Does anyone have advice on running a Western Gothic/Weird West game?Every idea I have feels tainted by Deadlands, The Dark Tower, or Dogs in the Vineyard, and I'm hoping to come up with something more original than plagiaristic homage.I do think a quest for something somewhere unmapped is a good hook, and the weirdness of an "almost-place" is compelling to me. But I keep getting drawn too close to the islands of my inspiration.Any advice?
>>98786256>Any advice?Stop worrying about it so much. You're already running a western. Its not going to be super original nor is that what anyone who's playing will want.
>>98786256Try to remember that before Americans came, the Spaniards and Mexicans had tried and failed to truly conquer the American southwest. REH wrote a nice little story about a vampire conquistador. In general, remember that these lands had civilizations for deep time, myths of terrible wars and bizarre cannibal subhumans.
>>98786256Maybe watch some Westerns and read some Gothic horror. The things the influences you cite are riffing on.
>>98786324I suppose that leaning into established tropes is sort of the way to go with this kind of setting; the subversion of expectations is only interesting insofar as it actually furthers the story.>>98786326This is good, too.I think I'm going to go with the "treasure hunt" idea, with the added caveat that the closer they get to their goal, the more "unmapped" the world comes, and the weirder things get.
>>98786256Gothic fiction has not really much in common with the western genre. You can almost surely do horror western, but gothic seems difficult.
>>98786256Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Originality is overrated and execution is everything.
>>98786256Lean into magical realism and read up on local Native American, Mexican, and Spanish myths. Pair it with Southern Gothic for a look at the "neighboring" Gothic looks like, which would be the biggest cultural influence on the Anglos rolling around the southern half of the West. Have all kinds of spooky shit and pseudo-metaphysical figures like The Judge from Blood Meridian wandering the landscape like they own the place, doing whatever the hell they want, and without explaining or justifying themselves.
>>98786794>Not the OP btwThis is painfully true. As much as I like copyright for 'originality' or some semblance of it, I know it is abused to the point where I'll hate it until I need it. I gotta learn to write are settings really a good way to practice writing and even exercise creative muscles?
>>98786256>I'm hoping to come up with something more original than plagiaristic homage.Then don't focus too much on genre-tropes and setting, make it about what really reverberates with you, then dress it with genre-tropes but just as decoration.
>>98786256Go cyberpunk instead of supernatural, >a cowboy betting his cybernetic hand on the cards its holding.>rich gold tycoon is forcing miners into full body conversions, now one has went psycho and is stalking the mine.>90 year old hookers keeping themselves "young" with implant after implant.>striking a bargain with a mysterious ripper at the crossroads, the best chrome you could imagine, just let him upload this one line of code into your firmware.
>>98786579Run it like an isekai. Your players leave the mid/late 1800s and end up in a familiar hardpan desert territory, but stuff is fucked up and weird. Everything runs on dream/nightmare logic. They're in a spooky, Western-themed Oz or Wonderland or whatever, and they've got to find their way out. The treasure they're looking for, your "Dark Tower" or whatever, is their way out.>>98786326What story was that, again?
>>98787226>I gotta learn to write are settings really a good way to practice writing and even exercise creative muscles?Not really, not the way you seem to expect, at least. Writing for worldbuilding trains you in putting together stuff in a way that makes sense: geography, timelines of events, characters, how all of that interacts. The sad truth is, you can skip almost all of it and still write a compelling story that keeps the reader hooked. As long as you are internally consistent with the inner rules you set up, you can keep it vague, and several hit reads had little to no actual worldbuilding. You still have to work on how you put it all down and polish your prose.
>>98786326>REH wrote a nice little story about a vampire conquistadorbased, what's the title?
>>98788254/tg/ gives better writing advice than /lit/, man.
How do you guys handle thorny topics? Stuff like the civil war, slavery, and native american resettlement?
>>98786809Got you covered, anon.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoEpAWa6argThe Red Ghost is a particularly good one!
>>98786256Read Man Corn by Christy TurnerRitual cannibalism, burials of power witches who were "giant" for their time, 6 fingers handed being viewed as a mark of a power witch. Ritual teeth grinding
>>98788301The Horror from the Mound https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601761h.html
>>98790160Thank you!>>98790021Are you trolling?
>>98788254>As long as you are internally consistent with the inner rules you set up, you can keep it vague, and several hit reads had little to no actual worldbuilding.If the internet has taught me anything, it's that your readers will do so much work FOR you.
>>98786809>Have all kinds of spooky shit and pseudo-metaphysical figures like The Judge from Blood Meridian wandering the landscapeBuster Scruggs is technically that, albeit a Bugs Bunny-cartoon like one
>>98786256I don't get it, what's wrong with running a dark tower game?
