First Edition Deadlands: The Weird West. One of the great RPGs. It is the late 19th century in the American West. Outlaws rob banks and trains, pursued by hard-faced Lawmen who are only separated from them by a badge and a sense of honour. Sharp dressed poker players ride on riverboats or fleece the hick locals in a piano bar as a couple of high-kicking dancers flap their petticoats. Cold-eyed gunslingers face each other down a dusty street as a ball of dry weed is tumbled along by the wind. A mad scientist rides his steam-powered mech against and leads an army of zombies against some Indian shamans protecting their lands with the power of the spirit dance.

Wait. What?

Deadlands, as do many role-playing games, takes a familiar genre and blends it with odder fare. The world of the Weird West has as much to do with horror movies as with westerns, and throws zombies and various flavours of magic into the mix. As well as shamans, some hucksters cast hexes with their decks of cards, priests can call on the power of god and the saints and mad scientists can imbue machinery with enslaved manitou spirits. And some folk just prefer to face these outlandish critters with their two fists and their six-shooters.

Deadlands gives an excellent background and storyline, as well as a system which includes specialised strengths and weaknesses for characters that are completely part of the setting (the whole book is written in the cod-western vernacular of western B-movies, critters and varmints and shootin' irons, and this carries over into edges and flaws in such descriptors as 'tinhorn' and 'big britches').

But the real jewel of Deadlands is the system, which is, for my money, not only one of the best fast-and-fun gaming systems ever created, but so in tune with the milieu that the game isn't the same without it (as was proved when the game was relaunched with a far inferior generic system). In tandem with the usual dice (everything from 4- to 12-sided), the players and gamemaster (or Marshall) each have a pack of standard playing cards, and get to draw cards to determine certain actions (combat order, magic use, etc), making poker hands to determine the level of success. In addition, it was also the first game I came across to use 'fate chips' - again poker chips - being awarded for good game play (good roleplaying, bravery, reducing the whole group to howls of laughter), and exchangable for such things as changing dice rolls or avoiding damage. Always a good thing to shoehorn into almost any system if you want to encourage heroic play. ( )

The America West has been a fertile source of successful movies, TV shows, novels, pulp stories...everything but role-playing games. Deadlands for a time looked as if it might break that curse; a novel system that included cards for initiative, lethal and fast gunfights, combined with magic that used poker hands and weird science that could make jet packs made for a splash. It didn't last, but it was a gamer try than most. ( )