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" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaves_and_the_American_Civil_War#Blacks_in_the_Confederate_Army) 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" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaves_and_the_American_Civil_War#Blacks_in_the_Confederate_Army) 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?
Quote from: Opaopajr;821838Just 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."
Maybe in your home games, but in mine we tend to want verisimilitude and a world that feels real to us.
I like Deadlands, but the lack of slavery in the CSA always struck me as a wimp-out. They settled for the feel of Brisco County when they could have gone for Joe R. Landsdale, for 1950's white-hat/black-hat TV serials when they could have gone for Sam Peckenpah.
On a semi-related note, here's something I'd always wondered about yet until recently never took the time to read: The actual Constitution of the CSA.
http://www.jjmccullough.com/CSA.htm
Quote from: Warthur;821850So how does the Civil War start if the South abolished slavery when the North did?
Maybe they completely rewrote the setting for Reloaded, in which case we're talking apples and oranges, but originally...
Civil War starts...up to this point, the major historical aspects are in line.
Battle of Gettysburg 1863 - (Holy Shit, the dead come back to life killing everything, maybe we'd better ease off on major battles for the time being)
1865 or 1866 - South abolishes slavery. Lots of reasons this makes sense given the altered history since Gettysburg.
So not sure where you get the "North and South both abolished slavery before the war" thing, unless like I said, they rewrote it in Reloaded.
Quote from: CRKrueger;821857unless like I said, they rewrote it in Reloaded.
They did not. For the first several years of the war slavery was legal both in the North and the South. IIRC, the South abolished it a year or two after the North simply because it was either that or lose. I'm not 100% certain of that time frame since I haven't looked at my DL stuff in awhile, but if it's necessary I can always dig out my DLR Player's Handbook and check the history section.
Yeah, that is my recollection of the Deadlands timeline. That since the South was losing, they decided to end slavery, so they would gain support from England, which was the time was the anti-slavery driving force in the world. In real life, England was pro-Confederacy to a degree, but wouldn't help because of slavery. And there was some Confederate politician who actually said (in retrospect), they should have done just that. Might not have been a common sentiment, but it wasn't completely alien, either.
And let me point out, the North had slave states. Missouri, was a Union state, yet was slave. And in Southern Illinois, slavery was legal in some limited circumstances, to work salt mines. I don't believe it was fully abolished until the Civil War actually ended when they passed the amendment abolishing slavery (the Emancipation Proclamation only covered the rebelling states)
The American Civil War is a really complex thing, it's far too easy to say it was all about slavery, but that's basically what is done today.
Quote from: CRKrueger;8218571865 or 1866 - South abolishes slavery. Lots of reasons this makes sense given the altered history since Gettysburg.
The whole point of this thread is that a lot of people don't find that the reasons given make sense. Slavery might have been a complex issue and the war might have been murkier than "slave-owning states vs. non-slave-owning states", but at the same time it was undeniably the hot-button issue driving the secession in the first place. Furthermore, giving up slavery would have been actively unconstitutional since the CSA constitution forbade the passing of any law "denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves". The way I see it, if slavery was ideologically important enough to secede over, and important enough to write into the constitution, it'd take more than 2 years after even the craziest outcomes of Gettysburg for the South to change its mind on the subject.
Hence why in my version of the alt-history the English and Confederacy conspire to give the Confederacy superior access to ghost rock, at least early on - the deal also gives England better access to ghost rock than the other European powers enjoy, which is an advantage big enough for the British to swallow their qualms about giving the Confederacy under-the-table unofficial help.
Quote from: JeremyR;821926The American Civil War is a really complex thing, it's far too easy to say it was all about slavery, but that's basically what is done today.
I hate 'Nazi Confederacy vs anti-slavery Union' as much as I hate 'Whitewashed Confederacy vs Blackwashed Union'. The OP seems rather to want the former, in reaction to the (I think unintentional) tendency of the official timeline towards the latter.
But, AFAICT IRL the attempted secession was almost entirely about slavery, about fear of the constriction eventual abolition of slavery. However the North was not fighting against slavery, but to preserve the Union - which AFAICT had no Constitutional basis. Slavery was morally wrong, but the Confederate states had the Constitutional liberty to secede for any reason or none, so stopping that was a moral wrong too. IMO both sides were fighting primarily for bad causes.
Edit: Like I said, best thing is stick much closer to real-world timeline. It's not as if the game actually centres on the war, anyway - it centres on the Wild West.
Quote from: S'mon;821933But, AFAICT IRL the attempted secession was almost entirely about slavery, about fear of the constriction eventual abolition of slavery. However the North was not fighting against slavery, but to preserve the Union - which AFAICT had no Constitutional basis.
What are you talking about? The Constitution is what sets up the Union in the first place.
QuoteSlavery was morally wrong, but the Confederate states had the Constitutional liberty to secede for any reason or none, so stopping that was a moral wrong too.
Where in the Constitution does it say this?
Quote from: Warthur;821940What are you talking about? The Constitution is what sets up the Union in the first place.
Where in the Constitution does it say this?
All rights not specifically granted to the federal government in the Constitution are reserved to the People, or to the States. The States never gave up the right to secede, a right the original 13 had previously asserted against the British Empire.
Quote from: S'mon;822051All rights not specifically granted to the federal government in the Constitution are reserved to the People, or to the States. The States never gave up the right to secede, a right the original 13 had previously asserted against the British Empire.
What is the Constitutional procedure for secession?
Is there a specific right to secede from the Union as opposed to revolting against the Union?
Quote from: Warthur;822112What is the Constitutional procedure for secession?
Is there a specific right to secede from the Union as opposed to revolting against the Union?
I see your mind has trouble grokking the concept of 'reserved rights' - that the US Constitution is not supposed to be all-encompassing.
Quote from: S'mon;822114I see your mind has trouble grokking the concept of 'reserved rights' - that the US Constitution is not supposed to be all-encompassing.
Oh no, I get the point, I just question whether there exists a right to secede that can be reserved to the states in the first place.
I'm not familiar with the Deadlands setting. It never really appealed to me. Nonetheless, I can offer a few ideas. Perhaps one or two of them are even helpful.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
An end of official slavery is not the same of a true end of it as an institution, if the same people stay in power and the controls are lax. You could have a Confederacy that has officially "abandoned" slavery, but inofficially just changed the rhetorics enough ("indentured laborers" intead of slaves, a stronger emphasis on contracts between really-not-slaves and utterly-not-slave owners). Perhaps apartheid South Africa can serve as a 'role model' for your Confederacy.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Texas might also still be a part of the Confederacy, but the "true" Rangers have gone underground and form the core of a guerilla army of sorts trying to 'free' Texas. That way, the PCs can become involved with them and even become involved in the foundation of a new nation.
Or alternatively, the Rangers are loyal, but honorable. Honorable foes the PCs can respect and who may treat their opponents with a certain chivalry are a cool thing for many settings, as this allows for elements such as a strained alliance between opposing forces to face a greater threat, and you create a more diverse and nuanced presentation of the supposed villain faction, which overall creates a more colorful and differentiated setting.
Quote from: Warthur;821719The 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.
Again, this seems to be a heroic struggle for your PCs to take a major role in, if they like.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- Ghost rock is discovered and is used by the South to close their industrial/technological gap with the North, prolonging the war.
Can you use ghost rock to create some sort of super weapon? You can probably use it to power those submersibles, and you totally should make them a major thing. Using subs to circumvent naval blockades is after all pretty much the purpose of those things; the American Civil War saw the first use of subs in combat; and not using powerful steampunk submarines if you could makes Jules Verne sadly shake his head.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Sacrificing one's own soldiers for racist reasons sounds too mustache-twirling evil for the purpose of the setting's verisimilitude and utterly stupid from a strategic point of view. Don't let your villains look like idiots. They can expoit their troops in a completely dehumanizing and contemptuous ways without willingly sacrifice them. The losses of fresh, green troops in most battles are likely pretty high anyway.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.)
That makes sense from a point of view of a more tolerant life on the frontier - living through horible situations together creates bonds. However, if you want to create a more plausible setting, old habits like racism die hard. Hell, in the real world, during the first world war, the American command of the expedition forces "informed" the French autorities about the savagery and rapist tendencies of their own black soldiers.
If you accelerate the normalisation process too much, it will look just as implausible as a slave-free Confederacy.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
The first part works, but female frontline troops are a bit early. If you want to go that route, have your equal rights activists demand voting rights for women (and blacks) as a bargain. "We will only die for a government we elected" seems like a decent message and while this condenses the whole soufragette movement to a few months, you still have it as a relevant element.
I would also suggest that these radical (for the time) demands will bring forward a strong counter-movement, strictly against these reforms. These would work well as both political opponents (in the more mellow version) as well as brutal goons (as a sorta terrorist conspiracy). "Proving that the powerful Senator is in fact, a member of [Enter name of reactionary conspiracy here] sounds like a pretty cool adventure or even campaign.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Also, assassinations. Reforms like these never seemed to work without martyrs.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
So, despite not negotiating for an armistice, the two countries decide on paralell elections? That sounds... odd, but the kind of odd that might actually work.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Did I mention how much credibility assassinations can bring to the recently deceased? This is a good example to use this instrument. Kill one of the two, use it as a moment to forment public outrage that carries the survivor to victory in the election.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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".
Okay, sounds good. You probably need a face for that party, someone the player can identify, but something like a sound of reason doesn't seem too much out of place.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
I guess the reckoners are some kind of supernatural force interested in maitaining human suffering?
I however think that assassinations almost never silence a movement, but grant it additional credibility and also creates sympathy for the movement while strengthening its followers determination - as long as it is more than some sort of cult of personality.
I would totally murder either Woodhall or Douglass to get to this point. Also, it's easily obtainable drama, and that is usually good for an RPG.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Preventing any disaster before they hit should primarily be the task of the PCs. If you can, turn this into an open-ended one-shot adventure with pre-made characters and have them try to protect the Peace with Honour candidates; if they succeed, events develop that way; if they fail you have other opportunities. As a warm-up to the real campaign, this could work, but by sheer necessity, this should be quite a challenge for the players to survive, let alone to succeed.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Again, murder one of them, create a coalition of needs government with Grant. Nonetheless, universal suffrage is pretty much a prerequiste for this.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
You know, actual election fraud is a lot less spectacular, but it is therefore also a lot less suspicious and it still occasionally spawns insurgencies and revolts. If you go with the slavery in everything but the name option, you could probably grant not-slave owners the right to vote for their
clients (Actually, a system based on an interpretation of the Roman patron-client relation seems to work rather well in this context and allows to borrow institutional dignity from the Roman Republic. See, it is all very traditional and noble). With a system like this, you don't need to manipulate the vote too much, because you make pretty sure whose votes truly counts.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
Actually, a strong anti Equal Rights position could very likely create strong sympathies within the more conservative or reactionary elements in the Union. It might appear to quite a few people that Davis is actually completely right, which, ironically, could accelerate a peace process.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
I think that you might get more mileage from a not (yet) independent Texas in this context.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
In 1872, There is no 'Imperial France'. The Empire doesn't survive the Franco-Prussian War and the resulting Third Republic is in no condition to project enough force to annex territories overseas. In '72, the republic has yet to recover from the war, and the reparations have to be paid as well (they aren't fully paid until '73). The country had a brief, but bloody civil war of its own (against the Commune of Paris) and is still not completely stabilized; the Communards may be defeated, but there is still a strong anti-Republican, monarchist movement. The French Republic might even be interested in a stronger diplomatic tie to the Confederacy to circumvent Bismarck's 'let's all hate the French' club.
