I bought the original Deadlands back in the ’90s, read it, liked a lot of it…and found other bits were wildly problematic. I never got to play it at the time and recently (last few years), Pinnacle has updated the setting to remove many (most...all?) of the problematic elements. So I want to give the Deadlands setting a look.
Deadlands was one of my favorite games from the 1990s. The only problematic aspect of the original setting, that I can recall, was the Confederate States of America still existing in 1876 where they abolished slavery voluntarily. While I believe this setting decision was made to ensure the game was fun and provide a cold war Spy vs. Spy atmosphere, that state of affair certainly plays into the hands of the Lost Cause narrative and I understand why people found it off putting. My biggest problem was that I could accept undead gunslingers, poker wizards, and mad scientist, but could not suspect my disbelief enough to accept a Civil War where the South essentiall won. But the new version of Deadlands did away with the CSA with its defeat in 1871 instead of 1865.
Fans of Savage Worlds and Deadlands...help me out. Sing the praises of either (or both) to let me know how awesome they both are.
SWADE rules are relatively easy, works well for most pulp/action oriented games, and the PCs start out fairly competent right out of the gate. I might run a Pulp Cthulhu game soon, and we're going to use SWADE instead of the PULP Cthulhu rules. As a GM, it's trivially easy for me to come up with NPCs and monsters, keep track of them during combat, and adapt the game a wide variety of settings (though I don't use it for every game).
One of my biggest criticisms of the game is how swingy the dice are. As a GM, I've done 30+ points of damage to PCs rolling only 2d6. (The dice explode in SWADE. If you roll a 6 on a d6, you roll again and keep adding it to the total so long as you keep rolling sixes.) There are some other gripes, like having to calculate the number of wounds a character or important NPC takes based on the damage done, but overall it's easily managable.
I played the original Deadlands in the 1990s of course, and I prefer using the Savage Worlds rules. While the original rules were full of that great sasparilla flavor we all love, "baroque" is a good way to describe the system. One of the best things about the game is that a posse of characters can be made up of anyone. You could have a mad scientist, a rabbi, a martial artist, a cowboy, a gunslinger, and a Swedish chef named Cookie all in the same group and it works just fine.
