Yeah this is great stuff, hope to comment more in depth when I can. Like the soundtracks and inspirations notes esp., as this is how I tend to think when starting up situations.

Quote from: Casey777;462199Yeah this is great stuff, hope to comment more in depth when I can. Like the soundtracks and inspirations notes esp., as this is how I tend to think when starting up situations.

Seconded. I think the soundtrack entries and 'recommended reading' are pretty on point although I have to admit I'm not sure a barrage of Xasthur etc. wouldn't just become distracting during play itself or grating even if it's thematically appropriate.

By the way for Seaside Town or Southern Gothic I could see using some of John Fahey's instrumental albums e.g. "Death Chants Breakdowns and Military Waltzes" or "Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death." I think there is something creepy about his sound and it's worked well with Call of Cthulhu for me.

Edit: while back we had this CoC music thread.

Yeah, I would use the soundtrack info for listening to music while tinkering with this stuff, not for use in play, at least ftf. There's enough distracting noise in game that I don't need to add music to the mix. Online I occasionally play music, sometimes even streaming it radio-like so others can listen if they want.

Heh, 4chan has/had a few Call of Cthulhu / Cthulhutech / Warhammer 40K etc. music threads and even collections on rs.4chan.org, /tg/ and the archive sites like 1d4.chan. Like much of /tg/, there's gold in piles of shite.

Pilgrims in a Strange Land

This flavor of Weird Tale assumes that the characters belong to a political or religious minority that was persecuted in their native land.  To escape oppression their community has traveled across the sea to establish a colony where they can practice their beliefs in freedom.  Although they may have set off with the idea of establishing a utopia or a shining city on a hill, these pilgrims in a strange land will find their very survival imperiled by forces both within and without.  Upon their arrival on foreign soil the colonists discovered that the land is already inhabited by savages that resent the intrusion and will wage bloody war to drive the newcomers from their rightful territory.  Worse yet, what if the colonists have brought something dark with them—some horror they harbor within their midst—to the new world?

The Setting: A fortified colony on the shores of a strange land.  The heart of the colony is its only church; the church is the finest building in all the colony and acts as the last place of refuge in times of strife.  The colony itself is a flickering light of civilization carved out of the vast, dark wilderness.  The surrounding forest teems with savages, strange creatures, and unholy temptations.  Those who spend too much time in the woods are liable to be thought tainted by the bestial powers that call it home; in the minds of the colonists, the forest's influence is something to be resisted and conquered.  The world beyond the forest is a complete mystery to the colonists—they possess no maps of knowledge of the new world beyond the borders of the colony itself.

The Themes: Discipline is survival—the only way to persevere against the savagery of the new world is to remain stoic and disciplined in the face of chaos.  Rigid adherence to law and order requires that the colonists forge their souls from cold iron to weather the misfortunes of this strange land.  The beacon of civilization is surrounded by barbarism—the colony's survival is a fragile thing.  Natural dangers, bloodthirsty braves, and supernatural threats encircle the colony and any venture into the forest is a likely suicide mission.  While the subjugation of the wilderness will necessarily entail some loss of life, the greatest threat is that the colonists will abandon their civilized ways and fight savagery with savagery.  The devil cannot be outrun—whatever persecution the colonists have fled from will catch up with them eventually.  There is always a viper in wait, and the most damning sins are carried by pious hearts.