Perhaps the best way to include a semi-autonomous, non-Confederacy Louisana (even though it would be a bit contrived) would be a French Empire-in-Exile, with a surprisingly alive Napolen III or IV. as L'Empereur de l'Ouest", calling New Orleans his personal Elba or something like that. A lot of pomp, a grand name (with Bonaparte, maybe even the grandest name of the 19th century), but very little actual power, the resulting Imperial Court could be a great place for pointless intrigues (utterly vicious, because they matter so little) and a point of levity for the campaign. Like Emperor Norton, but with an actual army. And nightmares about Sedan.
Quote from: Warthur;821719- 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.
In the second half of the 19th century, there are no European powers who could realistically establish colonies in the Americas, besides the British Empire and the French Republic - and the Republic can only do so during a very brief period in the 1880s, when the modernisation of the French fleet outmatches the numerical superiority of the Britsh navy.
Fleets from the German Empire cannot operate in the Atlantic without the toleration of the British Royal Navy; Austria-Hungaria could as well have no coast at all, the Osman Empire is collapsing and Spain is unstable. the Russian pacific fleet might be a factor (especially when the relationship between Russia and Japan develop differently, which might be the case when the American fleet is preoccupied with the ongoing civil war and thus less involved in the enforced end of the isolation policy in Japan), but it's tiny; the much larger Baltic Fleet has the same problems as any German navy has (in addition to no permanently ice-free harbors and the more pronounced bottleneck of the Skagerrak).
So, any recolonialisation attempts are pretty much limited to France and Britain. Maybe, there are a few German colonial efforts, but many are likely abandoned to appease the British Empire, and minor Russian efforts on the Pacific coast (Russia isn't well known for having too little empty space, after all).
However, depending on the importance of the reclaimed American colonies, the resulting British and French colonial conflicts could prevent the formation of the Entente Cordial (and, logically, the Tripple Entente); Britain could continue the splendid isolation policy on purpose, which would also keep France isolated as well (and pretty much guarantees German dominance in continental Europe). This could effectively prevent the First World War and replace with a series of minor wars (minor compared to the World War, that is).
The CSA was incapable of ending slavery, the weak executive had no power to compel the state government and slaveholders resisted every attempt by the CSA to control or use their slaves, to point of collaborating with the union government. If the CSA government couldn't compel the Slave holders to grow food for starving confederate soldiers, how are they going to compel the slave holders to give their slaves?
Quote from: theye1;822148The CSA was incapable of ending slavery, the weak executive had no power to compel the state government and slaveholders resisted every attempt by the CSA to control or use their slaves, to point of collaborating with the union government. If the CSA government couldn't compel the Slave holders to grow food for starving confederate soldiers, how are they going to compel the slave holders to give their slaves?
Yes.
Those who doubt this should read the CSA's constitution, an absolutely fascinating document. They did everything they could to hardwire slavery into the very existence of the state.
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;822149Yes.
Those who doubt this should read the CSA's constitution, an absolutely fascinating document. They did everything they could to hardwire slavery into the very existence of the state.
The CSA was slave society, meaning there entire society revolved around slavery. It's hard to imagine in today's society how much the American South depended on slavery. The CSA actually attempted some form of limited emancipation, and literally could no do it, even in the most limited circumstances. Not even to save themselves.
edit: They'd rather lose the war and be forced to give up their slaves, then willing submit to emancipation.
WTF? Deadlands Confederacy didn't have slaves?
Wow. I must have missed that! My crew only played with the core book years ago and I never GM'd so the people I played with must have always just used real world history.
So...yeah, a slave-owning Confederacy works fine in Deadlands...
But the Civil War in our games was something in the far background, as our games were always in the Weird West.
I would actually forget all the stupid alt-history metaplot and run Deadlands in the a world where history played out pretty much as it did here, just with magic.
Quote from: RPGPundit;822535I would actually forget all the stupid alt-history metaplot and run Deadlands in the a world where history played out pretty much as it did here, just with magic.
Yeah, I think that's the majority view. Alt-history actively hurts the game.
Quote from: S'mon;822572Yeah, I think that's the majority view. Alt-history actively hurts the game.
I don't get why people are so convinced that actual history is going to somehow be boring. I get infusing fantasy into history (that's what I do with Albion, for example), but feeling you have to put an alternate timeline on top of that just seems pointless, when real history is tremendously interesting and full of roleplay potential just as it was.
The main benefit to keeping Deadlands' alt-history is that the 1999 Marshal's Handbook details heaps and heaps of adventure locations, so if you stick close-ish to the alt-history they give you you can run a sandbox campaign straight from that.
Doesn't really seem to be an advantage significant enough to me to convince me to jettison real history though.
I am considering making one major change, though, because it grits my teeth to try and play it otherwise.
The Confederacy is in the process of falling as well as being a slave-owning state: Given the Confederacy was founded for and by slave-owners for slavery (it's stated in the Constitution), I don't feel comfortable having them abolish it and am actually okay with having them "win" the War for Independence. The thing is, I'm also thinking in the setting that slavery is such a gigantic boon to the Reckoners that the South has been pretty well-ravaged by monsters working in the shadows and maybe something like a Black Death-esque plague (The Red Death?) which, combined with the economic instability of slavery, is causing it to fall apart and simulate the same rush out to the Old West which happened in the real world.
This obviously impacts things like Hell on Earth but I don't think I'll be getting to there anyway. I'm not sure how it would impact other areas of the game. Among other things, I think it'd be interesting to impact the Deadlands-verse that the Union and runaway slaves got a much much bigger slice of things in the real world while the Confederacy's attempts at expansionism had bigger hurdles.
Quote from: RPGPundit;822797I don't get why people are so convinced that actual history is going to somehow be boring. I get infusing fantasy into history (that's what I do with Albion, for example), but feeling you have to put an alternate timeline on top of that just seems pointless, when real history is tremendously interesting and full of roleplay potential just as it was.
Honestly, given the way real life history turned out, I fully support Alt-History on behalf of those who weren't white males. Also, it adds the option of the Union/Confederacy Cold War competition.
Agent vs. Agent!
Spy vs. Spy!
Quote from: CTPhipps;913631Honestly, given the way real life history turned out, I fully support Alt-History on behalf of those who weren't white males.
Yes, this is why we would go for an Alt history.
We added magic so we can add equality, but just as we looked at the ramifications and logical consequences of magic we have to do the same for equality. For magic that means "what happens going forward" for equality the OP has chosen to ask "what happened in the past to make that happen"
Quote from: RPGPundit;822535I would actually forget all the stupid alt-history metaplot and run Deadlands in the a world where history played out pretty much as it did here, just with magic.
That's how I'd do it too and though I understand why they want with an alt-history, it's a pretty dumb one.
This is the game the tagline of which is "Spaghetti Western - With Meat." I don't really think they were going for the "whoever the fuck is the most pretentious and prestigious historical society's Alt-History award".
That having been said, feeding on the fear of Slaves in the South gets the Reckoners two things...Jack and his retarded brother, Shit.
A Divided America, with a Cold War mentality that takes the fear we experience at the height of our real Cold War and extends it for 200 years over the entire globe as the stage is set for eventual Global Thermonuclear War that brings the Reckoning...just what the doctor ordered.
The rise of the dead after the Battle of Gettysburg caused both sides to stop overt hostilities to reassess how they could continue the war without the Risen Dead destroying any battlefield victory. Now the South (and the Reckoners) had time. So the Reckoners possess Jefferson Davis and get rid of slavery in order to buy the CSA the geopolitical clout and support that will allow it to stand in opposition to the USA and thus create the Cold War that will eventually lead to the Reckoning.
Stop clutching your pearls, put down your crystal balls divining what must have been in the designer's head (it usually goes something like "we need to make the South palatable...WhiteWash!!!11!!) and just read what's in the goddamn book.
Claims that there's no way the South could have survived without slavery, even with economical support from Britain and France are countered by the fact that the South with slavery could still not have survived without economical support from Britain and France...but making it with support from Britain and France is FAR more likely.
Quote from: CRKrueger;913709This is the game the tagline of which is "Spaghetti Western - With Meat." I don't really think they were going for the "whoever the fuck is the most pretentious and prestigious historical society's Alt-History award".
That having been said, feeding on the fear of Slaves in the South gets the Reckoners two things...Jack and his retarded brother, Shit.
Honestly, speaking, I'm going to call bullshit on that. You've got the Confederacy and the Union as moral equals hating each other for reasons of the past war and land difficulties. However, both of these organizations are social justice minded equals with rights for men, women, blacks, and whites. This versus a seething mass of hatred and prejudice which was the case in real life without the constant culture of rape, torture, and violence which was the Confederacy.
FYI, I'm about as Southern as Boss Hog since my great aunt owns a goddamn former plantation and they still call it the War Between the States in my area. I'm speaking from experience when talking about my evil asshat ancestors rather than stuff I learned in a textbook.
QuoteA Divided America, with a Cold War mentality that takes the fear we experience at the height of our real Cold War and extends it for 200 years over the entire globe as the stage is set for eventual Global Thermonuclear War that brings the Reckoning...just what the doctor ordered.
The problem with that is it takes 200 years and I'm less than impressed with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse that way. The Earth, without the influence of Wild West Satan, almost blew itself up with nuclear weapons and you have infinitely more useful than uranium stuff glowing in its own backyard. Frankly, the alt-history timeline is impressive primarily in how they managed NOT to succeed for centuries.
QuoteThe rise of the dead after the Battle of Gettysburg caused both sides to stop overt hostilities to reassess how they could continue the war without the Risen Dead destroying any battlefield victory. Now the South (and the Reckoners) had time. So the Reckoners possess Jefferson Davis and get rid of slavery in order to buy the CSA the geopolitical clout and support that will allow it to stand in opposition to the USA and thus create the Cold War that will eventually lead to the Reckoning.
I've read the book, shockingly enough.
In fact, I actually like the idea of an Alt-Confederacy continuing onward as well as the Cold War decades earlier because I don't mind the idea of the world being well and truly fucked. As mentioned, I grew up in a place where the South Rising AgainTM was still an idea in my childhood and Thank God it's not passed into the generation after me.
The Confederacy is too good of a villain to use in a world which is completely overrun with vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness. I enjoyed
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and think that a still-functioning Confederacy is a perfect "show, don't tell" sign that the Reckoners aren't a bunch of lightweights getting themselves shoved over by some humans with True Faith, Shamans, and gunslingers.
Quote from: Warthur;821850So how does the Civil War start if the South abolished slavery when the North did?
Because it wasn't about slavery. That was the excuse Lincoln used. Lincoln just wanted to rule a continent and said so in now-published, then-private letters. He would have supported slavery if it had kept the continent under his rule. It was a taxation and States' Rights issue. The North was using the South and forcing it to bear the brunt of taxes. In real life, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the South--to areas not under Northern rule. Slaves in the North were still considered property.
People forget only one in ten Southerners owned slaves. And slavery was naturally being driven out by automation. The North actually slowed the dissipation of slavery by keeping trade benefits from the South and milking the South for taxes, which prevented farm owners from having the capital to switch more quickly to cheaper and more efficient machinery.
Quote from: Tod13;913713Because it wasn't about slavery. That was the excuse Lincoln used. Lincoln just wanted to rule a continent and said so in now-published, then-private letters. He would have supported slavery if it had kept the continent under his rule. It was a taxation and States' Rights issue. The North was using the South and forcing it to bear the brunt of taxes. In real life, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the South--to areas not under Northern rule. Slaves in the North were still considered property.
