Badlands came about because I was thinking a lot about Westerns. I was thinking about what made them work, what tropes did they lean on, and why they were so popular as a genre. I had been thinking about trying to get my local group, The True Crit Gaming Guild; into some Cowboy gaming. However, all this thought led me not to a designing a new wargame, but into another Role- playing Game instead!
There are a couple of things that I wanted to accomplish with Badlands:
- Mechanics based on Poker, a staple of the Wild West
- Ease of character creation that intuitively creates Role-play
- Use a Meta-currency for the GM and Players to influence game play
- Lean harder into narrative than crunch
- Create space to tell Wild West based stories, natural and super-natural
Poker as the Unifying Mechanic
I am not much of a Poker player, but I have a basic understanding of the various hands and how they interact. I wanted to make these rules a core mechanic for the game because Poker is an iconic tradition of the Wild West, and is tied to the American Mythology of the period. The Gamemaster is called the Dealer and they hand cards out to the Players. When there is a Challenge Check, it is resolved by the impacted Characters building a hand of cards and trying to beat the Dealers' hand.
Attributes, Values, and Skills have numeric values that indicate the number of cards to be used to Build a Hand. No one can never have more than 5 cards in their hand. If the Player has a better hand, their character succeeds in the Challenge. If the Dealer wins, the Character fails the Challenge.
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| Poker Hand Chart from Wikimedia Commons |
Intuitive Role-Play
Characters are built using 4 Attributes and 4 Values. Attributes are physical components, while Values are more about the characters outlook on life. These are built on with Skills, Traits, Assets, and Backgrounds that help flesh out what a Character is good at, and allows different abilities while Building a Hand. Characters also have Drives to manipulate Meta-Currency and Weaknesses that can be used to manipulate Meta-currency and Asset availability. All of these mechanical features allow clear and distinct levers for role-play as well as mechanical benefits too.
Meta-Currency
The Dealer and the Players all start with a pool of Poker Chips they can draw on. The Players have Luck Chips while the Dealer has Danger Chips. As Players cash-in Luck they are converted to Danger Chips for the Dealer, and as the Dealer uses Danger Chips they convert to Luck Chips for the Players. As the game progresses, these Chips get passed back and forth for various effects on the game.
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| From Canva |
Lean into Narrative
This is a rulings over rules type of game, and it is designed for the Players and the Dealer to lean into the story. It is not "crunchy" but there are a lot of decisions to be made thanks to how the different Character details help "Build a Hand" and the use of Luck/Danger within the game. At the end of the day, the Scene will React no matter the outcome of any Challenge Checks.
The game also encourages Dealers to structure Badlands adventures like TV shows and movies. It recommends a three act structure with a Beginning, Middle, End. It also uses the language of cinema such as Inciting Incident to trigger Challenge Checks, Final Scene for the dramatic finish, and Epilogues to help wrap up loose ends. This is a Narrative first game.
Tell Wild West Stories
Badlands spends time dissecting what makes a Western work on-screen. There is discussion of Themes, Stakes, and Genre Tropes so that the Dealer and the Players can engage in authentic feeling Wild West stories. However, the game is loose enough that your adventures can be any of the many types of Western stories, singing cowboys, wagon trains, cattle drives, outlaws, sheriffs, lone rangers, and more. There is also space for "straight" Westerns with white hats and black hats, or something a bit more supernatural like werewolves, shamans, cannibals, or even aliens! You can make your Wild West as wild as you want.
Some Details
The rules are 71 pages long. It includes almost everything you need to play. This includes a blank character sheet, a Quick Refence Sheet of rules, a Poker Hand chart, and an Index. The rulebook also has an initial adventure set in 1849 on the Oregon Trail to kick-off your Badlands experience. All you need to do is provide a deck of standard Poker cards with Jokers, and a handful of Poker chips.
Final Thoughts
Of course, if you have been reading this blog you know I have some core ideas and preferences about my RPGs. I tend to design games that I would want to play. Therefore, my preferences are on full display. Badlands is no exception.
Therefore, if you like narrative and character driven based RPGs that use a traditional story-telling format, this might be a good game for you. This is not a game to challenge the Players with survival like an OSR, it is focused on telling stories and looking for characters to grow and change. It is rulings over rules and forces the players to ask the question, "What is the right thing to do?". This question is about morals, ethics, and values more often than it is about survival in the Badlands.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
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