I am toying with the idea of running Deadlands, but (like many people here, if I remember right) I find myself a little thrown by the ease with which slavery is brushed under the table by the game's alternate history - it feels too much like addressing World War II without Naziism ever coming up.

So, I'm working on tweaking the timeline with the following considerations:

- I want the Confederacy to still be into slavery. This pretty much means they'll be the villains of the setting, but that kind of goes with the term "Confederacy" as far as I am concerned.

- The Texas Rangers still need to be available as a potentially sympathetic force, which to a certain extent rules out them working for the Confederacy.

- The whole equal rights thing still needs to be accelerated, at least in the West. This means there needs to be a potent force pushing for it.

So, thoughts on the timeline:

- Ghost rock is discovered and is used by the South to close their industrial/technological gap with the North, prolonging the war.

- The South's need for manpower becomes an increasing problem. They eventually set up "slave batallions" lured by the promise of emancipation (an actual plan of the Confederate military in history) - but the batallions are sorely betrayed, sent into nigh-suicidal missions, and various dirty tricks are deployed to ensure that any who actually accomplish their missions never get their promised emancipation.

- In response to the above, the Union integrates its forces rather than having separate white and black troops. This is to reverse a slump in black Northerners volunteering for fear that black Union forces would be used as badly as the black Confederates. (For their part, the black slave batallions rapidly run out of volunteers, leading to the ugly spectacle of slaves being ordered into battle with Confederate cannons trained on them to blast them if they deviate from orders - further hardening Union attitudes against the south.)

- Meanwhile, the North has its own manpower issues, leading to women playing a more prominent role in a range of professions. Soon the fighting is so intense that women are even fighting on the front line for the North.

- With men and women of various races mingling more in the North than polite society had previously allowed for, combined with an increasingly hard backlash against the Confederacy's excesses, Northern attitudes begin to conceive of equal rights not as a heresy or a pipe dream, but as the ultimate and loudest possible rebuttal of Confederate ideology.

- A lull in the fighting in 1872 comes up with a new peace initiative: special simultaneous elections in the Union and Confederacy, all offices up for grabs. The idea was that if the public sentiment really was for coming to some sort of peace, they would elect candidates seeking such. Due to the war dragging on for as long as it has with no end in sight, the old Republican/Democrat order has lost much of its credibility and on both sides of the border major new parties arise to challenge for power.

- In the North, Victoria Woodhull stands for the presidency on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Frederick Douglass as her VP. They did this in real life too, though in our timeline they were merely a very forward-thinking sideshow - here, thanks to the extreme shifts in attitude in the North that the extreme circumstances of the war have given rise to, they have a real shot.

- In the South, dissident Confederates find themselves drawn to the Peace With Honour Party, with an overt policy of ending the war gracefully; their main platform revolves around expanding ghost rock-based industrial capacity to the extent that slaves are not needed, giving emancipated slaves the option of seeking honest work in the South or heading North, and reaching a peace deal with the North which would "guarantee and ensure forever that the states of the Confederacy and the Union would be equal partners in peace, whatever form that peace takes".

- Obviously, the Reckoners have as their top priority the continuation of the war by any and all means necessary, so they need to sabotage this shit ASAP. Thanks to the Agency's closer integration into the heart of the Union government, they are able to get on top of this and give equal protection to both President Grant and his rivals; in fact, Grant gives clear and unambiguous orders that Woodhall and Douglass are to be given just as good protection as he is, fearing for the future of American democracy if assassination (supernatural or otherwise) were to become a perennial feature of the electoral process.

- In the South, the Texas Rangers do their best, but the incumbent Davis and his people (along with the influence of the Reckoners here and there) keep information back here and there to ensure that the Peace With Honour Party don't quite have as good protection as Davis does. Heroic members of the Rangers discover this imbalance, but not the chicanery behind it; as such, the Rangers are able to correct the problem before disaster hits, but there is a growing distrust between them and Davis.

- The election takes place: in the North, the balance of power varies locally, but the Equal Rights Party does take the presidency. Recognising that enough people voted Republican that their priorities need to be heard at the centre of government, President-Elect Woodhall begins negotiations with President Grant with an eye to giving Grant an important role in her cabinet - Secretary of State is mooted.

- In the South, the electoral process is a disaster, with the Knights of the Golden Circle engaging in mass voter intimidation (to the extent of attacking and burning down polling stations in areas believed to favour Peace With Honour) with Davis' apparent blessing. In addition, a massive storm rages across much of the Peace With Honour party's heartland, with flooding and bad weather making it impossible to either vote or retrieve ballots from those regions. Declaring this sinister coincidence "an Act of God", Davis refuses to rerun the vote in those regions, producing results which are, to say the least, a little strange.

- Davis declares that the victory of the Equal Rights Party in the North demonstrates the Union's contempt for traditional values and declares that he will not go to any negotiating table until the Union's ability to bully and threaten the South is destroyed. Realising that the War is going to continue yet again, Woodhall and Douglass mutually agree to make Grant Secretary of War.

