For example, the villain eventually turns on his masters when I feel like there's not enough build-up to explain why. However, I will say that the book could have used a bit more twists and turns.
The simplicity and lack of big politics is an appeal. The player characters come in, find the local baddie, and deal with it. The tagline of the new edition was "return to small town horror" and this certainly is a small town horror. There's a shooting contest, a stagecoach robbery, and a beautiful saloon singer to add a few more Western motifs to the event. He doesn't necessarily want to open the gate but if you're cashing the Devil's checks then you eventually you have to repay the balance. When the deck gets a complete fifty two souls, the huckster will have a gateway to hell opened underneath the town. The premise is that a local gambler has taken over a small town using a demonic deck that steals the souls of his victims. It is a story you can easily put into any existing chronicle and has a simple enough plot that every posse will generally want to deal with it: stop the hellgate from being opened by the evil huckster. This is roughly the same size as Night Train, one of the most popular early Deadlands adventures, but lacks the extensive opening fiction that took up half the book. Showdown at Sunset is a contrast to Horror at Headstone Hill in that it is a small self-contained adventure of about thirty pages. Reloaded thus got to be defined primarily by dealing with Stone, Brother Grimme, Raven, and Darius Hellstromme as well as averting the apocalypse. As someone observed about the metaplot heavy Abberant and Trinity games, if Divis Mal is so powerful that he can never be defeated and changes the plotline at will to accommodate then what is the point of the players? Which is to say they didn't have a point and the writers would have been better off making novels. However, that doesn't really leave much room for the player characters. It would eventually go on to Hell on Earth and Lost Colony in a kind of multi-generational saga that would culminate in the defeat of the Reckoners. Deadlands was originally envisioned as a metaplot-driven game of the Nineties that had a beginning, middle, and end. Reloaded did have an identity, it was just big epic plot point campaigns trying to get control over the massive metaplot that had come to eat the previous edition. I am a bit iffy if there's enough content to deserve an entire review but I think the book does provide a sense of direction for Deadlands: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition that was lacking for Reloaded. SHOWDOWN AT SUNSET is another adventure that has recently come out for Deadlands: The Weird West and helps establish what they're trying to accomplish for the new edition. And you can dial in your preferred level of gonzo vs. In any case, I also like the return to ground-level, local adventures and a more sandbox feel, as I never cared about the big metaplot stuff. Those things aside, the gonzo is par for the course for Deadlands, which is unapologetically high camp. trying to paint Lee as a heroic figure and pretend he wasn’t a raging white supremacist). railroady AF) and by 20th-century neo-Confederate revisionism (i.e.
It says a lot that, in a setting with monsters and magic and mad science, a slavery-free and racially-inclusive CSA was the one thing that utterly defeated my suspension of disbelief.Īnd yeah, Dead Presidents sounds pretty bad, but it’s pretty much what I’d expect from something heavily influenced by late-90s adventure design (i.e. It still leaves much to be desired in its treatment of Indians and Chinese Americans, for example, but getting rid of the Confederacy is a step in the right direction. Deadlands has always been a problematic fave for me, just like the source material it’s based on. Well, this edition is the one I wish I’d had a few of years back when I ran itso I’d call it a success overall.
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