Ninja and Pirates get their due... But what of Cowboys?

[Gentlegamer]

Isn't D&D a bit Wild West by default?

 

[adwyn]

Given how many loner types in OD&D and 1st Ed were just wanna be Clint Eastwoods I'd say the "cowboy" persona is at the core of most characters already.

 

[Wik]

When people talk about putting westerns in a fantasy game, I always wind up thinking of Kurosawa films, or something.

 

[DonTadow]

We once had a very fun story arch in a former d and d campaign where we found this tower that took us to different dimensions (ala sliders). We went to the different dimenssions, got artifacts, brought them back to faerun and sold them.

We dimensioned into one world that was very wild west. We appeared next to this train on horses and tried to catch up with it to ask questions. One average muddling party encounter later, soldiers dressed as mages are shooting pistols at us believing we're trying to rob the train. A nice fireball later, and hte train is distroyed, unforunately that was when we found out it was a western train version of the harry potter movies (complete with the cast of harry potter).

After we moved into town we laid low and got some jobs protecting a saloon from one of the brothel workers boyfriend whom was coming back to town. During some pretty cool encounters we had a shootout, got to jump out of a 2nd story window onto a speeding horse and rescue the damsel in distress in a quickdraw match.

 

[Klaus]

Here's a bit of the story behind my initial query:

I was watching Xiaolin Showdown, and Clay (the kung-fu cowboy) had won a Showdown against Jack Spicer in front of his dad (also a cowboy). And then we got to see Clay with the sheng gong wu (magic items) he won, standing next to his dragon pal Dojo. So the image of a cowboy standing next to a chinese dragon holding a sword struck me as a neat juxtaposition.

The closest I got to Wild West Fantasy was a short-lived Red Steel game. One of the PCs was an Honorbound fighter from Cimarron County, complete with sword and wheellock pistol.

 

[Andor]

It's sad but cowboys will just never be this cool.

 

[Slife]

You mean kind of like boktai?


Well, I guess it's more like a high-fantasy horror western, but two out of three isn't half bad.

 

[Ranger REG]

So Ninja and Pirates are the epitome of cool. But what of them Cowboys? Anyone tried to add a Wild West feel to a fantasy campaign? Long dustcoats, sword duels at noon, marshalls crossing the badlands to bring a criminal to justice...

I dunno. Kinda hard to picture cowboys without their guns. Since cowboys owed their existence to the vaqueros (which somehow got bastardized into the English "Buckaroo"), where and when does the vaqueros come from? I thought they originate during the early firearms period in Central America.

How about Europe? Don't they develop ranching?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Cowboys & Indians feels so 1950's ... Boot Hill notwithstanding.

I think the problem is guns -- which, frankly, d20 still doesn't handle very well.

 

[Ranger REG]

I think the problem is guns -- which, frankly, d20 still doesn't handle very well.

Not enough damage to be scared of them, even though they don't have the same psychological effect of a wizards' fireball?