The Knuckleduster Cowtown Creator from Forrest Harris and Knuckleduster Publications is a real treasure for the Western GM.

Here’s a review at RPG.net.

The Cowtown Creator hits me in several sweet spots. First it focuses on the real Old West instead of the movie/myth Old West. Whether your game is about the gritty realism or zombie-gunslingers, injecting some actual history is always a plus. Surround your zombie-gunslingers with accurate historical detail and disbelief is much easier to suspend.

How it conveys this historical detail involves my other sweet spots. Harris begins by describing various types of Western towns and examples. He even gives samples of the types and numbers of businesses you’d find in those towns. Next he takes us through each type of business, from the Cattle Yard to the Saloon, the Fancy House to the Barbershop. Along the way he offers floor plans (often based on period drawings and photographs), sample workers and customers, and colorful anecdotes out of the history books. As this is a system-free book, all the characters are presented in a descriptive paragraph rather than any kind of stat-block.

There are lists of business names, drinks, prices, and (my favorite) names culled from historical documents. And Names there are a lot of names. Thousands probably. More than you’ll need. [I used the names list to create a random name table that I'll post soon.]

In the back are a couple of system specific add-ons for d20, Deadlands [classic], and FUDGE.

And yet I still can’t convey how great this book is. It’s one of those that you grab when you’ve got a few minutes to skim something. Hands down it is the most useful Western RPG book I have.

Also checkout the The Knuckleduster Firearms Shop and the whole line of knuckleduster products, including Old West Miniatures.

[No, I am not getting compensated by Knuckleduster or Forrest Harris.]

Music and RPGs is a topic with stubborn opinions pro and con. Some like playing background music and sounds, others play a particular track during fights or a certain scene, still others detest it, claiming to be a GM, not a DJ.

I prefer music and some SFX in my games. Depending on the genre and tone of the game, I may loop a playlist in the background, or just highlight certain scenes with some background music.

In my recent Deadlands game I always played three songs from the Deadwood soundtrack as we sat down to play: “Theme From Deadwood,” “Arriving in Deadwood,” and “Iguazu.” These set the scene, as it were.

Recently I used Marco Beltrami’s excellent score for the 3:10 to Yuma remake. It is dark and subtle (for the most part) and perfect for looping quietly in the background.

Of course movie scores often get mentioned when music and RPGs comes up, and there are quite a few good Western scores out there. (Personally I found Morricone soundtracks distracting, they were too familiar and hence distracting.)

This topic comes up from time to time at the Pinnacle forum for Deadlands. Here a compiled list of music Deadlands players have used.

But what about sound effects? Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an easy way to have a gunshot or galloping horse or rambling saloon piano to a scene?

There is.

A little program called Soundstokey allows you to map sound files to your keyboard, making your laptop a sound board. It’s a snap to use.

During one game (it wasn’t a western game) I was playing a thunderstorm in the background and background music and using Soundstokey for specific sound effects. It was very easy to do with my laptop and Soundstokey.

If you don’t have any sounds for your game, try http://www.freesound.org/index.php.

I watched Appaloosa last night, staring Ed Harris,Viggo Mortensen, Renée Zellweger, and Jeremy Irons. Instead of offering a review I’ll link a review I agree with and move on to movie’s usefulness as RPG inspiration.

The protagonists, Virgil and Everett, are traveling professional lawmen. When a town goes to hell, as they are wont to do in Western movies, the town council hires gunmen slightly more trustworthy than those terrorizing the town. Virgil and Everett are those gunmen.

Wandering Freelance Lawmen
With a small group, say 2-3 players, you could definitely run with this concept. The players are wandering good guys going from town to town and keeping the west clean. Now that I say that , it sounds an awful lot like some of the fantasy “sand-box” campaigns I’ve played in. The advantage of this set-up is that it has definite story-arcs. Enter town, exciting and dangerous stuff happens, leave town. Repeat. [That sounds like a 10 word description of Dogs in the Vineyard.]

On the negative side, the Wandering Freelance Lawmen model can present some challenges. It requires the GM to create a interesting town/situation and NPCs every time the heroes move on. Repetition would be a serious danger. One way to avoid this would have enemies that were humiliated and left alive lining up to exact revenge. Travel becomes dangerous as any cowhand in a saloon might be a vengeful victim of the heroes “marshalling.”

This model seems best suited to a short game that involves a few towns all connected by the villain. Perhaps the iconic (or even cliched) evil wealthy capitalist is trying to buy up the land in three towns along a future railroad line (or near mineral deposits). Each town has it’s own gang whose real job is to make life hell and reduce the property values.

One other more thing. There’s a scene in Appaloosa where violence is avoided because a character is familiar with Apache ways. There’s a lesson for GMs in that. If your player has some quirky skill, let him use it. Find a way to let him shine with his Apache Traditions Knowledge.

The Amon Carter Museum has a web feature called “Texas Bird’s-Eye Views” that features some really nice maps of various Texas towns from 1871-1892. While they are behind a Flash-based map viewer at the website, many of them are also on Wikimedia Commons.

After the Civil War there was an explosion in panoramic or bird’s-eye view city maps. The techniques and technology were sufficiently advanced to produce beautiful works of art. There is a detailed article on Bird’s Eye View map phenomenon at the Anon Carter site.

Below are some samples:
Austin, 1873.
Austin, 1887.
Eagle Pass, 1887.
Fort Worth, 1876.
Fort Worth, 1886.
Fort Worth, 1891.
McKinney, 1876.

All told there are 60 maps on the Amon Carter site, and many are also available on Wikimedia Commons and these are only for Texas towns. I’m sure with some digging we can find more primary source maps of Old West towns, in fact you can count on it.

For my first real post at The Depot, I thought we’d go for something free and immediately helpful.

Colin Chapman’s Western Gear Archive,
lodged at Uncle Bear’s place.

There are four PDFs:
Western Handguns
Western Handguns II
Western Rifles
Western Shotguns

Each entry has a picture and some basic facts about the firearm. These are a great resource for helping you see what, for instance, a Forehand & Wadsworth Swamp Angel looks like in addition to knowing that it held 5 .41 long rounds and cost $14.00.

While you’re at Uncle Bear’s place, take a look at some of his other downloads (including a full line of Pulp Gear Archives).

An Inagural Post
The Depot is not the product of a lot of deep thinking and reflection. It was not market tested or focus grouped.

I was looking for any Western RPG sources I could get my hands on as inspiration for a Western game I was going to run. As I looked through RPGNow and IPR undet the “Western” heading, I realized that there was a decent amount of material out there. And this only scratched the surface. There’s the source material from books and movies to actual history and historical photographs. All of these resources for Western RPGs…and no central collection. No EnWorld or Story-games for Western RPGs. Maybe Western RPGs are too narrow a genre to have their own forum. But a blog or wiki? That makes sense.

I opted for a blog for a couple of reasons. As long as I keep updating it, a blog grows in usefulness. Without a good deal of material up front a wiki makes a bad impression–regardless of how much one adds later.

I aim to do a good job of categorizing the entries so they can be found when you need them. I’m going to cover anything a Western RPG player would find useful.

One more thing…
I am not my kind of expert on the Old West. I haven’t read every Louis L’Amour or Zane Gray or Ralph Cotton book. I haven’t seen many classic Westerns. But I love the genre and will be learning and sharing as I go.