The Foes: Savages—the natives of this strange land are terrifying Others bereft of the moral outlook that civilization brings.  They are an incomprehensible people who love battle, spare none from the ax, indulge in cannibalism and wild lusts, and howl their prayers to primordial demons.  (No, this use of "savages" is not particularly politically-correct, but it certainly is representative of the genre.)  The beasts who walk as men—even the local savages are frightened of the beings whose bodies incorporate the worst impulses of man and beast.  These skinchangers are protean evils who fights with tooth, claw, and forged weapons, but their real power is in there ability to steal another's face and form to infiltrate the colony.  The lost colonists—of course, the current crop of colonists were not the first stranger to attempt to establish themselves on this foreign country.  The previous colonists disappeared without a trace.  Will they return as the undead, as new-born barbarians who have "gone native," or as empty vessel filled with the monstrous souls of ancient evils?  The devil in the woods—despite their self-exile to the colony, the demonic force behind the colonists' persecution has followed them to the new world.  Does it walk among them in a familiar guise?  Any colonist who spends too much time in the woods—perhaps rallying the savages to a united warband or raising the bodies of the lost colonists—is a potential servant of the devil himself.

The Soundtrack: 16 Horsepower, Sackcloth 'n' Ashes and Folklore—foreboding Americana with a touch of hellfire and brimstone.  Munly & the Lee Lewis Harlots, s/t—Gothic Americana perfect for chaotic forays against the savage tide.  Rasputina, Frustration Plantation and Oh, Perilous World—both are schizophrenic takes on alternate American history.  Zoe Keating, Into the Trees—experimental, ambient cello loops that speak to the mystery and terrifying sublime of the forest.

Literary and Cinematic Influences: Aphra Behn's Ooronoko, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum, William Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Gaming Inspirations: Colonial Gothic, "Croatoan or Bust: Finding the Lost Colony" (from Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmissions), Solomon Kane (for Savage Worlds), Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing's beastmen and dark elves.

Historical and Cryptozoological Inspirations: Bigfoot, Cotton Mather, Indian captivity narratives, Molly Pitcher and the Marblehead magician, the Salem Witch Trials, the Roanoke Colony, Sir Walter Raleigh.

How about a cannibals of Borneo write-up? Not sure if it would East Indies traders meeting them, or just other natives having to fight them.

Quote from: danbuter;464483How about a cannibals of Borneo write-up? Not sure if it would East Indies traders meeting them, or just other natives having to fight them.

Heh, I would, but...I don't know a thing about the cannibals of Borneo!  Feel free to sketch one up yourself and post it though.

The Urban Weird

"This latter is one of the principle thoroughfares of the city, and had been very much crowded during the whole day. But, as thr darkness came on, the throng momentarily increased; and, by the the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door."
- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd"

Man is most alone when he is surrounded by the teeming masses of mankind. Typical urban adventures tend to be described with the adjectives "gritty," "dark," and "sprawling"; on their own, these adjectives can make for an exciting adventure, but with a little work we can tip each over fully into the realm of the weird.

The Setting: A massive city crowded with businesses, homes, brothels, seats of governance, drug dens, dockyards, open markets, slums, and warehouses. Bring put the grit by making a sharp delineation between the law and order that rules a city by day and the criminal element that controls it by night. Walking the cityscape during the day should pose no real danger—until you're ready to turn the tables on the players, of course—but nightfall should bring with it double-dealings, random gang violence, and an almost carnivalesque level of lawlessness.

Emphasize the city's darkness by drawing on the convention of another "dark" genre that is centered on the urban experience: film noir. The basic film noir set up is perfect for gaming: someone has a problem and is willing to pay the characters to solve it, someone needs something investigated and is willing to pay the characters to snoop around on their behalf, someone needs a mysterious package delivered—no questions asked—and is willing to pay the characters to make sure it gets done. Besides the basic set up, there is much to borrow from film noir; amp up the shadows, double-dealings, and moral ambiguity at every turn.

Fantasy cities are usually plenty big, but to make them uncanny push back the boundaries even further. Make the city an inescapably huge landscape in its own right. Not only is the city a sprawling mass of labyrinthian streets, back alleys, and plazas, it's also essentially unknowable; no matter how long you spend in the city it will always have new areas to explore and new ways to horrify.