People forget only one in ten Southerners owned slaves. And slavery was naturally being driven out by automation. The North actually slowed the dissipation of slavery by keeping trade benefits from the South and milking the South for taxes, which prevented farm owners from having the capital to switch more quickly to cheaper and more efficient machinery.
Friend, again, I'm Super-Southern and I've read the Constitution of the Confederacy. It was all about slavery and the people who would most argue it was about slavery when the Civil War began would be the Southern politicians who were starting the War.
Here's some lines from their Declaration of Independence:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
QuoteThe General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
QuoteThese ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
My ancestors rebelled because they wanted to be slave owners even if they didn't own slaves themselves.
Because they were big ass racists.
As for Lincoln's belief in Manifest Destiny, err, the Confederacy wanted to conquer South America and Central America. They even had a, no shit, supervillain society for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle
Which is something I think would make a good adaptation to the Deadlands universe.
On my end, I don't actually give a shit about the historical accuracy of the Deadlands universe per se. I'm entirely willing to completely go off script in my alt-history RPGs. Ancient Rome ruling the world to the Modern Day? Nazis having conquered the ENTIRE Earth with you as the plucky resistance? 2020 a cyberpunk dystopia with the majority of humanity living in massive slums?
Whatever makes a great game.
I also think Deadlands is some weird hybrid between the Wild West West and Call of Cthulhu.
Which is far from the strangest game I've ever played.
I'm just saying if you're going to put Confederates in my game, I'd like to shoot them in the face for the decades I grew up listening to their apologist's crap in my hometown. I'm not seeing the real benefit of just making them another type of American even as I *LOVE* the idea of "and then equality ensued." If you just need a Super-PowerTM rivalling the United States in the 19th century Wild West then have Mexico keep Texas due to Ghost Rock.
Quote from: CTPhipps;913716Friend, again, I'm Super-Southern and I've read the Constitution of the Confederacy.
You are confusing the reasons the South seceded with why the War started. The North did not invaded to free the slaves. The North invaded to feed Lincoln's egotism.
Quote from: Tod13;913727You are confusing the reasons the South seceded with why the War started. The North did not invaded to free the slaves. The North invaded to feed Lincoln's egotism.
There's not exactly a number of countries in the 19th century or any period prior to the 20th which were about peacefully letting go of massive amounts of territory. You are correct that Lincoln invaded the South to "preserve the Union." The thing was, he was still incredibly anti-slavery so it's not exactly changing anything.
Quote from: CTPhipps;913729There's not exactly a number of countries in the 19th century or any period prior to the 20th which were about peacefully letting go of massive amounts of territory. You are correct that Lincoln invaded the South to "preserve the Union." The thing was, he was still incredibly anti-slavery so it's not exactly changing anything.
Lincoln was not anti-slavery. He adopted that stance as an excuse for the invasion. He himself wrote he would have supported whichever side of the issue gave him the most support.
Quote from: Tod13;913732Lincoln was not anti-slavery. He adopted that stance as an excuse for the invasion. He himself wrote he would have supported whichever side of the issue gave him the most support.
Citation needed, especially given his strong public record of antebellum hostility to the 'peculiar institution'.
This conversation is exactly why after 6 months of playing I tossed Deadlands and very carefully transported characters, NPCs, some settings, plots and all over to a historically accurate setting in the same period. So much easier to just deal with what was, be it good or evil, than what we are dealing with here.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer;913735Citation needed, especially given his strong public record of antebellum hostility to the 'peculiar institution'.
From Abraham Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it."
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm (http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm)
Quote from: AaronBrown99;913751From Abraham Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley, 22 August 1862:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it."
That only establishes that Lincoln prioritized the preservation of the Union over the abolition of slavery. Going from that to "Lincoln only adopted an anti-slavery position to get support for conquering the South" is a stretch worthy of Mister Fantastic.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer;913756That only establishes that Lincoln prioritized the preservation of the Union over the abolition of slavery. Going from that to "Lincoln only adopted an anti-slavery position to get support for conquering the South" is a stretch worthy of Mister Fantastic.
Yes, Lincoln was elected by the Republican Party which literally had no position uniting it Pre-Civil War than anti-Slavery. It was made of Anti-Catholics, Catholics, Rich people, poor people, and more who had only one issue combining them. A hundred smaller parties who just wanted to hurt slavery every bit they could by isolating and making it impossible to spread.
You could make an argument Lincoln was a canny politician (ha!) who wanted to use slavery to get elected but he was well-well-well anti-slavery before the War.
It was literally the position which got him elected. He mentioned slavery as his stance more than Trump did his wall.
Quote from: rgrove0172;913749This conversation is exactly why after 6 months of playing I tossed Deadlands and very carefully transported characters, NPCs, some settings, plots and all over to a historically accurate setting in the same period. So much easier to just deal with what was, be it good or evil, than what we are dealing with here.
If you want but there's a reason I've never played a historically accurate Western.
And the arguments are actually fairly useful and informative, IMHO.
Because they nicely do confront the propaganda my ancestors were so fond of.
Quote from: CRKrueger;913709Claims that there's no way the South could have survived without slavery, even with economical support from Britain and France are countered by the fact that the South with slavery could still not have survived without economical support from Britain and France...but making it with support from Britain and France is FAR more likely.
Whether or not they could have survived economically without slavery is beside the point. Without slavery, why are they even fighting the war? "Keeping slavery" was their victory condition. If they abolish slavery just to get international support, it would be a fairly transparent ploy. As soon as they get built up enough to maintain a stalemate with the Union without outside help, they'll reinstate slavery (unless it takes so long that they just keep fighting for the sake of tradition and they forget what the war was originally about).
Quote from: Xúc xắc;913778Whether or not they could have survived economically without slavery is beside the point. Without slavery, why are they even fighting the war? "Keeping slavery" was their victory condition. If they abolish slavery just to get international support, it would be a fairly transparent ploy. As soon as they get built up enough to maintain a stalemate with the Union without outside help, they'll reinstate slavery (unless it takes so long that they just keep fighting for the sake of tradition and they forget what the war was originally about).
That is the real rub, isn't it? If they're willing to give up slavery then why wouldn't they reintegrate into the Union?
Quote from: CTPhipps;913780That is the real rub, isn't it? If they're willing to give up slavery then why wouldn't they reintegrate into the Union?
Tariffs and self-determination mostly, but you'd have to be willing to take their word for it and not disqualify anything written at the time as being "hiding the REAL REASON" they seceded.
Why not have the best of all worlds?
While Confederacy that'd abolish slavery, even in face of defeat (the slave units were only a step towards abolishing slavery, although very powerful and practical) is unlikely, or unlikely to do it soon, it's possible with supernatural intervention.
BUT
Even in Confederacy, there were more hardline slaver states, and ones more interested in slaves + states rights'/southern chauvinism. So why not have Confederacy have it's own secession, from hardline slaver states? So some of the original secessionist states leave again - Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia*, Florida, South Carolina and in addition, the later joining Texas. Much behind in industry potential as Border States, they'd quickly fall...if it wasn't for unleashing armies of technomagically mind - controlled slaves.
*Georgia and South Carolina's statemen, have opposed strongest the earlier plans and suggestions to abolish slavery, and cost Cleburn any chance of promotion.
Quote from: Rincewind1;913790Why not have the best of all worlds?
Why not play a different western game?
People are willing to handwave the shit out of whichever setting they get their mitts on, but this particular one just triggers the shit out of people.
My current idea for an altered timeline:
* The South wins the Battle of Gettysburg due to their dead rising to continue to fight and Lincoln is assassinated, becoming Harrowed, only for Andrew Johnson to sign a treaty with the Confederacy.
* The devastated South is almost immediately overwhelmed with monsters, famine, pestilance (I like the "Red Death" as a name for it), and other signs of the Reckoners actions.
* The North and South both move out to try and secure new territories but the existence of ghost rock changes everything.
* Texas, Nevada, and California in this universe would have strong independence movements as neither the Union or Confederacy would be all that appealing for various reasons.
* Confederacy sympathies are low because of mismanagement, tyranny, and brutality from the Reckoner-influenced governments. This drives many settlers out West.
* Utah IS an independent country in this version as no one would want to join either side.
* The Underground Railroad still exists but is actively sabotaging Southern efforts with violence now as well as liberating slaves forcibly.
* Mexico would be interested in retaking Texas as well given its own ghost rock would be financing an industrial revolution.
* Slave catchers are a good go-to bad guy as they work in the Wild West as professional kidnappers.
* Southern agents are desperate to get the Wild West to prop up the dying Confederacy with their resources and new slaves. Hence, the Cold War is very close to hot.
It's still pretty rough but I think it makes a very interesting timeline which still preserves much of Deadlands.
Quote from: Xúc xắc;913778Whether or not they could have survived economically without slavery is beside the point. Without slavery, why are they even fighting the war? "Keeping slavery" was their victory condition. If they abolish slavery just to get international support, it would be a fairly transparent ploy. As soon as they get built up enough to maintain a stalemate with the Union without outside help, they'll reinstate slavery (unless it takes so long that they just keep fighting for the sake of tradition and they forget what the war was originally about).
Why did they keep fighting without slavery? Because they were being manipulated by supernatural forces, which needed the Civil War to continue as part of the plan to drench the entire world in paranoia and fear for a couple centuries and then cause a Final War that would literally unleash the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse upon the world.
You guys did read the setting? We are still talking about the game Deadlands not Alt-History outside that context?
Quote from: CRKrueger;913799Why did they keep fighting without slavery? Because they were being manipulated by supernatural forces, which needed the Civil War to continue as part of the plan to drench the entire world in paranoia and fear for a couple centuries and then cause a Final War that would literally unleash the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse upon the world.
You guys did read the setting? We are still talking about the game Deadlands not Alt-History outside that context?
On this we agree.
It's like why the Nazis won WW2 and conquered the world in "Wolfenstein: The New Order."
The power of THIS IS THE SETTING.
Why not just run Deadlands a few years after the Civil War?
AKA, the Hateful Eight.
Quote from: Spinachcat;913840Why not just run Deadlands a few years after the Civil War?
AKA, the Hateful Eight.
Well there's not ONE disagreement here. There's several.
* Straight Deadlands: No racism, no slavery, equal Old West and Cold War Feuding Powers.
* CSA Lives, CSA evil: People who want the CSA to win so can be shot in the face.
* CSA Fails. history as is
You know after a steak dinner, cooked rare and some really good Merlot I would have thought I'd be ready to be all mellow and lovin' my fellow humans. But Jesus Fucking Christ on a Stick.
Quote from: Tod13;913732Lincoln was not anti-slavery. He adopted that stance as an excuse for the invasion. He himself wrote he would have supported whichever side of the issue gave him the most support.
You know, before I moved to a border state and heard real, live know nothing morons spout their goofy Southern slavery apologia in the flesh, I thought that except for a few in-bred Deliverance-style yokels we had all moved past that bullshit. And Jebus what a bunch of whiny, cry-baby losers. We won. You lost. (Just like the Nazis.) Get the fuck over it you mouth breathing morons.
Quote from: AaronBrown99;913789Tariffs and self-determination mostly, but you'd have to be willing to take their word for it and not disqualify anything written at the time as being "hiding the REAL REASON" they seceded.
I'm fine with using the actual, written secession proclamations which make it crystal clear that the fundamental issue for the South was maintaining slavery at almost any cost. As they eventually learned, the cost was too high so they gave up their rebellion.
Quote from: CRKrueger;913709This is the game the tagline of which is "Spaghetti Western - With Meat." I don't really think they were going for the "whoever the fuck is the most pretentious and prestigious historical society's Alt-History award".
