One of my favorite roleplaying settings of all time is Deadlands – a juicy little setting that combines westerns, steampunk, Cthulhu, alternate history, time travel, and zombies into a rich, tasty package.
Unfortunately, Deadlands is also the poster child for a style of roleplaying I love that is always doomed to failure.
But lemme fill you in a bit on the Deadlands history first. See, in 1863, a group of Indians had had enough with being beaten down by the white man, so a batch of them travelled secretly to the Hunting Grounds and broke the bonds on all the evil Manitou that had been bound there to release magic back to the world.
The first the white men found out about this was on the field of Gettysburg, where the North and South shot at each other. And as each man fell, they rose as zombies and chewed both sides to bits.
The Indian nations, fueled by magic, suddenly thundered forth to carve out a territory of their own, and both the North and South found themselves fighting on two fronts, unable to make headway. Ten years later, they’re still at a grudging war, brought to a virtual standstill.
The white man’s also learned to use magic, which they do by playing cards with the Manitou, betting their very souls to cast spells. And they’ve also learned how to fuse magic with mad science, creating all sorts of crazy ghost rock-fuelled gadgets.
But the Manitou are evil, and their end goal was to turn the world into a place of utter fear and terror so the Reckoners could be unleashed. The wars were good, but they wanted more – so they created the foulest monsters, dredged up from the subconscious, and now all sorts of ghoulies and critters are roaming the Weird West that need to be defeated.
Enter the heroes.
The nice thing about Deadlands is that it clearly has a Story, and each sourcebook advanced that tale a little. You’d get the latest supplement and discover “Oh, the North’s now in control of Shan Fan,” or find that in fact the plots that Character X had to make a railway to the West Coast had fallen apart. And there were rich secrets to be discovered (my favorite? Discovering that the leader of the Southern Confederate Alliance had been taken over by a doppelganger bent on hell and destruction).
Things happened when you weren’t around. Which was an incentive to pick up the new books. You had movers and shakers in the Weird West that you got attached to, and wanted to see what happened to them.
Now, Deadlands isn’t perfect. It has perhaps the most flavorful mechanic system ever devised, using both poker chips and a deck of cards – so cool - but the mechanics are complex and difficult to learn. Worse, some of the characters are outright useless (I played a Huckster, the guy who plays cards with demons, only to have them admit in later supplements that you wound up getting fried three times as often as the other PCs).
And Deadlands is the deadliest game around, if you play it straight out of the box. You have to make Guts checks every time you encounter a monster, which pretty much kills you, and every firefight is deadly. They have pre-planned adventures, but looking at them and the stingy rewards you get at the end of them, one wonders how any PCs survived to the end of any of them.
But the real problem with Deadlands? It has a Story to tell.
See, I’ve been rereading the supplements lately (when I’m down, RPGs are my comfort reading), and I couldn’t remember how the story ended. I remembered that everything did in fact get wrapped up and the Reckoners were disposed of, but I was surprised given how well I remembered the rest of it that I couldn’t remember the ending.
So I read Unity, the final Deadlands supplement. And remembered how terrible it was.
The story was actually pretty good. It wrapped up things. But as an adventure, which it was supposed to be, it sucked.
Unity is pretty much this:
“Go here and fail to save this important character who does better things than you do, who must die to advance the plot. Then go here and have another important character save your bacon from the hordes of evil armies. Then a third important character handles the Reckoners for you, and you play his errand boy.”
The thing is, I like dynamic worlds. As a reader, I like RPGs that have some movement – the world of D&D isn’t that interesting to me, mainly because it never really changes. Deadlands is great because it feels like history.
As a player, however, I want the ability to affect that. And when you have A Story to tell, you can’t really knock it far off-track. If you somehow, via a Herculean effort, manage to kill the mayor of Shan Fan and take control, you have now diverged from the official storyline and all future supplements don’t apply to you. And if you can’t do that, then what’s the point of roleplaying?
As a GM, I try to allow my characters to attempt anything. There are some things they’re vastly unlikely to succeed at, and some things that are downright foolish – as in, “If you do this, I am not going to attempt to pull your fat out of the fire, which may lead to a TPK” – but they can try anything. And in some cases, they’ve succeeded wildly.
When you have A Story, however, that’s hard to do. The PCs can’t stop the Modron March, or if they do then whoops the future supplements are worthless. That’s a bad place to be in. You have to leave the villains there for other PCs to fight.
Deadlands tried gamely to fight this. They had the rule of “If you stat it, they will kill it,” so wisely they did not give statistics for the biggest and most vital player characters. And they held votes from various groups around the world – if enough PCs succeeded in this module here, then the official storyline would reflect that victory. If they failed, then the storyline would reflect the failure.
But in the end, Deadlands, though a compelling read, is ultimately a failure as a roleplaying game because it puts the characters in a little box. And that’s never fun.
Sadly, my favorite game, Planescape, did that as well… But that’s a story for another day.
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