>>98792658OP wants the story to be his more than he wants it to be good.
>>98792658The main problem with The Dark Tower is King wrote it across such a long time that there's a lot of unintended inconsistency (as opposed to the intended inconsistency).Normally an editor fixes all of this but King's too big now for an editor to actually edit, which is why he keeps doing those lame detective stories with the autistic woman and no one will tell him to stop.Dark Tower is an excellent setting for a very weird west game though if you're willing to make some choices and fill in a lot of gaps.
>>98786256there was some anime with gunslinger walking postapo desert world
>>98796555Bi-weapon
>>98796555>>98796701Quadra-Firearm
>>98796701>>98796708Outlaw Bebop
>>98796709Sailor Ball Bizarre Adventures
>>98796709Cowboy Star
>>98795464I remember reading it not long ago; what inconsistencies?
>>98798136Everything involving Marten, the Man in Black, and Flagg stand out the most. The way the Crimson King was bolted on from another work, then shuffled off with a convoluted anticlimactic. Even small things like Roland being shocked to see a woman in trousers early on (because he can see where her legs meet, which is considered lewd in his culture) but then not remarking on it at all in flashbacks later in the series. Maerlyn getting mentioned in the first book in a context that does not match continuity. The beast that guards the Tower not ever showing up. Some of these have been papered over in reprints or were retconned in later novels in the first run, for the worse at times - Roland's ruthlessness gets toned down in The Gunslinger despite being very important at establishing what will be his ultimate character, for example.
>>98800246Oh, yeah; and we still don't know who the Ageless Stranger was meant to be!
>>98802079Or Bango Skank, for that matter.
>>98790021>Stuff like the civil war, slavery,I wouldn't involve the ACW or slavery in any kind of RPG campaign as a side topic unless you're prepared to have your game derailed into Django Unchained, or (far less likely) someone chudding out. Unless you want this to be the central focus of your campaign, I would avoid it like the plague.>native american resettlementIt's about as safe edgy as you can get at least in the US. Maybe people would sperg out in Canada the way Americans sperg out about the ACW. You could do something like Little Big Man, which uses the Indian Wars to comment on the Vietnam War, and I think most players are simultaneously mature and distant enough to handle it.
>>98796555Desert Punk?It's more post apocalyptic than Western imo.
>>98787675That's not an answer
>>98803083Not bad advice.If it doesn't matter to the story, don't mention it.
>>98786256Okay, so, first you set it in a frontier western town, okay?Then you involve some weird spooky shit.
>>98790021>>98803083I ran a western setting years ago, and I simply had the Framers put a 'gradual emancipation' clause into the Constitution based on Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.
>>98810183A corrupt land developer is trying to force out a rancher by staging false flag "Comanche" attacks. One of his hired guns is, in fact, secretly a werewolf.
>>98811904Holy shit, I didn't know that was a thing.Would that have worked?
>>98812007I mean, historically "no." The Framers debated abolition several times. It wasn't as though they were unaware that slavery flew in the face of everything they'd written down in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution.Several states did mimic PA's law, though--the northern ones. And even the southern states more or less saw slavery as a necessary evil, up to the point where it became integral to their economy and cultural identity during the years leading into the Civil War.
>>98811904>>98812007>>98813164Shit, it might have happened earlier if the Northwest Ordinance had passed as Jefferson intended it, stopping the spread of slavery outside the 13 States as early as 1784!This could have contributed to an end of chattel importations, not to mention a heavily outvoted slave-state bloc. It's possible that if phase emancipation started as early as 1800, slavery as an institution ends by the centennial anyway.
>>98786256On the trope thing.You have to think of genres like standards, it's a song everyone knows so you can pay attention to what makes this performance different. It's the context for your table to make its own thing within that style.
https://youtu.be/iM63gvrkVe0?si=xt-kZhnTSPKPJWrb ;
>>98796708u talking about Monopistol nigga
>>98800246King was killed at the accident in 1999 and replaced like Jim Carrey. The clone's books expose cannibal elites and the jewish tunnels under new york (dark tower 7, dr sleep) while his persona has been used to diffamate repeatedly against conspiracy theorists on twitter.thats why dark tower 5 6 and 7 are pure shit
I can't remember the full title and I think everything was lost when 1d4chan went under, but back in the day /tg/ worked on a setting called...Something...Sons of the Gun. The main conceit was that there were 52 mystical guns in the world, called 'Cards', and they would be dealt out to people of great destiny who could do wonderful or terrible things. But at some point, there was always a shuffle, a point where all the cards were gathered up and there was a tremendous gunfight, clearing the way for the Cards to be dealt anew.
