In Part 1, I shared a simple technique for creating immersion within the specific genre of a campaign, and applied it to Fantasy campaigns.

Part 2 took a solid look at Science Fiction campaigns (and was supposed to also include everything I cover this time around.

This vertically-oriented pair of images symbolizes the genres being studied this time around. It’s a composite of two separate items:
robot-8765694, Image by Ara_a from Pixabay
and man-8149696, Image by Roberto Lee Cortes from Pixabay

These genres were not chosen capriciously; between the four of them, they comprise fundamental structural elements that encompass every other genre that I could think of. But let me not get ahead of myself.

I should start with a reminder:

Recapping The Process

This and the next section are repeated verbatim from Part 2. Read over them if you need to refresh your memory or if you haven’t been here before, otherwise, you can skip down to the next colored panel, below!

0. Make a list of possible Mundane Activities (optional, but it helps).

1. Pick A Mundane Activity.

2. If it’s not something the PCs will perform in this game session, go back to step 1 and make a different choice.

3. Imagine a more genre-appropriate method.

4. Check for game balance issues. If necessary, vary the method to something that avoids the issues, or go back to step 1.

5. Apply genre-appropriate color language. Document the language for future consistency.

6. Create the bubble of narrative and attach it to the day’s play.

Recapping the Genre Discussion Structure

The Genre discussions focus on the considerations that generally apply to the most common and instructive genres – the application of the technique, in particular those that apply to steps 3, and 4. Fantasy RPGs were covered in Part 1.

Sections are arranged in a logical structure:

The existing parts of play that connect directly to the Genre.

Discussion of the points at which the process described above connects to the simulated reality within this particular genre.

Third, any conceptual tools that can help with the transformation of a mundane activity into a genre-specific activity.

Finally, any potential Game Balance and Campaign Issues get briefly examined.

That’s enough naval-gazing – let’s get to it…

If you skipped the above, resume reading here!

Genre Discussion 3: Superheros

Someone posted a survey on X (formerly Twitter) the other night asking for readers’ favorite RPG Genre. The choices offered were Modern, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. My response was that my superhero campaign encompasses all four.

The setting is modern – well, it’s actually near-future and recent past. But the near-future is somewhat more advanced, technologically, than we are actually likely to be by the time our calendar catches up, and even the recent past sections have slabs of sci-fi content tacked on.

Magic exists, and the campaign occasionally diverts into outright Fantasy, but often views it through a sci-fi prism for internal consistency. Whenever the Fantasy isn’t the immediate focus, though, that generally gets hand-waved, as does a lot of the sci-fi – it’s hard sci-fi when it has to be, and very sift sci-fi the rest of the time.

There are “Gods” (both ‘real’ and ‘wannabe’, and all the trappings that go with them. There’s healing so advanced that it might as well be labeled magical, but it has hard restrictions that are more sci-fi oriented. There are psychic powers and ancient evils and would-be destroyers of reality. Those are definitely trending into Horror territory – and some of the consequences of the other genres are horrific in nature.

Consider, for example, the fate of a parallel-world version of one of the PCs, who suffered near-fatal injuries before crash-landing in the primary campaign (near-future) setting; her life was saved by technology, replacing damaged biology with cybernetics, but in the process, parts of her humanity were also stripped away, leaving her a twisted reflection of what she once was. Barely recognizable, even when you know her origins, everything that she was has been removed and replaced, either physically, mentally, or emotionally. If that’s not a horror concept, I don’t know what is!

Multitudinous Genre Connections That Sometimes Miss The Mark

That’s the real power of the superhero genre – it contains just about anything you can think of, wrapping it all in an idealistic moral coating that propels the characters into these situations whatever their personal preferences might be.

But this heady brew comes with its own imperatives and rules; the superheroic genre is not simply an amalgam of other genres, it is an internally self-consistent genre that reinterprets the trappings of other genres within its own framework.

It’s not enough simply to combine the list of Fantasy genre connections with those of the Sci-fi genre. While they will be relevant and useful some of the time, on other occasions, the same genre-reference will miss the mark quite badly.

The Superheroic Genre

The difference in circumstance is, perhaps, best rationalized as the superhero genre sometimes needing to supersede the constituent genres, which are subordinated to it.

