Since the days of TSR’s Boot Hill, Western roleplaying games haven’t had much success. Deadlands has done pretty well for itself, but it isn’t a “traditional” Western by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps, then, low-cost, low-risk .pdfs are the way to go. This is the route taken by Politically Incorrect Games’Shady Gulch.

Content

Welcome to Shady Gulch

Despite the title, the opening chapter is more of an overview of the Old West in general: the slang, the history (in timeline format), and the status of foreigners and Indians. And even the centerpiece of the chapter, a list of town locations, is really a list of generic locations suitable for any Western town. In other words, instead of a colorful NPC blacksmith, you get: "The town blacksmith is responsible for shoeing horses and forging metal tools and pulleys." To my mind, a town with specific people and places would have been a more efficient use of the game’s limited page count.

Basic Rules

Shady Gulch uses a simple 2d6 attribute + skill roll-under system. When it matters, players cross-reference the margin of success or failure against one of six difficulty levels on a simple table to determine the degree of success or failure (of which there are seven, ranging from Critical Failure to Critical Success). Bonuses and penalties take the form of extra dice added to the roll, with the roller taking the highest two for penalty dice or the lowest two for bonus dice.

In practice, this makes outcomes extremely transparent and with minimal math, but at a price: once the attribute + skill total reaches 12, the only way for the attempt to fail is for the player to roll "boxcars" (double sixes). Penalty dice make boxcar results more likely, but not enough to keep a smooth increase in difficulty levels. This is most noticeable during combat (see below).

Characters

Character creation works based on a pseudo-class system. Players choose between Cowboys, Gamblers, Homesteaders, Scholars (writers, doctors, or teachers), Tradesmen (hunters, performers, or blacksmiths), Lawmen, Outlaws, Soldiers, Businessmen, or Drifters. (Indian professions also appear in the latest version.) This choice, in turn, determines potential Virtues and Vices, starting equipment, and what skills will be cheaper to purchase.

Virtues and Vices fill the game's "drawback" niche, and characters exceeding their occupations' requirements for either get extra character creation points. The Virtues – Lawful, Gentlemanly, Compassionate, Charitable, Loyal, Pious, and Tolerant – are perfectly fine, but the one-size-fits-all severity of the Vices – Alcohol, Opium, Lust, Greed, Zeal, Excitement, Gambling, Superstitious, and Sadism – makes each and every character into some form of addict or nut case. If a character has a vice at all, he will feel compelled to indulge in it full-bore, and with potentially catastrophic consequences (see below).

Characters have five Primary Traits – Strength, Dexterity, Perception, Reasoning, and Willpower – rated from 0 to 6, and three Secondary Traits: Reaction (determined by Dexterity and Perception), Stamina (determined by Strength and Willpower), and Reputation (defaulting to zero).

The game offers only 29 skills, most of which are fairly broad. Athletics, for example, covers gymnastics, sports, climbing, swimming, and running. I'm all for broad skills, especially in the interest of saving space in a compact game. Oddly, though, hand-to-hand combat gets three specific skills – Brawling, Knife Fighting, and Sword Fighting – with no skills covering other weapons, such as tomahawks or spears. Also, Brawling gets lumped under Strength rather than Dexterity, which generally annoys me; however, considering the generally ungraceful imagery of Western barroom brawls, I give Shady Gulch a partial pass.

No archetype gets a specific amount of starting cash – not even the Businessman, who boasts a meaningless "lots of cash" in his equipment list. This doesn't cripple the game at the outset, given the other tools of the trade provided, but in-game purchases are the realm of GM fiat.

Despite its flaws, the character creation procedure successfully serves the plug-and-play design goals.

Playtest: We built four characters in less than thirty minutes for my trial game.

Special Rules

Here the game covers some specific non-combat applications of the rules.

First up are the Virtues and Vices mechanics. Characters attempting to resist these impulses must make Willpower + Composure rolls. For Virtues, failure means a 2-die penalty to perception and composure until the character sleeps off his guilty conscience; for Vices, it's an automatic indulgence in the Vice combined with a 2-die penalty to subsequent attempts to stop. This makes Composure both a vital skill and the true measure of Virtue and Vice intensity.

Playtest: One character, for example, took multiple rounds to pull himself away from his opium pipe and join the loud brawl next door.

And speaking of opium, the chapter also covers the effects of that drug, of alcohol, and of injuries. Intoxicants and injuries get rows of status boxes that result in cumulative 1-die penalties when filled, with the size of each row based on Stamina; however, true to Western tradition, a shot of good whiskey will help ease the pain, with each block of intoxication countering one wound penalty die. Likewise, intoxicants provide a bonus die per complete block when trying to resist fear. All of this works logically enough.

Reputation determines how readily people will recognize the character, but not the nature of the reputation. I prefer this method over the bean counting of good and bad deeds.

For such a beer-and-pretzels game, the system goes into surprising detail regarding the uses of writing ability – how a biography can affect the subject's reputation, for example. I’m not sure how much use these rules will get, but it’s nice to see a more sedate ability getting a chance to shine.

