Advice on building a Wild West setting

[SoulDragon298]

I have been thinking about a wild west/fantasy campaign for awhile and would like to build a world for it to take place in. I was wondering if anyone would have any advice to help me build up this world.

[UnArcaneElection]

Pathfinder itself has some Steampunk/near pre-Steampunk stuff (Gunslinger for example), but Pure Steam seems to claim to offer a Steampunk subsystem, which should be adaptable to a Wild West setting; however, I have not tried this myself or investigated it closely.

This is probably obvious to most Pathfinder fans who would be interested in this, so I'm not really saying anything new, but putting my 2 coppers in to mark this to check back with later, and wondering if Paizo might actually come out with a Wild West AP in the future, since Golarion has suitable settings within it (most obviously Arcadia and the Mana Wastes, but also even Varisia and possibly Casmaron).

[ngc7293]

Our group played the movie The Magnificent Seven. Various versions of Gunslingers (the Paladin version was in there too) played the main characters. We had zombies and other undead that played the villains. Everything was pregen for 7th level. We had a lot of fun for a Western-ish Fantasy game.

[Knick]

Wild west/fantasy seems pretty broad. I suppose it depends upon which aspects of a wild west setting that intrigue you. To create an environment similar to the wild west, you need a few things:

1) An established civilization "back east," or, better yet, competing established civilizations.

2) A large expanse of land unsettled by said civilization(s).

3) Some valuable resource that drives the civilizations and individuals to colonize this large expanse. Think gold rush--or ghost rock, which might be more fantasy appropriate.

4) A native population that was perfectly happy until those civilizations started paying attention to the land they live in.

That pretty much sums it up. In a fantasy setting, it helps if you create a few obstacles that prevent magic from making it all too easy. I'd probably have some sort of reason for teleportation magic to not work over any sort of distance in this expanse to make other methods of getting the resource back more important. This also keeps all of the classic travelling through the west tropes alive.

Really, once you have those elements the other wild west stuff writes itself.

That's as much as I have off the top of my head. I hope it inspires!

[SoulDragon298]

Knick wrote:

Wild west/fantasy seems pretty broad. I suppose it depends upon which aspects of a wild west setting that intrigue you. To create an environment similar to the wild west, you need a few things:

1) An established civilization "back east," or, better yet, competing established civilizations.

2) A large expanse of land unsettled by said civilization(s).

3) Some valuable resource that drives the civilizations and individuals to colonize this large expanse. Think gold rush--or ghost rock, which might be more fantasy appropriate.

4) A native population that was perfectly happy until those civilizations started paying attention to the land they live in.

That pretty much sums it up. In a fantasy setting, it helps if you create a few obstacles that prevent magic from making it all too easy. I'd probably have some sort of reason for teleportation magic to not work over any sort of distance in this expanse to make other methods of getting the resource back more important. This also keeps all of the classic travelling through the west tropes alive.

Really, once you have those elements the other wild west stuff writes itself.

That's as much as I have off the top of my head. I hope it inspires!

It did thanks!

[UnArcaneElection]

Knick wrote:

{. . .} In a fantasy setting, it helps if you create a few obstacles that prevent magic from making it all too easy. I'd probably have some sort of reason for teleportation magic to not work over any sort of distance in this expanse to make other methods of getting the resource back more important. This also keeps all of the classic travelling through the west tropes alive. {. . .}

From my understanding of the Mana Wastes (region around Alkenstar), they will serve this function admirably.

[Bob Bob Bob]

What kind of Wild West you're expecting will change the story a lot.

• If you're going Wild Wild West then drop casters, keep alchemists (and similar), make magic item creation cheap and easily accessible and let them duplicate spells that are otherwise inaccessible. This gives you "no magic" while still giving you full access to spells and similar in the form of technology gizmos. The world basically runs the same way as normal Pathfinder (or Earth, if you want to introduce technology), you can pick and choose your level of "magic" used by other people (rare, variable, common). Theft probably becomes a bigger problem, and there's no end of quests for "someone just made a giant robot spider/something else that will destroy everyone else".
  
