Pinnacle launches DEADLANDS 30th Anniversary Kickstarter

Pinnacle Entertainment has launched the Kickstarter for the 30th Anniversary celebration of their seminal tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands.

Originally launched in late 1996, Deadlands used a novel rules system built for fast, six-shootin' action mixed in with magic and weird science. The game combined different die types with cards for greater randomisation and a whole magic system built around deck-building (this was streamline later on). The game was notable for its setting, which mixed Wild West action, Lovecraftian horror, steampunk science and black comedy. Think of Army of Darkness meets Unforgiven meets The Difference Engine with zombies and you're most of the way there. It's not for nothing that the legendary Bruce Campbell himself provided the introduction for the revised edition of the game in 1999.

The game had a revised edition in 1999, two sequel TTRPG games (Deadlands: Hell on Earth and Deadlands: Lost Colony) and a spin-off miniatures game using a simplified version of the rules, The Great Rail Wars, but an attempt to pivot to the d20 rules system (derived from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition) in 2002 backfired spectacularly and nearly drove the company out of business. Regrouping, the company used The Great Rail Wars rules as the basis for a new, universal rules system, Savage Worlds. The company released new versions of Deadlands for Savage Worlds, namely Deadlands Reloaded in 2006 and Deadlands: The Weird West in 2020. Both have been successful.

For the upcoming 30th Anniversary, Pinnacle decided not to re-release the original game. A 20th Anniversary reissue of the revised edition was released in 2017, and was recently reprinted and should be (for now, anyway) widely available. Instead, they've decided to look to the past of the game but focus on revised material for the current edition of the game.

First up in the Kickstarter package is Deadlands: 30 Years of Games, Grit, & Ghost Rock. This is a history and behind-the-scenes account of the making of the game over three decades, with exclusive new information on various movie and TV adaptations of the property that never quite took off, as well as multiple video games that were in development at one time or another but were cancelled. The book also acts as an art book, collecting most of the cover art for all of Deadlands' various editions and sourcebooks over the three decades. The book also includes the introductions to previous editions by Joe Lansdale, Mike Stackpole and Bruce Campbell, and an account of the time Campbell played the game.

As well as the requisite coins, cards and special dice, the set includes a new rulebook for playing the game. Deadlands: Core Rules combines the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Edition rulebook and the Deadlands: The Weird West corebook into one integrated edition, with irrelevant material from Savage Worlds (i.e. lasers and spaceships) removed and some material from the Deadlands: Weird West Companion added. This creates an all-new starting point for the game which is easier on both the wallet and the brain whilst trying to look up rules and not being able to remember which book they're in. This rule book will be available in a regular edition and a leatherbound special edition.

An additional new book is Deadlands: Rascals, Varmints, & Relics, a combined bestiary and item book collating previous material and adding new information on monsters and items.

The set also includes the Deadlands Accessories Box, which includes a GM's Screen, action deck, ammo tracker, poster map, dice and reference cards, and the Deadlands Starter Set, which includes a simplified "showcase" set of the rules for new players, an adventure called The Cursed Caverns, maps, tokens, pawns, another Action Deck, templates, archetype cards and so forth. 

Available as various add-ons are the extant material for the current edition of the game, including the adventure/campaign books Hell on the High Plains, The Abominable Northwest, Horror at Headstone Hill, Carnage in the Cascades and Night Train, and various map packs and archetype card sets (customisable pregen character cards, basically).

The Kickstarter will be running until 14 March and, predictably, has already been fully funded.

Pinnacle Entertainment launches DEADLANDS: THE DARK AGES Kickstarter

Veteran roleplaying company Pinnacle Entertainment has launched its Kickstarter campaign for Deadlands: The Dark Ages, the latest spin-off from its popular Deadlands roleplaying game.

Deadlands, a horror-steampunk-Western, was created by Shane Hensley and released through Pinnacle Entertainment way back in 1996. The original version of the game, which expanded over thirty sourcebooks, a mild revised edition in 1999 and spin-off miniatures game The Great Rail Wars, was hugely successful, popular and critically-acclaimed. In 2001 the company pivoted with Deadlands d20, a version of the game using the same rules as Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. This was monstrously unpopular, and the commercial failure of the game almost drove Pinnacle out of business.

