How Wild is your Western game?

At first thought, the Old West gaming genre is pretty straightforward; Gun fights, heroic but sometimes law-dodging cowboys and sneaky Indians, right out of a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood western movie. Or maybe a Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey western novel.

A deeper consideration of the genre reveals a lot more variety in potential campaign styles. Let's take a look at some of the possibilities.

Straight Historical Reenactment
This approach has its merits, especially if you are using the game as a tool to teach US (or Mexican or Canadian) history of the 19th century. With the advent of the internet, researching old west history is a simple matter of spending a little while on Google and taking some notes, and maps, authentic photographs from the actual era and other resources (like the Montgomery Wards catalog I posted about last time) are easy to find and put to use.

The problem here is that you either quickly venture into alternate history, which is fine of course (see the next setting option, below), or you severely limit what the players' characters can do without changing history. What if they're drinking at Nuttal & Mann's Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood on August 2nd, 1876? Best be sure to make sure they don't interfere with a certain infamous shooting! Even worse, historically speaking, what if they happen to catch the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater on April 14th, 1865, notice a suspicious looking character sneaking around and thwart JW Booth's evil plan?

Players in a strictly historical campaign will naturally want to have "cameos" at major historical events, otherwise, what's the point of being strict about the history part? If they are stuck in your fictitious town of Tumbleweeds, Arizona Territory and never meet any "celebrities" of the era, you're not really playing Straight History anyway. Ensuring the PCs get to witness history as it happens, and feel like they are contributing to, but not altering, the course of real events will take a lot of planning and consideration.


Alternate History Campaign

This is actually a very popular approach to Role Playing Games in the old west. Such notable titles as Deadlands (which also falls into the "weird west" and "steampunk" setting options, which I'll touch on later) and Aces & Eights employ the use of a familiar but different history, where the events of the world up till around the American Civil War occurred as recorded in our history books, but then something happened that changed the timeline, often in major ways.

I personally do not enjoy gaming in a post 1870 setting where the Civil War is either dragging on, or had a completely different outcome, but your mileage may vary. There are of course other historical turning points you could use to shift the course of events. A few ideas:

• Napolean Bonaparte never sells the Louisiana Territory to the US under President Jefferson. Explorers and colonists from the new US nation must contend with French occupants and defenders while attempting to settle the west.
• Mexican troops under Santa Anna defeat the army of the US in the Mexican/American War of 1846-1848, leading to ongoing confrontations over the colonization (not to mention water rights and mining claims) in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and much of California, which remain Mexican territory.
• Texas, after winning its independence from Mexico in 1836, never joins the United States in 1846, creating a third party in the conflicts over midwestern and southwestern territories.
• The Utah War of 1857-1858 takes a decidedly more violent turn and the Utah Mormons' defeat of the US army leads to the creation of the nation of Deseret, consisting of modern Utah, Nevada, Northern Arizona and bits of other bordering states. Rumors say Deseret now has eyes on the Colorado river's mouth at the Gulf of Cortez or even the harbor at San Diego for a pacific port!
• Combine the last two options to have a crazy complicated political and military situation in the southwest and Rocky Mountain regions!
• The telephone and automobile never get invented, and the old west era stretches well into the early 20th century. What new technological advances will you bring into the setting?

I don't want to ramble too long, or overload your imagination with too many options, so will pause here for now. Next time, we'll discuss the "Semi-Historical" and "Steampunk" campaign options, and then finally wrap things up with a look at "Weird West" and "Sixguns & Sorcery" campaigns.

Please post a comment with any comments or suggestions, including other interesting alternate timeline ideas!