On Archetype: Cowboys and Crusaders

One of my most successful Fantasy Role-playing Elfgame campaigns (at least in terms of length and insofar as one can describe their own campaign as successful) was about cowboys. I don't know why I chose cowboys, but school was hard, I had every hex of 12 by 12 hexmap to fill in and doing a western drawl is fun and easy.

The pitch was simple. Same homebrew world we were used to from college, in some far flung, untouched-yet-by-PC land but with all the tropes of the Wild West mixed mercilessly with tropes of Fantasy Land. Wield six-shooter with sword! Lasso up a dragon! Goblins with cowboy hats! Truly the mind races at the possibilities. 

Now D&D not being medieval, at least in its original incarnation, is old hat by now. Gygax and Arneson's conception of the world was more pulp fiction kitchen sink than historical journal bibliography and its mode of play was more Manifest Destiny than feudal hierarchy. If you want that go, play Pendragon (seriously go play Pendragon). Classic D&D famously had more references to Barsoomian Mars and its fauna than it did to nobility or princesses. 

This guy is technically a Disney princess.

However, what surprised me most about running this pastiche of Wild West and bog-standard fantasy was how easily the players grokked it. I had run a fairly typical high fantasy game up till that point (not that you can run any other kind of game with 5e) with its milieu of emperors and dragons and flumphs. And yet there seemed no cognitive dissonance between the setting and the players. 

To be clear, it is not the suspension of disbelief, that I found interesting. Players generally accept anything you put in front of them as long its internally consistent. It was how quickly the players were able to navigate the new sandbox ...conceptually? They had no issue using the knowing the saloon was where to find rumors and where the bounty board was and understood that bandits with six-shooters were not to be trifled with. I think what I'm saying is tropes and cliches are strong and useful tools for running a game, especially where genre is an element. Cliches when not overused (or riffed on) are mental load bearing structures. 

This post really knocked it out of the park in terms of "mental load bearing structures". At first glance I worried that maybe I'd created a boring setting full of "path of least resistance" type NPCs and quests. In retrospect I think instead I did a good job of taking some concepts to interesting conclusions. Missing sheriff? Turned by a vampyre into a fledgling toadie who used cenotaph portals to get into town and bypass its invitation requirement. He damn near ended the game with a TPK when he used his supernatural speed to blow through 4 six-shooters in as many seconds. Plus his star was pinned right though his flesh. Gruesome. I think I added enough interesting material for it to pass the Wicked City Test (though publishable is another matter).

Just gonna leave this right here. 

I think the marriage of two genres with strong archetypes is a bit like rebar and concrete. A duel with a corrupt sheriff is a good baseline. Knowing the local Bloodmoon may instill him with the power to return as a revenant? Maybe a bit cooler. 

All in all we played every week for nearly a year and a half. There were train robberies on the backs of raptors, morlocks with primitive gatling guns and the blowing up of at least one purple worm with a barrel full of gunpowder and nails. Calling the local cleric of a great dragon religion padre never felt more out of place than anything else.