Supernatural Wild West Fictional Settings

[deaddmwalking]

The ‘Wild West’ is a setting that has had a lot of play; the Wild West with supernatural elements may be a subset of that, but it is a fascinating one that resonates well with a lot of people. On the one hand, the ‘wild west’ was a relatively short-lived phenomenon – as lands were settled and organized the ‘wilds’ shrank – but it has lived long in the imagination.
The conversation about the Rokugan setting and a ‘fantasy Asia’ has me thinking about similar issues in Deadlands. While there are things I like about the setting, there are things that I don’t. Fantasy Asia has some advantages – it’s not set in a real place so you can change as much as you want – but you’re constrained to some degree by historical fact. Deadlands uses a single cataclysmic event – our world and theirs diverged in July 1863 during the Battle of Gettysburg. Based on their events and timeline, there exist some questionable decisions.

I’m hoping that in this thread we can discuss what the setting needs, and what types of cool things can be justified within the existing history. Keeping in mind that this would be intended for a game, and incorporating ‘cool things’ from a variety of cultures is to be encouraged, ideally we can maintain a western setting with Mexican Federales, Lakota warriors, Voodoo priests, gunslingers, outlaws, and settlers looking to make a better life. The period begins with the end of the Civil War, but with alternate history, it can look as much different as the needs of the setting dictate.

Toward that end, I would posit that a more interesting end of the war than real life (Union victory) or as posited in Deadlands (CSA remains, outlaws slavery). At the same time as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Confederacy lost Vicksburg, allowing the Union control of the Mississippi and bisecting the Confederacy. By the end of 1864 Sherman had marched from Atlanta to Savanah Georgia, which bisected the south again. At that point South Carolina, North Carolina and Virgina (with most of Northern Virigina occupied), Florida, most of Georgia, Alabama, and most of Mississippi formed a second region, and Texas with parts of Louisiana and Arkansas forming a third. Prior to the beginning of combat operations makes for what I think is a plausible and interesting point for a serious departure from history. Lincoln won a landslide victory in 1864 with a new Vice President – Andrew Johnson – who was thought to be too lenient to the south. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine him demanding an end to combat operations at that moment.

While it is a matter of historical fact that there were no largescale successful slave uprisings that created an independent nation in the Deep South, in an alternate history, it would be possible. Having Alabama create a free state in the Deep South seems interesting to me (I like Jubilee for a name). Florida, the least densely populated Confederate state might have been ripe for a fourth Seminole War with the participation of deserters from both sides and escaped slaves creating another distinct political unit (with the keys and the Southern tip in Union hands). The Carolinas and Virgina might have survived as the ‘Confederate States of America minus territory (particularly on the coast) that is occupied by the Union. Texas would form another country. With parts of the Confederacy intact, from a game perspective, it’s probably best to have an end to slavery. With no more fugitive slave act and the Confederacy desperate to keep the manual labor it has relied on for so long, I could see an abolition of slavery happen. Finally, there should also be a Plains Indian state that will survive Western expansion.

It might be interesting to have Sherman refuse Johnson’s orders and a militarized Pro-Union state based around Atlanta and Savannah that is not quite part of the United States of America. Depending on what happens with Johnson and impeachment, and so few Southern States returning to the Union reconstruction would have looked much different – there wouldn’t have been as many checks to Republicans and the Freedom agenda.
Regarding the supernatural elements, I think that tying the ‘rebirth’ of magic to the New Madrid Earthquake in 1811/1812 is interesting. It is referred to as Tecumseh’s earthquake because it is claimed that he sent it as a warning to the Creeks for refusing to join his resistance movement. Off-hand, I like the idea that this spiritual awakening and introduction of supernatural elements spread first among Native American tribes. It parallels the later spiritualism of the Ghost Dance. Effectively, I am positing what if the Ghost Dance was a) effective and b) started at least 40 years earlier. I think the eclipse of 1806 (which also ties to stories of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa) might actually work best without creating celestial events that did not actually occur. With stories of his ‘powerful medicine’, he seems a good candidate for ‘real magic’ in the United States, though of course using a real historical figure (even with or perhaps especially with alternate histories) is fraught.

What are your thoughts about what such a setting needs? How can it be plausible, and fun to play with, with lots of character options and be respectful to historical figures?


Edit - Made line breaks easier to see

[erik]

Trouble with 1810-ish is that it is less well known. And the US is still a fledgling nation. I mean we're on our 3rd President.

