Fantasy Games: Western Gold Mine

[Storn]

I just read the "wilderness RPG thread" and it sparked some observations in my own life... and their impact on my GMing.  These are just some observations and not *really* trying to be persuasive arguments.  Just some ideas linked together that have made MY gaming experience a better one.

I grew up in the gentle hills and woods of Ithaca, NY.  Well... not IN the woods, but you get the drift. I spent a lot of time playing and working in woods.  I've done a bit of hunting, know many hunters.  We had horses on the farm (which is why the Wilderness thread sparked me to write this).  I've ridden Morgans and Belgians.  I've herded Jerseys and Angus cattle.  Not a ton, but dabbled a bit.  I can talk about pigs, chickens, horses and cows with some actual experience.

According to recent surveys... my childhood is shared by only 3% of Americans compared to the 80% at 1900.  It makes for great cocktail conversations... If you ever meet me one, ask me about the attempted slaughter of the pig named Oscar Major.  It makes for great cocktail conversations because it, in our society, is unusual.  

Growing up on a farm has influenced my attitudes about death, about life, about hard work, about man's relation to nature.

Sorry, long intro.  I'm actually going somewhere.

But I think this led me to an interesting gaming decision several years ago.  I never cared for the Western as a movie art form.  Read an occasional Louis L'amour, watched occasional John Ford movie.  Then, several years ago, I saw "Big Country" with Gregory Peck as a pacifistic ex-ship captain caught between two families feud over watering rights.  Totally changed my idea of Westerns, now I actually seek them out.  

Pow!  I decided to start my Realms  fantasy game, but I would take MANY of the Western tropes and transplant them to fantasy.  Cow and horse culture.  Importance of space (I started the game after the continent had been depopulated by war and disease) and the outdoors.  Certain cultures had small horses, others, large draft beasts.  Fights over water and resources.  Good vs. evil.

Indians became Orcs.  Texas Rangers became player characters.  Sherrifs became, well, sherrifs.  

My childhood came back in very subtle ways... so I can teach and show my suburban and urban friends WHAT it feels to live on the land.  How psychological influencing being on a horse that weighs more than 5 men.  How cowboys (and therefore typical mounted fantasy adventurers) tend to ride 2 or 3 horses.. not one.

So, I really think that frontier "thang" has a lot to show RPGs.  If you doubt me, go watch Westward the Women (Howard Hawks director, first western shot on location starting in Kansas, going to California, I think its 1946 or 47, black and white) and see if you can't glean 2 or 3 great fantasy campaign ideas from it.

My title is WEstern gold mine.  The very first arc that I ran in my fantasy Realms (now going on 10 years) was a upcoming war between dwarves and humans over a newly discovered Silver mines in them thar hills.  Btw, I told the players that what I was really doing was running westerns on them a couple of years later.  They never saw it, but with hindsight, totally got it.

[b_bankhead]

Oh come on, give a 'real 'western a try, why does everybody HAVE to redo the Bad Tolkein thing? complete with  Tolkein-Western allegories (by the way Tolkein despised allegory)  Oh well.........
If you want to look at the most interesting western game out there then have  a look at   Dust Devils,, It might be fun to adapt the game to your western- like environment. Dust Devils has been adapted to Samurai,superspies, and other approaches, so it should work with your world.[/url]

But honestly try a real western for once........

[Doctor Xero]

Pow!  I decided to start my Realms  fantasy game, but I would take MANY of the Western tropes and transplant them to fantasy.  Cow and horse culture.  Importance of space (I started the game after the continent had been depopulated by war and disease) and the outdoors.  Certain cultures had small horses, others, large draft beasts.  Fights over water and resources.  Good vs. evil.

Excellent idea!  By presenting important concepts of the actual old West (by way of Western genre tropes) in a non-Western setting, you make visible or noticeable to the players things they would ignore or take for granted were you to present them within the old, familiar Western genre.  The use of a fantasy world prevents old West cliche's from occluding the concepts -- for example, range wars in a fantasy setting might evoke in players a sense of the conflict over limited natural resources and the Tragedy of the Commons, whereas range wars in a Western setting are more likely to evoke in players little more than the theme music to Bonanza.

In the literary world, part of what you are referring to is known as defamiliarization -- the technique of rendering the familiar new by presenting it in an unfamiliar way, so that people see what previously had been invisible to them due to overfamiliarity.  It's one of foundational techniques of satire/commentary, postmodernism, Dadaism, and the fantastical genres such as SF.

Just remember that this technique has been used both by brilliant minds, such as Jonathan Swift, and lazy minds, such as the authors of the more poorly written Outer Limits episodes.

