Working on WILD: Inspirations, Initial Progress, Setting and Colonialism

I'm trying to get better at documenting my creative process, especially for side projects that may never get finished. My current self indulgent TTRPG project started when I was first introduced to the quite delightful (and to my awareness popular) blog post "Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice". While I don't fully agree with all its conclusions, I got a few key takeaways:

• A deadly system encourages smart and careful play.
• A simple system makes for easy NPC character generation.
• The Wild West and its various factions make for easy conflicts for your PCs to get involved in.
• Cowboys are neat!

As this was stirring in my brain, I kept coming back to an old adage I've often encountered that D&D is more of a Western than it is a replication of actual medieval times (pretty succinctly summarized in this post about D&D being Anti-Medieval). To go over those points and others I often hear / was thinking about:

• D&D is largely about the value of individualism (as per the Americana mythos). Rags to riches stories. Taking destiny into your own hands.
• Most campaigns take place on a literal frontier between perceived untamed wilderness and traditional western civilization.
• Gold is the name of the game, and the world functionally operates more like capitalism rather than feudalism.
• Often races like Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls, etx are depicted as "savages" to be exterminated for loot and glory. Much like how some Wild West media justifies the eradication of American First Peoples.

Now layer on top of this all this I keep hearing about an Oh-Ess-Are and the classic West Marches, types of games I've never truly run nor played in earnest in a true-blue fantasy setting, and it got me thinking. Thinking about what? Well that much should be obvious:

Cyberpunk 2020 is a rare breed of a game. It may even be my favorite TTRPGs of all time, and certainly one I have absolutely no intention of playing in the near future (my feelings on it can best be described as "complicated"). Those who have read all my posts know it comes up a good deal in my writing, and will probably continue to, but for now let's just do bullet-point takeaways again:

• 2020 seems to be at its best when it's player directed. In many ways it feels very close to the West Marches ethos, only instead of exploring a frontier you're living life in a dystopic city.
• 2020 deals with being the lesser evil in a world of bad choices. Much like how there's seldom any real heroes in the Wild West, Cyberpunk is more about people trying to get by (kind of - The actual systems don't really support that the way I want to, but the intention is there).
• Shopping is a key part of Cyberpunk, and equipment often defines a character as much as skills. Likewise thumbing through magazines and going out and buying the necessary equipment is unironically a great experience.
• Cyberpunk isn't necessarily deadly but it could be. If you follow headshot rules, combat can be over in an instant, and most gangers and un-cybered up individuals get iced fast.
• Cyberpunk tries to de-emphasize combat by offering character classes who specialize in problem solving outside of gunfights. Likewise it offers a single character class that will always shine in combat.
• My full feelings on Cyberpunk are kind of complicated because it feels like a collection of microgames that you run for one table. Which is really really cool, but also I take issue with the layout and execution of those microgames. My full thoughts on Cyberpunk really need a full article or video at some point, but I earnestly think its core rulebook is something every TTRPG designer should try reading cover-to-cover.

I ran about a month's worth of 2020 before getting burnt out on it, but the parts that I loved struck a fire in me. That fire is what I used to cook the aforementioned ingredients of thinking about Boot Hill as well as my continued fascination with the OSR and OD&D. I've never been much for fantasy and have truthfully never played a proper OSR. I've played Mork Borg one-shots and rules-lite games, but not a proper campaign in the the old Gygaxian sense.

One additional question kept haunting my mind; If OD&D is a Western, what does Domain Play look like in an actual Wild Western. Do players eventually own ranches? Detective agencies? Railroads? Oil fields? At the very least it makes sense for them to have posses and maybe a homestead somewhere.

((For the uninitiated Domain Play refers to old-school rules wherein adventurers are later expected to run Strongholds, build Wizard Towers, field armies, etx - It's the logical conclusion to an Americana fantasy. Reap from the land in a gold rush (re: dungeon delving), drive out local wildlife, plant roots, turn your capital into more capital, wage war, etx. The Gygaxian Manifest Destiny if you will. Enticingly gameable? For sure. Problematic? Absolutely. We'll get to that part later.))

My first instinct was to read through Boot Hill to find answers. Surprisingly not much is written on the matter in Gygax's 1st Edition. So I did as I do in many situations like this; Instead of continuing to read, I figured I aught to just write my own system that'll give me everything I'm looking for. Those goals being:

• Wild West vibes.
• Fast and deadly combat that encourages smart play and (generally) discourages shoot-outs.
• A degree of the kind of character and play variety offered in Cyberpunk 2020.
• An OSR feel, particularly in having a Hex Mapped open world on a dangerous frontier and being fully player driven / sandbox.
• Survival mechanics and the pressures of capitalism.
• Clean and clear rules for Domain Play.
• Rules lite. Maybe procedure heavy?