- Meanwhile, in the South not all the Confederate states are so happy with the outcome. Those who rely most on slavery are the happiest; the less plantation-focused States find themselves chafing at the bit. After some heroic Texas Rangers discover just what dark deals Davis has been making to secure his victory, the Rangers consult with the government of Texas and aid it in declaring independence from the South. The newly independent Texas is bolstered by the fact that it is on the periphery of the South to begin with, plus the fact that the Texas Rangers are supporting it, plus its independent spirit makes it popular amongst the Territories. Frederick Douglass immediately schedules a speaking tour of Texas to explore potential for Union-Republic of Texas co-operation, the success of which helps the Equal Rights ideology to spread within Texas itself.

- Texas might have begun a tidal wave of secessions from the clearly corrupt Confederacy, had it not been for the Louisiana Backstab, in which Louisiana dropped out of the Confederacy and immediately declared allegiance to Imperial France. Seen as a French riposte to Britain's annexation of Detroit, the newly independent Louisiana is forced by the new colonial authority to give up slavery, but is able to do so thanks to New Orleans' status as a hub of ghost rock-based industry. (Indeed, the French involvement here may well be part of their desire to get in on that ghost rock action themselves.) Fearful of creeping recolonisation, the rest of the Confederacy saw no alternative but to back Davis.

- Recolonisation may well happen in the long term anyway: even the Reckoners can't keep the Civil War going forever, but if the collapse of the Union or Confederacy (or better yet, both) leads to a land grab by the European powers, that could set the stage for an even wider-ranging and more destructive war.

Thoughts?

I always thought it would be easier to resolve the Deadland's Confederacy in actual play as either extant and mid-Civil War, or an extinguished polity altogether during Reconstruction and Western Expansion. Play a campaign either in 1860-1870 and Civil War in full swing, or play without them. No lingering alt history to dream up, let alone to tease or sandbag onto players.

"Hey, there's this really cool idea, and this really critical time period, and no! you can't take a meaningful part while they are together creating an alternate history. Now listen to a parade of Mary Sues changing the world."

When inserting an alternate universe crisis, better play during a snapshot in time than an elaborate rebuild.
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As for your ideas, I like it up to "A lull in fighting in 1872..." After that it reads extraneous. Unless players get to mess with the backroom scenes of those alt history elections, secessions, and defections, who really cares? It is a finished thing, the past is prologue, why do we need that detail to play?

I also don't care for the gloss of "and the South instantly catches up in infrastructure mid-war, because ghost rock." The South will lose by sheer dint of ghost rock being an equivalently distributed advantage, thus a wash. And there is not enough peace time to undo the lack of infrastructure investment over generations.

You could easily summarize this all into: "Due to war exhaustion, Union and Confederacy begin to collapse, with the Confederacy first. European colonial powers see opportunity for land grab and tech exploitation. Chaos ensues, here's the new map, I'm starting you all in this little square. Any questions?"

Quote from: Opaopajr;821726As for your ideas, I like it up to "A lull in fighting in 1872..." After that it reads extraneous. Unless players get to mess with the backroom scenes of those alt history elections, secessions, and defections, who really cares? It is a finished thing, the past is prologue, why do we need that detail to play?

Well, a) it bears on the different characters of the Union and the Confederacy (which as-written Deadlands tends to write as being just as bad as each other, which I'm not keen on), and b) who's currently President is something people would probably want to know, and c) it brings in some actual historical characters who were specifically fighting for equal rights and gives them a role in the changes the setting is based on.

If you're happy to accept the setting as is and wave everything off as "the past is prologue" then sure, you don't need any of that, but I've seen a significant number of people (not least on here) saying that they're not happy to leave it there - that the sudden disappearance of slavery and rapid manifestation of equal rights in Deadlands flies in the face of their suspension of disbelief and they need a little extra background context to make that work.

QuoteI also don't care for the gloss of "and the South instantly catches up in infrastructure mid-war, because ghost rock." The South will lose by sheer dint of ghost rock being an equivalently distributed advantage, thus a wash. And there is not enough peace time to undo the lack of infrastructure investment over generations.

My thinking there would be that the British would make an under the table deal with independent Los Angeles to get preferential access to ghost rock, which they'd pass to the Confederacy (at the meantime disrupting the Union's supplies) for the sake of covertly bolstering the Confederacy against the Union.

That's pretty much how I'd want to play it also. Great job!

Quote from: Warthur;821719The South's need for manpower becomes an increasing problem. They eventually set up "slave batallions" lured by the promise of emancipation (an actual plan of the Confederate military in history) - but the batallions are sorely betrayed, sent into nigh-suicidal missions, and various dirty tricks are deployed to ensure that any who actually accomplish their missions never get their promised emancipation.

This more or less happened, referred to as "Confederate States Colored Troops" as the first wiki link I could find details a bit. The rest of your description is more or less dead on, all the link adds beyond the name is why it worried them in the first place.

Quote from: MrHurst;821741This more or less happened, referred to as "Confederate States Colored Troops" as the first wiki link I could find details a bit. The rest of your description is more or less dead on, all the link adds beyond the name is why it worried them in the first place.