The Themes: Alienation is all—the city is far too large for anyone to feel connected to their fellow man. Worse yet because the city is a place of back-alley deals and rampant crime, no one feels like they can trust anyone else. Play up the feeling of urban paranoia by limiting the characters' contacts, having the other denizens of the city eye them with suspicion and hostility, and by showing the casual brutality that comes with urban life. The city is a place of wonders—while day to day life in the city is a struggle for survival, the metropolis is a place that seems to collect life's wonderments. Most markets and bazaars will be selling base goods, but tucked away at a small stall might be a beautiful (but accursed) puzzlebox that brings both woe and weal. A dusty bookshop might have a notorious grimoire among its offering. The city itself might possess a life of its own; what if its well-know streets began to warp and rearrange themselves according to some occult pattern? Life is cheap—a knife in the back comes when you expect it and when you least expect it. Make the city a dangerous place to be and design your adventures there to draw the character's down its worst alleys and most violent neighborhoods. Never hesitate to show them what happens to the unwary.

The Foes: The rivals—if the adventurers are the usual suspects—that is, a group of ne'er-do-wells out for gold—one way to challenge them in a city environment is to establish a similar group of sword-for-hire who compete with them for gainful employ. Make their rival group just as competent, if not more heartless. Skew the rivals toward the weird by giving them a strange benefactor who possess arcane powers or a supernatural lineage. Dopplegangers—anonymity is both a blessing and a curse in a city environment. Contort the fear that accompanies the loss of personal identity by introducing creature who can assume others' likenesses. Make identity-theft part of a vast conspiracy that the characters unravel one thread at a time. The sewer-dwellers—what happens on the streets is bad enough, but why not make the characters plunge into the abject by having them investigate what happens beneath the city streets? Confuse and confound the players about the nature of the menace; you're spoiled for choice when it comes to the final reveal: beastmen, sentient shambling mounds, skaven, a cult sworn to the service of a plague demon, etc. The serial killer—something is stalking the streets of the city with murderous intent by night, why not have it come after the characters or someone the characters' care about? Perhaps the killer plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the players by sending them clues hidden in ciphers within blood-stained notes. The killer, of course, always manages to slip away into the fog and shadows before being apprehended; what are the killer's motives and is there a supernatural element to its uncanny ability to evade detection?

The Soundtrack: HUMANWINE, Fighting Naked—this is what it sounds like when you rage against urban alienation. PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea—bright, flash, but with a dark, unsettling undercurrent, just the vibe your city should be giving off. Sxip Shirey, Sonic New York—chaotic bursts of song that replicate the mad tumble through city streets. World/Inferno Friendship Society, Addicted to Bad Ideas—an anarchistic album with a Weimar Berlin feel; Peter Lorre references abound.

Literary and Cinematic Inspirations: Honore de Balzac's Pere Goriot, Clive Barker's "The Forbidden" and "Midnight Meat Train," Jules Dassin's Night and the City, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Howard Harks's The Big Sleep, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, Fritz Lang's M, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, Thomas Ligotti's short fiction, Richard Marsh's The Beetle, George du Maurier's Trilby, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Alex Proyas's Dark City, Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Gaming Inspirations: The City State of the Invincible Overlord (for older editions of D&D), "Jacks Wild: Six Stabs at Jack the Ripper" (by Kenneth Hite in Suppressed Transmissions), Lankhmar (for older editions of D&D or RuneQuest), Sharn: City of Towers (for 3.5 D&D), Vornheim (for Lamentations of the Flame Princess).

Historical and Cryptozoological Inspirations: Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, The Black Dahlia murder, Dopplegangers, H.H. Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Mole people, Parisian absinthe houses, Parisian catacombs, Spring-Heeled Jack, Victorian London's East End opium houses, Anthony Vidler's Warped Spaces and Uncanny Architecture, Weimar Berlin, the Zodiac Killer.