Here is an 1806 map of the US.


It is way too early for the conflict between North and South. Heck, you have wars with other countries taking the forefront. The White House gets burned by the Brits in 1814!

You aren't having a wild west campaign in 1810, you're having a founding father or post revolutionary campaign. You're better off doing some National Treasure bullshit with magic.

If you want a Wild West setting then it has to be later, as in during the era of the Wild West. Today's xkcd as reference:

The Wild West takes place namely, in the West. Note there is no "West" in that map of the States from 1806. There's no setters moving out West in a gold rush or any of that jazz. You can damn well forget about revolvers and gunslingers.

So, with that in mind, fast forward to the same time setting as Deadlands/Civil War. You can set it before, during or after the civil war, but that's the defining event of the era, and it just makes sense to use it. How about the South near the end of the war tries to dabble in magic to turn the tide and unleash an undead apocalypse? The South can properly be cast as the villains as history ought dictate since they were our Nazis.


[edit: Oh... I must be sleepy, reading comprehension a bit lagging. So you want to have 50 prior years of magic being real before the Civil War.... eh, that's gonna change probably a lot. I'm gonna stop typing because I'm sleepy and no help.

[OgreBattle]

A lot of refugee tent camp misery and nonwhites in the setting too

‪https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-5-bi ... uJIm‬

So you can have have Asian sorcery, Aztec survivor sorcery, along with Native American and Christian sorcery

[Grek]

Do not do Civil War alt-histories, those are always going to bring out the uncomfortably racist parts of the gaming community. If you must have an alt-history setting, set it much further back:

• Admiral Zheng He refuses to obey Emperor Yongle's isolationist orders and sails northward, ultimately founding the Kingdom of Zheng, an eunuch-led elective monarchy, where California and British Columbia are today. Settlers expand east, ultimately halting at the Sierra Nevadas.
• The Incan, Mayan and Aztec Empires are not destroyed by the Europeans, but subjugated by the Zheng for nearly a century before obtaining their independence - the Incan through warfare, the Mayan through conquest and the Aztec through diplomacy.
• The Cortes expedition encounters a unified, Mandarin-speaking, musket-wielding Mesoamerica and were unable to expand beyond the Yucatan - only the Mayan city-states (who had the least loyalty to the Zheng Emperor) allied with the Spaniards.
• The Portuguese obtain permission from the Zheng Empire to settle the eastern coast of Brazil and to trade openly with the Inca and the Aztec, in exchange for fleet basing rights in the Atlantic. Spain and Portugal briefly go to war over the issue.
• The character of the slave trade is greatly altered by the presence of the Zheng Aztecs, who rejected the idea of hereditary slavery and limited the ability to sell slaves without their consent. Escaped slaves would only be extradited if they could be demonstrated in court to have been captured and maintained in accordance with local law.
• Spain focuses on its European holdings, resulting in the Dutch-Anglo Wars ending decidedly in favour of the Dutch. New Amsterdam not only survives, but expands into Canda, ultimately extending to meet the Zheng settlers in Manitoba. The colony is ultimately granted its independence, becoming the Hudson Commonwealth.
• Napoleon escapes Elba onboard the Inconstant and sets sail not for France, but across the sea to America, seizing control over France's colonies in hopes of raising an army to retake the French mainland. Imperial Louisiana breaks away from the French Republic, becoming a European monarchist state in the west.
• The return of magic in 1803 is centralized around the Great Plains, leading to a rush of outside settlers trying to acquire the newly discovered magical resources of the region. Although the indigenous population tries to keep the outsiders from their lands, new settlements sprout up faster than the local militaries can chase them out. The result is a patchwork frontier where every town obeys a different set of laws and justice can only be found at the end of a wand.

[Thaluikhain]

Do not do Civil War alt-histories, those are always going to bring out the uncomfortably racist parts of the gaming community. If you must have an alt-history setting, set it much further back

Yeah, this is unfortunately very true. And setting divergence points further back means you can chuck more weird stuff in, which has definite plusses (and minuses, of course, but I think the plusses win here)

[Username17]

Much depends on how weird you want your weird west. If magic is a big enough deal, the West will be largely unrecognizable and you might as well go high fantasy or set it in space or some fucking thing.

On the other hand, the actual Wild West had unreconstructed slavers and genocide against Native Americans and deeply shitty treatment of Chinese people and so on and so on. Tough call.

-Username17

[Iduno]

So you're looking at more Adventures of Briscoe County Jr.? Except maybe more accepting of race?