Good luck with your campaign!  (And I know what you mean about sharing something with which you have an intimacy which is rare for others -- also a cool thing for a game master to do if her or his players are receptive.)

Doctor Xero

[Jasper]

Great idea.  I've often drawn inspiration from historical periods, but have never thought of transplanting them to fantasy for some reason -- maybe too much knowledge of medieval history to use more easily? -- but instead have always gone the other way: history to sci-fi.

Your players were ignorant of the true method behind everything: was this to introduce some niterestnig themes "by stealth"?  In other words, would your players have objected to the themes you wanted in the game if they knew they were from western settlement history and rural life?  I imagine a lot of people have contemplated doing something along these lines for such reasons: exciting and familiar trappings to get everyone roped in, and then introduce something that you know they will like, but that they might not have known they would like.

[Storn]

Your players were ignorant of the true method behind everything: was this to introduce some niterestnig themes "by stealth"?  In other words, would your players have objected to the themes you wanted in the game if they knew they were from western settlement history and rural life?  I imagine a lot of people have contemplated doing something along these lines for such reasons: exciting and familiar trappings to get everyone roped in, and then introduce something that you know they will like, but that they might not have known they would like.

This game started some 9 years ago and has been run in various mini-arcs ever since.  But it was never a once a week type of game.  I say this, because it is with hindsight that I saw *my plan*.  But when I was in the midst of it, I must confess that I was going on instinct and influences.  In hindsight, I see that I'm fascinated by American Individualism, Frontier,  and that dialogue between Civilization and those Fringe areas.

I'm not sure if the players would have objected... I mean I stated right up front that I viewed the Orcs that were on the fringe of civilization were not stereotypical EVIL.  Or; "much like American Indians.  Some will kill you.  Some are interested in trade.  Some are agrarian, like the Anasazi.  Some are herders of goat, deer and sheep.  They are individuals and individual tribes."  They took that in, nodded, and then we got down to rolling dice. <g>

And the Player character organization, the Blue Gryphons, had as much in common with the 3 muskateers as they did with the Texas Rangers.  One cultural trope was that the BGs were so respected in their country on the frontier, which was severely underpopulated and large stretches of cattle country, was that a free meal was to be had at any citizen's home.  

This really inspired in the PLAYERS, a love in their frontier country.  It was awesome.  But they definitely were thinking 3 Musketeers than Texas Rangers in the beginning.  But the silver rush introduced more 'western tropes' and after awhile I just fessed up.  At that point, the game was running very smoothly.

Since then, I'be introduced a few more "historical" concepts into my Realms.  In very short order, I introduced the Kholtar, a mongol inspired mystic blood blending of the exiled Lost 13th Tribe (ala Jewish mythology) of Elves with Orcs.  I had listen to the Devil's Horsemen on tape during a long car trip about the Mongols... which really inspired me to work in some of that Mongol flavor.  Seeing the players faces when the crested a ridge and saw some 10,000 orcs stretched across the plain in neat little rows of tents in groups of 10.  That was priceless.  

When a message went to the Kholtar leader some hundreds of miles away and an answer came back in a mere 5 days, they were convinced that magic was involved.  I got to spring the mongol idea of Pony Express, combined with mirrors on them.  Floored them, I must say.

My Realms really has moved somewhat away from the Western as an idea, although I just worked in a whole individual saddle art from one tribe of equestrian orcs riding Morgan size horses.  Right now, my game is really looking like a Reneissance situation.  Magic is coming back.  Elven culture is in ascendence.  Gunpowder facisimile has *just* been introduced by the dwarves (firedirt, apologies for stealing from Mike Stackpole <g>).  The printing press has been around for 50 years, so we are just starting to see newspapers (yellow rags) in major cities.  Player characters are just putting together a learned scholar symposium to copy and proliferate an enormous library cache recently discovered.  Trade, politics, bejezus...we just had a elven diplomatic snafu that revolved around the loss of certain key elven craftsmen (root and wood weavers) to the reclamation of lost elven capitol... it was a fantasy version discussion of Outsourcing.  We all just stopped playing and looked at each other and went... hey!  we're talking about Outsourcing for christ sake!

The game has really moved to an elven centric one... and that is a bit less "western" like, due to the long lives, the influx of powerful magics etc. etc.  But when we touch on human issues of space, slavery, economics, nation-state building... yeah, it becomes a lot more like a fantasy game with Western themes disguised just slightly.  There is a dialogue of Rationalism as Magic gets stronger, Divine Magics get weaker.  Certain cultures are dealing with serious destablization as clerics are publically unable to call upon divine powers.

