The Wild West Is Boring

As many folks have observed over the years (e.g., James Maliszewski back in 2008, Paul Hughes at greater length in 2016), Westerns were a huge influence on D&D (and Traveller), and you can see the imprint of the Western mythos on many subsequent TTRPGs. Game designers love their open ranges and noble savages, even in genres that wouldn't seem likely to accommodate them—think of Shadowrun's Great Ghost Dance and Cyberpunk's Nomads. Lots of non-Western RPG settings include quasi-Western gimmicks or locations (wandslingers in D&D's Eberron, the Savage Coast in…D&D's Mystara). There have been many attempts to create Western systems and settings over the years, too, some played straight, others with Lovecraftian or other horror and fantasy elements woven in.

Few of them really stuck, and none in a big way. Some of it's probably timing; the Western's star was on the wane all through the early decades of TTRPGs. Boot Hill, the direct follow-up to OD&D, came out in 1975, already past the peak of the Western zeitgeist (a lot of the long-running Western TV shows, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, ended in the early and mid '70s; the spaghetti Western craze was still going, but was starting to peter out). Still, Boot Hill's heyday coincided with How the West Was Won; the '80s had the novels of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy; the '90s had a small Western film revival (and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman); the 2000s had Deadwood; and the list goes on. The Western never went away. It just never caught on in RPGs.

Why not? You already know my thesis: The Wild West is boring (as an RPG setting).

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When I say “the Wild West,” I mean the post facto American (but also German, Italian, Spanish…) vision of “the Old West,” the setting of nearly all of the movies, TV shows, comics, and books that Gygax and company grew up with, and the setting we all reflexively think of when we hear “Wild West.” Cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, six-shooters, chaps, big rowel spurs, ten-gallon hats, saloons, cattle drives—and, narrowly, the time period from the end of the American Civil War to the end of the 19th century (or perhaps to the First World War, depending on whom you ask and where exactly you're talking about).

Why's it boring? Because total hegemony by the United States is a fait accompli. For everybody else, the wicked and the just alike, in every sense—historically, culturally, geopolitically—it's all over but the crying. The Confederacy is gone. The Mormon Rebellion is over. Mexico has been conquered. The border with Canada is settled. Russia is out of the picture. France is out of the picture. Native American resistance continues in fits and spurts, but it is doomed to fail; the war has been lost for decades, if not a century or longer. On an individual level, of course, there's plenty of potential for conflict and adventure (up to a point), but at a societal level, there is no real conflict and no potential for change. It's a lifeless world.

(As a side note, it's also not merely a racist fantasy, but an unsporting racist fantasy, one in which the colonizers can't possibly fail. Compare the also fantastically racist South Asian setting of Rupyard Kipling stories like “The Man Who Would Be King”: You've still got all sorts of fucked-up white supremacist assumptions baked in, but instead of the patronizingly mournful idea of the Vanishing Indian—history's sun setting on a picturesque but irrelevant race doomed to extinction—there's a sense of the indigenous people as an indivisible part of an inimical, unconquerable landscape. Better? No. More respectful? Kind of a win some, lose some situation. But a more gameable assumption about the setting! To Zedeck Siew's excellent Twitter observations about decolonizing D&D, handily collected here by W. F. Smith at Prismatic Wasteland, I add a corollary: We should not avert our eyes from D&D's colonialism, but, in the spirit of those colonizers par excellence and all-around degenerates the British upper class, we should, by Jove, be sportsmanlike about it. Or seem to be.)

The West is good at beginnings, offering all kinds of exciting reasons for characters to head for the frontier, many of which come with baked-in vendettas, rivalries, nemeses, and other animosities. The ex-slave trying to make the most of her hard-won freedom, looking over her shoulder for Confederate sympathizers. The Union veteran unable to readjust to civilian life, jumping at every sound and loathing Johnny Reb. The young woman fleeing an unhappy engagement, or an unhappy marriage, or a scandal of some kind. The disgraced physician (or lawyer, or journalist) who wants to start over with a blank slate. The dilettante son of a rich family, itching to escape the constraints of upper-class urban life.