They made a comeback several years later by using the streamlined version of the Deadlands rules from Great Rail Wars to launch Savage Worlds, a generic or universal rules set that could be applied to any kind of setting, from space opera to epic fantasy to steampunk to historical. The game was a big success and in 2006 they released Deadlands Reloaded, a revised version of the game acting as a setting for Savage Worlds. This was also highly successful. In 2018 they released the revised Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE) and in 2021 released Deadlands: The Weird West, the current version of the setting.

Deadlands postulates a break from established history during the American Civil War. At the Battle of Gettysburg, the hordes of dead soldiers come back to life and start spreading across the country. Shortly thereafter, a huge earthquake destroys most of California. In the ruins prospectors find "ghost rock," an unusual substance that triggers both a "ghost rock rush" and huge leaps forward in technology, particularly for the way it supercharges steam technology. Supernatural creatures start appearing across the continent (and, it's at least hinted, the world). Magic suddenly becomes real. The result is a setting that resembles the real Wild West, but one in which magic and steampunk technology also coexists. The setting can be described as a Western meets Lovecraft meets The Difference Engine. The setting is noted for its huge tonal variation (it can move from adventure to horror to comedy) and its well-described array of factions and personalities.

The original game spawned several spin-offs. Deadlands: Hell on Earth is set in the post-apocalyptic future, asking what happens if the forces of evil win and reduce the Earth to a "deadland," a world of fear and despair. The vibe here is more Mad Max. Deadlands: Lost Colony is set in space, on a colony planet settled before the Reckoning took place on Earth. Deadlands Noir is set in an alternate, possible 1930s where the focus is more on gumshoe detectives in the back-alleys of places like Chicago and New York, and the forces of evil have to be much quieter and more subtle.

Deadlands: The Dark Ages is both a prequel and sequel to Deadlands, set in 877 on the island of Britain. Morgan le Fay has been retroactively resurrected thanks to events in the mainline Deadlands setting, a thousand years further in the future. Her return changes history (which may or may not result in ramifications in the extant Deadlands settings), but it also spawns opposition, namely the return of Merlin with the goal of stopping her schemes. He recruits bold adventurers to help take down Morgan and return history to the right path (more or less), whilst they also have to fend with issues such as Danish invaders and civil insurrection.

The Dark Ages range will launch with a core rulebook, a graphic novel called Merlin's Champions, the Accessories Box including dice, bennies, tokens, archetype cards, action cards, maps and some 3D terrain. The Cursed Village set adds more terrain, enough to build a full village (cannily, the 3D terrain can be repurposed easily for other roleplaying games). Optional accessories include metal dice and item cards. There are an array of options for physical products and PDFs (and both).

The Dark Ages Kickstarter has already hit its goal, with additional stretch goals expected. The campaign will run until 4 October.

A Roleplayer's Guide to Roleplaying Games

 A few months back I wrote A Beginner's Guide to Boardgames, which was quite successful. So now I'm going to do the same thing for roleplaying games, because why the hell not? This article will differ because it's less-focused on more recent games and offers more of an overview of the entire field, and also that there is no differentiation between "beginner", "intermediate" and "advanced" games, although I note in each entry how approachable each game is. Generally the main difficulty with RPGs is getting into them in the first place and getting comfortable playing them; once that's achieved it's relatively straightforward to adapt to other games.

So, pen-and-paper roleplaying games. Since the mid-1970s, when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released the original version of Dungeons and Dragons, RPGs have been a continuous source of enjoyment, bringing together friends and allowing them to bond over murdering dragons in the face. RPGs have diversified over the years, offering rules-heavy, combat-focused games and lightly-codified, narrative games where the emphasis is more on creating a collaborative story than in winning any particular objective or reward.

RPGs, like boardgames, went through a lean period in the late 1990s when video games (including, ironically, some games based on pen-and-paper RPGs) exploded in popularity. They also made a strong comeback in the 2000s thanks to the Internet and, more recently, the arrival of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites as a way of funding more niche and specialised games.

Without further ado, let's take a look at some of the better RPGs for beginners that are around.