I'm pretty sure we've already had this conversation, but I feel there's a bit of strawmanning going on in the above post, so I'll try and keep it brief.
1. Every game set on "Earth" is set on an alternate Earth.
2. Any and all deviations from real Earth history should ideally serve one purpose and one purpose only — adapt it to better serve the game you want to run (whetherfor thematic reasons, or because you don't want to be arsed to do research).
3. A big part of the draw of running games on alt-Earths, for me, is the resonance with our own history. Therefore, I try to keep deviations to the minimum necessary.
Now, Deadlands has steampunk bullshit. The reason it has steampunk bullshit is probably because Shane likes steampunk bullshit, and framed it as the work of the Reckoners, probably for extra shits and giggles.
Deadlands also has Alien Space Bats (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats)-gauge alternate Civil War history. Now the Civil War is a touchy subject, as civil wars are wont to be (try and get elderly Spanish people to talk about theirs, I double dog dare you), but I think it's safe to assume that it serves the purpose (intentionally or otherwise) of saving Pinnacle a metric fuckton of fan butthurt. There's the Confederacy, there's the Union and they're all super cool. Or scumbags, but in equal. And your PC can use either gray or blue uniform and not be a pro-slavery dumbass.
Now that's one way to handle it and knowing Pinnacle's strong preference for Saturday morning cartoon aesthetics (see: most Savage Worlds settings) I kind of see where they're headed.
But I can't help comparing this to the way
O Desafio dos Bandeirantes — an original Brazilian RPG set in alt-Colonial Brazil circa 1650 — handled it. It didn't sweep it under the rug. There were ex-slave PCs, and slavers and escapee-slave-chaser bad guys, and a ton of unpleasant shit. They could have gone a similar route but they didn't. And it made for a grimier and grittier game, and we liked it.
Deadlands' take on the West results on a setting that is almost as divergent from the late-1800s American West as WFRP's Empire is from 1500s Germany. Which is okay, I guess. Historical calques are a tine-honored tradition in fantasy dating back at least as far as Howard's Hyborian Age essay. And the American West, too, has seen its share of steampunk and supernatural silliness in fiction.
What we're talking about is preferences. I think the Deadlands alt-hist, both the Confederacy and the ubiquitous steampunk mad science, make for a sillier setting I'd like and is therefore Full of Fail for my nefarioys GMing purposes. I tone it down because fuck it, I'd rather play it as a more subdued horror/dark fantasy Western. I want a Western where the graveyard scene from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly gets interrupted as the buried gold's owner rises from the grave, doomed to lure and slay those who follow him in the sin of greed. I want a Django who flips open the coffin to reveal an undead companion he's been cursed to lug around and feed with the souls of his unsuspecting victims, or a Vulcan that fires bullets that bounce off without wounding the hungry spirit an insane Comanche medicine man slew the last few people of his community to bind into flesh.
Keep your Hellstromme gewgaws and your Confederate emancipators to yourself; I'm fine with a slightly darker West.
Quote from: The Butcher;913866Now, Deadlands has steampunk bullshit. The reason it has steampunk bullshit is probably because Shane likes steampunk bullshit, and framed it as the work of the Reckoners, probably for extra shits and giggles.
While I'm all about grimdark awesomeness with a side order of bleak blackness, I'd like to point out something that steampunks are *puts on monocle and top hat* *crinkles nose in snooty fashion*
arrivalists. Steampunk is a relatively new phenomenon but science-fiction in the 19th century and specifically the Wild West is absolutely nothing new whatsoever. The Civil War actually began the beginnings of the "technology as a force for evil/war" which would begin in the Civil War and ultimately reach its climax with the death-dealing weapons of World War 1.
While Giant Robot Spiders are certainly silly, I'd like to mention that a major part of the Wild West to any enthusiast of the genre is that it's a LIMITED time period. It exists only as long as the frontier is untamed. Symbolically, civilization in the form of the RailroadTM (which was a big fucking important thing back then) eventually arrives and all Wildness from the West is drained out. It was in Red Dead Redemption as an underlying theme that the Old West was dying.
Ergo, Mad Science is a thing and perfectly appropriate to any WW campaign.
Quote from: CTPhipps;913870Ergo, Mad Science is a thing and perfectly appropriate to any WW campaign.
Fair enough. I just think Deadlands abuses the trope.
I give all my confederate dudes mustaches to twirl, so the players are extra sure that I'm the king of Hating Slavery.
At the end of every session, I do a PSA like the old 80's cartoons, about how slavery is bad.
I then give each player homework, a 1000 word essay on why slavery is wrong, and everyone in the south was evil, and everyone in the north was good.
HAVE I MENTIONED THAT SLAVERY IS BAD? I WOULDN'T WANT ANYONE TO THINK I THOUGHT SLAVERY WAS OK. I REALLY DON'T.
Actually I only played. My Deadlands GM was a wild west fan, both fictional and historical, and did a great job.
Quote from: Ratman_tf;913949I give all my confederate dudes mustaches to twirl, so the players are extra sure that I'm the king of Hating Slavery.
Ehhhhh.
I grew up with a daily dose of propaganda that slavery wasn't that bad of an institution, that the war wasn't about slavery, and that equality would have happened SOONER if the South had won rather than the North. Treating the institution of slavery as a pretty terrible thing for the 1/3rd of the cowboys (which would be, historically, black) isn't a bad thing.
I don't need to lecture my players that slavery is bad but I don't see something wrong with just treating the Confederate GOVERNMENT and its supporters as bad guys.
Albeit, I rather like the idea of inserting a handsome Confederate hero who is just confused by the player's hostility (which is historically accurate for many--plenty of people were incredibly racist but still against slavery).
[video=youtube;mxa45Ulf3FI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxa45Ulf3FI[/youtube]
6:23 is when he talks about slavery.
I think I'm going to have the Confederacy controlled by the Knights of the Golden Circle as a Illuminati-esque organization which worships the Reckoners. I'm also going to move the timeline to 1890 with Jefferson Davis dying last year and being replaced by Nathan Bedford Forest Junior (actually the original as a Harrowed) as their puppet. If I'm going to completely wild with the Evil Confederacy, I might as well go completely.
I actually think this might be beneficial as I can have a heroic Southern resistance against the Evil Powers Ruling the CountryTM. The thing is, I imagine they wouldn't actually be anti-slavery but Anti-Reckoner. The KOGC would be all into the occult and evil magic which no righteous Christian man would stand for (not to mention the fact they probably have plenty of association with "undesirables" from the West like Manitou-worshiping Native Americans).
That would lead to some interesting scenarios where the PCs have to deal with whether they can put aside their distaste for slavers long enough to work against their enemy from within--and perhaps the Southern Resistance types realize just how awful their reputation is abroad even in the United States and faced with LITERAL DEMONIC FORCES.
Quote from: The Butcher;913866I want a Western where the graveyard scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly gets interrupted as the buried gold's owner rises from the grave, doomed to lure and slay those who follow him in the sin of greed. I want a Django who flips open the coffin to reveal an undead companion he's been cursed to lug around and feed with the souls of his unsuspecting victims, or a Vulcan that fires bullets that bounce off without wounding the hungry spirit an insane Comanche medicine man slew the last few people of his community to bind into flesh.
These are all excellent ideas.
Quote from: Bren;913864You know, before I moved to a border state and heard real, live know nothing morons spout their goofy Southern slavery apologia in the flesh, I thought that except for a few in-bred Deliverance-style yokels we had all moved past that bullshit. And Jebus what a bunch of whiny, cry-baby losers. We won. You lost. (Just like the Nazis.) Get the fuck over it you mouth breathing morons.
Well, that was... like the opposite of mature. Nobody is apologizing for slavery. Are your beliefs and comprehension that sad and weak? (It really comes across like someone from TBP shouting about being triggered.) The rest of us have been discussing actual facts and things that might effect or make sense within the Deadlands storyline. Did you miss that much of the conversation centered around Deadlands' removal of slavery from the North and the South, and the question of how there could be a Civil War without it?
I really enjoy CTPhipps posts--the excerpts from the South's Declaration of Independence foremost among them here http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?31935-Deadlands-with-a-slave-owning-Confederacy&p=913716&viewfull=1#post913716 You very rarely if ever see someone with indepth knowledge and being willing to explain in that detail. (Even if I disagree on some details.) I suggested that didn't mean there were no other reasons for succession and that slavery had relatively little to do with the North's invasion, since Lincoln was obsessed with power and ruling the continent. That's something to build a non-slavery Civil War scenario on.
S'mon had useful things to say here, including the conversation with Warthur http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?31935-Deadlands-with-a-slave-owning-Confederacy&p=821933&viewfull=1#post821933 Warthur even made a decent long timeline of changes and received good feedback on it.
And our poster child for RPGSite had useful feedback: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?31935-Deadlands-with-a-slave-owning-Confederacy&p=822535&viewfull=1#post822535 Use real-life events--they were interesting enough.
At the top of page 2 AaronBrown99 and, once gain, CTPhipps provide useful feedback on Lincoln's actual personality/reasoning. We didn't even get to discussing Lincoln suspending posse comitatus or disappearing his political opponents in the middle of the night. Once again, really interesting alternative reasons for conflict. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0005.103/--lincoln-administration-and-arbitrary-arrests?rgn=main;view=fulltext
CRKrueger provides a useful reason for the CSA/Civil War to exist without slavery http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?31935-Deadlands-with-a-slave-owning-Confederacy&p=913799&viewfull=1#post913799 This was interesting to me, as it echoed existing cultural stories of the Illuminati trying to Immanentize the Eschaton via world wars.
Somewhere there was even a decent discussion of the Constitutionality of secession. While not as rigorous or in depth as Lysander Spooner http://praxeology.net/LS-NT-6.htm it nevertheless was useful and not nearly as dry as Spooner's work. (I don't think it mentioned that the treaty under which Texas joined the Union specifically allowed for leaving again.) Spooner, in case you aren't familiar with him was Northern Abolitionist who supported the right of the South to secession. He also ran a private postal service that was driving the US Postal Service out of business, resulting in Congress granting the USPS a legal monopoly.
Quote from: CTPhipps;913951I don't need to lecture my players that slavery is bad but I don't see something wrong with just treating the Confederate GOVERNMENT and its supporters as bad guys.
Most of my players are small "l" libertarian, so they'd probably be fighting both government's forces. :eek: Rock, meet Hard Place.
I do a lot of historical gaming and our group prefers a more factual, realistic approach but we have dabbled in some alternative stuff from time to time. My opinion is, its your game, do as you like! If you want to turn the Holy Catholic Church into a secret cabal of demon worshippers bent casting the world into hell... great! Just warn your Catholic or otherwise sensitive players that you might offend someone with the fiction. Same goes here.
Quote from: Tod13;913996Well, that was... like the opposite of mature.
Ignorant morons trigger me.
QuoteI suggested that didn't mean there were no other reasons for succession and that slavery had relatively little to do with the North's invasion, since Lincoln was obsessed with power and ruling the continent. That's something to build a non-slavery Civil War scenario on.
There were two primary reason for the Civil War. First and foremost, southerners voted to secede so as to ensure the preservation of slavery in the south. The reason is right in the documents. Disagreements about tariffs and trade and state vs. federal control had been going on since before we had a Revolutionary War. Nothing new to see there. What was new was the demographic change tipping the balance of power against slave-holding states. As the first US Census shows during America's early history population was about evenly divided between slave holding states and states where slavery was abolished. But over time this slowly changed and based on existing trends it would continue to change. By 1860 61% of the population lived in free states and 71% of the population lived in states that did not ever secede from the Union.