• If you want spaghetti Western then just pull out the checklist and make sure you hit all the points. One of the party members is left for dead by a partner. Another is a lawman/former gunslinger hunting someone down who saves them. The barmaids are saucy, the rest of the patrons are angry, surly drunks, and the bartenders dispense wise advice. The villians are cartoonishly greedy, corrupt, and vicious, the players are... less so, but not by much. I just realized this is also most fantasy. There should have been a recent war, and remnants of the losing side should still be around and trying to fight the war (or are now just bandits). There should be a stable, civilized part of the world but the players are always out in the boonies where lawlessness reigns and powerful characters set themselves up as tyrants in towns. Everyone has a get rich quick scheme and half of them are just gouging travelers on prices. The other half are secret treasure maps to lost buried gold that they'd totally go get if they could but they'll let you have it for just a few hundred gold. You can pull adventure ideas from the blurbs here.
  
• Then there's the comedy variations. Tampopo is an excellent comedy that for the most part still keeps the spaghetti western tropes (in a more modern setting). They Call Me Trinity is just a spaghetti western done as a comedy. You just pick and choose which parts of the spaghetti western checklist to play straight and which ones to subvert. Maybe the barmaids are all angry surly drunks, the bartenders are all attractive women, and the patrons all have wise, sage advice. Maybe the players are actually in the civilized part of the world but everyone behaves like it's the wild west. "I say good sir, you appear to me looking at me in a most untoward manner. I shall be forced to empty my crossbow into your churlish person!"
  

Then we have to talk about magic, black powder, and armor.

• Magic can totally be present in all of this, but some spells are specifically problematic... sort of. Teleport takes the place of rail cars. Resurrection magic and speak with dead mean that there's lots of bounties and you have to hide the body to get away with murder, but it's awfully easy to frame someone. It would also be near impossible to kill people well connected enough. Planar Ally/Binding probably just needs to be removed, long term outsider service could fix "lawless frontier" with "infinite swarm of angels". Or make sure it stays that way with "infinite swarm of demons". Either way too much Outsider involvement removes a lot of the humanoid versus humanoid/nature struggle at the heart of most westerns. There's probably some other spells, that's just off the top of my head. Oh, and fabricate makes a nice industrial assembly line.
  
• Black powder is a choice you have to make on whether you want western or fantasy to win out in weapon selection. If you want more of a western feel then you need to choose what level of firearms to use. If you want more of a fantasy feel than just make hand crossbows and repeating crossbows martial (or simple) weapons. Maybe make a repeating hand crossbow. That'll give less martial classes a slow shooting "rifle" with a light/heavy crossbow, and martial characters a "revolver". Probably make long/shortbows exotic to make them rarer.
  
• Armor is probably best done with Armor as DR. I don't know if this is the best way to do that particular subsystem (there's a few), but it's the easiest way to cover stopping a gun with a chunk of metal (as guns bypass armor normally). It'll also let lightly armored dex people be the hardest to hit with a "gun" and give people a way to wade through bullets/bolts (by suiting up in big, heavy, uncomfortable metal armor). Chain shirts essentially become bulletproof vests.
  

Finally, in order to get the kind of running gun battles you expect from a western, all you need to do is increase encounter distances. How you do this is up to you (reduce the penalty on visual perception checks to -1 for every 100 feet outside is a good one) but as long as you play their enemies spending the whole time they try to run up and smack them with a sword shooting them full of bolts/bullets, they'll pick up on it and starting using ranged weapons themselves (and hopefully ducking to cover).

[Eltacolibre]

Make an advanced/Mythic Pale Stranger villain, could be quite a lot of fun.

[SoulDragon298]

Eltacolibre wrote:

Make an advanced/Mythic Pale Stranger villain, could be quite a lot of fun.

Thinking either that or a gunslinger graveknight.

[DrDeth]

You guys know I am an unabashed Pathfinder fanboy. But honestly, there are some really good Wild West (and better yet Weird West) game systems out there.

[Pan]

DrDeth wrote:

You guys know I am an unabashed Pathfinder fanboy. But honestly, there are some really good Wild West (and better yet Weird West) game systems out there.

Yeah unless you are cool with fantasy up to 11 in your wild west game I'm with Doc on this one.