Deadlands: Reloaded

[reposted from my blog The Depot: A General Store of Old West RPG Resources]

A well-dressed card sharp riffles a deck of cards and vanishes in a wisp of smoke. A man wearing a bowler with a mechanical monocle raises his hand and fires a smoke-belching contraption that blankets the street with beetles. A dour-faced preacher--bible in one hand, Colt Navy in the other--delivers a fiery sermon and the posse feels the hand of the Almighty reach down and straighten their aim, steel their resolve. An iconic gunslinger saunters into a saloon and orders a whisky, the smell of death lingers on him; not because of the men he's killed, but because he has died himself, and has returned to wreak vengeance on his murderers.

This is the Weird West: where the civil war was fought to an uneasy truce, California is a shattered maze of islands and marshes, and the monsters of myth and legend stalk the land.

Deadlands: Reloaded is a restart of the RPG hit from the mid 1990s, Deadlands: The Weird West Roleplaying Game. It uses a new rule-set and the history has been slightly advanced.

If Deadlands is completely unfamiliar to you, there's a large metaphysical backstory explaining the whys, but the bottom line is nasty monsters and real magic are enjoying a resurgence, centered on the Western U.S.

Character types fall into a few broad categories: Gunmen, Religious types, card-dealing magicians, steam-punk mad scientists, and Natives. However, as Deadlands: Reloaded uses the Savage Worlds rules, there are no strict character classes found in some RPGs and characters can be highly customized.

The heroes can fight against the tide of evil that forms the back-story and reason for the recent disturbances out west, or, as I do when I run Deadlands, you can largely ignore the metaplot and simply run the game as zombie gunslingers versus werewolves, witches and el Chupacabra.

Classic Deadlands (as the original version is called) had it's own system that some players prefer to the new version. It used chips and cards in ways that some felt was very "in genre." Others found the old system "clunky" and burdensome in combat. Deadlands: Reloaded uses the Savage Worlds rules with a few setting-specific tweaks. Savage Worlds is a system that encourages cinematic, even pulpy, gameplay, without leaving realism fully behind. I've often described it as the "John McLain" setting on the action/realism dial.

Pinnacle Entertainment provides Savage Worlds Test Drive rules (PDF), along with some Deadlands sample adventures and characters, if you want to try before you buy.

One more thing, if you are interested at all in Deadlands, or any other Pinnacle product (and I highly recommend them) the Pinnacle Forum is an excellent resource. The writers and designers are usually around, along with long-time fans and players. The atmosphere is friendly, helpful, and welcoming.