From the 1860 US Census
[ATTACH=CONFIG]303[/ATTACH]
Pro-slavery Southerners were afraid that support for slavery had eroded in the country as a whole and that with the election of a Republican President, they might soon lose sufficient political clout to maintain their “peculiar institution”; they were afraid that if they did not secede, slavery might be taken away from them. And rich southerners as a group really did not want that. Second, the north decided not to let the south secede. The myth that secession wasn’t about slavery sure does seem popular though.
Population Sources
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1790a.pdf
https://havechanged.blogspot.com/2013/04/civil-war-demographics.html
https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html
I came across this interesting bit of trivia supporting the importance of changing demographics towards fears of antislavery sentiment in the south. I also learned something I had not known. I did not know that prior to 1835 the state constitution of North Carolina gave voting rights to all freemen who were at least 21 years of age, who had been residents of their county, and who owned land or had paid taxes – and this included free blacks. That's right
blacks could vote in North Carolina well before the Civil War. But it was too good to last. In 1835, free blacks were disenfranchised by a decision of the North Carolina Constitutional Convention. At the same time, convention delegates relaxed religious and property qualifications for whites, thus expanding the franchise for poor white men while eliminating the franchise for free blacks.
Quote from: Tod13;913996Well, that was... like the opposite of mature. Nobody is apologizing for slavery. Are your beliefs and comprehension that sad and weak? (It really comes across like someone from TBP shouting about being triggered.) The rest of us have been discussing actual facts and things that might effect or make sense within the Deadlands storyline. Did you miss that much of the conversation centered around Deadlands' removal of slavery from the North and the South, and the question of how there could be a Civil War without it?
A brief digression...
This is probably not the forum for having an in-depth argument about the reasons and rationales for the Civil War beyond the issue of how it relates to a game about zombie cowboys as well as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse being shot in the face by Tesla guns. Deadlands is a game which has the peculiar quality of being a horror game in the same context as the Old World of Darkness with its katanas and trenchcoats. The problem is that this also includes Pooka, Malkavians, and Sons of Ether. It's further made troubled by the fact the period of the Civil War is a divisive one in a way which Americans are somewhat in denial about as each side acts like the consequences were papered over but which resound to this day.
The history of it matters in a way even as I APPRECIATE the attempt to actually move beyond it in the Deadlands canon as the fact black, Chinese, and Caucasian cowboys working together in their bizarre egalitarian setting is actually MORE historical than the traditional 20th century refuge of the ex-Confederate popularized by
The Outlaw Josie Wales. I've decided to set my current campaign,
Mad Mojave Murder in Virginia City, which while the setting of
Bonanza was actually a mass outpouring point for freed slaves and one full of African Americans seeking a new life from the South's prejudices.
Random Historical NonsenseGetting back to the constitutionality of secession, suspension of habius corpus, and more, there's a lot of ways to get into the issue of making the "Union Good" and "South Bad" business troublesome. Particularly since it is the Union government which IMMEDIATELY THERAFTER repurposed the violence-trained American and Confederate soldiery to the extermination of the American Indian in what was less the work of settlers than the deliberate organized genocide of the US government.
Lincoln himself is an interesting case as "Honest Abe" was actually a liar and two-faced in his dealings. The thing is, an analysis of his historical actions reveal he was always against slavery and well known to placate those ambivalent about the subject while pursuing it. Yes, he was a man who favored gradual emancipation but research also states that the famed "If I could reunite the North while freeing no slaves" was not the secret insight into his character but political jerrymandering. Lincoln and his inner circle intended to destroy slavery but part of this was also because the South had effectively usurped the American political process and destroying it was necessary to end the dealock over the American political process.
But Lincoln was merely the personification of a hundred years of growing anger and dissatisfaction against Southern appeasement.
Since the "one slave state, one free state" system was instituted, it had literally made the United States a near-one issue country due to admissions being halted due to one side needing the other while oftentimes ignoring the sympathies of the territories admitted. Basically, Kansas really-really disliked the importation of pro-slavery Southerners in the years leading up to John Brown. Democracy on a very real level was subverted as the balance of power was the primary purpose in Washington for many was maintaining the status quo.
Unless you were a Southerner, in which case destroying the status quo was the issue. On a personal level, my opinion of the subject which I've heard since I was old enough to understand the concept of why my now-deceased but 100+ year old while alive great-great aunt (whose living relations fought in the Civil War) very much attempted to illustrate why it wasn't about slavery.
The problem is that I tend to not actually have much of a high opinion on the subject because the Confederacy had a general history of, "It's only a crime when they do it." While the actual separate government only existed in for a short time from secession to dissolution, the Southern government existed "defacto" years before and was constantly attempting to get more slave-owning voting states than Union ones so it could legalize slavery throughout the North. The issues of the Dredd Scott case were a deliberate political ploy to make slavery universal and normalized--which failed spectacularly.
Plus, there's the caning of Charles Sumner which says everything you need to know about how the Southerners viewed the democratic process. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner)
Really, the Pre-civil war period is probably the most interesting part of the slavery issue as you often had die-hard racists nevertheless taking a stand against slavery. The anti-slavery lobby wasn't afraid of taking advantage of that racism either. "Fancy Girl" parties were one of the more lurid examples where increasingly light skinned women were trotted out to explain the horrible sexual depredations they suffered under the laws which identified them as blacks until completely white-looking women arrived and often caused riots when they were revealed.
History, truly, is stranger than fiction and if you want a purely serious Deadlands game, that's stuff you can borrow from because the hate and build-up against the Confederacy is still there in that setting.
Or you can focus on the airship pirates.
[video=youtube;TZrh6eooyrg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZrh6eooyrg[/youtube]
Quote from: CTPhipps;914157A brief digression...
An interesting digression + airship pirates. Thanks!
QuoteGetting back to the constitutionality of secession, suspension of habius corpus, and more, there's a lot of ways to get into the issue of making the "Union Good" and "South Bad" business troublesome.
The South being responsible for a lot of Bad, doesn't make everything the Union did good. Nor do the bad things the Union did make the South Good...or even good.
In just the same way that the fact that Allied bombing in WWII was responsible for over a million civilian deaths does not somehow make Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan good.
Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;913995These are all excellent ideas.
Thank you, kind sir.
Quote from: Bren;914162In just the same way that the fact that Allied bombing in WWII was responsible for over a million civilian deaths does not somehow make Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan good.
Pretty much my attitude.
I wouldn't remotely be ambivalent about the Union if not for the fact the same people who won the Civil War were the ones who sponsored the subsequent campaign of expansionism at any costs against the West's Natives.
Black and Gray Morality at its finest.
Thank you for these up dates on the cival war. It's a hole in my history.
Quote from: CRKrueger;913799Why did they keep fighting without slavery? Because they were being manipulated by supernatural forces, which needed the Civil War to continue as part of the plan to drench the entire world in paranoia and fear for a couple centuries and then cause a Final War that would literally unleash the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse upon the world.
You guys did read the setting? We are still talking about the game Deadlands not Alt-History outside that context?
That premise was pretty fucking dumb, even as I was reading it back in the day. The world at that time had plenty of Imperial cold and hot war paranoia throughout the globe, even as USA and Brazil were like the last major holdouts on slavery. You'd think King Leopold's Rape of the Belgian Congo would be more than enough to sustain replacement for the Confederacy, let alone the Opium Wars of China or god knows what else anyone wants to add to this list.
It was a lame USA-centric supernatural illuminati eschatology then, it remains still a lame USA-centric supernatural illuminati eschatology now.
And I do love me some Deadlands, even to this day.
But just like oWoD and FR, I know when to kick off the metaplot/metapremise from the wagon and tell them to walk on. The broad brushstrokes of Deadlands is delicious good fun. The details should linger on more localized horror while avoiding a Grand Unifying Theory of Big Bad Evil Guys.
There's a reason I love IN SJG because the Demon Princes are as contrarian and undermining to everyone else and each other as can be, while the ingenius evils invented by man truck ever onward without them. Grand Unifying Theories of Big Bad Evil Guys are trite, and even stupid, without factoring the immense capacity for mankind to "fucking do it anyway."
Quote from: Opaopajr;914188That premise was pretty fucking dumb, even as I was reading it back in the day. The world at that time had plenty of Imperial cold and hot war paranoia throughout the globe, even as USA and Brazil were like the last major holdouts on slavery. You'd think King Leopold's Rape of the Belgian Congo would be more than enough to sustain replacement for the Confederacy, let alone the Opium Wars of China or god knows what else anyone wants to add to this list.
It was a lame USA-centric supernatural illuminati eschatology then, it remains still a lame USA-centric supernatural illuminati eschatology now.
And I do love me some Deadlands, even to this day.
But just like oWoD and FR, I know when to kick off the metaplot/metapremise from the wagon and tell them to walk on. The broad brushstrokes of Deadlands is delicious good fun. The details should linger on more localized horror while avoiding a Grand Unifying Theory of Big Bad Evil Guys.
There's a reason I love IN SJG because the Demon Princes are as contrarian and undermining to everyone else and each other as can be, while the ingenius evils invented by man truck ever onward without them. Grand Unifying Theories of Big Bad Evil Guys are trite, and even stupid, without factoring the immense capacity for mankind to "fucking do it anyway."
I for one disagree strongly. The Confederacy has quite a bit over the horrific evil crimes of Imperialism going on at that time because of the same thing the Nazis had: They have recognizable comic book uniforms, atttitudes, and aethsetics. If you want a SERIOUS villain, then certainly, go make up a historical set of evil doers from any number of the crimes committed by Europe or America during that period. However, if you want a Southern gentleman with a literal mustache which can be twirled and his army of gray-uniformed ghost-rock mutated orcs then DAMN you have the Confederacy. You know what's a great idea?
MOON SLAVERS!
After being defeated, Robert E. Lee's Colonel takes steampunk powered rockets to the Moon (which has an atmosphere due to altered laws of physics and leaks from an alternate Earth) which they promptly colonize. Rockets are routinely sent down on raiding missions to kidnap people for New Atlanta as they prepare their plan to DESTROY THE WORLD.
There was no end to comicbook quality military uniforms in the 1800s, let alone the evils that were perpetuated in their guise. Your appeal to villain aesthetics still rings hollow and global historically naïve to me.
Quote from: Opaopajr;914197There was no end to comicbook quality military uniforms in the 1800s, let alone the evils that were perpetuated in their guise. Your appeal to villain aesthetics still rings hollow and global historically naïve to me.
Then I shall forward the argument that a American based game in the American West is probably best forwarded by American based evils.
Albeit, I totally think Mexico would make an awesome Evil Empire.
(http://www.internationalmovie.com/images/wardrobe/military/Mexican/Mexican-3.jpg)
As for why the Confederacy makes a good villain globally?
Well, bluntly, I just like that they were the North Korea of their time.
As bad as the British got in their treatment of their possessions--even they said, "Fuck the Confederacy."
Quote from: CTPhipps;914198Then I shall forward the argument that a American based game in the American West is probably best forwarded by American based evils.
I can wholly support that. In fact, I wholly support running a Deadlands game in situ pretty much anywhere in the Civil War timeline. The chaos of that mini-apocalypse and discovery of ghost rock would make for a killer (pardon the pun) campaign.
That said, I could just as easily see an awesome conversion based on Mexico's independence and subsequent multiple civil wars as the Deadlands basis in some "Aztec," Apache, or Comanche focused sundering. Gets closer to around the rise of Napoleon and, if you dump the ghost rock, avoids most of the industrial revolution Wild Wild West gonzo tech. I kinda like the ghost rock tech, though, as it really captures the mid-late 19 Century tech revolutionary times of trains, factories, dynamite...