Is this ambitious? Yes. But I feel like I needed to step into the OSR / OSR-adjacent ring for a bit, design out of my comfort zone of narrative-heavy games or crunchy tactical games. And thus an idea was born: WILD.

A Reaction to the Ruleslite Market

If you've read my post on LIGHT (and been following my reactions to the Beacon Editions), you'll know I take issue with a lot of modern rules-lite design trends. Namely the trend of the eloquently named F*ck-You Design, wherein the GM is expected to fill in design gaps, make encounters and generally do a lot of the design work. But often I take issue with the fact that there isn't usually much there there. Often it boil down to 3 Stats, a simple resolution mechanic and a vague setting. There's too much vibes not enough game. Too much flavor not enough meat. So, as I do with all things I dislike, I'm trying my hand at it and trying to make a campaign-focused rules-lite game (we'll see if it really is as lite as I'm hoping). My general goals in this arena are:

• Easy to play, easy to teach, easy to run.
• Roll tables galore.
• Low low prep. Wild wild west.
• Emphasis on Rulings over Rules (without going so far as to provide the GM with no support).
• Open ended play that favors creativity over game knowledge.

Why Call it WILD?

The first and most obvious reason is that we're dealing with the Wild West. Specifically inspired in part by the mythologized version of the American Frontier as popularized by dime novels, Hollywood films and Wild West shows like the ones hosted by the (hypocritically genocidal) Buffalo Bill. Of course there's plenty of harsh realities, nasty diseases and gory ends as well. My aims aren't to romanticize or justify the horrific colonialism nor the "Cowboys vs Indians" part, but rather that the game is much less focused on realism and much more interested in the mythical west that never quite existed (and is clearly full of its own issues when taken at face value). Add to this that there are planned magical elements and the general vibes are chaotic and free, and the "Wild" part of Wild West seems to fit well.

Additionally most of these "rules-lite" games tend to have one to two word titles that are in all caps. I couldn't tell you where this started or why. My best guess is something about it echoing the "Minimal words, big vibes" ethos of these games. Thus WILD.

Starting With a Hit Chart

The first thing I actually put together for WILD was a Hit Chart, namely this 2d6 Hit Chart:

Much like Boot Hill and Cyberpunk 2020, I knew gunfights would feel better if you could target specific body parts and have randomized consequences for getting shot. By using 2d6 I was able to put a lot of weight on getting hit in the chest (roughly a 44% chance) without resorting to full percentile. It also means the roll can be modified in two ways: The more precise and strategic advantage of getting +/- # to the roll, or the more random "Roll 3d6 and pick 2". Additionally this makes shooting someone's hand a trickier more precise shot.

The hope with this was to simulate everything I found cool about a gunfight; Shooting a gun out of someone's hand, taking an enemy down non-lethally by shooting them in the foot, blasting off an opponent's groin for the lols, or putting a bullet between your target's eyes. From here I wanted to make sure every roll on the Gun Damage table had the chance to take most characters out of the fight, all it takes is one good hit and your character might be dead (Cyberpunk actually has a great little bit at the start of its combat section about how deadly gunfights in real life are). Thus we can check off the "Gunfights are deadly" goal. From here I worked out some cover and initiative rules so that there is a survivability difference between an absolute moron and someone being careful. Lastly I gave players two tiny little edges: The first is Perks (which we'll go into another time, and which some NPCs can have), the second is Luck. Luck is a currency that I haven't quite figured out how I want to be replenished, but you can use it in any amount to adjust any roll by 1 on a 1-for-1 basis. Because often it's luck in America that defines your fate, just as much as your own hard work.