Here's my contribution for today:

7. Pagan Outskirts

"I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth."
   - The Wicker Man

This flavor of Weird Fantasy assumes that your setting has an established religion that holds sway throughout the realm and that the characters were born and raised under the auspices of that religious institution.  Of course, the trick here is to thrust the characters into the outskirts of civilization where the established church offers no protection or sanctuary; what the characters will soon discover is that not all the people of the realm hold the same beliefs or hew to the same faith that they are familiar with.  In the Pagan Outskirts, the old ways still command loyalty and the ancient ways of worship—blood sacrifice, pacts with demonic forces, and pledges to the fierce, primordial spirits of nature—still hold power over the hearts and minds of a secretive rural populace.

The Setting:
An isolated village or town far from the reach of the established church hierarchy.  The village is self-sufficient and self-contained; local farming, animal husbandry, traditional artisan handicrafts, and bee-keeping provide for the people's material well-being.  Indeed, their self-reliance is such that they largely govern themselves; religious and secular authority wields nominal power, at best.  The people's spiritual well-being is provided for under a darker cast; these villagers or townspeople cleave to the ancient pagan ways that dominated the land prior to the spread of the normative, modern religion.  

The Themes:
The modern is endangered by the ancient—make sure the characters have every modern innovation that seems to guarantee their survival.  They should be equipped with modern tools of warfare (such as well-forged sword, crossbows, and perhaps even early firearms) and the tools of modern faith (holy water and the shield of true belief).  However, make a point to show them that while the old ways—pagan magic and primordial beasts—might currently slumber, they are still strong.  Perhaps even stronger than steel and sacrament.  

Corruption is a worse fate that death—the pagan people will be welcoming.  Too welcoming.  They do not wish to oppose outsiders with force of arms, they wish to convert outsiders back to the old ways through seduction and the arousal of primal lusts.  

The New Age is upon us—play up the cyclical nature of the threat that faces the characters.  While the pagan ways may have lain dormant for ages, make the characters privy to their movements as they stir and awaken.  Perhaps a prophecy of comes to pass, perhaps occult rites are nearing completion, perhaps the stars are aligning...in any case, the primordial beings once worshiped by fearful men arise anew and the characters number among those chosen to witness the rebirth of the pagan order.

The Foes:
The Pagans—at first, the pagans will seem like cheerful, fulfilled people.  Indeed, as the characters witness their simple lives of observing nature's cycle and obeying their natural inclinations, they may begin to envy the freedom of their lifestyle.  But this will change when the characters learn of the means these smiling, friendly folk use to appease the dark gods they serve.  


The Scarecrows—the fields and farmsteads of the pagan outskirts are protected from thieving birds by pumpkin-headed effigies filled with straw.  Or at least that is all they seem to be until they are called upon to ravage those who threaten the villagers or their way of life.  

The White People—where did the villagers learn the ways of pagan magic in the first place?  Why, from the white people, of course.  The white people are a race of cave-dwelling degenerates forgotten by time.  Uninvolved and uncivilized, they are brutal, ignorant, but possessed of uncanny senses and an innate connection to the blood-magic used by the pagan people of the village.  

Nature's Hunger—something ancient and primeval stirs in the wilderness, awakened from its slumber by the sacrificial blood-rites practiced by the pagans.  Perhaps the characters arrive too late and the hungering maw is already lose in the wild, or perhaps the characters have been lured to the pagan outskirts as the final sacrifice.

The Soundtrack:
Pagan Outskirts requires a soundtrack that takes folk back to its bloody pagan roots.

Current 93, Swastikas for Noddy—apocalyptic folk music replete with folkloric touchstones, invocations, and maledictions.  

Espers, II and III—folk psychedelia that frequently spirals off into otherworldly sounds.  

Fern Knight, Castings—self-described "music for witches and alchemists," tarot symbolism abounds here.  

Sol Invictus, The Blade—the grim, unflinching determination of nature is the order of the day.