Quote from: Opaopajr;914253I can wholly support that. In fact, I wholly support running a Deadlands game in situ pretty much anywhere in the Civil War timeline. The chaos of that mini-apocalypse and discovery of ghost rock would make for a killer (pardon the pun) campaign.
That said, I could just as easily see an awesome conversion based on Mexico's independence and subsequent multiple civil wars as the Deadlands basis in some "Aztec," Apache, or Comanche focused sundering.
One thing I really enjoyed was Red Dead Redemption's take on the Mexican revolutions and having them happen as something which is cyclical at the time. You could easily do something with Marshalls as they find themselves trying to do some monster-hunting but caught between the corrupt government and ruthless rebels.
QuoteGets closer to around the rise of Napoleon and, if you dump the ghost rock, avoids most of the industrial revolution Wild Wild West gonzo tech. I kinda like the ghost rock tech, though, as it really captures the mid-late 19 Century tech revolutionary times of trains, factories, dynamite...
Do people dislike the gonzo tech?
The premise may be fucking dumb, too bad that wasn't the question or point being answered.
The question or point was that there WAS a premise, and all the questions that are some variation of "Why doesn't Deadlands resemble all these other Alt-History Confederacies, the ones without Ghost Rock, Walking Dead, or the Immortal Avatars of the 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse running around?" are kind of ignoring the text where things are actually explained.
Belgium's Rape of the Congo setting up a world stage for Nuclear Armageddon 200 years later...You're supposed to put the cap back on the Nail Polish after using it, not tape it under your nose. :D
Quote from: CRKrueger;914405The premise may be fucking dumb, too bad that wasn't the question or point being answered.
The question or point was that there WAS a premise...
OK, OK. There was a premise. It was an incredibly fucking dumb premise. But you are right there was a premise. In the same sense that someone with really bad taste still has taste.
Quote from: CRKrueger;914405The premise may be fucking dumb, too bad that wasn't the question or point being answered.
The question or point was that there WAS a premise, and all the questions that are some variation of "Why doesn't Deadlands resemble all these other Alt-History Confederacies, the ones without Ghost Rock, Walking Dead, or the Immortal Avatars of the 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse running around?" are kind of ignoring the text where things are actually explained.
Belgium's Rape of the Congo setting up a world stage for Nuclear Armageddon 200 years later...You're supposed to put the cap back on the Nail Polish after using it, not tape it under your nose. :D
Weirdly, i feel the need to point out the events DIDN'T set up those events. The Reckoners LOST that war and then rewound time to win by sending back the [strike]Terminator[/strike] Old Stone....then someone ELSE rewound time (Pinnacle Entertainment) and Old Stone was killed.
So it's all alternate timelines now.
But there's never been a master plan by the Reckoners to destroy the world.
Quote from: Bren;914407OK, OK. There was a premise. It was an incredibly fucking dumb premise. But you are right there was a premise. In the same sense that someone with really bad taste still has taste.
Dumb premises aside, I actually do think there's a benefit to it which is just running into the Unfortunate ImplicationsTM by accident. Which is to say that a LOT of gamers would hesitate to play blacks, Chinese, or more in games in the historical west simply for the case of not wanting to deal with a Storyteller's idea of what is period appropriate racism. When, ironically, the Wild West was about as multicultural an environment as you're likely to humanly get (while also being extraordinarily racist by our standards). As many as a third of what we think of cowboys were black after all.
So I applaud the idea.
It's just an idea which screws up when you have the Confederacy existing.
Quote from: CTPhipps;914391Do people dislike the gonzo tech?
I do.
No wonder our Deadlands DM put his campaign in Arizona.
These discussions are exactly why I don't do Alt-History RPGs.
Quote from: Spinachcat;914422No wonder our Deadlands DM put his campaign in Arizona.
These discussions are exactly why I don't do Alt-History RPGs.
I admit, the spirited discussion of this is making me think of an interesting plot hook.
THE TERRITORY INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT
The PCs are confronted with people from California, Nevada, Utah, and Texas who want to make their own third nation. The Western States of America.
:)
Quote from: Spinachcat;914422These discussions are exactly why I don't do Alt-History RPGs.
If I find your alt-history premise compelling or interesting for some reason I'm in. If I find your premise actively annoying to me, then I'm out so I won't trouble your table and its alt-history premise. If I find your premise uncompelling/uninteresting, but not actively annoying then I'm in if the balance of other factors* make playing sound fun and I'm out if they don't. So again, I'm unlikely to trouble your table.
* Stuff like...What's the system? Do I like or tolerate your GM style? Who else is in the group and how much do I enjoy their company? Where and when do we play? Do I have anything better to do with that time commitment?
Quote from: CTPhipps;914424I admit, the spirited discussion of this is making me think of an interesting plot hook.
THE TERRITORY INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT
The PCs are confronted with people from California, Nevada, Utah, and Texas who want to make their own third nation. The Western States of America.
:)
Wouldn't they have most of the North American ghost rock? If so, aiding or hindering their effort could be interesting. And someplace other than Texas or the Deep South as the breakaway region has the virtue of not having been overused.
Quote from: CTPhipps;914411Weirdly, i feel the need to point out the events DIDN'T set up those events. The Reckoners LOST that war and then rewound time to win by sending back the [strike]Terminator[/strike] Old Stone....then someone ELSE rewound time (Pinnacle Entertainment) and Old Stone was killed.
So it's all alternate timelines now.
But there's never been a master plan by the Reckoners to destroy the world.
You know Deadlands: Hell on Earth, the post-apocalyptic setting, is the future of the Deadlands world, right? Or one of the futures? You don't get post-apocalypse without apocalypse. The reason they call them the Reckoners, is that they brought the Reckoning, ie. an apocalypse of both Global WMD Exchange and Biblical proportion.
Did they extinguish all life on earth and turn Earth into an asteroid field? No, but nowhere did anyone say that was their intent.
Quote from: Spinachcat;914422No wonder our Deadlands DM put his campaign in Arizona.
These discussions are exactly why I don't do Alt-History RPGs.
I don't mind a good alt-history romp, but usually that takes the form of...
"What if instead of X, we had Y?"
Instead with Deadlands it's always a historical circlejerk with the subtext of white guilt completely discarding the entire supernatural basis of the cosmology and all the answers already given for why things are. Not liking the answers is subjective. The fact that the answers were given is not.
Cue alignments, gods, rain shadows, all the stupid hard and social science crap that people always throw in completely ignoring the COSMOLOGY of that world, which is never exactly our own.
Also if you were looking for a historical treatise you might not want to have picked up the game the bills itself as Spaghetti Western - With Meat. If you did, not sure that's Pinnacle's fault.
Quote from: CRKrueger;914525I don't mind a good alt-history romp, but usually that takes the form of...
"What if instead of X, we had Y?"
Instead with Deadlands it's always a historical circlejerk with the subtext of white guilt completely discarding the entire supernatural basis of the cosmology and all the answers already given for why things are. Not liking the answers is subjective. The fact that the answers were given is not.
Cue alignments, gods, rain shadows, all the stupid hard and social science crap that people always throw in completely ignoring the COSMOLOGY of that world, which is never exactly our own.
Also if you were looking for a historical treatise you might not want to have picked up the game the bills itself as Spaghetti Western - With Meat. If you did, not sure that's Pinnacle's fault.
The problem with this argument is the cosmology is thrown into a real-world situation. You can argue Napoleon conquers the world with dragons just fine but if you're arguing dragons make Napoleon a pacifist then you're going to have people argue the point because Napoleon was a shifty warmongering but terribly competent son of a bitch. The supernatural doesn't trump the historical OR VICE VERSA.
All of them are just setting elements in the end.
Some make sense, some don't.
Quote from: CTPhipps;914532You can argue Napoleon conquers the world with dragons just fine but if you're arguing dragons make Napoleon a pacifist then you're going to have people argue the point because Napoleon was a shifty warmongering but terribly competent son of a bitch. The supernatural doesn't trump the historical OR VICE VERSA.
All of them are just setting elements in the end.
Some make sense, some don't.
Yes, the supernatural
can completely trump the historical, that's what supernatural means by obvious definition. Napoleon will become a pacifist if he is charmed into becoming one, or has been possessed by a supernatural being that now puppets him into acting like one for its own purposes - like Jefferson Davis is in Deadlands, for example.
If you don't like a Napoleon pacifist, that's your own subjective opinion.
If the setting includes methods of Mind Control and Possession, then Napoleon being so compromised is objectively plausible. The fact that you find that an uninteresting, uninspired or weak way to change his path through history, or want to dismiss it because of your own personal ideas about the motivations of the author - that's your own subjective opinion.
My big issue with the cosmology of manitous feeding on human suffering is how much of a cop out it ends up being. They end slavery to bide their time for a bigger apocalypse, so the major manitous are working in concert? OK, then why the fuck couldn't they get their act together elsewhere, especially in the West? Why allow a sporadic "booga boooga!" to harvest a bit of fear when the goal is massive industrialization for an apocalypse later?
You can't be powerful coordinating puppetmasters while nincompoop manitous are tipping your hand left and right. Ohhh, but they are scaring humanity into embracing technology to fight back... Bullshit, man would embrace new technology anyway because of laziness and greed. Having known supernatural forces openly arrayed against mankind risks cooperation and coordination. Staying quiet and still, letting mankind do the work, does more damage. It takes too many conspiratorial layers, between mankind and manitous, to bottle back the genie in order to forward the industrial revolution plan for atomic apocalypse.
Again, I find the grand unifying theory of big bad evil guys just useless. It read too much like a publisher cop out and whitewash. But if we are to answer "Why South Loses Slavery Yet Still Survives?" just fall back on the Deadland's equivalent of 'a wizard did it': "Unobtanium is Super Useful and the Council of Manitou Made it So." One line, ignore alt history attempts at natural world coherency completely, and run with the madness.
Does that satisfy me? No. But I don't play Deadlands for the greater world premise or metaplot leading to Hell on Earth.
Quote from: Opaopajr;914662My big issue with the cosmology of manitous feeding on human suffering is how much of a cop out it ends up being. They end slavery to bide their time for a bigger apocalypse, so the major manitous are working in concert? OK, then why the fuck couldn't they get their act together elsewhere, especially in the West? Why allow a sporadic "booga boooga!" to harvest a bit of fear when the goal is massive industrialization for an apocalypse later?
You can't be powerful coordinating puppetmasters while nincompoop manitous are tipping your hand left and right. Ohhh, but they are scaring humanity into embracing technology to fight back... Bullshit, man would embrace new technology anyway because of laziness and greed. Having known supernatural forces openly arrayed against mankind risks cooperation and coordination. Staying quiet and still, letting mankind do the work, does more damage. It takes too many conspiratorial layers, between mankind and manitous, to bottle back the genie in order to forward the industrial revolution plan for atomic apocalypse.
Again, I find the grand unifying theory of big bad evil guys just useless. It read too much like a publisher cop out and whitewash. But if we are to answer "Why South Loses Slavery Yet Still Survives?" just fall back on the Deadland's equivalent of 'a wizard did it': "Unobtanium is Super Useful and the Council of Manitou Made it So." One line, ignore alt history attempts at natural world coherency completely, and run with the madness.
Does that satisfy me? No. But I don't play Deadlands for the greater world premise or metaplot leading to Hell on Earth.
Actually, this is part of the reason I revived this thread. Is there a downside to having the Confederacy win the war (storytelling wise)? You have the Reckoners now have secret puppet-mastery of the Evil EmpireTM and now they've got it churning out evil which they can feed on while preparing to move to the Wild West to increase the size of their buffet considerably. I think it makes them look more terrifying and skilled personally.
