Witch West Wild Wood
Let's do some imagineering.
Genres I have never played or GamesMastered.
I hate SuperHero games so that's off the table.
I have seen a lot of old 'Cowboy and Indian' Wild West movies.
Absolutely no racism, cultural appropriation, etc, intended whatsoever.
I grew up before Wokeism, before LGBT, before the internet,
damn I grew up before CD's which emerged in my teenage years.
Back then that meant Compact Disc, not Cross-Dresser. FTR
"My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought
cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives." Hedley Lamarr
This game has many influences. It attempts to stay true to the spirit of the early pioneering days of the roleplaying games industry, during the late seventies and throughout the eighties when the Satanic Panic was a real problem for kids with imaginations playing harmless games in safety. Back in those days Vampires and Orcs were terrifying monsters, not something you could play as a character and have sympathies for their plight. There were fewer moral dilemma's. The guy with the black hat was bad and the white hats were heroes. Those were simpler times.
Perhaps we do not want to keep this game quite so basic as that but it helps at the groundwork to provide a context to build from.
- "A man deserves a second chance, but keep an eye on him."
- "If everything isn't black-and-white, I say why the hell not?" John Wayne
During the nineties we all had a dose of David Lynch where the white picket fence came to symbolise something nasty hidden in the closet. Ripley eventually merged with and became the Alien, overcoming the fear of fear and replacing her gorgeous femininity with predatory feminism. The cynicism of post-modernism replaced the naivety and excitement of modernism as we collectively realised what we had collectively done, how we had been manipulated by corporate greed to the extent of destroying the ecology to unsustainable levels. Not so sure we all wised up yet.
That is really what this game should become about; to do justice to the world and culture we ourselves live in despite aspirations to return to a more elegant, pure state. Accountability for the consequences of our actions even where those actions were simply an attempt to bring some form of stability and harmony to our lives. This is the frontier we all must face on an ongoing basis.
The prototype cowboy town in this game where the characters hang out as a base of operations is;
A Town called Harmany
with two A's to push the point across nicely.
Wild West
"The American Film Institute defines Western films as those "set in the American West that [embody] the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier." Wikipedia, Western (genre)
Your character is one of the following types;
Gunslinger, Preacher, Scout, Tribal, Witch.
I won't focus on the Game System because this blog already has several of those floating around.
Tabletop Terrain
As I spend a lot of time crafting tabletop roleplaying game terrain,
I have had this idea on the back burners of my mind for many years without doing anything with it.
Here we go then, this is that opportunity.
Cowboy towns have characteristic features.
Identifiable locations.
Big fronted stores.
Big fronted store fronts are either 3" 4" or 5" wide
by approximately 3" - 4" tall with variations
(for a one story building)
with a boxy room behind it,
as wide as the front and between 3" - 6" long,
2" tall per level of the building,
and a back door.
Always a back door.
These are easy to create with card
which can both flat-pack and fold to 3D.
The original idea is they are pop-up buildings
so the whole town can be kept in a box on a shelf.
My crafty mind runs ahead of itself toward sculpture.
Recommend the Fronts and the box-rooms are detachable.
Recommend also making flat roofs so miniatures can walk on the roofs
because this is hell of a lot simpler than faffing around with triangular roofs.
Recommend also each building front has a large space for the Store Sign,
but with an ability to change the store sign for the building front.
The easy way of course is to only make the Big Store Fronts
and do a Blazing Saddles fake town job.
It takes Time, Energy and Focus.
And take a deep breath of that dusty desert air...
 |
| Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little, Warner Bros. |
Crafting Method
"Towns popped up overnight along the Western Frontier." Ahem see Deadwood.
In my decades of crafting experience the very best way to make 'wooden' box-rooms is from card-stock and corrugated-cardboard, is to cut 2mm-3mm wavy strips of card-stock 'planking' with a craft knife using no ruler and glue them like planks onto 2" wide (for single-story buildings, 4" wide for two-story buildings, 6" for three-story buildings, and so on) corrugated-cardboard using PVA glue. It takes 24 hours to dry. Repeat the same on the reverse.