Literary and Cinematic Inspirations:
Clive Barker's "Rawhead Rex" and "In the Hills, the Cities," Piers Haggard's Blood on Satan's Claw, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, M.R. James's "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad," Stephen King's "Children of the Corn," Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, "The Shining Pyramid," and "The White People," Vernon Lee's "Dionea," Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General, Ken Russel's The Lair of the White Worm, Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm (the film and the novel are quite different from each other), Lars von Trier's Antichrist.

Gaming Inspirations:
100 Bushels of Rye (for HarnMaster), Green and Pleasant Land (for Call of Cthulhu), Through the Drakwald (for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing 2e).

Miscellaneous Inspirations:
Celtic druids, Benjamin Christensen's Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, Sir James Fraser's The Golden Bough, human sacrifice, Margaret Alice Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe, the pagan rival of the 1890s, standing stones, Montague Summers's translation of the Malleus Maleficarum.

8. High Gothicism

"And since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them."
   - Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo

I've already touched on ways to bring in influences gleaned from Gothic literature in Dark Medieval Times, but in this section I'm going to focus on how to change the conventions of the second-wave of Gothic fictions—the novels that marked the high point of the Gothic's literary popularity in the late 18th century—into grist for the Weird Fantasy mill.  The main focus of the Gothic's second-wave of novels is an implicit contrast between the norms and more of the rational, Enlightened British Isles and the "Gothic barbarism" of Europe's continental powers.  High Gothicism generally implies a Renaissance level of culture and technology; indeed, the British authors who wrote Gothic fiction during its most influential years tended to set their tales in fanciful re-imaginings of France, Spain, and Italy.  However, while those settings have elements that appear modern and advanced, they are also always haunted by a barbaric past in the form of feudal aristocrats, a "medieval" church that had yet to be reformed, and peasants who were still ignorant and superstitious.  Such settings were recognizably European, but the differences from their native Britain were strong enough to color their stories with hints of exoticism.  Furthermore, the world of High Gothicism eschews the usual fantasy pantheon antics for a single, powerful monotheistic church.  British authors of Gothic texts used their southern settings as a pretext to explore their cultural distrust of Catholicism; so too might you use a setting based on High Gothicism to explore a church gone rotten with corruption and extravagance.  

The Setting:
A moderately-sized town in a pseudo-European locale.  The townspeople are an ignorant, superstitious lot; they cling to their religion and their superstitions, and they see the work of the supernatural everywhere—even where a rational answer seems more plausible.  The town has two significant landmarks nearby: a old castle and a monastery or nunnery.  The castle is the family seat of an old line of blue-blooded aristocrats.  This family believes that their rarefied blood sets them apart from the common man; they prefer to keep to themselves and disdain intrusion upon their secrets.  The monastery or nunnery is thought to be a place of religious contemplation, but in truth its master is a cruel, calculating villain who uses the guise of spirituality to mask a variety of misdeeds.  The town is also near a deep woods and towering, majestic mountains.  These sublime natural features are both awesomely beautiful and home to cunning bandits.  

(In Gothic tales, natural beauty tends to fortify the protagonists; to emulate this in your game perhaps any character who pauses to observe the natural sublime and rhapsodize on its solemn splendor regains a few Hit Points.  On the flip-side, protagonists in Gothic tales tend to be attacked when they traverse the woods and mountains, so perhaps such a pause for dramatic soliloquy would also be cause for a random encounter check.)

The Themes:
Reason vs. the Supernatural—High Gothicism pits Enlightenment rationality against the superstitions and supernaturalism of the benighted past.  One way to emphasize this theme is to take away any supernatural powers the characters might normally have; make arcane and divine magic, enchanted items, and extraordinary powers solely the province of the villains.  Make the players rely on ordered, rational plans instead of mystic MacGuffins.  