Moral issues, drama, plot twists, questions of fate and destiny and good and evil, and the soap opera that comes with the superheroic territory – when any of these are directly connected to the events in-game, the superheroic genre itself takes prime position, and any other genre reference takes a back seat unless it can serve the superheroic genre itself.

Objectives and Motivations

Fantasy elements and trappings usually have to be ‘filtered’ through another genre to some extent (but not always; when the Fantasy is a dominant sub-theme, it’s the non-Fantasy elements that get filtered. That’s the difference between a Dr Strange campaign and an Avengers campaign in which Dr Strange just happens to appear).

The primary difference between a ‘straight’ Fantasy campaign and a Fantasy-oriented Superheroic campaign lies in the Objectives and Motivations of the participating characters. If the primary objective is one of gaining wealth, or prestige, or social standing, or simply surviving in a dog-eat-dog world, its a straight Fantasy campaign; when there is a higher purpose involving the protection of others, it can either be a Straight Fantasy with some superheroic elements, or it can be a Superheroic campaign within a Fantasy environment.

Those two alternatives actually comprise a continuum – any given campaign of this type can occupy any position along that spectrum, and there ultimately aren’t a lot of differences.

Perhaps the biggest one is that – for the most part – superheroic campaigns have self-sufficient characters who may seek artifacts for a specific purpose but otherwise rely on their own innate capabilities, while Fantasy campaigns are about acquiring the power needed to achieve the end. Under this model, the Lord Of The Rings is more superheroic than Fantasy, which only goes to show how subtle some of these distinctions can be.

The Filtering Of Fantasy

The only rival for this is the “filtering” that I’ve mentioned several times. This is principally an intellectual and philosophical difference, and as such can be very hard to pin down. Fortunately, I have a fairly extensive example to which I can point.

A while back, I published a summary of the basic in-game concepts of “How Magic Works” from within the campaign in The Meta-Physics Of Magic.(7576 words).

This incorporated a number of in-game mini-lectures from a Master magician to the more self-educated PC who was the spellcaster of the party. I worked very hard on these conveying the impression of someone who had studied “Magic” at a University level, and who knew more about it therefore than most practitioners of the art. Along the way, he discussed the internal physics, philosophy, and practical application of Magic – and, in the process, captured the perfect example of a Fantasy campaign element viewed through a science-fiction / superheroic lens.

If you want more of the backstory and context, and a slab of lecture from the same NPC on time travel, that’s available too (in a three-part series), A Long Road – Zenith-3 Notes for all (aka Zenith-3 synopsis & notes).

Be warned, these are LONG posts – 16,072 words, 35,147 words, and 53,566 words respectively, a total of 104,785 words. If I accept Amazon’s stats of 250-300 words per page, that’s 346-420 pages – a thick paperback! (You may want to use the Print-on-demand feature at the bottom of each post to save it as a PDF for off-line reading).

Interactions with Sci-Fi

Examining Sci-Fi content in a superheroic content actually brings us closer to the primary thesis of this series. Again, the differences between straight sci-fi and sci-fi in a superheroic context are subtle and hard to pin down; they boil down to a difference in emotional focus.

In straight sci-fi, conveying a sense of wonder to the players is key. The subtext is “the universe is amazing”, even in a hard-nosed Traveller campaign. This can be tricky because to the characters in the campaign, it might not be all that amazing – they live, breathe, and work in that environment. For comparison purposes, a Star Trek campaign explicitly focuses on the sense of wonder, and the characters share in it. It’s all about exploration and discovery.

In a superheroic campaign, sci-fi elements can occasionally project that sense of wonder, but the focus is suborned by the needs of the superhero genre – action, drama, soap opera, and so on. That makes the sci-fi in a Superheroic context more akin to a Star Wars campaign, if that helps!

An ongoing strand within my superhero campaign is always the ordinary lives of the characters. These are ordinary people who have become extraordinary and who find themselves living in an equally-exceptional world within the broader reality, aware of things that the “man (or woman) on the street” rarely notices.