Quote from: The Butcher;913866Deadlands' take on the West results on a setting that is almost as divergent from the late-1800s American West as WFRP's Empire is from 1500s Germany. Which is okay, I guess. Historical calques are a tine-honored tradition in fantasy dating back at least as far as Howard's Hyborian Age essay. And the American West, too, has seen its share of steampunk and supernatural silliness in fiction.
What we're talking about is preferences. I think the Deadlands alt-hist, both the Confederacy and the ubiquitous steampunk mad science, make for a sillier setting I'd like and is therefore Full of Fail for my nefarioys GMing purposes. I tone it down because fuck it, I'd rather play it as a more subdued horror/dark fantasy Western. I want a Western where the graveyard scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly gets interrupted as the buried gold's owner rises from the grave, doomed to lure and slay those who follow him in the sin of greed. I want a Django who flips open the coffin to reveal an undead companion he's been cursed to lug around and feed with the souls of his unsuspecting victims, or a Vulcan that fires bullets that bounce off without wounding the hungry spirit an insane Comanche medicine man slew the last few people of his community to bind into flesh.
Keep your Hellstromme gewgaws and your Confederate emancipators to yourself; I'm fine with a slightly darker West.
Hells, this bit made me wish to play Deadlands more than any actual published material (I too have been tired of GONZO STEAMPUNK FOR SCIENCEEEEEE!...). Maybe it's time for some house - rules and to dust off the old Aces & Eights...
Quote from: Opaopajr;914662My big issue with the cosmology of manitous feeding on human suffering is how much of a cop out it ends up being. They end slavery to bide their time for a bigger apocalypse, so the major manitous are working in concert? OK, then why the fuck couldn't they get their act together elsewhere, especially in the West? Why allow a sporadic "booga boooga!" to harvest a bit of fear when the goal is massive industrialization for an apocalypse later?
You can't be powerful coordinating puppetmasters while nincompoop manitous are tipping your hand left and right. Ohhh, but they are scaring humanity into embracing technology to fight back... Bullshit, man would embrace new technology anyway because of laziness and greed. Having known supernatural forces openly arrayed against mankind risks cooperation and coordination. Staying quiet and still, letting mankind do the work, does more damage. It takes too many conspiratorial layers, between mankind and manitous, to bottle back the genie in order to forward the industrial revolution plan for atomic apocalypse.
Again, I find the grand unifying theory of big bad evil guys just useless. It read too much like a publisher cop out and whitewash. But if we are to answer "Why South Loses Slavery Yet Still Survives?" just fall back on the Deadland's equivalent of 'a wizard did it': "Unobtanium is Super Useful and the Council of Manitou Made it So." One line, ignore alt history attempts at natural world coherency completely, and run with the madness.
Does that satisfy me? No. But I don't play Deadlands for the greater world premise or metaplot leading to Hell on Earth.
Interestingly enough - wouldn't it make more sense for the Confederacy in Deadlands' world to actually win the Civil War (with support of Manitous), so they could create their Empire for Slavery, stretching from Cuba to Brazil? That ought to raise more suffering than a period of detente following abolition of slaves.
QuoteInterestingly enough - wouldn't it make more sense for the Confederacy in Deadlands' world to actually win the Civil War (with support of Manitous), so they could create their Empire for Slavery, stretching from Cuba to Brazil? That ought to raise more suffering than a period of detente following abolition of slaves.
I brought this up in the Pinnacle Forum and the creator had this to say.
http://www.pegforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=233274#p233274
Slavery played second fiddle to the war as far as the Reckoners were concerned. They did everything they could to keep the war going. That is foreshadowed by the very first supernatural event, the dead rising at Gettysburg and changing the course of that battle.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that was just a "supernatural twist" to an historical event. It was purposefully done. The old Marshall's book even discussed how generals kept dealing with "weird events" that kept the war going.
Unfortunately for the Reckoners, the South had no viable chance to keep fighting even with their aid without outside support (which also spread the war's influence farther). So slavery had to go. In fact, the South would need a more direct hand in order to keep the war going, so the Reckoners installed their own president (replacing Jefferson Davis with a doppleganger, covered in Dead Presidents).
Ultimately, there was a "logical" reason (subjective of course) for changes that do free up game play. The Reckoner's needed the war, and if that greater evil led to some lesser goods, well, sometimes "the ends justify the means" even for the bad guys.
Quote from: CTPhipps;914896I brought this up in the Pinnacle Forum and the creator had this to say.
http://www.pegforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=233274#p233274
Slavery played second fiddle to the war as far as the Reckoners were concerned. They did everything they could to keep the war going. That is foreshadowed by the very first supernatural event, the dead rising at Gettysburg and changing the course of that battle.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that was just a "supernatural twist" to an historical event. It was purposefully done. The old Marshall's book even discussed how generals kept dealing with "weird events" that kept the war going.
Unfortunately for the Reckoners, the South had no viable chance to keep fighting even with their aid without outside support (which also spread the war's influence farther). So slavery had to go. In fact, the South would need a more direct hand in order to keep the war going, so the Reckoners installed their own president (replacing Jefferson Davis with a doppleganger, covered in Dead Presidents).
Ultimately, there was a "logical" reason (subjective of course) for changes that do free up game play. The Reckoner's needed the war, and if that greater evil led to some lesser goods, well, sometimes "the ends justify the means" even for the bad guys.
Interestingly enough, I'd say they got their battles wrong. Antietam'd be a much better fit than Gettysburg - after Antietam, without Reckoners gaining control of both British and French governments, the chance for foreign intervention was practically non - existent, even if South'd abolish slavery, since it'd be seen through the lenses of Emancipation Proclamation any way, as well as interest on the other side of the Pacific generally waned as alternative sources of cotton (from India, Turkey and North Africa) provided to be, while expansive, a good alternative to counting on Southern blockade runners and their King Cotton blackmail.
By the way - did Vicksburg also fall around the same time range as Gettysburg in Deadlands? I can't recall, and that was actually more important than Gettysburg itself (cutting Confederacy in two via Mississipi).
Quote from: Rincewind1;914900Interestingly enough, I'd say they got their battles wrong. Antietam'd be a much better fit than Gettysburg - after Antietam, without Reckoners gaining control of both British and French governments, the chance for foreign intervention was practically non - existent, even if South'd abolish slavery, since it'd be seen through the lenses of Emancipation Proclamation any way.
By the way - did Vicksburg also fall around the same time range as Gettysburg in Deadlands? I can't recall, and that was actually more important than Gettysburg itself (cutting Confederacy in two via Mississipi).
I think the general canonical pace of
Deadlands is that the North loses big as Gettysburg and then they suffer numerous slogging battes until the conflict becomes impossible to win. Basically, they turned it from the Civil War into Vietnam.
Quote from: CTPhipps;914903I think the general canonical pace of Deadlands is that the North loses big as Gettysburg and then they suffer numerous slogging battes until the conflict becomes impossible to win. Basically, they turned it from the Civil War into Vietnam.
Oh, I know. But during Antietam generally North's situation was much worse than during Gettysburg (and as I mentioned, but don't take just my word for it but also McPherson's and Masur's, the fall of Vicksburg was of equal if not larger consequence strategically than Gettysburg), and a possibility of suing for peace was very likely in a scenario where McClellan didn't even manage to achieve a draw.
Of course, Gettysburg is the battle most heavily set in American culture and psyche, so I am not surprised. Just a wasted chance for the plot to be less Deus Ex Machina - ey, as a Confederate Victory during Antietam, with Reckoners' help (or even alternative, Deadland's Gettysburg complete slaughter of both sides during Antietam), would much more easily end the war and allow for foreign intervention, alongside perhaps slavery's abolition because of Evil Spirits managing to mind - control most of the important plantation owners and Confederate senators.
And as for why there's so much controversy discussing Deadland's decision - one look at CTPhipps' link to the main forums, and you can see how the usual Southern apologists come out of the woodworks immediately. Yes, it was about States' Rights. Namely, about state's right to treat people as property, and ensuring that in process of colonizing the West, enough free states'd not be created to destroy Southern Democrats domination of the Senate.
Quote from: Rincewind1;914917And as for why there's so much controversy discussing Deadland's decision - one look at CTPhipps' link to the main forums, and you can see how the usual Southern apologists come out of the woodworks immediately. Yes, it was about States' Rights. Namely, about state's right to treat people as property, and ensuring that in process of colonizing the West, enough free states'd not be created to destroy Southern Democrats domination of the Senate.
100 years of propaganda is a hard time to shake off. But yes, growing up in this environment, it makes me know that "Confederates aren't so bad" is a pretty insidious slippery slope.
Even if it's done to, ironically, make it so black and Chinese and women cowboys are common in gaming.
Despite, you know, being common in real life.
Quote from: CTPhipps;914918100 years of propaganda is a hard time to shake off. But yes, growing up in this environment, it makes me know that "Confederates aren't so bad" is a pretty insidious slippery slope.
Even if it's done to, ironically, make it so black and Chinese and women cowboys are common in gaming.
Despite, you know, being common in real life.
You have to understand that most people don't know that. Hell, if they know anything about the Old West at all, it's from Clint Eastwood movies, if that.
The entire idea, as far as I can tell, is to make it easy for average non history knowing schmuck to jump in without a history lesson.
Quote from: Warboss Squee;914933You have to understand that most people don't know that. Hell, if they know anything about the Old West at all, it's from Clint Eastwood movies, if that.
The entire idea, as far as I can tell, is to make it easy for average non history knowing schmuck to jump in without a history lesson.
You'd be surprised how those Know-Nothings (HAH, now that's a historical joke) will yet suddenly unleash a tempest in a teapot over the minutiae of gun information...Nerds, eh. Can't beat them, had to join them.
even though you won't see this...slavery was a thing in one point in the Deadlands setting but was dropped.
Quote from: Warboss Squee;914933You have to understand that most people don't know that. Hell, if they know anything about the Old West at all, it's from Clint Eastwood movies, if that.
The entire idea, as far as I can tell, is to make it easy for average non history knowing schmuck to jump in without a history lesson.
The developers have been quite candid about the fact they wanted to make their Western game something which wouldn't attract the worst sort of gamer. Our hobby is 99% made of wonderful people but that 1% who justify racism, sexism, and God knows whatever else weirdness they want to do at their table by "playing in character" or "being historical" or "true to the setting" is my own personal bugbear. I still need to share the story about the player I kicked out for being racist against Asians (with Asian players) in my local WOD chapter because Kindred of the East said he could according to him.
Effectively, they wanted to do their wacky wacky Wild West horror game without scaring off gamers who wouldn't normally touch it. Unfortunately, that ended up being the case of white-washing the Confederacy versus adjusting their world to simply being more progressive due to the existence of demons, undead, and so on.
Quote from: Rincewind1;914938You'd be surprised how those Know-Nothings (HAH, now that's a historical joke) will yet suddenly unleash a tempest in a teapot over the minutiae of gun information...Nerds, eh. Can't beat them, had to join them.
An irony being the Know-Nothings were a major part of the Republican Party as while they hated Catholics, they also generally voted against slavery.
And yes, the "states rights" meme never dies.
Quote from: Allensh;914948even though you won't see this...slavery was a thing in one point in the Deadlands setting but was dropped.
In a bit of randomness, there was actually a Confederate (major) general who proposed emancipation in order to win the war. He's generally cited as "proof" of the whole business of it being about state's rights versus slavery. What people generally forget is Patrick Cleburne was laughed off the stage (actually, it was historically polite silence--which was worse) and generally seemed to not quite get what the whole point of the war was since he was an irish immigrant.