The church is a corrupt institution—there are only two types of believer: those who blindly follow the church's doctrine because they are afraid of what awaits in the next life and those who use the mask of piety to hide a multitude of sins.  As with the previous theme, it is entirely appropriate to eliminate clerical spells and holy powers when playing in High Gothicism mode.  Similarly, it is appropriate to give religious characters and places a horrible hidden secret: perhaps the goodly monk is tormented by carnal desires; perhaps the nunnery gives sanctuary to an unrepentant assassin, or perhaps the local abbess has made a pact with the very devil she claims to rebuke.  

Emotions runneth over—if ever there was a time to indulge your thesby inclinations, now is it.  Characters in High Gothicism should display the revolt of emotions kept too long in check; sorrow, melancholia, terror, horror, and mania should be writ largely upon the important characters that the players interact with.  In this case, it's encouraged to ham up the performance and create personalities that are overwrought and unhinged; melodrama is your friend here.

The Foes:
The bandits—run-of-the-mill foes to be sure, unless...they are at the beck and call of someone or something far more sinister.  In fact, discovering who these miscreants serve is half the battle.  

The monk—oh how the mighty fall!  Once a pious ecclesiastic, now mired in a spiritual darkness.  What preys upon the cleric's soul?  Is it bodily lust?  Lust for arcane power that can only be had through a Faustian bargain?  Political gain?  Whatever it is, make sure the player characters are directly obstructed the monk from his goal.  

The cavalier and his retinue—the eldest son of the castle's aristocratic family is a knightly man who will immediately take a disliking to the characters' low-born status.  Or, if they be nobles themselves, he will set himself to prove his obvious virtue against theirs.  

The crypt-thing—the land below the local nunnery or monastery is riddled with hidden crypts known to few.  The characters will discover just how labyrinthine those crypts are when one of the villains outlined above steals away a young maiden and secrets her within a forgotten vault.  Of course, what the villain doesn't know is that the crypts are far from uninhabited.  What kind of misshapen beast crawls along the catacombs, feasting on the flesh and bones of the long-dead?

The Soundtrack:
High Gothicism requires a soundtrack that is inspired by Romanticism and darkness.

Black Tape for a Blue Girl, As One Aflame Laid Bare by Desire and Remnants of a Deeper Purity—the sound of passion consuming faith and reason.  

Lycia, Tripping Back into the Broken Days—"tripping back into the broken days" is the mantra of High Gothicism; this album is fragile, stripped down, and bare to the bones.  

Mors Syphilitica, Feather and Fate—the lushness Gothicism of a soaring, heavenly voice.  

Sopor Aeternus & the Ensemble of Shadows, Dead Lovers Sarabande (Face One and Face Two)—melancholic airs from out of time; possibly the most funereal music project in existence.





Literary and Cinematic Inspirations:
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers, Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Isaac Crookenden's "The Vindictive Monk or The Fatal Ring," Richard Cumberland's "The Poisoner of Montremos," Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, Thomas Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe," Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" and "A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family," Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Eliza Parsons's The Castle of Wolfenbach, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Pit and the Pendulum," Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolfo and The Italian, the Marquis de Sade's The Misfortunes of Virtue, Percy Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Olalla," Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.

Gaming Influences:
The Darkest Night (for Lady Blackbird) and Ravenloft (for AD&D or later editions of D&D).

Miscellaneous Inspirations: Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the Codex Gigas, Gothic architecture, the Hand of Glory, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Romanticism.

10. The Weird West

"All right, I'm coming out. Any man I see out there, I'm gonna shoot him. Any sumbitch takes a shot at me, I'm not only gonna kill him, but I'm gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down."
The Unforgiven

Of course, if one wants a full-blown Wild West campaign there are several games on the market that offer a full immersion in the tropes of that fictional mode, but for our Weird purposes I'm going to focus on how you can inject a bit of the Ol' West into a fantasy campaign to amp-up the strangeness.  

