Six Shooter: Grim & Perilous Adventures in the Old West
Six Shooter: Grim & Perilous Adventures in the Old West
About eight years ago, I started work on a project I titled "Wasteland". It was a Western-inspired campaign setting for D&D 3.5e, my game of choice at the time. It was one of those projects that grows faster than you can build it, and eventually my ideas outpaced my motivation to put them on the page. I kept the Word file, though, having put in too much work not to use it sometime down the road.
Fast-forward to four years ago. I had been voraciously reading Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition books, and it was, in my opinion, the best RPG I had found up until then. Being a Warhammer player, I was drawn in by the familiar mechanics and setting, but what sold me was the grittiness of it all. This was no D&D, with heroes slinging spells and mortals quickly ascending to near-godlike power. Instead, it felt grounded and brutal: novice characters were never more than a hair's breadth from death, magic was fickle and mysterious, and the power to challenge the gods came at a terrible price.
Of course, by that time WFRP 2e had finished its print run. Much as I adored it, I kept looking for something similar, but living and evolving. I came across Zweihänder, which was at the time a fan-made Old-School Revival project taking the creators' favourite parts of WFRP and adapting them into something that could be built upon. I saw they had a Kickstarter incoming, hopped onboard, and a new love story began.
I think Zweihänder is a great game. It has all of that grounded, gritty feeling I admired about WFRP, but also has a thriving and ever-growing community and body of works. Somewhere around two years ago, I decided I wanted to throw my hat into the ring and add something to that body of works, and Six Shooter was born.
The title came early on, an iconic weapon to pay homage to Zweihänder's title. It's hard to pin down what drew me to a Western-inspired supplement, but it likely had to do with the popularity of the Red Dead Redemption series, my own recent playthrough of Hard West (a somewhat flawed but overall enjoyable Weird West XCOM-like game), and having read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian the year before. Blood Meridian in particular motivated me, as it's an excellent example of a grim, merciless Western. I initially went back to my work on Wasteland, and while very little of it made its way into Six Shooter (a high fantasy Western doesn't necessarily have a lot of parallels to a low fantasy one), it was as good a jumping-off point as any.
What followed was two years of picking up Six Shooter, putting it down, and picking it up again. I have a very hard time seeing projects through to completion, usually getting hyper-focused on one for a few weeks or months and then dropping it for about twice as long. Near the end of March this year, however, I resolved to finish it. A little over two months later, it's finally in a state where I'm satisfied enough to put it online.
But that summary oversimplifies things a bit. I've already touched on the bumpy road of developing Six Shooter, and I want to share a bit more of that. My original aspirations for the project were pretty lofty: a book-length supplement with content for every aspect of Zweihänder. I planned to include new material to correspond with each chapter of the core rulebook, from character creation to game mastery. This vision was a constant stumbling block, and I think that's true of many of my projects: I think of the big picture first, and lay out a broad template that I assume I'll fill in later. What ends up happening instead is frustration as I get one section near completion and realize I have a dozen more chapter titles with nothing following them.
For Six Shooter, I was stuck in this rut for most of the past two years. In March, I didn't just commit to finishing Six Shooter; I took a step back and reconsidered what I wanted it to be. Rather than a massive undertaking that would likely never end, I decided to focus my efforts on what I felt was truly necessary for its success. To do this, I looked very carefully at Dark Astral, a "chapbook" expanding on one of the campaign seeds presented in the Zweihänder core rulebook.
Once the writing was finished, the next challenge was art. I had started searching online stock image repositories for material soon after diving back into the project, but while there was impressive art available, to get all of it into the document would be prohibitively expensive. Looking back to Dark Astral, as well as the well-received community supplement Leather, Steel, Blood & Bone, I gauged how much art I would likely need and how it was dispersed in those documents. With that knowledge, I turned to pixabay; I had initially avoided it due to small offerings in the categories that interested me, but once I realized I wouldn't need an extensive gallery, the site (and the free commercial license it offers) became much more appealing. I ended up sourcing almost all my art from there, finding pieces for insets, cover images, and double-page fills, as well as using many smaller components to make a custom page border. The rest of the art in the chapbook comes from the art packs offered by Grim & Perilous Studios on DriveThruRPG.
The most difficult part of the process besides motivation was getting Microsoft Word to cooperate with me. I like Word a lot as a versatile word processor, and I learned a lot about its capacities and limitations during this process, as well as my own limitations in using it. I was able to get a lot out of Word, and I'm very pleased with the final product, but there were definitely some head-scratchers along the way. Between page numbers that didn't line up, a finicky table of contents, and page borders that didn't work quite the way I wanted them to, I faced a few hurdles in producing Six Shooter. I feel like there could have been better ways to solve these issues, but I was able to find workarounds that were good enough for me.
The Book
But enough about the process; time to plug the product! Six Shooter is 70 pages of content adapting a wide range of concepts from Zweihänder into a Wild or Weird West setting. I've tried to keep things straightforward, and any ideas that seemed too complex to make mandatory are still included as options for parties who prefer them. You can purchase a PDF of it on DriveThruRPG here!
To quote the blurb:
- A campaign hook based on the Reconstruction-era United States
- Rules for replacing dice rolls with draws from a poker deck
- A guide to acclimate you to the SIX SHOOTER setting
- 16 new Professions
- 9 new Expert Professions
- An arsenal of advanced firearms
- A Showdown system for deadly gunfights
- A bestiary of 25 cryptids and corrupted souls to menace your party
- And more!
THE FRONTIER AWAITS!"
If you do pick it up, please leave a review telling me what you thought! I'd like to keep supporting Six Shooter if there's interest, and would love to hear feedback.
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