DeviousQuail
Hero
Thanks for the interesting topic. It's fun to think about how to make all these things work together. Looking at your map can I ask that the western bit where you've crammed together Washington state and British Columbia be filled with a group of Druids and Artificers attempting to live side by side? Maybe even an enclave of coastal Wizards?
Other thoughts:
Other thoughts:
- Firearms: I've played around with introducing Firearms to my campaigns and found what I think is a decent way to include them alongside normal "medieval" weapons. They are simple weapons with the Finesse and Firearm Loading (use an action to reload after X amount of shots instead of every shot) traits. For attack rolls you can use Dex/Str mod or just take +2. For damage rolls you can take 1dX+Dex/Str Mod or 2dX. It keeps firearms inside the current weapon paradigm for attack and damage rolls while also making them deadlier for lower level creatures to use. For those that care about the math you reach an approximate breakeven point with a +3 modifier. A +4 modifier and up being strictly better for anything short of a crit fishing build.
- I actually tried this with crossbows in a non-firearms world to help set them apart from other ranged weapons. For a wild west setting I would probably take crossbows off the weapons table entirely.
- Dragons: Throw out the chromatic vs metallic divide and go with wild vs robber baron. Two extreme ends of the spectrum. Wild dragons are a part of the land, have all your standard dragon abilities, but cap their size at young with a few adults across the entire continent. Make them excessively against unnatural change and modernization. Robber baron dragons on the other hand have traded in their size and appearance to be more humanoid. They still have their breath weapon, natural armor, frightful appearance, etc. but they can also wear a tailored suit, top hat, and fit inside buildings. I'd even ditch the wings and tail as a sign of how different they have become from their wild cousins. Both sets of dragons present their own sets of difficulties for people on the frontier. Just in vastly different ways.
- Evil Empire(s): Hardly the first to comment on this and yet I won't let that stop me. I wouldn't include any strictly evil empires. I would include a few larger empires whose armies are vying for control of pieces of the frontier. The individual towns and territories would probably only pay lip service to whatever army has the nearest forts. Assume that most people living out here have left the countries of those armies behind intentionally. You can go with stand-ins for America in the east and Mississippi river region, Mexico to the south, British to the North, and have various Spanish and French interests scattered around. These groups can create conflict with each other. More of a random skirmish level of conflict than open war. The difficulties of holding territory far from home, desertion by soldiers who want to take up prospecting or farming, and a lack of an appetite for war and conquest due to one or more recent large scale conflicts not in the frontier can keep these groups from massively expanding.
- Natives: At the time of the actual wild west you had a ton of different native cultures pretty much everywhere throughout the west. Mimicking that in a way that doesn't lead to design failure is beyond me. Also, how that works in a world with Elves, Dwarves, Humans, etc. is it's own wrinkle. So instead of doing that I would create a few larger nations of native peoples. It reduces cognitive load to remember 4 groups instead of 40 and you can spread them out in different geographical areas that impact what their culture is like. It can also inform who they are used to dealing with. An Apache or Navajo stand-in would probably have a lot of history with the Mexico stand-in, a Sioux stand-in would be more connected to the American and British stand-ins, and a Salish stand-in might have little contact with anyone other than other native groups and new settlers.
- One difference from real life that I would implement is that the Native groups are more condensed geographically with large swathes of empty or near empty land between them. The combination of deadly monsters, magical or natural inhospitable terrain, and smaller populations could have constrained them a lot more. The influx of trains, guns, and a large amount of new people could be the difference in cutting through and settling these areas.
- With new technologies, trade partners, and more people this is probably the best time for the Natives to also be looking at expanding. Either as a larger and slower force like our European groups or as smaller groups and individuals like the settlers. Unlike the foreign settlers who have all more or less chosen a new way of life, native groups might have greater struggles when it comes to the way things have been done vs these new paths made available. There's probably a cool hook in there that a better designer could take advantage of.
- Size: Any creature of gargantuan size feels out of place to me in a setting like this. Capping most things at large with a few huge creatures is probably the way to go. I don't know exactly why I feel this way. Maybe it's because huge and gargantuan feel too epic for a western? Giant mechanical spiders not withstanding, if you can't put it on a train it's probably too big for the setting.