Some Western themes are still very impactful.  Newspapers were certainly a big part of that culture.  Being able to print books and newspapers changes a fantasy world.  Magic can fill in for railroads (a system of gates called Wildways has steadily become stronger and stronger with the return of magic) and telegraphs (scrying and sending spells).

I have to say, I've always been an armchair historian.  I also work at home, and listen to NPR pretty much all day.  Taking bits and pieces of real world, and weaving them with a bit of disguising into the Fantasy world is a lot of fun for me.  

I also have been highly influenced by 3 players, 2 of who I have now, who are all medieval historians.  The 1st, Ilan, was there at the real beginning of my GMing career and it was a lot of dialogues between us that crafted my approach.  He is now in Texas, I'm in Michigan.

I think a lot of my reliance on the Western was in order to avoid "medieval tropes" that all three KNOW so well, are EXPERTS at.  Made me go to other areas of culture and history.  Bob teaches at Kzoo, he doesn't want to do Ars Magica, "too much like work".  But exposing him to Reformation, Reineissance, Exploration, Rationalism ideas combined with "have six gun, will travel".. makes my game so NOT Ars Magica.  Now, my elven centric players seem to be more in a dialogue that resembles the American Revolution than San Francisco gold rush.

I apologize to just blathering.  I was just really struck this week by this approach and how much fun I have with it.  And Xero?  Thanks, I didn't know the technique had a name... makes perfect sense!  good to know.

[hix]

Storn,

After checking out 'Westward the Women', I was wondering whether you could recommend any other hidden gems of Western books and movies that'd be good sources of provocative Situations (capital-S)?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Point 1: This is cool.

....I decided to start my Realms  fantasy game, but I would take MANY of the Western tropes and transplant them to fantasy....Indians became Orcs.  Texas Rangers became player characters. ...

Point 2: Isn't classical D&D very much a Western -- or at least a drama of (political correctness alert) colonialism? You have a frontier, you have good civilized folk expanding out into its opportunities while being threatened by its chaos, you have Orcs et al as stand-ins for the natives, and you have explorer-conquerors -- the player characters -- with a remarkable, Cortez-in-Mexico ability to go off into unknown territory and whup everything?

[komradebob]

Hey Storn,
I didn't realize you were an Ithacan! Small world. I grew up about 40 minutes west of there and went to college at "IK".

As an aside, I'm kind of thinking of doing something that goes in th opposite direction, from mythic fantasy to western, specifically taking the Cattle Raid of Cooley and the Red Branch stories and reworking them as a sort of range war set up...

Robert

[Jasper]

Sydney,

You're absolutely right there, now that I think about it!  D&D and Star Wars both, and probably all kinds of other American entertainment -- all ultimately westerns.  And more or less spaghetti westerns too, if I understand exactly what a spaghetti western is.

Not only are the PCs explorers (and occasionally conquerers) but they're the sort of tight-lipped lone gunmen (except somehow forced into a group) who ride into town, destined to help anyone in need before moving on and riding into the sunset.  While occasionally agents of a distant government ala detached or retired Army officers, they're usually out for profit but ultimately Good Christian Soldiers. The black and white morality is often a major component of D&D games (although it is in a lot of Western culture so that may not be surprising), particulaly those with Paladins in them.  

Storn's initially unconscious transferral of strong western themes into D&D may have better informed than most, but may not have been at all uncommon.  Pretty interesting.  I wonder what Gygax would say about it.

[Sean]

Dungeon module B2, "Keep on the Borderlands", and all its many, many, many imitators, are essentially Westerns.

"There's goblins out on that frontier, Jeb."

*spits* "Don't ah know it, Carter. Rustlin' cattle and harassin' the wimmenfolk."

(silence)

"I gots me a matched pair of Wands of Magic Missile sez them goblins have hung around them caves a few weeks too long."

"My trusty Crossbow of Accuracy says the same thing, Carter."

The basic D&D campaign setup for the initial adventure for most groups is a Western. What's interesting is that the structure of the Western has such a strong psychological pull for most people and yet Western RPGs don't get the same popularity. It's like a world where nobody will drink rum or coke by themselves but rum and cokes are very popular, only everyone claims the rum and coke is just coke.

[M. J. Young]

O.K., but maybe you've got it backwards.

Maybe it's because Westerns draw on the same basic simple plot concepts as fantasy games--rescuing the helpless, going after the evil ones, looking for the lost treasure, all basically simple core concepts for stories which can be pursued rather easily and still make a compelling adventure.

So I'm inclined to think that it's not that fantasy games take their ideas from westerns, but that both draw from the same basic plots.