But, especially in campaign play, especially if experience brings even a modest increase in power, especially with even a hint of domain or faction play, it all falls apart. You win a gunfight or two, you find some buried Spanish gold, you rout the Klan…now what? Conversely, you're an outlaw: You rob banks, hold up stagecoaches, derail a train. Your infamy grows. The Marshals come for you. Now where? There are no rival factions to play against each other, no rebel prince to pledge your loyalty to; there isn't even a frontier, really. There's just the inexorable grind of Manifest Destiny. It's manifested California and Oregon already, and Washington is just around the corner (if it hasn't happened yet). The “frontier” is a shrinking patch of wilderness, a shrinking population of hopeless people hemmed in and subject to the final spasms of a slow-motion genocide. It would be unappealing even if it weren't so sordid (and don't get me wrong; it's absolutely morally repugnant). There's no uncertainty. No possibility.

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Above, I said that “few” Western settings and systems stuck. I see people praise Aces & Eights and Dogs in the Vineyard once in a while, but it seems to me that the big one, the closest to an enduring success, has been Deadlands (besides, it's the only one I've read; I ended up with a copy of Deadlands Reloaded thanks to some bygone PDF bundle). I don't like the setting, to be clear up front—neither before nor after the retcon of the Confederacy—but I do think it understands the assignment, as they say, and that understanding has been part of its success.

The decision to use a supernatural deus ex machina to shake up the American balance of power in the late 19th century probably wouldn't do it for me even if it weren't aided and abetted (even post-retcon) by Lost Cause propaganda. It's not just racist; it's goofy and, even with its “a wizard did it” handwaving, implausible. But putting independent Mormons, multiple Native American polities, Chinese pirate lords, a Haitian robber baron, and some kind of zombie California in there? That's the right idea, even if the setting can't make the weakness of the United States make sense and weighs everything down with a heavy and very Manifestly Destined metaplot.

"How would you do it, Michael?" I don't hear you ask. But obviously I've been thinking about it, so: Just stop clinging to the post–Civil War American West. Keep your duels at high noon, train robberies, bank heists, stagecoach chases, abandoned silver mines, and all that. Keep your saguaros and tumbleweeds, if you must. But whip up a good old secondary world for them. Mix and match different eras of North American colonial history, and stir in some South African history too.

Keep the basic premise: overland expansion by an Anglo-analogue empire. For the flavor, mash up the American revolution, the Confederacy, the Mormon Rebellion, and the Boer Wars (throw in the English Civil Wars and Europe's 1848 revolutions for good measure): A republican revolution “back home” failed, but it's had a partial success here in the colonies, with separatists establishing several fragile independent republics on the frontier. These new republics are egalitarian (for some people) lands of opportunity, with an economic dynamism and social mobility (for some people) that put “back home” to shame. They're also variously run by, or at least harbor, slavers, genocidaires, and intolerant religious zealots. Win some, lose some!

On the far side of the colonized continent, mash up Russia, France, and China: A culturally distinct great power from across the sea is sailing up and down the coast. They've established some port cities, but are less interested in large-scale settlement than they are in trade and resource extraction. Where the Anglo empire tends to rely on exclusion and ethnic cleansing, and the separatist republics on outright genocide, the Franco-Sino-Russians have developed a policy of nonaggression and cooperation with the indigenous people, organizing native auxiliaries to supplement their limited military presence and pouring advanced weapons into indigenous hands in exchange for furs, spices, jewels, or whatever it is the land is rich in.

Combine Mexico (reaching back to pre-Colombian cultures for inspiration) with the Zulus: A third power, erroneously conflated by the settlers with the indigenous people whom they in some superficial respects physically resemble, is making their own bid for regional hegemony, pressing in by land from another direction. Better organized and more technologically advanced than the other colonizers give them credit for, they are led by the greatest military genius of the era. The more battles they win, the more lurid racist propaganda the Anglo-types will hurl at them.

Voilà! An unstable balance of power, villains and antiheroes aplenty, and the wind of change blowing across the frontier—but with the future entirely uncertain. Sprinkle the ancient ruins of a lost empire around for some classic D&D or voguish science fantasy flavor. Delicious!