Dungeons and Dragons: The Classic
Well, we have to start here, don't we? The original roleplaying game, the longest-surviving and, for most of its lifespan, the most popular. You know the drill here, a group of players create characters from stock fantasy races (humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes being the basic choices) and stock fantasy careers (barbarian, bard, cleric, mage, monk, paladin, rogue, warrior) and engage in surprisingly diverse adventures, ranging from political thrillers to gruelling dungeon crawls to war epics and many more. It's straightforward, it's fun and it can be quite varied in tone and potential (which is more than can be said for some other, more tightly-focused RPGs). D&D remains probably the ultimate RPG because it's so familiar but can turn on a dime in a heartbeat and become something quite unpredictable and weird.

You do have a choice of which rule set to play with, as the five numbered editions to date (not to mention several variant half-editions) do each have their drawbacks and benefits, and I'll be covering that in a separate article. Fortunately, the current edition is one of the more welcoming, hitting a sweet spot of offering a lot of customisability and options whilst also not being extremely confusing and occasionally flat-out broken. The 5th Edition is well-supported by Wizards of the Coast with a lot of online support, but the relative paucity of published material is a bit surprising, and the lack of new world books updating settings like Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Planescape to the new edition is disappointing. But compared to the insane bloat of previous editions, the new edition makes D&D a lot more welcoming than it has been for many years.

An alternative choice may be Pathfinder, which is derived from D&D 3rd Edition but eliminates many of its smaller problems (the larger ones remain, however) and backs it up with an immense amount of support and, more recently, an SF spin-off called Starfinder. It isn't as streamlined and elegant as D&D 5th Edition, but it has an utterly titanic amount of content, a friendly and welcoming community and support that is second to none.

Star Wars: The Ultimate Beginner's Game
Well, it's Star Wars, isn't it? You can play a bounty hunters or a Jedi, an Imperial stormtrooper or an ace Rebel pilot, an escaped Wookie slave or a Coruscanti noble. Games can be set at the height of the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, during the ancient Jedi-Sith conflict or, crazily, maybe during a rare period of peace. Hate the movie Rogue One? Form your own crack team of agents and try to steal the Death Star plans your way.

There are three distinct versions of the Star Wars RPG: the original West End Games version, the two ill-advised Wizards of the Coast editions (derived from D&D 3rd and 4th Editions, and neither fit particularly well) and the current game from Fantasy Flight, which consists of three distinct rulebooks (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny). I've never played the Fantasy Flight version and have heard mostly good things about the rules, but the complete experience does require purchasing three very expensive rulebooks and then buying custom dice, a huge no-no for most RPGs. Fantasy Flight do good work and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one, but I'm not particularly moved to try the new version (especially after being burned badly on the WotC editions).

Instead, if you can get hold of a copy (and there's been a recent 30th anniversary reissue, which makes things easier) of the original West End Games version, go with that. You only need six-sided dice and the ruleset remains one of the most elegantly designed. It's streamlined, easily understandable but opens up into greater complexity later on. It's a game which will have you gunning down stormtroopers, flying X-wings and doing the Kessel Run, all in under twelve parsecs (put lots of skill points in Astrogation). Compared to many roleplaying games, which tend towards bloat and steep learning curves, the West End Star Wars is a thing of beauty. It's Star Wars! It's fun!

All versions of the game do suffer the "Jedi problem", namely that players portraying Jedi can end up dominating games and getting over-powered, but a canny Gamemaster can overcome that problem by balancing opponents appropriately. Overall, Star Wars has a tremendously well-developed setting and a lot of variety, and the West End Games version nails it very nicely.

Deadlands: The Weird West
The original "Weird West" roleplaying game and still one of the most satisfying roleplaying experiences around. The game is set in an alternative history of the 19th Century, when, at the point of the American Civil War, a Native American shaman inadvertently released Lovecraftian forces of horror into the world. The dead rise, hideous spirits possess the living and horrific monsters appear to threaten the United States and indeed the entire world. Players can take on the role of local townsfolk trying to defend themselves, secret agents belonging to paranormal investigation organisations (the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the Texas Rangers), escaped slaves seeking revenge against the Confederates or anything inbetween. A robust rule system which treats combat like a poker game remains inventive twenty years on (now streamlined with the new Savage Worlds rules system, derived from Deadlands 1st Edition) and there is scope to treat the game like an outright horror game or a zany steampunk adventure with zeppelins and crazed inventors.

