Casting Shadows

In past years of #RPGaDAY I have shared my thoughts on the great campaigns I have been a part of creating and of the classic published ones I have chosen to run. For #RPGaDAY2024, I would like to instead share some thoughts on a classic campaign that could have been – one that got away.

Long, long ago, when Kenzer&Co had just released Aces&Eights the first time, I got quite into it. Westerns are a passion of mine, inherited from my father, and that game is the western toolkit to end all western toolkits. Whether you want a tightly-focused and short experience like the Shootist, a sprawling and expansive trek across endless, timeless, and endlessly dramatic land like Rawhide, fantasy like Young Guns or whatever shades of romanticism or realism you are drawn to – Aces&Eights has what you need waiting in its tooled faux-leather general store of a core book. Card games, rustling, mining, real estate, cattle drives, horse breaking, entertaining… you name it, it’s there for you to stake a claim to it and turn it into your future.

We loved playing this game. The mechanisms were a hit. The setting was a hit. The research into my western film library was a hit. The resulting characters and their experiences – fortunate and unfortunate – were a hit.

They even had and survived a shootout in a corral of all places – like that ever happens.

So what happened to the campaign, you ask?

Well, a few things that really had little to do with the game is what happened to end the campaign while it was still in its formative sessions after several months of weekly play. To really meet the rising vision that was becoming obvious to everyone about how the campaign would work, we needed to switch from having one character to a troupe of characters. Some of the players were happy with that, some refused. As we explored play with very eccentric characters intended to take us into the nooks and crannies of the play experience offered by the game, the relationships between them – a mixture of actual and chosen family – began to fray. Life on the frontier was hard, their flaws pushed them into tough situations they always needed help to extricate themselves from, and what few successes they enjoyed upset some powerful and amoral people. It did not take long before even the family ties were starting to fray.

Then the beating heart of the group, a one-armed former gunman, was killed.

Then the most troubling brother got arrested and was to be hanged by the neck until his bones were bleached by the sun.

Then the jailbreak ended in a shootout that killed the most notorious gunman on the villainous robber baron’s payroll… inciting the need to gun down the hapless lawyer trying to rescue his brother from jail lest one’s villainous grasp on one’s stolen territory get slippery.

Under the pressure to generate more characters, mourning the loss of the ‘glue character’, and because of the growing splits within the family coupled with the cold certainty that death was waiting for them, the campaign closed. Magnificent, bloody, exciting, full of potential… and only in its opening moments.