Robert E. Lee, himself, also actually did argue for it at the end out of a matter of pure desperation after the Emancipation Proclamation but I've had the man lionized for his treason so long that I don't exactly afford his argument all that much joy either. Also, because Lee was ALSO shut down since no one really wanted to be independent without slavery. The general problem with Deadlands is not their argument isn't completely unreasonable, though it is, but the fact is it's sources and logic are basically the same ones used by my jerkasses of ancestors.
In any case, I want to thank everyone for your insight into all of this. The issue of slavery and the Confederacy were things which were sticking point with my racially diverse and (ironically) primarily Deep Southern gaming group. All of us had grown up around the subject and it wasn't something we were comfortable with the canonical version of.
Honestly, I don't think we would have probably done Deadlands if not for the fact my recent book just got published which was a post-apocalypse H.P. Lovecraft Weird Western (https://www.amazon.com/Cthulhu-Armageddon-C-T-Phipps-ebook/dp/B01KUOM7SI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472020559&sr=8-1&keywords=Cthulhu+Armageddon#nav-subnav). All of them were in the mood for it to celebrate the book's release. When I wrote that, I made sure to make the protagonist Black simply because I have the same love/hate relationship with Howard Phillips as I do Wild West handling of race.
Still, I'm glad we did because we're presently having a ball.
It says something as well that of the PCs that one is black, one is a Chinese man, another a Chinese woman, and the last a Irishwoman who hates the South.
:)
I personally give no shits about the historic facts of the (un)civil war as it relates to Deadlands, because Deadlands in Alternate History.
As in things didn't actually happen this way, but we are saying it did to make the setting we want.
If you don't like it/can't handle it/are triggered, go play something else.
Quote from: Warboss Squee;915131I personally give no shits about the historic facts of the (un)civil war as it relates to Deadlands, because Deadlands in Alternate History.
As in things didn't actually happen this way, but we are saying it did to make the setting we want.
If you don't like it/can't handle it/are triggered, go play something else.
People don't mind if you complain up and down about Kender, Malkavians, Ravnos, or nerfing classes but if you say it isn't fun to have the Confederates not be mustache twirling slavers you shoot in the face and you're suddenly a pariah.
Tsk-tsk.
Quote from: Warboss Squee;915131I personally give no shits about the historic facts of the (un)civil war as it relates to Deadlands, because Deadlands in Alternate History.
As in things didn't actually happen this way, but we are saying it did to make the setting we want.
If you don't like it/can't handle it/are triggered, go play something else.
Verisimilitude.
Quote from: Rincewind1;915158Verisimilitude.
It's a game setting element. One I don't like.
No more.
No less.
Quote from: CTPhipps;915156People don't mind if you complain up and down about Kender, Malkavians, Ravnos, or nerfing classes but if you say it isn't fun to have the Confederates not be mustache twirling slavers you shoot in the face and you're suddenly a pariah.
Tsk-tsk.
You seem to be of the opinion that I don't apply the same line of thought to those games.
You would be wrong.
is Haiti in the setting?
Quote from: Warboss Squee;915237You seem to be of the opinion that I don't apply the same line of thought to those games.
You would be wrong.
If you're on the internet and don't like people complaining, you may be in for disappointment.
Quote from: CTPhipps;913631Honestly, given the way real life history turned out, I fully support Alt-History on behalf of those who weren't white males. Also, it adds the option of the Union/Confederacy Cold War competition.
Agent vs. Agent!
Spy vs. Spy!
Well, except there's better tensions to run in the real historical wild west.
I'm running a Wild West game right now. And what you have to understand is that so much of what happened in the west only happened BECAUSE the war ended, and it happened the way it did because of how the war ended. For another 20 years after the war, the American West was still largely about fighting battles between Northerners and Southerners brought over from back home; it was that instead of USA and CSA it was (northern) lawmen vs. (southern) outlaws, (northern) city folk vs (southern) farmers, (northern) republicans vs (southern) democrats, (northern) businessmen vs (southern) saloon owners, etc etc.
The gunfight at the OK Corral was a part of that too.
As for the "white male" stuff, there's tons of way better historical drama, and socially meaningful drama, to play out without just keeping the Confederacy either as a whitewashed 90s "We're not racist anymore!" cop-out or as the mustache twirling racist villains that simplify the problems.
In my campaign, we've only been playing for a few months and we've already dealt with the brutalities of the Indian Wars, the harassment of the Chinese, distrust and discrimination of scandinavian immigrants, and the black migrations to the West (like the real-history all-black Kansas settlement of Nicodemus). The debates, conflicts and tensions within communities, where some of your neighbors end up acting as Night Riders and try to burn the barn of the black homesteaders, while the abolitionist mayor is demanding the ex-union Sheriff do something about it, is more interesting than just having the CSA agents being responsible for it all.
Quote from: Tod13;913732Lincoln was not anti-slavery. He adopted that stance as an excuse for the invasion. He himself wrote he would have supported whichever side of the issue gave him the most support.
The entire Republican party was anti-slavery; it was a key part of their platform. His election as president was what precipitated the Southern states' secession, so it seems really weird to be trying to pretend that this was somehow not a big deal to them.
Quote from: RPGPundit;916128Well, except there's better tensions to run in the real historical wild west.
I'm running a Wild West game right now. And what you have to understand is that so much of what happened in the west only happened BECAUSE the war ended, and it happened the way it did because of how the war ended. For another 20 years after the war, the American West was still largely about fighting battles between Northerners and Southerners brought over from back home; it was that instead of USA and CSA it was (northern) lawmen vs. (southern) outlaws, (northern) city folk vs (southern) farmers, (northern) republicans vs (southern) democrats, (northern) businessmen vs (southern) saloon owners, etc etc.
The gunfight at the OK Corral was a part of that too.
Very true. The Earp/Cowboys feud was based as much in political gains as it was in personal vendettas.
Your campaign sounds terrific, by the way. Can I ask what system you're using?
I made a new thread to discuss these possible issues.
http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?35118-Alt-History-Deadlands-Analyzing-how-society-changes-in-the-new-timeline&p=916171#post916171
Quote from: RPGPundit;916129The entire Republican party was anti-slavery; it was a key part of their platform. His election as president was what precipitated the Southern states' secession, so it seems really weird to be trying to pretend that this was somehow not a big deal to them.
I suspect from his posts that you're talking to somebody that's had an anarcho-capitalist reeducation, and I've observed some bizarre crossovers of CSA apologetics and ancap revisionism, attempting to reframe the secession as a civil liberties revolution that's relevant to the present day. After the various pre-war political declarations unambiguously supporting chattel slavery as a positive social and economic value and citing potential threats to it as the primary cause of the secession, the tune began to change before the war even ended. By the time the 'peculiar' social order of the South had been recategorized as crimes against humanity, the cognitive dissonance must have been intense. I've heard sympathizers say the damnedest things, about how the CSA didn't have conscription, didn't have their own political prisoners or suspend habeas corpus, didn't have taxes or military expropriation, didn't constitutionally prohibit abolition of slavery in it's own states, etc. I've had a friend who considers himself a scholar and intellectual wave off primary sources and tell me that the secession of the 1860s was a revolution of the states against over-regulation by the Federal Reserve Bank. Of course, the Fed didn't exist until the twentieth century, but in 1860 there hadn't been ANY national bank for decades!
You'll usually find "it wasn't about slavery" in the center of a lush, cultivated garden of ignorance, surrounded by a high wall of impenetrable alt-think that would make a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist blush with envy.
Quote from: TAFMSV;916211I suspect from his posts that you're talking to somebody that's had an anarcho-capitalist reeducation, and I've observed some bizarre crossovers of CSA apologetics and ancap revisionism, attempting to reframe the secession as a civil liberties revolution that's relevant to the present day. After the various pre-war political declarations unambiguously supporting chattel slavery as a positive social and economic value and citing potential threats to it as the primary cause of the secession, the tune began to change before the war even ended. By the time the 'peculiar' social order of the South had been recategorized as crimes against humanity, the cognitive dissonance must have been intense. I've heard sympathizers say the damnedest things, about how the CSA didn't have conscription, didn't have their own political prisoners or suspend habeas corpus, didn't have taxes or military expropriation, didn't constitutionally prohibit abolition of slavery in it's own states, etc. I've had a friend who considers himself a scholar and intellectual wave off primary sources and tell me that the secession of the 1860s was a revolution of the states against over-regulation by the Federal Reserve Bank. Of course, the Fed didn't exist until the twentieth century, but in 1860 there hadn't been ANY national bank for decades!
You'll usually find "it wasn't about slavery" in the center of a lush, cultivated garden of ignorance, surrounded by a high wall of impenetrable alt-think that would make a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist blush with envy.
*random historical digression*
Mind you, the Confederacy is quite possibly one of the most interesting governments you could ever do a series of movies or read throughs on if you ever wanted to do a
Paranoia game. If you could somehow surgically remove the horror of the peculiar institution's apologists very real effect on the United States and how it continues to inflict misery to this day with its legacy (hello David Duke), you'd note the hypocrisy and self-lies and rationalizations were there from the beginning.
Just as the Republican party was an alliance of men who had absolutely nothing in common other than their distaste for slavery (and I remember to tell my students, "They were racists by our standards, all of them, but by that time
even most of the world's die-hard racists found slavery abhorent."), so was the fact the Confederacy had nothing in common other than slavery.
You had to look no further than New Orleans where the culture of slavery was every bit as thick and in the blood as the rest of the South if not more so but the "rules" for justifying it were slightly but distinctly different. Blacks could rise to become plantation owners themselves, for example. and had a vested interest in wanting the system to continue even as the rest of the South looked at the concept with horror.
Also, no sooner had the ink dried on the Constitution that the government realized it couldn't function with the majority of its rules which it gradually threw away.
Deadlands idea the South would have to liberate its slaves to win the war isn't one which was entirely without merit. Toward the end Robert E. Lee (who has way too much apologia himself) himself forwarded the idea but only so they could win--ignoring that was the reason they were rebelling.
The Confederacy from the very beginning was everything and nothing to a bunch of people and meant whatever was convenient. Which makes Deadlands concept fascinating as a surviving Confederacy would have to be rebuilt from scratch or be a kind of
Brazil-esque dystopia even without slavery.
Quote from: CTPhipps;915117The developers have been quite candid about the fact they wanted to make their Western game something which wouldn't attract the worst sort of gamer. Our hobby is 99% made of wonderful people but that 1% who justify racism, sexism, and God knows whatever else weirdness they want to do at their table by "playing in character" or "being historical" or "true to the setting" is my own personal bugbear.
I find that really hard to believe, because I played Deadlands in the 1990s, and it seemed to me that whitewashing the confederacy was ALL about allowing gamers (who seemed as geeks to tend to be more pro-CSA than the average population) to be able to play a "noble and heroic CSA officer" without having to deal with the unfortunate ugliness of racism.
There were way more geeks who wanted to romanticize the Confederacy by claiming that the it wasn't a racist regime than those who wanted to play Confederates in order to live out some kind of racist fantasy. In fact, I don't remember actually running into a single one of those in a Deadlands game. In general, actual full-blown 'want to get to oppress black people in an RPG' racists seem very rare to me, and they generally don't hang around with the rest of the general population.
So I'm pretty sure Deadlands' Confederacy, whatever the designers say now, was really all about getting to have your cake an eat it too: you could be a heroic Rebel opposing the oppressive north in the 'war of northern aggression' and show that the CSA was "actually not about racism at all".