Savage Worlds: Deadlands

Deadlands (Savage Worlds) Imagine an alternative West where things are wilder, weirder, and whole lot more deadly. Basically, it’s Cthulhu meets Cowboy/girl. Things began to change during the civil war. Apparently at Gettysburg, the dead on the battlefield wouldn’t stay…well, dead. Now rumours whisper of mysterious beings called the Reckoners who create monsters and use magic to turn the west into Hell itself. It’s already started on the West Coast.

California has shattered into a labyrinth of flooded sea-canyons, and a mysterious super-fuel called “ghost rock” has been discovered. More valuable than Gold or Diamonds, this strange material has spawned as much war and strife as it has “steampunk” devices.

Players are steely-eyed gunfighters, card-slinging sorcerers called hucksters, mysterious shamans, brave warriors, mad scientists, and more who battle against evil and attempt to prevent the “Reckoning”.

Deadlands is a genre-mixing alternate history role-playing game which combines the Western and horror genres, with some steampunk elements

In this award-winning, best-selling setting, gunfighters, braves, hucksters, martial artists, shamans, mad scientists, the blessed, and more square off against far more than desperate bandits.

The game is set in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century. The canonical year for the first edition of Deadlands is 1876. A later supplement, Tales o' Terror, advances the game's backstory and metaplot ahead one year, to 1877. The second edition of Deadlands uses the updated backstory of 1877 as the canonical starting point. Deadlands: Reloaded further updates the backstory and advances the canonical starting point to 1879.

The basic rules provide for characters and settings that could be expected to appear in the "Wild West" genre of movies and pulp fiction, and most of the in-game action is presumed to occur in the wild frontiers of the American West, or in barely tamed frontier towns like Tombstone, Arizona or Dodge City, Kansas. However, later supplements expanded the in-game adventuring area to include places such as the Deep South, the Mississippi River, Mexico, and the Northeastern United States. These supplements often provide for adventures set in urban areas such as New Orleans, New York City, or Boston.

The canonical, basic setting is referred to as the "Weird West" due to the juxtaposition of the Western setting with the horrific and fantastical elements of the game. The history of the Weird West is identical to real-world history, up until July 3, 1863. On this date in the game, a group of American Indians from various tribes, led by a Sioux shaman known as "Raven," performed a ritual in an effort to drive out the European settlers. This ritual created a conduit to a spiritual realm populated by powerful malicious entities known as the "Reckoners." The events surrounding and immediately subsequent to Raven's ritual is known as "The Reckoning."

The Reckoners feed on negative emotions, particularly fear. Sufficient levels of fear in the population of a given location allow the Reckoners to begin subtly altering the environment of that location: the sun shines a little less brightly, trees become stunted and "evil" looking, rock formations take on the appearance of corpses or monsters, and so on. The more powerful the fear, the greater the environmental changes.

The ultimate goal of the Reckoners is to turn the entire Earth into an evil, haunted wasteland — literally a Hell on Earth. However, the Reckoners cannot directly enter Earth's realm unless the overall fear level of the entire planet becomes sufficiently high. To this end, they use their powers to create monsters, madmen, zombies, and other creatures and villains that will sow fear and terror throughout the land.

An event called "The Reckoning" awakened an ancient evil, and you'd best hope the howls you hear on the High Plains are just a pack of ravenous wolves...