I see the newer reboot of deadlands is up on kickstarter and I was curious about thoughts on the setting, I like Savage Worlds but the setting and books seemed expansive.  I might be interested in leaving the station on the new train.

The original setting was (to me) a lot like Shadowrun, only more steampunk than cyberpunk.   But basically magic comes back into the world.  Deadlands had something more of a horror element to it, but the fantasy aspect was much more prominent.

I am actually the opposite, I dropped it because I do not like Savage Worlds.

The original Deadlands system was rife with personality but clunky in practice, it used a deck of cards for several vital tasks which wound up slowing gameplay down considerably.  As it migrated to SW, the mechanics smoothed out, but it also lost a good bit of that personality in the name of streamlining, which has only gotten more pronounced over the years.  If you want to get into the setting, I recommend trying to find copies of the original Deadlands books, pre-SW, which I feel went into much greater detail.

I am not a fan of the Savage Worlds implementations. The immediately previous to the kickstarter SW version is free right now, so you might want to check that out. I find the Classic System charming and fun, the table looks right with cards and poker chips all over the table. I have played the hell out of it. I have also played the hell out of savage worlds, but I feel it isn't right for Deadlands.

I loved the original deadlands. I've always disliked Savage Worlds.

Deadlands is set ~13 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the dead began rising and magic etc came back.  There's a bunch of books for it, but they are mostly redundant and don't really detail the setting that well beyond the main book, being more adventure/metaplot and niche rules focused books (Though oddly, there are plenty of setting supplements that take it out of the 'wild west', which is to say 'Back East'... go figure).

Thematically you play a cowboy of some sort. Or a cowgirl. Or an Indian (either with magic spirit magic, or you know, with a gun). You can play a wandering kung fu monk, but that requires the right book.  You can play a DEAD cowboy, and if you die, you can become a Dead Cowboy.  Card Players are demon wrangling wizards.  Hanging Judges are evil ghosts that will, well, hang you, unless you can get a lawman (or are a lawman) to shoot them dead.  Tremors (the Kevin Bacon film) is alive and well.  Most of the famous cowboys in history are detailed NPCs if you look in the right books.  A couple of them are dead and loving it.

And yes, there is steampunk, and yes, you can play a Doc Brown mad-scientist steampunk making fool. Also, much like the card players, you wrangle demons to make the steampunk work.  There isn't a gold rush, per se, but instead a... hrmm... coal rush, only the coal in question is a magic, soul infused, demon coal called Ghost Rock, which is also vaguely uranium?  Whatever: The Mormons are doin' their own thing in Utah, which is a bit dystopian authoritarian techocracy (steam punk style).   Abraham Lincoln is a Dead Cowboy roaming around working for the Pinkertons.  

The Civil War never officially ended, due to the sudden rise of Zombies at Gettysburg preventing a definitive end to the battle, and subsequently the war, but the South has been given something of a whitewashing, which has offended some people because they can't be offended that the South is Tru Ebil Slave State in the setting.

I think that pretty much covers the bulk of hte setting. You are Big Damn Heros trying to prevent teh world from falling into evil because of Fear, and if you obey the metaplot, you not only fail, but you keep fighting through not one, but TWO sci-fi future settings before you finally get the job done.  Don't follow the metaplot, its dumb.

Quote from: Spike;1127878Don't follow the metaplot, its dumb.

I think that's good advice for pretty much any game line.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1127824I loved the original deadlands. I've always disliked Savage Worlds.

Is your gaming primarily theater of the mind?

I find Savage Worlds rocks hard if you are using lots of minis and terrain at the table, aka almost like adding roleplay to a wargame. SW is especially good for large scale cinematic fights with 10+ minis per side. But I've also found SW doesn't do anything for theater of the mind play.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1127885Is your gaming primarily theater of the mind?

I find Savage Worlds rocks hard if you are using lots of minis and terrain at the table, aka almost like adding roleplay to a wargame. SW is especially good for large scale cinematic fights with 10+ minis per side. But I've also found SW doesn't do anything for theater of the mind play.

I want to defend SW and say it's more than just a roleplaying poncho pulled over a mini-game, but I really can't. I've enjoyed playing it, but it's not an awesome system. The times where I've been willing to accept it (warts and all) are when the alternative is even worse (like Palladium's system for Rifts). I felt the best RPG parts of SW were in the Cortex system (classic like Supernatural, not the weird stuff like Smallville and the Marvel game that came out later), but that died off way too soon.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1127899I want to defend SW and say it's more than just a roleplaying poncho pulled over a mini-game, but I really can't.