For the November 2016 Blog Carnival, the subject that I pitched up to participants was “Ordinary Life in RPGs”, divided into three alternate strands – The Ordinary Life of the GM, The Ordinary Life of the Players, and The Ordinary Lives of the PCs. It’s the last one that’s relevant in this context, obviously, but all three strands came in for attention. You can read the Carnival Roundup at this link for a synopsis of the posts.

In particular, Ordinary Lives in Paranormal Space and Time (5520 words) seems directly relevant.

Rather than conveying a Sense of Wonder, you are mostly trying to convey the exact opposite – that however extraordinary the technology around them, dealing with it is just part of the PCs daily routine.

All that having been said, there are a few direct connections to the Superheroic Genre, which either supersede or superimpose themselves on any other genre elements.

Existing Genre Connection: Using Powers

The most obvious one is when the PCs (or NPCs) use the powers that make them superheroic. These should never be matter-of-fact or vanilla game-mechanics (even though the game mechanics tends to dominate such occasions); that just means that the GM has to work that little bit harder. Rather than a sense of wonder, though, what should be conveyed is a sense of Extraordinary Agency. These are the shticks that separate these characters from mere mortals, and that should be emphasized and celebrated each and every time (though not necessarily to the same intensity each time – as with many things, familiarity breeds contempt; overuse can blunt the impact and make the flavor rather blase).

I pay particular attention to how other capabilities interact with powers, and how different powers interact with each other, simply because the variety provides subtle nuances that help keep these interactions distinctive, while adding verisimilitude to the fantastic.

One final point that I need to make before I move on: I am firmly of the opinion that these extraordinary capabilities are just something that most PCs and NPCs have at their fingertips whenever they want them, and that this means that they would be used for convenience as well as for dramatic effects. When applicable, they should be used casually, just as someone who was a bit stronger than most would get used to that strength and adjust their ordinary life to exploit it. That might mean carrying grocery bags that are too heavy for most people, or whatever. Comics are full of this sort of thing; and it always adds to the sense of verisimilitude of the extraordinary abilities in question. So I’m always pushing my players to embrace this concept – with, it must be admitted, only limited success so far, despite decades of trying. This in no way invalidates what’s been written above; there is a huge difference between the casual use of extraordinary abilities and the dramatic use of such abilities in a life-or-death context!

Existing Genre Connection: The Edge Of Dystopia

The mere existence of supervillains that need to be opposed – or invaders from other realities, or whatever – automatically places the PCs as the shield between the ordinary world and world-shaping / destroying calamities. By definition, all superheroic campaigns occupy the thin boundary between a prosaic (and protected) existence and the edge of dystopia.

Sometimes, the best that can be salvaged from a situation is a “recoverable, temporary, dystopia”; at other times, dystopia can be prevented completely, though dramatic requirements generally require this to be by the skin of the PCs teeth.

This all contrasts markedly with most Sci-Fi – with Star Wars again being the stand-out exception. As a general rule, most sci-fi where this isn’t the case (2001 A Space Odyssey, for example) lacks the drama to make a good adventure / campaign setting. There can be exceptions, but this is a useful rule of thumb.

Existing Genre Connection: Subterfuge and Paranoia

Is James Bond a superhero? Tell you what, I’ll come back to that in a moment.

The existence of enemies, not just of the PCs, but of all existence as it is currently experienced by the man on the street, demands a certain level of paranoia when encountering something strange. In a straight sci-fi or fantasy campaign, the dominant attitude is often “We have to understand this” or “What does this explain?”; in a Superhero campaign, it’s “Who’s behind this and what is their agenda? How do we fight it if we have to? DO we have to?”

Coupled with this and accompanying it is a second phenomena, exemplified by Clark Kent’s glasses. Secret Identities are part and parcel of the universe, and everything that happens to that disguised character has to be considered in terms of the impact on that secret. So much so that it’s an almost-ubiquitous ongoing trope in superhero comics: trapped in his secret identity, the character can only watch as an emergency unfolds, and he has to use his wits to get into a position to intervene without revealing his secret.

I have often thought that Kent should have some subtle body prosthetics to make him look a little less “perfectly in shape” as his superheroic identity – he should be able to wear a superman suit for a charity gig and it should be immediately obvious that he is not the man of steel. Nothing so obvious as a pot belly, just a somewhat less defined musculature, a slight ‘softness’ around the middle.