Good catch - my thinking was that in this timeline they'd adopt them somewhat earlier in the war (say, because their ghost rock-fuelled gains created a golden opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have had the manpower to exploit), so that more people would have a chance to see those groups in action and the Union had more time to build up a backlash against those practices. (In the real history it was a desperation move born out of the Confederacy's looming extinction.)

If I were ever to run Deadlands I would probably want to set it in the aftermath of the Civil War, stick much closer to real-world history but just say that 'out West' on the chaotic frontier there's not enough social order to get in the way of female, black etc gunslingers, especially with the Ghost Dance causing a rebirth of magic as the dead rise from their graves to fight the living...

Alternatively the war could still be going on, but I'd probably stick to real life, as much as The Good The Bad and the Ugly did anyway - broad strokes and mythic, no reason to sweat the details.

I don't think I'd want to use much of the game's official canon alt-history, which bugs me for similar reasons to the OP.

Quote from: Warthur;821745Good catch - my thinking was that in this timeline they'd adopt them somewhat earlier in the war (say, because their ghost rock-fuelled gains created a golden opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have had the manpower to exploit), so that more people would have a chance to see those groups in action and the Union had more time to build up a backlash against those practices. (In the real history it was a desperation move born out of the Confederacy's looming extinction.)

It makes sense, and this is probably the best approach of handling "The south still has slaves" I've seen made for Deadlands. The idea of progressive movements being pushed along by disgust with the open abuses of communities in the guise of freedom is rather believable. I particularly like the idea of re-colonization as the central authority of the US breaks down, could let things go in a very different direction, but you'd be flying entirely by the seat of your pants at that point.

Certainly beats the "Well it wasn't about slavery so there aren't any" bit from the game itself, but really I'll take what I can get to not have to walk face first into that issue.

Another solid rallying point for the progressive movement could be freemen being captured as escaped slaves out west. The practice was a pretty big stick used by the abolition movement prior to the war, I can't imagine it'd be taken any better when it happened in disputed territories by a group of rebels. Plus I can see some player character happily ruining the day of people who do such things.

It's not all that fucking hard.

A Confederacy with Slavery = not officially recognized by Britain and France = no European counter to US naval blockades = Confederacy curbstomped = end to war = Reckoners sad.

A Confederacy without Slavery = officially recognized by Britain and France = European counter to US naval blockades = Confederacy not curbstomped = continuing war either Hot or Cold = Reckoners happy.  

Realpolitik combined with supernatural influence that makes perfect sense given the setting?...NAH, it's WHITEWASHING!@!!1!!111!!!

Bleah.

That's a reason for the Confederacy to drop slavery during the war, but it isn't sufficient to explain slavery never having been a thing in the first place, because if there were no slavery there'd have been no war in the first place = Reckoners extra-super-sad.

Not sure that "having slavery and then abolishing it" (you know like the North did earlier) is "never having been a thing in the first place".

I like your ideas. I also like the idea of there being colonies formed in the chaos. It would be a grand mess with several European powers tossed directly into the mix. British Michigan, French Louisiana, Spanish Mexico. Seems like an interesting time to play in!

I'm Deadlands-illiterate so can someone please ELI5...

Quote from: S'mon;821761If I were ever to run Deadlands I would probably want to set it in the aftermath of the Civil War, stick much closer to real-world history but just say that 'out West' on the chaotic frontier there's not enough social order to get in the way of female, black etc gunslingers, especially with the Ghost Dance causing a rebirth of magic as the dead rise from their graves to fight the living...

How is this not the ideal solution?

Quote from: S'mon;821761Alternatively the war could still be going on, but I'd probably stick to real life, as much as The Good The Bad and the Ugly did anyway - broad strokes and mythic, no reason to sweat the details.

I don't think I'd want to use much of the game's official canon alt-history, which bugs me for similar reasons to the OP.

But then that's exactly how I feel.

Quote from: Warthur;821779That's a reason for the Confederacy to drop slavery during the war, but it isn't sufficient to explain slavery never having been a thing in the first place, because if there were no slavery there'd have been no war in the first place = Reckoners extra-super-sad.

Reckoners, for the most part, only had enough power to openly influence humanity after the ghost dance ceremony sundered the veil. Humanity is perfectly within its rights to be evil for evil's sake, while the Reckoners look on from behind the veil smiling. Your pre-sundering Civil War explanation to please the Reckoners and say "they did it" is unnecessary.

Just because the game's metagame canon is eye rolling bullshit doesn't mean you have to labor ret-conning it. We can still play snapshots of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance periods without getting into the weeds on "how it all makes sense." Look at the modern contortions of trying to undo the FR bullshit of 4e into 5e; you're not selling a published setting, so why bother with this for a home game? Sell the premise concisely and directly to players — don't sweat the details unless you're going to play them out.

Quote from: CRKrueger;821781Not sure that "having slavery and then abolishing it" (you know like the North did earlier) is "never having been a thing in the first place".

So how does the Civil War start if the South abolished slavery when the North did?