the Old West asks the GM to do an awful lot of work. This sandbox is wide open, with enough material for potentially years of play. There’s a lot to track and dozens of NPCs. There’s plenty of ideas and signposts to follow, and the players’ choices will also contribute to the world building, but there’s no getting around the fact that the GM will need to thoroughly marinate in this setting. Of course, for the right player that can be part of the fun.
At least most people will have a shorthand understanding of this setting. More so than when I’ve had to introduce new players to the technologies and horrors of the 1920s in Call of Cthulhu, of which I am currently running two campaigns. And after one of those wraps up, my next group will find themselves in a whole new world of hurt. One lovingly created by Effekt that deserves any and every accolade it gets.