RPG Archive: Boot Hill Wild West RPG

Return to the American Wild West for gunfights, cattle wrangling, railroad building, bringing criminals to justice, and more in Boot Hill.
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Boot Hill - Wild West Role-Playing Game (Third Edition) is fifty years old counting from the first edition. It evolved from a mostly miniature based combat simulator into a full-fledged RPG with a breadth of adventures, from range wars to ballots boxes, some of which still hold up and are well worth running. The third edition of Boot Hill contains a more robust set of RPG mechanics to go with shootouts and other physical challenges.

Who Are the Player Characters?

Boot Hill does not define who characters are but what they do. Therefore, any human being from anywhere in the world present in the Wild West could be a player character. Boot Hill defines the American Wild West as running from 1848, when gold was discovered in California, to 1912 when the final territories became states and shut down the frontier.

What Adventures Do the PCs Embark On?

Broadly, Boot Hill defines 57 work skills and five weapon skills. The work skills range from thief skills to wilderness skills to knowledge of Cow Handling, the Fast Draw, Medicine, Wrangling, and many more. Skills are roll under using a d20 with combat skills having a different set of in depth rules.

Specifically, PCs earn experience points in order of value for: surviving a gunfight, bringing a criminal to justice, winning a brawl, coming up with a brilliant idea that saves the day or resolves an adventure, using a work skill, and simply playing the game. While combat may net the most experience points it is also the most dangerous, so many PCs may spend plenty of time thinking their way out of trouble and working using their work skills which in turn will generate further adventures.

The game covers shootouts, brawling, and explosives in detail along with horse riding and horse quality. It covers an esoteric ranges of other topics like safe cracking, bronc busting, and gambling.

GM Tools: NPCs

Multiple NPCs are detailed including 11 pages of game states in table format for both fictional NPCs and historical NPCs. NPCs have a surprising amount of detail to guide GMs. Each NPC has two optional attributes: Bravery and Greed. Each is rolled when an NPC’s reaction to fear and stress or a chance at self-interest are tested respectively. This addition takes a bit of stress off of the GM trying to make decision after decision for a variety of NPCs and can serve either as a guide or a final decision maker. NPC reactions to PCs receives quite a bit of detail, again helping guide the GM to resolving various encounters.

GM Tools: The Western Campaign

Because bringing criminals to justice nets XP, the GM is provided with details on frontier justice including vigilantes, posses, loot (for robberies), and rewards for bringing in the bad guys. GMs also get rules for healing, intoxication, the cost of living including rations, and how to use a campaign map for tracking movement. A random encounter table for use with traveling is included.

Two possible campaigns are discussed along with several campaign seeds. There is a brief discussion on bringing in horror elements into a campaign. A bibliography, glossary, main street map, and large town map round things out.

With details on a larger setting with a map, a town with a map, NPCs including statistics and possible reactions, and various adventure seeds and encounters a GM is well supported to run a Wild West campaign.

Boot Hill: Is It Still Worth Getting?

Boot Hill as print on demand with PDF costs $18.99. It covers an entire game system and the bare bones of setting with maps and encounters. It includes well-tested roll under skills, combat (including shooting and brawling), nearly 60 job-related skills, robust NPCs, horses, an adventure, and campaign information including maps. If you want to run the Wild West, then yes it is an outstanding value.

For being decades old, Boot Hill is surprisingly well-designed. The things PCs can do to earn XP are well covered with rules. Roll under using a d20 systems are still going strong today and the combat rules are well detailed. The GM has plenty of support and a robust system for portraying and running NPCs. There are even maps included. While this RPG Archive article doesn’t have the space to cover the five available adventures, a GM would be well supported for running political shenanigans with BH3: Ballots & Bullets, a range war using BH5: Range War!, or a more D&D-esque wilderness and mine crawl in BH2: Lost Conquistador Mine. And if you can snag a copy of the actual boxed set itself, you get a poster town map and wilderness setting along with tiny punch out cardboard chits of PCs and NPCs to use on the town map along with a GM screen.

Highly recommended.

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Charles Dunwoody

Charles Dunwoody


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Right, but I was talking about the subgenre of Revisionist Westerns that was peaking around 1985-1995. Silverado was not a revisionist Western, but more traditional.
Ah, I missed that. Not to be obtuse, but can you expound more on what qualities make a "Revisionist Western" to you? I am not seeing the distinction.
 

