Quote from: Ghost Whistler;595354surely you mean Deadlands?

No, oddly enough, Deadlands itself wasn't the reason.  They were playing Godlike, and it couldn't handle large enough groups of people fast enough, so that's why Hensley started looking at Great Rail Wars (which is a Deadlands skirmish wargame) and hacking it to do WWII better.

There was no need to create Savage Worlds to do Deadlands better, if you wanted small party action, you used Deadlands, if you wanted skirmish-level you used Great Rail Wars.

IIRC, though, the first published iteration of GRW as a kind-of RPG itself was Rippers! a Victorian Steampunk monster hunting game that had nothing to do specifically with either Deadlands or Godlike.    That was the proto-Savage Worlds.

Quote from: CRKrueger;595445No, oddly enough, Deadlands itself wasn't the reason.  They were playing Godlike, and it couldn't handle large enough groups of people fast enough, so that's why Hensley started looking at Great Rail Wars (which is a Deadlands skirmish wargame) and hacking it to do WWII better.

No, you are BOTH right. Actually, Deadlands was in fact a big part of the reason.

In addition to their problems with Godlike, a game of Deadlands with 11 players where combat was running slow compared to a different GRW game the previous night was one of the factors that lead to Savage Worlds as well. In fact, it was that Deadlands game that directly lead to Shane pitching the idea of a system that would ultimately become Savage Worlds. The Godlike game had planted the seed of frustration in him, but Deadlands itself hammered it home.

Other factors included their previous frustrations with converting Weird Wars to d20, and their previous idea from 1999 to make a full RPG system out of Great Rail Wars that was shelved when the d20 OGL came out, as well as Shane's crisis in trying to decide where to go with the company at the time.

It wasn't any one of these things, but rather the culmination of them that lead to Savage Worlds.

You can read about the circumstances that led to the creation of Savage Worlds here:

http://www.peginc.com/freebies/SWcore/MakingofSW.pdf

"My next stop was the Bloomington/Normal, IL, area for a game of GRW and then Deadlands with my good
friends Dave Ross and Aaron Isaac. I also got to meet and get to know the extremely talented Dr. Rob Lusk.

During the day, we had about eight people playing Great Rail Wars with probably a thousand points a
piece. Eight strangers, hundreds of figures, vehicles, boats, monsters, and the game lasted about three hours.
Phenomenal. It had been a while since I’d played GRW, and I’d forgotten how much I missed it.

That night we went to Dr. Rob’s house for an  awesome game of Deadlands. It was great fun, but we
had a gang of about 11 player characters, so combat was a little slow. Not bad, but certainly nothing like I’d
experienced the night before.

After the game, Dave, Rob and I sat up and talked for hours about this new idea. About a system that was
fast and easy. Would anyone care? Was there a market for it?"