SW is what it is. Your definition is spot on. I've had great fun running 40k and Mage Knight RPGing with it. SW lets you break out your wargame gear and party. Sure, it looks like a bunch of graying dudes are playing with toys, but its really super cereal!

I played in a couple of SW Deadlands campaigns and had fun. Savage Worlds rules encourage swashbuckling, trick shots, and taunting your enemies sometimes over attacking every round, and that's awesome. We had some sessions that felt like a Zorro scene, especially when we had more non-magic characters.

What did wear on me eventually is there's so many caster options for Savage Worlds, and Deadlands finds a home for every one of them except psionics. There's the preachers, Blessed, who are mechanically fucking awesome, and end up being more mage/clerics than miracle workers and faith healers. There's Indian shamans and creole voodooists. There's mad scientists, who do fit the setting but suffer somewhat from not having rules support for building anything larger than a gizmo with a power in it. There's Hucksters who are probably the most iconic for the setting, and their casting mechanic matches the setting better than Blessed, but then they're lost in the noise of all the other casters. It's too easy to have a majority of the party be casters, and that reminded me I was playing Savage Worlds too much, compared to when we had more gunslingers and did more cowboy stunts.

Easily solved if you're the GM, just limit casters, but most GMs don't, and not all players are interested. I still recommend it, but the more seriously you take the setting the more you may want to limit character creation options.

Just piping in to say that I agree with the above observation that Deadlands runs better as a setting when the number of arcane PCs are low or none.

Quote from: oggsmash;1127559I see the newer reboot of deadlands is up on kickstarter and I was curious about thoughts on the setting, I like Savage Worlds but the setting and books seemed expansive.  I might be interested in leaving the station on the new train.

I'm running a Deadlands campaign (every other week, with another player GMing a SW Slipstream campaign in the intervening weeks).  My experience:

- The basic flavor of the setting is awesome.  If you pick too deeply, it becomes niche, campy, and a bit nonsensical.  So I prefer to use the general broad strokes of the setting.  From everything I've seen, the new setting is no improvement over the old one, if not worse.  Play the free released one.

- As others have mentioned above, this game works best as a Western game with a little magic, as opposed to a magic game in a Western setting.

- The campaign flows best (in my opinion) as an episodic campaign (like a weekly TV show or serial).  Take one of the many published adventures and modify it to fit your needs or come up with your own scenario, but break it up into a single overall goal with 3-5 steps/encounters.  It plays fast and smooth that way.

- Minis or maps (like roll20) are really helpful, as there are enough simulationist rules that it helps.

- Most of the monsters work best as a final boss or as an obstacle to be avoided/outsmarted.  A Novice or Seasoned party will get destroyed by 75% of the monsters in the game.  Not to mentioned most of the NPCs will challenge Legendary adventurers.  So even most of the published adventures give ways to banish/frighten off/avoid the magical monsters as part of the adventure, because if you run a too monster-heavy adventure, your players will be rolling up new characters often.  This can make the game a little repetitive (with walkin' dead being a common mook) if you are just running it as a menagerie.  Strong characters, NPCs and story-lines can help this a ton.

I like it, and will probably run it for a while.  The low number of character "classes" will eventually mean that players will exhaust their character ideas pretty quickly, but by then I expect we'll be ready for another setting, anyway...

Original Deadlands had a background step where you'd draw cards to determine a new character's past, and you'd have to draw certain cards to have access to arcane abilities, limiting the number of people who could be running around shooting magic everywhere.  Savage Worlds had no such restriction, so you can be rolling around fireballing everything.  I also have a beef with Savage Worlds magic system being basically "all the magic does the exact same thing, just some types of magic have access to different spells".  It kills some of the flavor.

Run it without the metaplot. And this iteration is pushing the metaplot WAY to the rear.

As for liking/not liking SW... depends how you run it. I find it extremely flexible and fast in my hands and have no problem putting in the details that I desire (like differentiating magic). There are plenty of SW settings that literally show you how to overhaul the magic system in a bunch of different ways - Shaintar stands out for this. Converting it to SWADE would be relatively easy. There are also plenty of solid supplementary material from the fans that do all kinds of cool stuff - including Vancian magic, Spell points, pure-effects based etc.

Now how much you want any of this in your Deadlands? /shrug. It all comes down to how you want your setting-conceits served up.

Of course if SW ain't your thing - pick up the older material and mine it for fluff and use your system of choice!