Fightin’

Combat in Shady Gulch is simple, straightforward, fast, and rather brutal. After an initiative roll based on the characters’ Reaction ratings, the players must choose one of six fairly self-explanatory actions: attack, defend, use skill, move, reload, or aim. Characters on the defensive still get a chance to attack at the end of the round, if they haven’t been attacked. This means that a character on the defensive can be forced to stay on the defensive in a given round – keeping one’s head down in a gunfight, for example. Conversely, characters are more than welcome to trade blow for blow, barroom brawl style.

Defensive rolls aren’t compared directly to attack rolls; instead, defense success levels alter the difficulty level of attack rolls on the outcome table. Again, this keeps math to a minimum and makes results extremely transparent.

Attack success levels determine damage, removing the need for separate damage rolls. On the downside, Strength doesn’t affect melee damage beyond its function as Brawling's controlling attribute. So, Strength results in higher possible damage with a fist, but not with a sword.

Revolvers do three points of damage on an average hit – just enough to cost the average character one wound level. However, because damage equal to or greater than a character’s Stamina results in an automatic knockout, the same hit will also take that average character out of the fight without killing him.

Beyond that, the majority of the combat chapter is a laundry list of bonuses and penalties for special circumstances: fighting underwater or mounted, using two weapons against single or multiple opponents, lassoing, etc. The result is a fairly comprehensive treatment of combat in a small number of pages.

Playtest: Combat moved swiftly in my trial game, and would have moved more swiftly still if I’d remembered to apply the aforementioned knockout rule. (I’d recommend moving said rule to the wound effects section.) This speedy combat ordinarily would have delighted me; however, there’s a problem, and it has to do with the nature of penalty dice. For the main antagonist in my playtest, I took the outlaw from the sample characters section (see below). His Dexterity is 5 and his Firearms skill is 10, for a total Firearms target number of 15. So, he could only fail on a roll of boxcars. That’s all well and good, since I wanted him to be tough… but as the combat progressed, penalty dice left him completely unfazed. One PC took the maximum cover allowed by the rules. The outlaw never missed him. The outlaw took multiple wound penalties. He still never missed. And given his high target number, his margins of success – and hence, his damage – were fairly high for each attack. Meanwhile, those characters with target numbers below 12 took a noticeable death spiral. In short, there’s little characters can do to significantly increase their odds against highly skilled foes beyond relying on high-damage weapons for quick knockout results – a good simulation of neither the historical nor the cinematic versions of the Wild West.

Behind the Scenes

There are two main methods of making a game or game supplement plug-and-play: provide sufficient details for the GM to run a game on the fly, or provide a pre-written adventure. In its description of the town of Shady Gulch, this game fails to do the former; here, when given the perfect opportunity, it fails to do the latter. Instead, this section offers a series of story and subplot ideas so brief and generic as to be nearly pointless. Some examples:

“Rustlers are out to steal cattle from the homesteaders and cattle barons nearby the town. They are quiet and slick. Who can stop them?”

“The characters have been paid or offered a bounty to track down and capture a criminal or wild animals terrorizing the town and nearby homesteads.”

“The character is in debt to someone and is always trying to raise case to pay him back.”

I have nothing against story ideas per sé, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with Westerns could think these up. Fewer ideas with game statistics and greater detail would have been more valuable to me – there aren’t even any animal stats to use with that second example. There are five sample characters for PC/NPC use, such as the outlaw from my combat example, but that’s not enough to pick up the slack.

The section spends still more space on generic gamemastering advice – most of it good, but all of it taking up room better spend on increasing the game’s utility. In that regard, the sample dramatic results of critical successes and failures do a much better job.

Shady Gulch is a 49-page .pdf document in 8-1/2” x 11” page format with an attractively thematic sepia tone cover and a black and white interior.

Art’s not a major factor in this game – which is good, considering its size. What’s there, however, is quality stuff, clip art though it appears to be. The layout stays crisp and clear throughout, as does the writing. Despite the admirable inclusion of an index, the game could use a touch of work in organization here and there, however – the ranged combat section states that the difficulty of an attack is based on range increments without pointing out that these increments correspond to levels on the success chart, for example.

This could be the basis for a fun and inexpensive little Western campaign. Standing in its way are design priorities more suited to a larger game and a mechanic that, while extremely transparent and easy to grasp, starts to falter just as characters become as competent as their cinematic counterparts. Nevertheless, given both the easy-to-swallow price and the dearth of “pure” Western games on the market, Shady Gulch is worth a try for fans of the genre. Or they may wish to wait for a new edition that’s in the works, which will feature a completely different system and a fully developed town and adventure, all of which may well address my concerns.

SUBSTANCE:

• Setting
• Quality = 3.0
• Quantity = 2.0

• Rules
• Quality = 2.5
• Quantity = 3.5

STYLE:

• Artwork = 4.0

• Layout/Readability = 4.0

• Organization = 2.5

• Writing = 3.0

• Proofreading = <0.0>