[erik]

I’ll try to expand on my last thought now that am less groggy. Maybe if the racists largely died or were transformed during the magic influx and people largely identified racists as villains. Nazis were terrible but they make great bad guys for everyone to hate. Slavers and racists could potentially serve that role.

[shinimasu]

What a Weird West Setting needs in order to be fun and compelling:

- A large map left largely un-filled that players are enticed to explore with the promise of as yet undiscovered riches.

- A robust resource management minigame to make the exploration itself part of the challenge.

- Small bastions of civilization that largely operate under their own individual rules because even if this setting has a central government it doesn't have cars and ain't nobody walking into the sand wastes if they absolutely don't have to.

- Encroaching Industry and class tensions between rail barons and literally everyone else.

- Monsters, ghosts, thunderbirds, and assorted regional curiosities for the bestiary.

- Tensions between indigenous peoples and settlers.

- The awe and majesty of unclaimed nature and a sense of how small we are in the universe. Thinking you're hot shit in town because you won big at poker and got everyone drinks only to continue on your journey and get lost in the canyons and realize the world doesn't actually care how good you are at cards. It is big and you are tiny.

- Wagon trains.

- Swamps

- Death Valley

- Fiddle competitions with Satan.

What a Weird West setting does not need:

- Re imagining the civil war for the hundredth time.

- To be literally set in America.

[deaddmwalking]

So you're looking at more Adventures of Briscoe County Jr.? Except maybe more accepting of race?

Probably.

I'm re-watching the series right now (I have the DVDs, but it is also available for free online which surprised me).

I think that the setting can really work for a party dynamic (in the show he's a Bounty Hunter employed by the Westerfield Club) so it's easy to seed adventures. I think I would like slightly MORE of the supernatural. He has the ghost of his dead father visit him and the orb provides healing and super-strength at different times in the series. I would prefer to remove a singular object of power and make it so weird and mysterious stuff is more accepted...

[Thaluikhain]

You could go all King Solomon's Mines (or maybe even Lost World) and have the PCs wander into a large isolated area which has entire undiscovered nations. You're dropping the Wild West setting and just taking Wild West characters and sticking them into a new setting, though.

Or perhaps Mysterious Cities of Gold, only you'd end up erasing a lot of the real inhabitants and replacing them with people from Atlantis.

[OgreBattle]

I’ll try to expand on my last thought now that am less groggy. Maybe if the racists largely died or were transformed during the magic influx and people largely identified racists as villains. Nazis were terrible but they make great bad guys for everyone to hate. Slavers and racists could potentially serve that role.

Killing George Washington in alternate 1776 sounds more fun and fresh

[Iduno]

I’ll try to expand on my last thought now that am less groggy. Maybe if the racists largely died or were transformed during the magic influx and people largely identified racists as villains. Nazis were terrible but they make great bad guys for everyone to hate. Slavers and racists could potentially serve that role.

Killing George Washington in alternate 1776 sounds more fun and fresh

How about a compromise? Thomas Jefferson.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I’ll try to expand on my last thought now that am less groggy. Maybe if the racists largely died or were transformed during the magic influx and people largely identified racists as villains. Nazis were terrible but they make great bad guys for everyone to hate. Slavers and racists could potentially serve that role.

Killing George Washington in alternate 1776 sounds more fun and fresh

Or having Adam Weishaupt replace him? Ewww....

[DrPraetor]

Our ancestors developed a technological workaround that allowed all the Western tropes without the genocide, slavery apologists, and other squick: post-apocalyptic scifi.

Now, this setting also appeals to right-wingers who secretly crave to have their masculinity validated in a Hobbesian war of all-against-all (and no-one would hurt their precious feelings.) But, hey, my forum avatar is Josef Stalin - a glass house has three walls too many.

Mad Max is a Western. Rifts is a Western. The Road is a Western, so is Book of Eli. Fallout is a Western. A boy and his dog is a Western and just as squick as real history.

That said, if you really want circa 1860, you can do an alternate west setting, if the player characters are black or native. Blazing saddles, with magic played relatively straight, would work as a setting.

[Dean]

American racism was propagated by the wealthy as a means to turn the working man against small groups of themselves. It was a consciously created belief to stop the proletariat from fighting the bourgeois effectively. It is easy to imagine a world where society’s greatest enemy is not the aristocracy and is instead fucking werewolves. In such an environment racial tensions would no longer be stoked by the wealthy, in fact it’s likely those old beliefs would be stamped out quickly as unpatriotic. That brother needs to help brother in the battle of poor people against werewolves or chupacabras so the rich can sit back in New York and demand all the newspapers they own print stories about the heroism of the werewolf fighters stopping the werewolves from coming and ruining rich peoples stuff.

