This idea just hit me yesterday and I've been mulling it over since. I've never attempted to make an Indie RPG or even tried writing up anything conceptual before. I just felt especially compelled to get this particular concept I have in mind down somewhere so that others can see it and share their thoughts with me about it.

Setting Premise:

Anyway, the basic premise is that it's 1910 on the American frontier, and the players are members of the Spellbreakers, a special branch of the U.S. Marshals Service. While the Marshals deal with enforcing the law and dealing with mundane crimes and criminals, the Spellbreakers are tasked with dealing with the strange, magical, and supernatural elements that break the law. In this alternate history, magic is real, and so are many other things to roam the Old Eldritch West. Dragons, the Fae, Old Gods, Demons and many other assorted creatures do exist. But they aren't above the law.

Technology has progressed normally, for the most part, though the Dwarven Clans that reside in the Appalachian Mountains are a bit more advanced, though not particularly interested in sharing with young, reckless, humans. And, of course, there are some men out there with a strange spark of genius, capable of inventing wondrous, though sometimes unpredictable and dangerous, devices. Though not strictly magical, those men who would use their engineering and technological expertise for criminal acts also fall under the Spellbreakers purview.

It is a period of great expansion for the United States, and the belief in Manifest Destiny is strong. Settlements are built further and further out into the burgeoning territory each day, though not all of them last. The frontier is a dangerous place, filled with many dangers including several of the Elven Tribes and their Gods, who after showing no interest in being 'civilized' have fought against attempts by the U.S. government to relocate them from lands that they have lived off of since before the race of man even existed.

These are very strange times, when robberies are just as likely to be made by a pack of outlaws with revolvers as they are by a staff wielding sorcerer and a retinue of elementals or a mad scientist backed by mechanical spiders and armed with a tesla cannon. It is a time of great change, where even the greatest seers are incapable of seeing the coming future clearly, where the capricious 'Fair Folk' still steal babes from their cribs and destroy those who they believe have slighted them, where the caves and mountains of the land are home to great Wyrms who rest for centuries amidst their vast treasures, where the forests are protected by eternal spirits who have lived since the Earth was first formed and where the dead do not always rest peacefully in their graves.

But the Spellbreakers, be they men, dwarves, elves or others, are determined to make sure that no matter what might be out there, it will not prey upon the innocent with impunity.

Goal: I know that I should try and better explain what I am trying to attempt with this game idea. Mainly, I want to try and mash together elements of Wild West and Fantasy adventure together for the people that love both of those things. Not idealized but not gritty either. The goal isn't to horrify those playing, but rather to really try and highlight the bizarre, the strange, wondrous, and fantastic elements. True, there are going to be plenty of scary moments, but they should never be so scary that that aspect overwhelms the entire experience.

I'm uncertain currently what sort of system I want to go with here. I don't know if I should try making a whole new system or if there might be a system that would be very easy to use with this setting.

This is all a very new experience to me (as it might be easy to tell) and I just hope that I'm doing it right. I crave whatever feedback, concerns, and other thoughts that any of you would be willing to share.

My first reaction is "wow, really cool!" so please do keep going with this. My second reaction is one of caution: I don't need a 300-page setting guide. I need details that I can use in play, and no more.

This might make a wicked hack for Dogs in the Vineyard, which shares the conceit of "PCs are the anointed chosen, who travel around this fictional Old West from town to town, rooting out problems and judging people--often with their guns." What Dogs lacks is the strong fantasy aspect. Players can bring magic and supernatural aspects into play on their own, but the core setting does little to help with that. In fact, even when players do that, it's color not system.

Are you interested in developing a system for this? Or are you happy to write up some setting information and playing it with some existing ruleset?

First off, thank you for thinking that my idea is cool!

Could you elaborate a bit on your second reaction? What details would be considered the most important when it comes to actual play?

I've never taken a crack at trying to develop a system before, so I'm a little hesitant to dive into the deep end. So I would say that I feel a bit more comfortable with picking an existing ruleset. However, while hesitant to try and develop a new system I am not averse to the idea.

I think I'd just need a bit of help in doing so.

You know those 300-page setting books? Sometimes followed by more 300-page setting books?

I never know what to do with them. I mean, they're cool and fun to read, but I never feel like I can use even a fraction of that material in actual play. Figuring out what details players can use in actual play is the trick, yeah.

I don't think you need to create an entire world. I think you need to create an idea of a world, some rules for how it works, one or two interesting places for characters to base and explore, and some interesting factions to cause trouble. Probably also some rules for the supernatural elements you want to explore.

If you want to head down the path of creating your own game system, you better really want to do it. It's either in your blood or it isn't. If it isn't, you're asking for a lot of pain; just borrow another game's rules and hack them for your awesome setting. There are lots of games that have licenses that let you do this (commercially even, if you care). If it's just for personal use, you don't even need a license: just pick a game you like and hack away. What are your publication goals, if any?

If that's the case, I think I can safely say that developing a whole new system from scratch is not in my blood.

I do understand what you mean about the setting books and believe me that that isn't what I had in mind. They are a nice read once in a while, but, yes, I would much prefer just giving people the feeling and idea of what the world is and letting them populate it as they wish. And considering how divergent the setting already is, there isn't any need for it to be entirely historically accurate. I think it is better to give freedom to the person running the game rather than mapping everything out for them, but that's just me.

Publication goals? I honestly hadn't even thought about that yet. I'm not sure I even want to think about that yet until this is more than just an idea in my head.

That's cool. Take a look at The Shadow of Yesterday for a possible ruleset for your setting. You can tailor its skills, secrets, and keys to fit your world. It's also released free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Or you could just go with whatever ruleset you're most comfortable with, which it sounds a bit like you were thinking of at first.

Adam's mention of figuring out "some rules for how [your world] works" wasn't referring to an RPG system, by my reading; it referred to the kind of rules you might give a team of writers who were writing a TV show set in your world. Things like "townsfolk are never friendly at first," or "kobolds are merely an annoyance unless organized," or "women are just as strong as men" or whatever - Anything that would help an improvising GM get the appropriate feel without having to go to a 300-page setting book. (My examples here are pretty weak, and others can probably beef them up a lot without much effort.)

Adam, am I reading you right?

And BV, welcome to the Forge. Do you have a real name by which we may address you?

Yes, Mike. I'm talking about creating high-level rules for the world so that GMs and players can create the detail themselves and end up with something that would delight but wouldn't surprise another set of GMs and players. They'd be, "Oh, this is cool. I hadn't thought of that. But it totally fits into this world."

My name's Christopher if you'd like to refer to me by that rather than Blind Venetian. I'm still working out those sorts of things with the setting. One idea that I've been going over is that in the world of Spellbreaker, the undead, at least the corporeal ones, have become much less of a problem. The idea is that there, when people die, their bodies are generally cremated in order to keep necromancers from building their own little armies from the deceased.

Of course, a crafty necromancer is just going to find other ways of procuring bodies.