But, beyond that, there is the whole trope, shared with some Horror campaigns, of “things man is not meant to know”, redefined in this case to mean “things ordinary men are not ready to be told about.” Secrets and subterfuge are an inherent part of a character’s role within the campaign. Everyone has their secrets, and those secrets need to be protected, and that mandates a level of paranoia about exposure of those secrets.

Which brings me back to James Bond, and the super-spy genre in general. If your concept of superheroics can encompass ‘street level’ characters who wear ordinary clothes instead of spandex (or equivalent), then James Bond ticks every box for a superheroic campaign. I would argue that if Batman is a superhero, then so is James Bond. The only thing really missing is a personal life divorced from his “day job” – but, logically, if he has a cover identity (and he implicitly does, in the original novels), then he has to spend some time keeping that cover identity ‘alive’. Just because it’s always off-camera doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. In the spy game, this is commonly called a “Legend” – for more, see Wikipedia’s article on Espionage, in particular, the section on Organization.

Points Of Contact: All this and Melodrama, too

I’ve mentioned drama and soap opera a number of times already. Put those together, and it spells Melodrama. Most of the time, Melodrama is used as a contrast to the action-oriented main sequences, often for light relief.

In melodrama, molehills cast shadows so long and intense that they appear to be mountains. Even relatively trivial circumstances are depicted as possessing a significance far in excess of the way normal people would view them in real life. Because of the superheroic reality hidden beneath the ordinary lives of the characters, these exaggerations are perceived as being of genuine substance – the example offered earlier of a character who needs to use his wits in order to intervene in a situation in his heroic identity while protecting his secret is a good example.

Rather than belabor the point further, I’ll simply point readers at Melodramatic Licence: Drama in RPGs and move on.

Potential Game Balance Issues

I’ve covered a lot of ground in this discussion, and the potential for game balance issues hasn’t even been mentioned so far. That’s because, as a rule of thumb, these are the same as those already discussed in reference to the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres – i.e. the application of abilities to circumstances for which they were not intended to be relevant.

Read almost any story set in the 1970s or earlier, and consider the impact on the plot of ready access to ubiquitous mobile telephony, were such to be available. Leave out Google, and Google Maps, at least for a first glance; the mere access to instant person-to-person communications from wherever characters happen to be unravels a lot of plots directly, and distorts most of the rest, sometimes greatly, sometimes only a little.

Take, for example, a basic Agatha Christie story. You have a crime, and a list of suspects, none of which can initially be ruled out. Inevitably, investigation follows, and either triggers another criminal act, or the original act demands a second act. This is supposed to provide clues to narrow down the suspect pool. At the instant of the second crime, you telephone the first name on your suspect list and establish their whereabouts – if they are not alone, or their location can be verified, they have just been eliminated as a suspect. On average, by the time you get about half-way through your suspect list, you will have identified the perpetrator and can subject them to intense scrutiny to understand their motives. And the story has all the impact of wet spaghetti.

It must also be pointed out that because the characters (generally) already have extraordinary capabilities, many such game balance issues fade into insignificance. Of greater import, generally, are relative power levels within the range of those extraordinary abilities.

That’s both good and bad – good, because it makes the whole question less of an issue, and bad, because it encourages you to stop looking for these problems, leaving you to be blind-sided on the rare occasions when they are not quelled into insignificance.

As a general rule, game balance issues only matter in a superhero campaign when one PC makes another redundant or irrelevant. When one character can do 80-90% of the story on their own, they have gone too far.

Genre Discussion 4: The Wild West

Westerns aren’t my forte. I’ve never run one, and the genre holds little appeal to me. Nevertheless, I’m familiar with most of the basic tenets and tropes. This puts me in a position to undertake an analysis but not to back it up with actual experience – so take what’s below with a grain of salt.

As a general rule, Western campaigns are distinct from all the other types discussed so far. But that doesn’t leave them completely isolated; much of what is written below will apply to any low-tech non-fantasy campaign (Sherlock Holmes for example) and even most low-tech campaigns with a fantasy element (Call of Cthulhu, for example).

