The New Frontier

The background for this setting is what will attract fans. It’s for hard core role players and roll players alike. People who have not taken the time – and it does take time to wade through the share mass of this book – will try to tell you this is Deadlands or a post-apocalypse DitV etc, its not. If you like those games you will probably like this one too. CSR is unique and deserving of some recognition, for its intricate background. This Year we are getting a number of very innovative and non-d20 setting properties, some are using very innovative mechanics and I believe are taking the hobby to great places (see Secret of Zir'An. Though I believe main stream games [as opposed to indie] games need to look at the emulation of morals, emotion and "social-modes" a bit more, these two games included). In many ways CSR is one of the great games of the summer. In others …not so much. But bare with me. Be warned you will need to leave your RPG prejudices behind.

Home on the Range

It must help to isolate ones self while being creative. Conceivably, it takes away the distractions of your peers and allows you to focus on your own unique vision. Then, in most cases, Editors (individuals eminently familiar with the current commercial environment) come along and help you, after the fact, so you can tap into the consumer market. CSR did not get such an Editor. The Author has not edited his own work very well. The game is full of words I just really did not want to read and/or pay for. While I appreciated his humour, much of his expository text and prose is verbose, obtuse or at worst condescending. Though he writes, on a whole, better then I and has more creative talent :D. That's why I'm a reviewer. Art and lay out are average. The art comes in two types old "wood cut" type clip art, all of which is OK. Much of the original art is mediocre. it is all thematically relevant, original, and adds to the feel of the game. Much of it is less then “crisp” and most is sketchy. It’s a style thing and well it wont work for everyone. Again its and indie game and it shows. I would like to see CSR get picked up by, say White Wolfs, "Art House" imprint or Fantasy Flight Games and edited, with a very heavy hand and get a pro lay out it deserves. If the mechanics get a polish (not an overhaul just a tweak), I wouldn’t complain either. Then it may take the game world by storm. Maybe. But even the author recognises this game is not for everyone. But it does have merit so keep reading.

Mood is for Loven', not Fightn'

This is one very gritty game setting it is unashamedly about gratuitous violence, personal power, coercion, ambiguous morals, prostitution, slavery, booze, dope and making a quick buck at the expense of others. It glorifies the anti-hero and in many ways rewards anti-social behaviour and I love it for all these things. This is a “HBO” role playing game. It is at its core Deadwood the rpg, essentially it re-images the whole US as one great big scattering of Deadwoods. (If you haven’t seen this show go get it or I’ll feed you to the pigs.:D)

The Promise Land

The CSR world. How can I describe this? It's horrible, ugly and down right nasty!!!. As succinctly as I possibly can , During the US Civil War the earth suffered a cataclysm. In essence, as I understand it, a huge rock hit the earth (in the northern US) leaving a devastated world in its wake. Society has since arisen from the cometary-fragment-and-mantel-dust-induced, Dark Age (called the Turning [sort of]) and rebuilt. The America of CSR is very different to the one we know. It's geographically different has some new Seas (in place of the Lakes) a massive curtaining mountain range cutting off Canada (sorry Canada, I guess) and other cool topological features like that. The Society is "Western like" all over. Population levels are low. Life is real hard, most everywhere. Most folks are still just living one step above subsistence. We also have Caribbean-like Vodoo cultures, with magic. Vyl (as in “vile”. They are mechanical constructs possessed by demons) things to the north. Back on the Western riff we have Native nations. Yep the Nations are a true power in the world after the Turning. Thrown into this mix is a group of missionaries who are preaching that man is flawed, life is a payment for his innate sin, and the Apocalypse (as per the Biblical one) is upon the world, so do as the church says if you want to save your eternal soul. Essentially these guys – the New Roman Church – are justifying the new worlds harshness and their own. Into this set up come, some tough hombres called Gunslingers, who are…well…sort of like…well really are …Templars. Yep those Templars.. More or less. They have secret arcana secrets they have haned down since before the apocalypse. For example they can work charms on their pistols Oh and in the north lurks the Vyl-Steam mechanical demons, remember those? And the war between north and south still rages on. Now championed by the Barron’s, feudal lords and tough bastards, which rule whole chunks of land and provide what stability and economy there is. Patrick does a better job of the background than I ever will so read about it here

Contraptions and Doohickies

Now comes the game system. At its core it's a roll under d% mechanic, which we know works quite well. It’s “old school” and shows. The roots of this game appear to be in systems like Rolemaster and Aftermath. The game has Classes called “Casts” and it has “Levels”(incongruously although they are used as a artifice for advancement and power adjustment and less like the D&D equivalent) Much of the system layers the Author has added on are good. Some of the things like "Threat" are wonderful in play. As are the plethora of unique skills even characters from the same Cast (class) are not guaranteed to have the same full skill list or even option to have the same list of skills. Strangely, combat forgoes this core mechanic and adds a different one. In combat you have a target number usually between 9 and 12 which you have to role over.( I’m one of those people who would have all the ice mechanics go one way and changing the attribute roles to add attribute + d% role v target number would suit me too) in order to hit. Modifiers cant reduce this below 3 however. Both mechanics have systems for critical success and botches as well as other nuance, all of which are quite easy to follow once explained which much of the rules are, in a few well laid out pages.

The Measure of a Man

Excepting for Character Creation. It's this part of the game that could have done with lots of editing. Take my word for it when I say its over engineered. Actually, don't take my word, look for yourself. I will give and example here and another by pointing out that you have to randomly generate what type of advancement table you will use, from over a half dozen of the little F(%^*(#ers. Oh and you have to generate all your skills for you PC up to 10 th level, and other minutiae, all of which is quite tedious. It is impossible to do it for a group of players at once (due to the uniqueness of the games "Cast" or Classes it is done in parallel, incrementally and iteratively, at best). It is very flavourful thankfully, but only if you have time to go through the book. It took my group of 4 a full 5 hour session to get most of our characters –nearly – done. They need to be finished off with around 2-3 hrs additional work between sessions. However more then many of the other games we have done lately the Players felt invested in they PC's. Was it because of the effort involved or the detail?