The technique to use here is imaginative substitution: change out the too-blatant "Western" conventions for similar figurations that keep the symbolic meaning intact.  If your campaign world doesn't have firearms, there certainly won't be any shoot-outs at high noon.  However, you can replace the quick-draw gun fight with crossed swords in the town square.  That's how they do it on the frontier—questions of honor are answered by who has the fastest draw, the steeliest eye, and the most vicious cut.  (See just about any samurai movie for inspiration here; after all, samurai movies borrowed from the Westerns, so it's only fair to re-appropriate!)

The Setting:
A rough, ramshackle border town on the western frontier.  While the town does have a sheriff and his deputies as the nominal law, they're too few and too weak to hold back the tide of lawlessness.  Prospectors have struck silver and gold in the nearby hills, causes a rush to establish mines and land contracts before the wells run dry.  Of course, where there's gold, there's greed.  And where there's greed, there's murder and the scent of death on the wind.

The Themes:
Justice is where you take it—the powers that be, such as they are, aren't able to provide satisfaction.  If you want justice or to uphold a notion of the law, you'd best do it yourself and be able to enforce it with the strength of steel.  

Be quick or be dead—the Weird West should favor quick action of calm, measured plan-making.  Put the characters in situations where their lives hang in the balance of a single, foolhardy decision that must be made now.  

The stakes are high among outlaws—the Weird West is a setting where outlaws, wanted men, and wolf's heads go to evade the due process of the world back east.  Such men have nothing to lose; they jump at the opportunity to snatch a wealth, no matter how dangerous the circumstances.  Stagecoach robberies, bank heists, and mine raids are among the brazen crimes the characters should be witness to—regardless of what side of the law they fall on.

The Foes:
The Ghost-Dancers—of course, the frontier was not an uninhabited place before the arrival of gold-crazed prospectors and explorers.  The  native population will resent the intrusion on their land, especially once pogroms for their removal get underway.  While the Ghost-Dancer tribe's bloody raids are fearsome enough, their shamans have the power to summon and direct ectoplasmic horrors from beyond the grave; they're not too squeamish to use the screaming souls of the characters' loved ones against them.  

Derro—dwarves love gold, but these aren't your usual Tolkienian warriors or your crafty Norse artificers.  Rather, the derro are a race of dusky-skinned, white-eyed calibans who are drawn to gold as a moth is drawn to a flame.  They will take gold and silver through both cunning and atrocity alike; they need the precious metals to appease He Who Roils in the Darkness.  

The Revenant—if they're in the Weird West, the characters likely have some ghosts in their past.  What if those ghosts were to borrow the rotting corpse of some hanged fool to seek revenge?  

The Dust Devils—whirling tempests that scour the flesh off the bones of the living.  Dust Devils are particularly active at night in the wastelands, but have been known to descend on bordertowns without warning.

The Soundtrack:
The Weird West requires a soundtrack that is grotty, sweaty, and full of piss and vinegar.

Black Jake & the Carnies, Where the Heather Don't Grow—punk bluegrass that spits fire and casts a deadly spell.  

The Builders and the Butchers, Salvation is a Deep Dark Well and Dead Reckoning—the sound of a country apocalypse.

Johnny Cash, American I-IV—there's a reason why he's called the Man in Black.  

The Legendary Shack Shakers, Pandelerium and Swampblood—raucous, untamed psychobilly; perfect for saloon brawls, shoot-outs, and last rides.  

Literary and Cinematic Inspirations:
Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, William S. Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, George Hickenlooper's The Killing Box, John Hillcoat's The Proposition, Alejandro Jodorowski's El Topo, Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Eugene Manlove Rhode's West is West and Copper Streak Trail, John Vernon's The Last Canyon.

Gaming Inspirations:
Boot Hill, Deadlands (either the original game or the Savage Worlds edition), Weird West.

Miscellaneous Inspirations:
The Alamo, Custer's Last Stand, Doc Holliday, the Ghost Dance, the Gold Rush, the Hatfield-McCoy feud, Old West gunfighters, manifest destiny, the Sun Dance, the Trail of Tears.