Ah, I missed that. Not to be obtuse, but can you expound more on what qualities make a "Revisionist Western" to you? I am not seeing the distinction.
Usually a revisionist western is one that subverts the traditional conventions found in westerns such as the inclusion of morally ambiguous "heroes," a little less myth and a little more realism, and by not providing a clear line between the black hats and the white hats. I honestly find it rather difficult at times to figure out whether a movie is considered a revisionist western. Wikipedia lists The Searchers (1956) on it's list of revisionist westerns but not Fort Apache (1948). Fort Apache was one of the earliest Hollywood westerns that treated Native Americans with sympathy and depicted the commanding officer of the fort as a piss poor commander who only got himself and others killed.

The Great Train Robbery (1903) is on Wikipedia's list of revisionist westerns even though it's article notes "Though it did not significantly influence or advance the Western film genre upon release, it was widely distributed and copied, including in a parody by Porter himself." How the heck is it a revisionist western then?

I don't typically get into arguments over whether a work of fiction belongs in one genre or another. If someone wants to call something a revisionist western (sigh), fine. We can still talk about what makes that movie good.
 


Ah, I missed that. Not to be obtuse, but can you expound more on what qualities make a "Revisionist Western" to you? I am not seeing the distinction.
"Western" is a actually two things. It's a history, and it's a mythology. "Revisionist" compares and contrasts the two.

It's like the 2004 King Arthur film, set in the historical 5th century with no knights in shining armour.
 

D&D owes a huge debt to westerns. Real medieval villages didn't have a general store and a tavern. Everyone was serfs, beholden to a lord. Armed strangers couldn't ride into town and get up to shenanigans.
While I don't really view D&D as a western, mainly because it shares so few of the tropes, I do agree it shares a debt. As the Old West isn't really the same as the historical west, D&D is more like a Renaissance Faire which isn't anything like either the medieval or renaissance period. In the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set, the city actually had laws to control the carrying of weapons. PCs needed to pay some sort tax to carry certain weapons, other weapons were outright banned, and there were locations where one simply couldn't carry a weapon at all. Not unlike the actual historical western town where you weren't permitted to sashay around town with a six-shooter on your hip.

I think most D&D campaigns ignore a lot of logic for the sake of playing the game.
 

"Western" is a actually two things. It's a history, and it's a mythology. "Revisionist" compares and contrasts the two.

Well, that's certainly one reasonable example of revisionism. However, you can also question the history with more accurate history, or question the mythology by exaggerating aspects of the mythology to bring them into focus and ask questions like, "Why should a killer be made a mythical hero?"

My biggest problem with Revisionism when it comes to Westerns is that there is often a lack of self-awareness in the genre where the people making the movies don't realize that the movies that they are using as a reference were themselves revisionist and asking the same sort of questions. "Shane", "High Noon", "The Searchers", "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance", "True Grit", and "The Shootist" are all already Revisionist movies that would in many ways be shocking to the audience of the 1930s. When the audience you are producing a revisionist piece for is no longer in touch with either the history or the mythology, and indeed their only points of reference are themselves revisionist, then it gets to be comparing one revisionist narrative to another with nothing left (for me) but shock value.

That said, I did like both versions of "True Grit".
 

Rumor has it Steven Spielberg is looking to make a Western for his next film. Not sure if that will be enough...
It'll probably be good, but we haven't exactly seen, say, World War II films come roaring back despite him making some really wonderful ones (and Tom Hanks making amazing TV miniseries set during the war).
 

Let me get on my soapbox.

D&D owes a huge debt to westerns. Real medieval villages didn't have a general store and a tavern. Everyone was serfs, beholden to a lord. Armed strangers couldn't ride into town and get up to shenanigans.

The way we play D&D is a western disguised as medieval Europe.
I had a thread on that last year! For my next from-scratch campaign, I think I'm going to start by creating a Western setting and then turning it into D&D and seeing what that looks like. I suspect it'll be a pretty natural fit.
 

It's worth saying: Westerns as a genre almost always have an audience; it's seldom a big one.

Also worth noting: a lot of classroom games about the Oregon Trail are written (teacherspayteachers.com has over 40), targeting various ages and educational standards. I suspect that they provide a net negative on interest in the genre, because, to be blunt, many suck... they focus more upon the standards than on gameplay, and both fun and learning suffer for it. The literary genre and film genre are wide... but much of the focus educationally is upon the Oregon Trail.
 

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