You get close to 20 attributes in the game only 8 of which are primary the rest being secondary/derived from these 8. Unfortunately because the author like to write its hard to get a feel for what each do and how they synergise. This is a bit annoying and makes character creation slow the first few times, we found.

However in much the same way as World of Darkness and Vampire in particular is a game about character and is driven by character so is CSR. The “Cast” are lots of crunch and lots of fluff and so caters both to the power gamer and the role player mentality. In the core players book you can play any of the flowing

Bladesman – A sort of gypsy / macho knife fighter

Gambler – A card player and charlatan of the gaming table. A killer too if cornered

Gunman – Your standard Cowboy with a gun and hanker’n for gunsmoke

Mountain Man – A hillbilly, roughhouser, trapper, and hunter. Good with a Long rifle

Revivalist – A man of the Word, a fire and brimstone preacher man and mountebank

Rifleman – A Cowboy with a prediction for longarms and death from a distance

Scout – A loner, knows the secret ways of the wild, it’s trails and otherwise

Shootist – Cowboy with a duelling death wish. Wants to be the best and will die trying

Brave – A Native tribal warrior, a walker with the old ways

Gunslinger – A mystic warrior saviour who has a sacred pact with his guns

Apparently more are on the way in both the GM book (needed to paly the game more on that later) and in the Equipment book and in the Magic book (where most of the Spellslinger Casts are [some are in the GM book?] We know of other like the Shanghai and a few others some of which are Spellslinger types (yes I would have loved to have seen one of these in the core book, I guess the Revivalist could be seen as one but that isn’t tough like the Gunslinger).

Each of these “Casts” gets – literally – pages and pages of “Skills”, which are much more like D20’s feats then “Skills” are in other games. They provide unique aptitudes for each Cast. You receive a core of Cast skills and then two other layers of skills to flesh out your character, which are largely random. I do not really understand the random skill rationale and suspect that like the experience charts this artefact will be dropped in favour of choosing (which cost additional experience and can only be done if your stat is high enough according to the rule book yet more rules that I will imagine will be dropped by most groups. The core skills rate high on the goddamn-o-meter and give each Cast some down right ornery’ moves. The secondary skills are more of the same, while the tertiary skills are more generic, utility skills.

There is lots of what appear at first to be nice “character interface” or “roleplaying” innovations, and while they didn't live up to my initial expectation (which is often unrealistic when it comes to new games), they did serve well in play and added a new dimension to the game. Pc's can be measured for Good, Bad, and Ugly as well as Tiredness, Thirst and Intoxication. PC’s also get Vices (like Dope, pros, or fistfighting) to take of the Edge, Draw Styles and other nifty flavour all of which indirectly effect the game.

Rivers of Blood

Combat great and includes hit locations and location hit points, tho it's well done. The number of roles in combat can be low. No more then say D&D, or at least it felt that way, so certainly acceptable by most role players. However combat was very deadly and there is a hell of a lot of nuance when you factor in the prevalence of Threat, Pain Stun and Mental Stability to bandage wounds (can you do it) how far you get blown back by the gun wound and do you lose grip of you primary weapon and have to go for a second? While the present fashion is towards rules-lite games, CSR is a shocking change of pace, but is that a bad thing? I do not think so, no. On top of all of this, you get special systems for pistol duels and other Wild West staples you would expect. You will find people shot back through ban doors and of roof tops. The system in play is not quite as deadly as I was lead to believe, which given character generation, is a good thing. There is a possibility of a one shot combat particularly from high level characters. However, it’s a nice balance between realism and theatre. Players wont get too badly penalised for standing out in the open and firing their pistols, and roof running and the like is, if not encouraged at lest not penalised severely as far as I can tell [the GM’s guide might contradict me though].

Circle the Wagons

Unfortunately, there is not much more in this large perfect bound book then what I have herewith recounted. Much of the particulars required to run a game in good fashion must be in the Gm’s book. So while in the background section of the book A Map is given important places are not marked not even New Rome. The map is of the political boundaries type and leaves out other detail, which I found disappointing. I take it as a positive sign that I wanted to know more or the world. Also oddly, England apparently unaffected by the cometary fragment has not tried to take advantage of the prevalent anarchy. Being allied to the Confederacy I find it hard to believe she is not trying to renew her colonial claims. The background also mentions Monsters and Taint Zombies but there is nothing on them here. All this and more must be in the GM guide. This makes the purchase of this indie game around $60 in total, which is steep in comparison to other product out there, though arguably you get more with CSR then say DitV or Dust Devils so on that level (which seams a fair way to judge) it’s a superior product, that caters to a more main stream if “Old School”type of play. Is this a game for you? If you can tolerate a heavily game systema and some unusual design then yes. If you are interested in a unique Post-Apocalypse or Wild West game (and who isn’t) then again this will put you in good stead. The highest recommendation I can give it is that I want to paly more and am awaiting more of this line. I’m also looking forward to seeing this game grow.

The initial hype around this game is somewhat deserved and if you have the cash, go out and hunt it on down, shoot it in the back, kick it in the head and disembowel it, 'cause if you don’t it will find you first.

I predict that CSR may well become a cult classic. I hope so. And yes your D&D group would convert to this game I reckon. Everything they like is here. Only this time it has teeth, an attitude and a C@nt. Eeeeeeehhharr!!!

Style: In Spades (5) Substance: Grit but not True Grit (4)