Trim the excess bits of card-stock off where it sticks out over the corrugated-cardboard and cut the lengths you want for the buildings width and depth from this after the glue has dried. Cut out any doors and windows. Do the same for the floor (standard 3"x4" 'average' size building) and stick it all together with PVA along the edges of the corrugated-cardboard. Use strips which are cut with a ruler user along the side of the corrugated-cardboard to hide the corrugations.
Base-coat it 50/50 PVA and black acrylic paint then dry-brush it with 'mid-brown' and dry-dry-brush it with magnolia (never use white, it looks like frost and snow). Do it in that order to avoid having to faff about with gluing card-stock onto the 3D corrugated-cardboard model. Don't glue the roof on, you can lift this off to use the playing space inside the building. Make the roofs slightly larger than the floor.
Remember this project is inspired by cowboy towns so there will likely be a porch out front and the floor is raised so stick two sheets of corrugated-cardboard together for the raised floors. Bonus move is to put the corrugations horizontal and vertical so it strengthens the floor. Measure and glue the walls around the outside edges of the floor, not on top of it. You want as much floor-space inside your buildings as possible. I always stick to the idea of 1" grids for moving miniatures even if the grid is not obvious on the models.
Get creative with customising the buildings. Of course it would be so much simpler if somebody produced a nice series of A4 colour printable card-stock flat-packs with tabs to glue or slot for the whole town... I am sure such a thing exists somewhere but haven't bothered researching it yet. With Money you can shortcut Time, Energy and Focus. There's gold in them thar hills...
Locations
Essential Buildings
Saloon
General Store
Sheriffs Office / Jail
Bank
Barber Shop / Dentist
Herbalists Store
Church
Livery Stable
Mine Entrance
Undertakers
Outhouses
Hitching Posts & Water Troughs
Teepee's
Corral (fence sections)
Expanded Buildings
Houses
County Court House
Lumberyard
BlackSmith
Grocery Store
Bakery
Express Mail Office
Doctors Surgery
Clothes Store
Bordello
Laundry
Hotel
Harem
Restaurant
Lawyers
Printer / Newspaper
Assayer's Office (minerals)
Weavers Workshop
Dyers Workshop
School House
Grain Silo
Water Tower
Gallows
Farmhouse
Train Station
Library
But how do we make it much more interesting
than a simple Wild West World based on old movies
which always had more-or-less the same plots?
Witches
We all know from Dorothy's hideous adventure in Oz
as well as from the real histories
how many Witches were around in the Wild West.
Let's make a feature of that!
Witches come in all shapes and sizes.
We are using the word Witch loosely to include all types of magic user;
Sorcerers, Shamen, Wizards, Mages, Medicine-Men, etc.
In this Game World they are all simply called Witches by the superstitious folk.
Witches work alone and they work together in Covens.
It makes sense to have rules for Covens as well as Spells.
Power
Witches and magic is all about Power.
Spells require Power to work.
The more Power you put into a Spell the more Powerful it is.
Power is an indicator of how much of a change is to be made to the world.
It is measured in Amount, Range and Duration.
We will borrow the relevant charts from Brains&BrawnRPG®
©2015 Ordo Octopia. All Rights Reserved.
Amount
1 point = droplet, candle flame, coin, hand clap
2 points = punch, hammer fall, shot of rum
3 points = 1 horsepower, high wind
4 points = 10 horsepower, storm
5 points = 100 horse power, hurricane, tsunami
Range
1 point = within touch
2 points = within throwing distance
3 points = within sensory range
4 points = within memory of target
5 points = within imagination
Duration
1 point = immediate
2 points = a moment, a few minutes
3 points = an hour, a change of state (weather)*
4 points = a day, until nightfall or sunrise
5 points = a year, permanent
If you're using SLOP RPG ™ Power equates to Power which is 1D6 per point.
This shows how much Power is available to the Witch at that particular time.
You do not have to use all those available points.
If you're using It's All About ™ Power equates to Discipline value.
Witches can pool their Power
by collaboratively putting points into the Spell Pool for any particular spell.
Work out the Points Cost for the Spell you want to cast.
This means adding up what you want from each of the three charts.