In most campaigns, the things that a character can do in-game that are not possible for the player in the real world are generally employed as a genre connection. In Westerns, the exact opposite is true – it’s more about how much harder activities are that we take for granted that provides the strongest connection to the time period and hence to the genre.

There is often a technology employed that has been superseded by more modern innovations, and this also permits the GM to load his narrative with genre-specific flavor text. The more research that has been done (even if it’s only watching genre-related TV and movies), the more the GM will have picked up almost by osmosis – and it doesn’t even matter very much if it’s historically inaccurate, because the players will share the same zeitgeist and referents.

Existing Genre Connections: Grit

‘Grit’ has a double meaning in this context. First, there’s the ‘grim determination, never-say-die’ meaning which was a necessary attribute on the frontier. All characters should exhibit this trait to some extent, but no-one will notice unless the GM makes doing so clear. It might not be going to far to list it as an additional stat for whatever game system you are employing, assuming it (or something equivalent) is not there already.

Way back in the day, I even saw the suggestion that it should be (24-CHA) on a 3-18 D&D stat scale – implying that characters without “Grit” are effeminate pretty boys (and the female equivalent, shrinking violets). On a d20 scale, that should be (26-CHA). I’m not sure that I agree with this, and I certainly didn’t think so at the time, but there is a certain plausibility to it, perhaps exemplified by the logic described in “A Boy Named Sue” – or, to put it in the Australian vernacular, characters who look rough as guts tend to have what it takes to survive and prosper, no matter the challenges.

The second meaning is the one that I originally had in mind when I outlined this part of the article: people didn’t bathe as often; there generally wasn’t as much opportunity to do so, for one thing, and it could be dangerous unless you had trusted ‘friends’ to watch your back. While there could and would be exceptions, once a week was considered adequate, even normal. Attending court or some public festival would generally require either an extra bath, or more likely, bringing forward your next scheduled one.

The GM should construct a list of adjectives and short descriptive passages for each day after a character’s last bath and sprinkle these into his flavor text at the start or end of each day. For example:

0 days – pristine and polished, scrubbed clean
1 day – clean and natural
2 days – a little trail dust. Pronounced 5 O’clock shadow.
3 days – feeling like you are part of the country around you
4 days – feeling a little gritty. The beginnings of a beard, still scraggly.
5 days – the grit has become grime and the body odor is a little distracting
6 days – feeling filthy and grubby, itching, caked with dust. You need a shave.
7 days – body odor makes your eyes water, the itching is constant and persistent
8 days – food tastes like garbage, your sense of smell has shut down
9 days – you feel like a horse’s rear end, shaggy and unclean, way overdue for a bath.

For characters who are part of their local community, or who want to be, they will likely attend Church on Sunday, and that requires them to have bathed and changed into their best clothing. Afterwards, before changing back to workaday outfits, you might wash them or (more likely) hang them from a tree-branch and beat them clean with a stick.

Soap at the time was generally fairly caustic and harsh, and many avoided using it on themselves for this reason (it was regarded as fine for clothing). It didn’t have the purity or consistency of the modern stuff and often felt as grainy and gritty as the dust you hoped to wash away. Poor examples might be akin to washing yourself with coarse sandpaper. From the mid 1860s, the same soap would be used for everything, no matter how harsh – there’s no such thing as shampoo, at least for most people, at least until the late 1870s. It was also common to share bathwater, possibly with a top-up of heated water (one of the great controversies of the era was whether hot or cold water was to be preferred).

Two articles that may be of value:

• Washing the hair in the 19th century – Mansion Musings
• The History of Shampoo and better haircare – eco hair and beauty

Emphasizing cleanliness, or the lack thereof, provides a useful connection to the genre, especially given the double-meaning of ‘grit’.

Existing Genre Connections: Weapons

Of course, even if the game mechanics involved are fairly generally unchanged from one weapon to another, the more specific you can get in this respect, the better, because those specifics are a direct line to the genre – and can help avoid mistakes that a knowledgeable player will expose.