TLDR Racism is an invention and while America has a crazy racist history it’s very easy to decide that monsters that eat people exist and that means no one cares if anyone’s Mexican anymore.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I would like to hear more about your Bloodborne/Bioshock Inifinite mashup. Beast of America indeed.

[maglag]

TLDR Racism is an invention

Say, how do humans can tell if something else is a fellow human or a rock or a bear about to maul them?

By their looks and sounds and smell and whatnot.

Our brains are hardwired to be suspicious of anything that looks/sounds/smells/etc than unusual. It was kinda crucial for survival back in the day.

So, it's sadly natural that somebody who grew up all their life in an enviroment where every human is white-skinned and never even knew that black-skinned people were possible would treat a bunch of black-skinned people as an anomaly.

There is no conspiracy, just blind evolution, and people must be taught to be non-racists just like they need to be taught to pee and poop only at a bathroom instead of anywhere they feel like and also to wash their hands before eating and other healthy habits that we're not born with.

Also as a recent example or racism being a bug, even google's super advanced algorythms can spontaneously become racist out of nowhere.

[Dean]

Maglag your notion that people naturally equate different skin tones with an innate sense of threat is wrong on every level. It's important that you learn why and then to not repeat these terrible arguments.

Say, how do humans can tell if something else is a fellow human or a rock or a bear about to maul them?

It is not natural to assume someone is inhuman because of their skin tone. You do not "naturally" confuse darker people than you with rocks or bears or any kind of life threatening other. People telling you that feeling threatened by black people is the natural order of things are intentionally lying to you for the purpose of propaganda

Our brains are hardwired to be suspicious of anything that looks/sounds/smells/etc than unusual. It was kinda crucial for survival back in the day.

The bullshit evo-psych explanation that we evolved to naturally hate black people because tribes needed to naturally instantly hate foreign tribes and want to kill them on sight is repeated often and makes literally no sense anthropologically or evolutionarily. First there is no evolutionary benefit to instant hostility when seeing people you don't recognize, second ancient humans would almost never travel far enough to see people with very different skin tones so the entire premise of this makes no sense. Sailing has only existed for a few tens of thousands of years. That is far too small an amount of time for something practiced by far too small an amount of the population to have any evolutionary fingerprint in you. The nonsense image in your head of a tribe of dark skinned people and a tribe of light skinned people coming upon each other where the first one to decide to kill the other has the advantage makes no sense and has no basis in anything. The idea that there is anything in your "evolution" that would hard wire you to feel scared when you see a dark skinned person ignores both science and common sense. It almost seems like a piece of propaganda to make a very modern class division seem intrinsic to human nature.

There is no conspiracy, just blind evolution, and people must be taught to be non-racists just like they need to be taught to pee and poop only at a bathroom instead of anywhere they feel like and also to wash their hands before eating and other healthy habits that we're not born with.

Fuck you. Children are born without understanding that objects have permanence or that there's a past or future or that other people exist but you're telling me they naturally know that brown skinned people are sneaky. Fuck you. Children need to be taught racism and then when they become older maglags they need to be taught to excuse racism with pseudoscience. You are literally arguing for "Scientific Racism" who's wikipedia entry I'll briefly repeat "Scientific racism is the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism". Scientific racism is a rare pseudoscience that has been publicly and internationally denounced by the scientific community as being totally invalid. It genuinely sucks that you are arguing with points that were internationally denounced 69 fucking years ago in support of a belief system less supported than using cranial measurements to predict criminal behavior


In summary there is nothing natural or inherent about skin tone based racism. Race as you know it is a completely unscientific concept. Your race can change if you change your zip code, different countries have different "races". It's a social construct and it could be socially deconstructed. In a world where The Flood attacked no one would put any more weight on a person being dark skinned than on them being tall or short or thin within a couple generations. Once it was no longer profitable to maintain those lines they would stop being actively maintained which means they would fall apart. If someone is willing to make a setting with magic and vampires and werewolves you have all the tools you need to make everyone stop giving any shits about how tan someone is as a measure of that persons innate value.

[Blade]

Compared to other animals Humans have an outstanding tendency to cooperate with complete strangers. Many animals will gladly cooperate with members of their kin but will be aggressive towards anyone outside of that group.

