Deadlands - My Own Thread

[ValhallaGH]

As far as adventures go, any of the One Sheets will work as an introduction. That said, it's best to pick an adventure that lets you segue into your campaign easily.

If you don't have a Campaign worked out yet then just have them wander from random thing to random thing until you get your inspiration figured out.


If you absolutely need to read some gameplay stories, then start going through some of the threads here and here.

Good luck.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Thanks Valhalla - I will take a look at those thread in the hope they discuss particular adventures.

In the long run I am hoping to run a campaign, but right now we just want to try a few one-shot adventures to try the Savage Worlds system. Hence my wanting to know about good beginners' adventures.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Savage Worlds Powers

In Test Drive rules it talks about powers, but how MANY powers does one get with character generation.

The Deadlands pregens are odd. 3 have arcane edges. 1 has one power, 1 has 2 powers and the other none listed. (Is this right?) One also has 10 Power Points and the other 20. Can this be?

How is all this determined? Is is so many powers per choice the appropriate edge or ???

 

[amerigoV]

Although a campy movie, Undead or Alive (2007) does capture the key points of Deadlands (the West, Zombies, and a fun ending).

On the pregens:

Doc has the Weird Science edge. He makes items and they have the full amount (so his 20 PPs are not spread among the powers). As he gains Powers in the future, he makes another device and it also has 20PPs). Gazetteer allows him to rig up stuff using any power the settling allows for him (subject to Rank) with half his PPs (no regen on the PPs for this item - a consumable).

Shady is Huckster. If you do not have the setting, I would double his PPs to 20. In the setting, you can "deal with the devil" to power your spells. It basically is playing poker with a spirit. So up his PP and cast as normal.

Father Sam also uses Deadlands special rules. Basically, they can cast anything cleic (you are calling on God, so just pray for what you want) but their is a tough Faith check (failure is rather punative). You might just revert to the core rules if you do not have Deadlands. Give him 2 Powers and 10 PPs, remove Conviction (setting specific), and in its place either give +5 PPs or another power.

Deadlands shows how you can modify the Arcane edge to really give a different feel to magic. Without the book, you need to fall back to the core rules.

 

[Rel]

I was confused about the pregens when I used them too. They make a lot more sense when you've got the book in hand.

I ran a short (about 10-12 sessions) Deadlands campaign after I got the book back in April. My primary goal was to run some sort of Savage Worlds game as an ongoing campaign since my group had only ever played SW as one-shots. When I was trotting out possible campaign settings, Deadlands was the one that struck a chord with the players the most. And why wouldn't it? It's cool as hell.

I structured my campaign less like I normally would and more as a "tour of the Deadlands setting". As such it was very episodic, with each session being its own adventure. I started them off with the Buffalo Soldiers one-sheet. It served to get things started as well as take them to the town that would be home for the first 1/3 of the campaign: Deadwood.

I loved the TV show and used lots of the characters therein to lend the town plenty of personality. There was lots of...um...colorful language. The adventures in town focused on a few things: Conflict between the Sioux and the Deadwood settlers, the coming of the Iron Dragon rail to town, and the discovery of a small Ghost Rock deposit in addition to all the gold there was to be found there.

Ultimately the PC's ran afoul of the Iron Dragon Chinese Warlords and, on the advice of Al Swearengen, they got the hell out of town headed south. They had a tangle with some werewolves up in the mountains before making their way to Denver and getting in the middle of some of the S&R v. Hellstrome stuff there. Also in Denver I had a pretty cool shooting contest that I pulled out of the movie 'Winchester '73', which I highly recommend.

There was a short side trip back east to Chicago where one of the PC's picked up a mysterious package full of California money, which was mostly worthless anywhere but California. This spurred them on to the final portion of the campaign that had them heading out west.

On their journey they passed through Bad Luck Pass, which got renamed "Jackelope Pass" after it was discovered what was causing all the bad luck. And they got to meet a Utah Rattler up close and personal, the defeat (by the skin of their teeth) of which impressed both the Comanche and the soldiers of Fort 51. Finally they got to California proper.

That was where the member of the party with the mysterious inheritance discovered that the money was seed money left by his father (a U.S. Senator from Mass.) to start a Ghost Rock mine in the California Maze. The group did battle with some Maze Pirates and giant sharks before arriving at the claim, which (cliffhanger ending style) was being held by the Mexicans!