I make extensive use of a 1983 game product from Firebird Ltd called ‘The Armory’ (by Kevin Dockery), designed for MSPE and Espionage/Champions. You would expect this 41-year-old game supplement is in short supply these days, but see what I’ve found:

• Amazon no longer list it.
• The Shop On the Borderlands list it for £10.50, but have no copies available.
• I did find four second-hand copies on eBay for prices ranging from AU$8.27 to AU$494.54 (plus postage in both cases).
• Hero Games list it for sale as a Dark Champions supplement for US$7.50 – which I presume to be a PDF version, though the Hero Games listing doesn’t say.
• I think that’s a PDF because Hero Games also list it through DriveThruRPG for the same price (AU$11.39) and they are explicit about the format – this is a PDF of scanned images.

I think it says something about the ubiquity of the product that it’s still so widely available, even if it is in PDF form. But, if you can wait a little while (a few months), there is another option.

My Pulp Co-GM and I recently backed a fundraising campaign through GameFound for what is (in effect) an updated version by Evil Genius Games (funded in just three hours!) designed around the Everyday Heroes game system based on d20 Modern (“5e compatible”). I’d have told readers about it, but it came to my attention too late to do so.

Evil Genius’ website list their version as available for purchase from “Later This Year”, the expected delivery date quoted on the fundraiser is February 2025. So, maybe 4-6 months from now, you’ll be able to buy this “in color” version from the link supplied. Of course, being a new product and of modern production standards, this option is going to be a fair bit more expensive – maybe US$45 or US$50, plus P&H.

Beyond that, there are any number of websites out there dedicated to old weapons, some useful, some not. Wikipedia can also be an extremely valuable resource – start with the manufacturer’s page (if you know the name) or do a “nationality weapons-type manufacturer” search, eg “French Pistol Manufacturer” or “Swiss Rifle Manufacturer”. The same search in google, bing, or duckduckgo can also be fruitful – and don’t neglect an image search while you’re at it! Nothing helps immersion quite like an image, especially of something exotic or fancy.

Existing Genre Connections: Human Activity

The past is increasingly a foreign country to those used to modern life. Two examples highlight just how different things were back then.

The first is a sequence in Back To The Future III, in which a traveling salesman is touring the country selling the latest invention, Barbed Wire. Before this, people didn’t fence off their herds; they relied on cowboys to keep them together, brands to establish ownership, and generally let the cattle or horses wander where they wanted to in search of food. Confrontations were inevitable when those herds wandered onto someone else’s land, and rustling was a constant danger. Landowners had to look after the hands they employed, because they were completely reliant on them; mistreat or abuse them and they would move on to someone else’s employ, perhaps taking part or all of your livestock with them!

The second is more general – back then, everything had to be done by hand. And that usually meant a skilled specialist. The further out you went, the fewer of these there would be. Another way of looking at this is that specialists would have growing ‘sales territories’ depending on how essential their specialty had to be.

Some tasks were ubiquitous and would be found almost everywhere – blacksmiths, saloon-keepers, undertakers, carpenters – but many more would not. Bakers, Lawyers, Dentists, and Stonemasons for example. And some professions would fall somewhere in between – doctors, for example. So that’s three different progressions.

The US, north to south, is roughly 1650 miles. I looked up an 1850s map of Mississippi and noted the distances between communities, finding that one of two situations generally held true: (1) a triangle formed between three townships would have two sides 20-30 miles long and the third side would be 15-20 miles; or (2) the third side would have a fourth community in the middle, 5-7.5 miles removed from both the vertices. There were 4 of the first for every example of the second, so that works out to an average distance between communities of 20.22 miles.

That says that there would be roughly 81.6 communities along the north-south line, maximum. Call it 82. Assuming that this is the maximum settlement density west of the Mississippi, and the further west you go the more it declines until you get to the coast – not an entirely true assumption, some areas would have more (Texas) and some less (Arizona) due to geography / climate, you can create a set of tables which combines distance West of the Mississippi with the distance to the nearest town on the other axis to determine a % chance of a particular service being present.

I estimate that the relationships would hold for a distance of about 1700 miles (then you get too close to the west coast), so that gives horizontal units of 85 miles for a table with 20 entries, or 170 miles for one with 10 entries.