Humans have the ability to keep track of people and their reputation, allowing them to form complex relationship networks based on the actions of others rather than on their kin.

Humans also have the tendency to positively see their social groups and negatively see the others. But the criteria for the group can be completely arbitrary. If you separate people by skin tones, this will create a skin-tone based prejudice. But you could just as well separate them by length of hair or handedness and you'll get the same behaviors.

[pragma]

Compared to other animals Humans have an outstanding tendency to cooperate with complete strangers. Many animals will gladly cooperate with members of their kin but will be aggressive towards anyone outside of that group.

Humans are so comically sociable that we befriended apex predators and turned them into labradors.

Humans also have the tendency to positively see their social groups and negatively see the others. But the criteria for the group can be completely arbitrary. If you separate people by skin tones, this will create a skin-tone based prejudice. But you could just as well separate them by length of hair or handedness and you'll get the same behaviors.

There's real life precedent for this in the Rwandan genocide. Hutus and Tutsis didn't exist in the modern sense before German colonizers made a caste system.

[TheFlatline]

While it is a matter of historical fact that there were no largescale successful slave uprisings that created an independent nation in the Deep South, in an alternate history, it would be possible. Having Alabama create a free state in the Deep South seems interesting to me (I like Jubilee for a name). Florida, the least densely populated Confederate state might have been ripe for a fourth Seminole War with the participation of deserters from both sides and escaped slaves creating another distinct political unit (with the keys and the Southern tip in Union hands). The Carolinas and Virgina might have survived as the ‘Confederate States of America minus territory (particularly on the coast) that is occupied by the Union. Texas would form another country. With parts of the Confederacy intact, from a game perspective, it’s probably best to have an end to slavery. With no more fugitive slave act and the Confederacy desperate to keep the manual labor it has relied on for so long, I could see an abolition of slavery happen. Finally, there should also be a Plains Indian state that will survive Western expansion.

I'd suggest looking at Haiti/Saint-Domingue Revolution for historical seeds and an idea of what a successful slave uprising would look like. Historically, Saint-Dominique scared the living *shit* out of the South. I mean, not only was it a successful slave uprising, but it (and malaria) defeated a sizable army sent by Napoleon.

At one point Saint-Dominique/Haiti I believe was even part of the South American revolutions against Spain, I want to say providing guns & ships to Bolivar at one point, and at least sanctuary in another point. There were plans to help seed revolutions elsewhere, such as the US south. Check out the podcast Revolutions for a 20 or so episode on Saint-Dominique's revolution. It is really kind of nuts.

I propose that an alternate US history starts with an economically strong Haiti/Saint-Dominique seeding a slave uprising in the South. The Civil War doesn't even *need* to happen at that point. Charismatic ex-slaves turned generals who had decades of experience in guerrilla warfare in Haiti could land or train and help whip up the support of slaves. The south had a similar ratio of slaves to whites, albeit without the French cultural grey area of intermarriage and raising up black people via marriage during the French Revolution (Alexander Dumas' father was a black "slave" born to a slave and a Count in France who later came and freed him, took him to Paris for an education, and who eventually rose to command cavalry before being betrayed by Napoleon who disliked how charismatic he was with his troops. Read The Black Count for an excellent biography).

Anyway, I can easily see abolitionists like John Brown either timing Harper's Ferry for when the military is preoccupied with the uprisings in the south and gaining traction, or even flat out joining Saint-Dominique's industry of slave revolutions.

At this point you can take the US alternate history in almost any direction you want.

[deaddmwalking]

I was definitely considering using Haiti for inspiration, and part of why I wanted to move the timeline back as far as when 'real magic' enters the world. In addition to Tecumseh, I would like to have real Voodoo style magic (as depicted in the Prince and the Frog, etc), but once I have concerns around being sensitive to a real religion/spiritual group. Is in insensitive to make voodoo magic PROVABLY REAL when there are people who believe that it IS REAL? Or is that just sauce for the goose?

[Mask_De_H]

Fuck, you're stupid.

Institutionalized American racism, of which our White Nationalist movements come from, was designed to keep broke white people from realizing they had it just as bad as broke, emancipated black people. White people were indentured servants right along black chattel slaves, and the Irish basically didn't count as people for a good long while.

[Whipstitch]

Counterpoint: Orion chicks



Sure, it's a li'l weird that she's green, but somehow I think we'd get over it.