This is basically a game for people who appreciate the Lovecraftian approach to cosmic horror, but hate the nihilism and prefer to belief they can defeat eldritch forces from beyond the dawn of time with gatling guns, gyrocopters and steam cannons.

Call of Cthulhu: Go Mad & Die
On the flipside of that approach is Call of Cthulhu, the official roleplaying game of Lovecraftian horror. In this game you create paranormal investigators and set out to investigate strange goings-on in various parts of the world. The emphasis is on investigation, research, cooperation and collaborative storytelling: victory doesn't come through killing the monsters with shotguns, but through surviving with your limbs and sanity intact.

Call of Cthulhu has been hugely popular for thirty years for offering a very different experience to the power fantasies of games like D&D. The characters in Call of Cthulhu are far more fragile and more likely to end up dead, maimed or insane if they try to fight horrific monsters head-on. Defeating the forces of darkness requires brains, wits, intelligence and knowing when to make a strategic withdrawal. To be fair this game is not for everyone - watching D&D-raised power-gamers trying to hack their way through the game and getting angry when they realise they can't can be an uncomfortable experience - but for those who enjoy the tension and the horror, it's a gripping experience.

World of Darkness: Be a Vampire, Drink Blood, Have Fun
This isn't a roleplaying game, but rather a family of interrelated games which share a common background and setting. The best-known of these is Vampire: The Masquerade, which allows you (spoiler alert) to play vampires, with additional rulebooks allowing you to play werewolves, mages, mummies, wraiths etc. Essentially this is a game which allows to play as the "bad guys", but also explores these cultures to reveal a great deal of nuance and complexity.

If you want to play an urban fantasy RPG, World of Darkness is the go-to choice, although there is some confusion due to the fact that there are two distinct versions of the setting and all of its sub-games. Paradox Interactive recently bought the entire setting and seem to be considering a revamp of the whole line, which would be welcome. But if you want to play a vampire and engage in vampire-based shenanigans in a very well-realised world, this is the ideal choice.

Numenera: Be Weird, Be Wonderful
Numenera is, essentially, Dying Earth: The Roleplaying Game (which actually exists as a small, intriguing game from Pelgrane Press). Set a billion years into the future when nine great ages of human civilisation have come and gone and aliens (from both other planets and other universes) have settled on Earth, the game features one of the most vivid and interesting settings to emerge in recent years. The game has magic, although it's really ultra-advanced science and technology, and offers an intriguing balance between traditional D&D-style roleplaying and something far weirder.

Originally launched through Kickstarter, the game is now expanding with a second edition (but don't call it a second edition) which seeks to give players more of an ability to change the world. It's an interesting, original game which takes Jack Vance's original Dying Earth setting and revamps it with a lot new ideas and atmosphere.

There's a lot more out there, of course. There's the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying title from Green Ronin for those who want to fulfil their Game of Thrones fantasies. There's the newly-released Starfinder SF game from Paizo Publishing or its spiritual predecssor from the old TSR days, Alternity (complete with its StarCraft RPG spin-off). There's a whole family of Warhammer 40,000 RPGs from Fantasy Flight (which are sadly quickly going out of print). There's an intriguing RPG about godlike superheroes in a fantasy realm in Exalted. Deadlands has a post-apocalyptic, far-future sequel game called Hell on Earth. There's a generic universal roleplaying system called, er, GURPS, which can be used to play everything from cyberpunk to adventures on Terry Pratchett's Discworld (and was used by Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont to create the Malazan world). There's the Shadowrun roleplaying game, a fantastic setting which is still looking for a good rules system (and still not finding it). If you can find a copy, there's the bafflingly-out-of-print MechWarrior RPG if you like big stompy robots. There's the Judge Dredd RPG from Mongoose Publishing for those who want to Be The Law, as well as the classic space opera Traveller game, which has been around for almost as long as D&D, not to mention the madness-inducing Paranoia (trust no one!).

There's a lot of roleplaying goodness out there and a lot to choose from. It's a good time for the field and a good time to get involved.

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