An example progression might be:
82/1.1 = 75; 1650/75 = 22 miles separation; 100%.
75/1.1 = 68; 1650/68 = 24.265 miles separation; 100×22/24.265 = 91%.
68/1.1 = 62; 1650/62 = 26.613 miles separation; 100×22/26.613 = 83%.
62/1.1 = 56; 1650/56 = 29.464 miles separation; 100×22/29.464 = 75%.
… and so on.

Note that I plucked the “/1.1” out of thin air; the correct answer might be higher (a greater sparsity of professionals) or lower (a slower decrease in professionals). It might even vary from one table to the next.

I didn’t have time to actually do a full table, and don’t really know enough about the genre to do so definitively, so I’ll leave this as a proposed general principle.

The key point is this: For everything that needs doing, it has to be done by hand. While there might be someone who knows what they are doing available, the further west you go, the less true that is likely to be, and the more will have to be done by willing (unskilled) amateurs. They can compensate for that lack of skill to some extent by increasing crudity of product, but that can only take them so far. There’s more to be done than there are people to do it; everyone should always be busy doing something, and usually doing it the hard way. Describing what someone is doing, and how difficult they are finding it, gives a line into the socioeconomic reality of a region, and that connects what the PCs see and encounter with the genre.

Existing Genre Connections: Animal Life

The creatures that inhabit the wild west (aside from people) are genre staples – cattle, horses, coyotes, rattlesnakes, eagles, vultures, and so on. While you can sprinkle the occasional oddity – a thunderbird or bigfoot or whatever – into the mix, at least 95% of the creatures seen (not necessarily encountered) should be one of these iconic staple creatures, because that connects that encounter directly to the genre, and by extension, also connects those rarities. If the reality is mundane (but challenging), the PCs won’t bat an eyelid at the occasional Zombie Were-Panther (or whatever).

Existing Genre Connections: The Natural World

The other (related) beat that you should regularly hit is descriptive scenery, emphasizing the natural quality of everything from horizon to horizon. It’s very easy to take it for granted, and it’s also easy to overdo it; so you need to master the art of efficient narrative. I know that I harped on about it in part 2, but it bears reemphasizing!

The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative. and Part 6 in particular (because it offers the entire series as a downloadable PDF and a checklist) should be helpful.

Ideally, you want to be able to drop three or four words into a narrative passage now and then to remind people of the environment in which their characters exist. “The sky and desert are a watercolor swimming in heat-haze” is a good example. “It’s dryer than an old cow skull” is another, “and the sweat dripping from your brow the first water this land has seen in a decade.”

Point Of Connection: It’s Harder

This actually follows on from an earlier point – anything that the PCs want to do, or want to have done, will be harder work than the players are used to. But don’t just tell the players that – show how and why, break the task down.

“You want a new hat? The nearest milliner is in Jefferson City, 80 miles away. Or you can try the Widow Goode’s place in town, if you are willing to accept less expertise. Ideally, you will want a calf-hide or maybe a piece of horse-hide, and it will need to be treated by boiling it in urine for a day or two. If you want to die it, you’ll need to buy the die from the general store – their stocks will probably be limited…”

Point Of Connection: It’s Unusual

It goes almost without saying that if there’s something that’s normal in the setting but unusual from the perspective of the players, it needs to be spelt out. A couple of sites that might be useful in this regard:

• 10 Strange Ways People Did Things Before Modern Conveniences – Listverse
• Ten Harsh Realities of Common Jobs in the Old West – also Listverse

Point Of Connection: Social and Societal Issues

Perspectives on a lot of issues have changed massively since the era of the American Frontier. That leaves the GM a lot of scope – he can approach some issues from a modern perspective that will resonate with the players, but should equally tackle some from the perspective of the people living in that era.

It can be extra work to bring a society from that era to life for the players, but doing so establishes and re-establishes a direct connection between campaign and genre.