Remember, Western and Medieval Fantasy (and Sci-fi and dozens more) are not plots nor even genres, they're settings. The have to be combined with plot concepts (romance, adventure, mystery) to create something more. You can do any plot in any setting. No plot belongs to a particular setting. Star Wars was mentioned as "a western set in space", but all its primary inspirations came from the sci-fi serials of the fifties (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers). These, too, used simple plots. So did the pulp novels that predate the western genre--aren't all Westerns really remakes of the adventures of Allan Quartermain in Africa, moved to the new setting?

It's not that fantasy draws its plots from westerns, but that there are only so many simple plots that are compelling, and westerns did them all before we started playing games. If none of us had ever seen a western, we'd probably create much the same stories, because these are the simple stories that are relatively easy to create.


Spaghetti Western, incidentally, arose because Italian filmmakers found they could use such simplistic plots combined with cowboys and other American West tropes to make popular films on a low budget in Italian sets. It thus comes to mean any western that uses a simple plot and low budget to make a movie intended to appeal to the American box office (at a time when most heroes were cowboys).

Western games don't do so well now because most of the baby boomer generation got tired of cowboys and replaced them with superheroes and fantasy heroes--which is why those are the more popular settings for games which rose first among baby boomers. I've seen Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and a dozen others, watched many hours of the Lone Ranger, and I'm not particularly interested in those heroes.

Or maybe it's the appeal of being a hero who can do things we could never have done in our wildest dreams. We could have grown up to be cowboys or rodeo stars, if we'd made that our objective. We could never have grown up to be superheroes or wizards no matter what we did.
--M. J. Young

[Sydney Freedberg]

Maybe it's because Westerns draw on the same basic simple plot concepts as fantasy games--rescuing the helpless, going after the evil ones, looking for the lost treasure....

There's one more common element though, which is the "swarms of barbaric Others" who are variously Indians (Westerns), Africans or Asians (British pre-WWI colonial "Boys' Adventure"), or Orcs et al (fantasy). Now admittedly this is also the part that can get a little ethnic cleansy and disturbing.

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.S.: I am not trying to say this particular campaign (let alone fantasy and Westerns in general) is inherently racist. Quite the contrary: By being conscious of how different genres echo each other, Storn seems to have avoided sleepwalking into ugly cliches and had some more nuanced and interested ideas.

[Storn]

Hey Storn,
I didn't realize you were an Ithacan! Small world. I grew up about 40 minutes west of there and went to college at "IK".

As an aside, I'm kind of thinking of doing something that goes in th opposite direction, from mythic fantasy to western, specifically taking the Cattle Raid of Cooley and the Red Branch stories and reworking them as a sort of range war set up...

Robert

Ithacan at heart, living in Southfield, MI.  And I grew up between Watkins Glen and Ithaca to be exact, just outside of Mecklenburg.  Went to school in Tburg.  The gorges and hills certainly has colored my art and my gaming  from the beginning.

Sorry folks, I wuz outta town on vacation, in the West!!!  New Mexico.  Saw lots of great art in Santa Fe.  Saw Carlsbad caverns and White Sands (and if those aren't natural wonders great for fantasy or westerns... hit me with a sharps fifty!).  But the real kicker for me was Bandolier nat'l monument with pueblo ruins of a town in a canyon valley and a few hundred yards away, cliff condiminiums in the cliff sides.  What a great place for a neat little fantasy village, be it humans, orcs or even elves and dwarves!

Jasper, I wasn't saying that my ideas were all that new... just a different filter to look at lots of old ideas.  I just threw these ideas out to y'all because it gave ME a handle that really works for me as a GM.  For me, I could smell the leather and horse sweat in a way that I never could with knights on horses, or Mongols on ponies... because I rounded up the occasional cow.  And I think it translated in gameplay, from my passion and descriptions of that kinda life.

Syndey, I think you are onto something, that Western is a setting and Fantasy is a setting.   And they can draw from similar wellsprings at times.  This is precisely my point... that Westerns (and I really mean movies here, Marvel Comics Kid Colt never really inspired me to run much fantasy <g>) can allow for a lot of hooks, a lot easily acceptable and knowable tropes...  the Western is SO ingrained in our culture, these bits become easy to communicate to the players.

I ran a little, unsucessful campaign based on the Wagon Train idea in a fantasy setting.  Now, as far as I know, Wagon Trains weren't crisscrossing Europe (although trade certainly was, especially dem dere Norse), but when I told the players that covered wagons, ox, horses were going to be their "environment" for several adventures, I got a slightly different response from them than if I had told "arabic caravan" or "silk road caravan".  I think.  Certainly not scientific.  Just my notion.

Just a few more cents...