When is a Western No Longer a Western?
I have gone back and started thinking about other ideas for the Western Campaign I have been working on. Imagine if you will, a ranch somewhere in the American West during the late 1870s...
The Civil War ended a few years ago, the Transcontinental Railroad has been completed. This ranch is inhabited by cowboys, a Chinese cook, and some other people passing through, is on friendly-ish terms with a tribe of Native Americans and a wandering mountain man who comes to trade every so often.
These characters receive the Call to Action and find themselves involved in strike against a greedy land baron, a band of train and bank robbers, corrupt officials who have aims on what is left of the Natives' land - all classic Western tropes.
But as the story progresses, more is revealed to the group of heroes. Magic is real but the Catholic church works feverishly to keep anything supernatural covered up, chupacabra hide in narrow canyons and come out to feed at night, a shaman's curse poisons the cattle of an Army base, killing the soldiers and reanimation the dead as zombies. Devil princes tempt mortals with power in exchange for servitude.
Former Chinese railroad workers are kidnapped and forced to mine ore to build a weapon for a megalomaniacal industrialist and the group's cook leads a mission to rescue them. The captives are taken to safety in San Francisco but a new blend of opium is turning users into half-man/half-animal hybrids.
The characters are the same, the setting stays the same aside from an occasional foray into a large city but is the story still a Western? Or has it been something else dressed up as a Western the whole time?
The Civil War ended a few years ago, the Transcontinental Railroad has been completed. This ranch is inhabited by cowboys, a Chinese cook, and some other people passing through, is on friendly-ish terms with a tribe of Native Americans and a wandering mountain man who comes to trade every so often.
These characters receive the Call to Action and find themselves involved in strike against a greedy land baron, a band of train and bank robbers, corrupt officials who have aims on what is left of the Natives' land - all classic Western tropes.
But as the story progresses, more is revealed to the group of heroes. Magic is real but the Catholic church works feverishly to keep anything supernatural covered up, chupacabra hide in narrow canyons and come out to feed at night, a shaman's curse poisons the cattle of an Army base, killing the soldiers and reanimation the dead as zombies. Devil princes tempt mortals with power in exchange for servitude.
Former Chinese railroad workers are kidnapped and forced to mine ore to build a weapon for a megalomaniacal industrialist and the group's cook leads a mission to rescue them. The captives are taken to safety in San Francisco but a new blend of opium is turning users into half-man/half-animal hybrids.
The characters are the same, the setting stays the same aside from an occasional foray into a large city but is the story still a Western? Or has it been something else dressed up as a Western the whole time?
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