Point Of Connection: Servants

One interesting dichotomy that’s sure to show up at some point is the issue of Slavery. There won’t be a lot of it in evidence on the frontier, people can’t afford to buy slaves, and on the frontier there would be a lot more pragmatism, a lot more acceptance of a man’s (or woman’s) worth being based on what they can do; the wealthy just over the Mississippi is where it would be encountered more commonly. In modern times, the divide on the issue is viewed as a north-south thing, thanks to the civil war, but that hasn’t happened yet. However, for those with the eyes to see and the news to observe, there are already rumblings and discontent, storm clouds on the horizon.

One of the tools that my Co-GM and I regularly use in Pulp is to use newspaper headlines and controversies of the day to regularly establish the game world (with the occasional twist, of course). Tracking the course of the debate, one step at a time (with suitable delays – it takes time for news to spread, based on proximity to the nearest telegraph office / railroad) can serve a similar function in a wild west campaign. Plus other relevant news, of course.

Potential Game Balance Issues

The biggest possible game balance issue stems from players applying modern attitudes to old-world problems. The assembly line is not even a glimmer in Henry Ford’s imagination – everything is hand-crafted and this is viewed as only natural and right.

I suggest establishing a code phrase that you can have an NPC drop into a conversation whenever this sort of thing becomes an issue – a ‘staying in character’ way of warning a player that their proposal (whatever it is) is stepping too far out of genre. Something like “That’s just not the way things are done,” for example.

Not only should you actively pull strings and metagame to stop genre violations (after delivering this warning, of course, giving the player warning of what’s coming if the continue), but there should be social ramifications of violating social norms. Everything and anything from trumped-up charges and a threatened hanging to characters being run out of town.

Other Genres

I said at the start that these are iconic representations, between them, of most genres. Adapting the principles described covers just about everything you can imagine.

There are a couple of principles to keep in mind – the filtering of one genre through another; resolving conflicting genre elements; the dichotomy between “what’s possible / easier” and “what’s harder / not possible, and what gets done instead.”

One final point remains to be made: Connecting a campaign to genre is easily done, but often risks game balance issues and other problems. If your focus is on doing so through mundane tasks and “everyday life,” those problems don’t go away, but they do shrink in scope and threat. As a GM, you still need to be on your toes whenever an “interesting question” gets posed, because the rulings you make under such circumstances are more likely to have repercussions.

GM: “The Purple Worm opens its mouth to swallow you whole.”

Player: “I cast blade barrier down its throat, snout to tail. If I can. How much damage does it do?”

GM: “An interesting proposition…”

This is an example from real life – it happened in my Fumanor campaign. Since I couldn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work, I permitted it, and arbitrarily ruled that its HD were effectively divided along its length given the nature of the attack, because every 10′ length of Blade Barrier was triggered. It very quickly became puree.

But I made it clear that this only worked because there was enough room within the creature for the blade barrier to fit – don’t try doing this to a Dragon, where that is not the case, it won’t work!

Player: “This is the 1950s, right? I’ll patent the basic design of a color television camera and receiver, then set up a factory to make both. I’ll give the cameras away for free to any studio that wants them, and sell the receivers. I’ll use modern automation in the factory and train employees as necessary to keep the costs down, and put a really low level of profits on the price-tags – I want to undercut or price-match the manual assembly-line black and white models. As the manufacturers of those sets go bust or look like going bust, I’ll buy their TV manufacturing arms off them, and modernize to keep up with demand, while rehiring all their workers…”

GM: “It’s going to take time, and it’s not going to be that easy. A lot of the basic patents have already been issued, and you’re going to have to make the assembly-line automation yourself – what they can do locally isn’t up to job…”

Dangers to a campaign come in many shapes and sizes, but genre-busting is one of the most deadly, if you’re not careful.

Wrap-up

I’m sure some readers thought, when reading the basic tenets of this article, “But that’s all so obvious, so simple. I Already do that.” If you’re one of them, congratulations on being next-level as a GM – but I bet that you’re doing so in a fairly piecemeal fashion.

For others, especially beginners, this powerful technique may never have occurred to them, though they may have been looking for a way to achieve this, or have felt that something was lacking but didn’t know what.

And, I’m sure, in some cases, a GM wasn’t even aware that something was lacking; the status quo of mechanics breaking immersion was the price you paid for the ability to interact with the setting.

Whatever your level of ability as a GM, this technique can step it up a notch, possibly into a whole different league.