All in all it was a very fun campaign. I did note that the episodic nature with few recurring groups of bad guys, combined with the fact that I drove most of the action rather than the players, meant that the ending didn't feel climactic the way I like most campaign endings to feel. That was by design and could have been anticipated but I wish I'd done a little bit better job of managing that. Like I said, the whole design of the game was to be more of a "tour of Deadlands" rather than my normal, plot hook heavy, type of campaign.

The good news is that the group loved the setting and one of the players is thinking of running it when next he gets a chance to GM.

 

[Templeton580]

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[Rel]

Sounds like a great campaign, Rel. Can you go into detail on the shooting contest, with regard to the general setup and mechanics? I love those sorts of non-combat scenes, so I'm always keen to hear new methods for doing them.

I struggled with it a bit before the simplest of ideas hit me: Just adjudicate it on the fly by having the PC (or NPC) describe the shot in question.

Essentially the notion was that each participant would take turns calling a shot and then attempting it. The other participants had to make the shot or be eliminated. I think the first to lead off was the Deputy Marshall of Denver and he started simply with "hit this playing card at a range of 50 paces". Still (barely) short range for the rifle (it was a Winchester '76 that was just being rolled out in my game, set in 1876) at a Small target (-4) so the target number for the shooting roll was 8. Two of the NPC's (including the one who called it) and two of my PC's made the shot, narrowing the field to 4.

The "gunslinger" PC from my game was up. He had the Steady Hands edge and opted to shoot from horseback at the same playing card at the same range. So that would be -4 for Small Target plus another -2 for Unstable Platform (except the PC who called it negated that penalty). Target Number 10. The other PC and the NPC who wasn't the Deputy both failed it.

So then the Deputy got to call the shot again and he went with a silver dollar thrown into the air. That was a Tiny target (-6) and I added an extra -2 for having to coordinate the throw with the shooting (effectively a multi-action penalty I guess). So Target Number 12 on that shooting roll. The Deputy made it with IIRC a 14 after spending his only Bennie. The PC failed it badly, re-rolled with a bennie and got an 11. He decided not to chase his losses (after all, he was a two fisted gunslinger and didn't much need a longarm anyway) and conceded the contest to the Deputy.

The group all agreed that it was a fun challenge of their (fairly impressive) shooting skills and were fine with the fact that the Deputy came away the winner. As a result they ended up being hired by Smith & Robards to guard a shipment on a train because the agent from S&R "saw what a fine bunch of marksmen they were during the contest". And the Deputy was favorably disposed toward them later when they had to explain about the big shootout with some Hellstrome mad scientists while they were guarding the S&R shipment on the train.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Painted Minis

So, does anyone have a bunch of painted Deadlands / Weird West minis they would like to sell

Thanks to others providing links, I found 2 prepainted sets for sale. (Haven't bought them yet, but I know they are out there). From Rel4 or something like that.

So are there any others? (Please don't include non-painted (I found a site that lists MANY western miniatures) or suggest counters (I am not interested in counters at all and would rather use my Star Wars and DND minis if that was the case).

 

[Rel]

So are there any others? (Please don't include non-painted (I found a site that lists MANY western miniatures) or suggest counters (I am not interested in counters at all and would rather use my Star Wars and DND minis if that was the case).

If you don't mind my asking, is there a reason you're so opposed to counters? I much prefer figures myself but I also run some kind of off the wall games (Deadlands and Space: 1889 being good examples) that figures are hard to find for. I started printing off small pictures for my Deadlands game and punching them out with one of my wife's scrapbooking punches and they work well for that game in my opinion. I also found that they were pretty handy at GenCon because I could transport several dozen counters in the same space as I could 2 minis.

Anyway I was just curious.

 

[Connorsrpg]

I guess I have always used minis. I find them more important than the battlemat. I guess it is their 3d nature and ease of use (counters too fiddly...and of course they look much better.

Flat counters just don't do it for me after years of using minis. I even printed out and glued triangular figure flats. Very tedious and still didn't have the feel. In the end I used the figure flats to pass around to show what the people looked like and used a mixture of DnD and Star Wars minis to represent them. (This was a one-off Pulp! game).

I often use dominoes, etc for 3d walls too. Even over battle mats. I guess it is a 3d vs 2d thing mainly.

C