Casting a spell (like everything else in life) involves three criteria:
Time - Energy - Focus
Time it takes to cast the Spell, and which time of day/night/lunar aspect/year is best,
and how long the spell will last.
Energy is Power, the energy required to make the magic work.
Focus is the outcome you are attempting to achieve
and also the ability to avoid being distracted.
In game system terms this is to roll the dice
for a Discipline Check (It's All About RPG™) or Oxygen Check (SLOP RPG™).
Brains&BrawnRPG® has its own established Magic system.
Witches have Spirit Allies and deal with Supernature.
Witches have spell books of instructions of what must be done to perform a spell.
All of the research for this is available from many sources.
I will not repeat information available elsewhere as it would be a total waste of time.
Improvise, Customise, Personalise.
Wild-Wood
This game is not set in arid desert conditions like most of the American Cowboy movies
in black and white and colourvision.
It is set in a rainforest.
We get to have jungle varmints instead of outback critters.
Monkey troupes, Lions, Elephants, Gorillas, Crocodiles.
We get to have all sorts of exotic plants for herbalism and voodoo,
including flesh-eating plants.
And of course, quicksand.
There are no 'new' stone buildings built or in use.
It is possible the jungle contains very ancient stone buildings,
completely overgrown ruins of a forgotten lost civilisation.
That is not the primary focus of this game.
There are however small hand-carved heirloom stone ornaments, tools,
and territorial way-markers used by the indigenous peoples.
There is a Dry Season followed by a Wet Season of monsoon floods,
which returns the long Green Season to the world, which gradually dries out again.
The reason the buildings are raised is because during the short Monsoon season,
small boats are used for transport after the roads become river-ways.
There are of course also the year-round river-ways with annually changing tributaries
all over the wide fertile valleys between many, many hills.
One common landscape feature are tall, wide tree-roots
holding together 'tumps' of raised earth in which many flora and fauna thrive all year round.
These have grown taller and wider from year after year of monsoon and root growth.
They are like small islands or mini-hills amidst the wide, usually dry and green flood-plains.
Making TableTop Terrain Tree's
We are doing this the easy way using sticks collected from nature.
Use a hot-glue-gun for roots and texture, vines, and to stick the twigs to a base.
3mm mdf cut to shape with a Stanley blade.
Use sponges from the washing up, I suggest buying a blender dedicated specially for this to avoid getting toxic plastic particles in your food and causing evil problems in your body. Or simply rip the sponges apart with your hands. Soak them in watered down green paint and use PVA glue to stick them to the trees. You could add a sprinkle of sawdust soaked in green paint. The cheapest most easily available supply is organic kitty litter pellets soaked in water until it crumbles and then dried.
To make the Tumps, stick your trees on top of a block of polystyrene plastered with sharp-sand and PVA mix, then build roots down its sides for the trees. Don't forget those liana's made from organic twine.
You might want to watch some Tarzan movies too, then.
One More Thing...
The Colonists, 'frontier town cowboys',
who live in what the Indians describe as 'the Dead World',
characteristically have blue skin of different tones
(cyan cobalt indigo lavender magenta).
They are more likely to have iron and black powder.
The indigenous Indians who live in teepee's and treetops,
hunter-gathering in 'the Live World',
characteristically have green skin of different tones
(emerald lime pine olive mint).
They are more likely to have spirit allies and natural magic.
Half-breed children have mottled skin.
There are some jobs which only Settlers do, some jobs which only Indians do,
and most jobs which anyone will do as a natural part of cultural integration.
Despite occasional frictions the cultural exchange and blending is a two-way effort and is generations in. For example, if a Herbalist Store in the first town is run by a blue-skinned settler using imported remedies, have the Herbalist Store in the second town run by a green-skinned Indian using local plants.
Brainstorming Session Ends.
For the main Witch West Wild Wood blog click here
For the Price Lists & Banking click here
For the Other Continent click here
For Cultural Development click here
For History & Future click here
For Visual Resources click here
For Brains&BrawnRPG® click here
That's it, that's your new Tabletop RPG.
©2024 Ordo Octopia. All Rights Reserved.