On Roll-to-Hit

Those who know me personally know I have a deep, deep aversion to Roll-to-Hit. It's usually an immediate turn-off for me because it means that a player could potentially lose their turn by the roll of a dice (often equivalent to a coinflip in games like D&D 5e) wasting their precious time and not being much fun. Cyberpunk 2020 started to change my mind on this. While I don't love the execution of Cyberpunk's combat system, the stacking modifiers makes for an engaging Roll-to-Hit combat system that's (sometimes) light-weight. So I decided, as a variety of games have, to pair this with hyper deadly damage. This way missing is less frustrating, because you know when you do finally hit it'll drastically change the battlefield. I did some minor playtesting on my own and the tension was pretty enjoyable! ((And gave me an excuse to break out my Rail Raiders Infinite miniatures))

A Few More Touches

To further flesh out characters I added four main pools characters have to manage:

• Blood is a bit like traditional HP, and literally tracks how much blood a PC loses before they KO. Most PCs will have between 4-10 Blood, and wouldn't you know most shots can cause between 4-10 Blood DMG.
• Brain might get renamed to Pain as it measures a PC's will to stay in the fight. When getting punched you take Brain DMG (lol). Similarly otherworldly foes may cause Brain DMG simply by being witnessed (a la Call of Cthulu). I might change the melee part, but I think it pairs well with the last pool.
• Belly measures how much food's in the tank. Starvation rules feel integral for a setting that's about making sure you have a way to put food on the table. Similarly it's a way to make illness not simply affect combat HP, but rather have PCs fight to keep food down so they don't starve.
• Drunk is the final pool which acts as temp HP for the other three pools. In this way being an alcoholic is less of an explicit mechanic and more of a choice the Player might make due to the game rewarding being Drunk.

Next I did want a Stat line for universal Skill Check resolution, because though the universal resolution trend isn't perfect, it's also really really useful. Initially I was considering stats like "Moxie" or "Gumption" and eventually I realized that the perfect Stat line was staring me in the face, one I'd never used in a game I'd designed before. The old school classic: STR, DEX, CON, WIS, INT, CHA. (And LUCK of course). The game is then a Roll-Over d6 pool where players by default get 2d6s and can get more via Perks and Proficiencies. The more d6 that roll over, the more successes! All Evens grants something lucky, all odds... Well y'know.

Then I added some fields to accommodate for Perks and Rituals (which I'll touch on later) as well as track proficiencies, inventory, guns and illness, and voila! A character sheet was born!

Pretty much every game I design starts with the Character Sheet. It's the first thing the player sees and will be the backbone of a lot of the gameplay. So even though this will probably undergo additions and revisions, this was a fantastic place to start!

Not Technically America

Now that I knew how WILD would play, Setting was the next step on the agenda. If WILD is going to be the kind of open-world West Marches OSR-esc Gygaxian campaign, a lot of the prep needed to be frontloaded. For that I needed a clear idea of the setting, world, factions, etc. The most obvious setting might be the American frontier or some made-up slice of it a la Red Dead Redemption, but that didn't quite feel right. While my knowledge on it is by no means collegiate, I am quite interested in American history and have studied it a decent a bit. As a result of this study I also know how complex and granular it can get, and that to properly do it justice to the players and to the respective parties in that history I'd need to do a lot of research. Which somewhat goes against the whole point of this being a light-weight side project. It also would limit me in what I could and couldn't include, especially when it came to the paranormal.

Instead I chose to make my own mythical setting, based on the fever dream that is America's memory of the Wild West. If Theros is Wizard of the Coast's take on Greek mythology, then Union and the continents of North and South Aurelica was my take on the United States' mythology. [[*1]] This way I wasn't constrained by historical timing, technology, magic, etx. While you won't find elves or dwarves, the nations of humans in play (while clearly inspired by real ones) are very much made up and their history just as fanciful.

Natives in Aurelica

Another main reason for this deviation was in presenting the atrocities that accompanied the United States' birth and expansion westward. A lot of Wild West media either tries to justify these atrocities or ignore them altogether, and neither option sits right with me. From the Trail of Tears to the Indian Wars, the history of the American frontier is also a history of genocide. Even before the U.S. the peoples of Central America were being wiped out by the Spanish. These are tricky topics that I by no means want to gloss over or write out in a Western, but it presents a few pretty clear problems if I was to try to historically present things 1-to-1:

• First and most pressingly, many of these cultures were not only too numerous and diverse for me to catalogue casually as a side project, but (unfortunately) many were successfully eradicated at least in part. Records are often incomplete, language guides are hard to find (and often of dubious accuracy), sources often come from colonizers and the vast multiplicity of native cultures in play have literally filled volumes of books. Doing research and presenting these cultures accurately would be a huge task more befitting of a professionally published and peer reviewed book.
• Secondly I simply wouldn't feel comfortable writing about the actual First Peoples who suffered a genocide (especially in the country I literally live in) without getting far more first hand exposure than I already have. Frankly, even then I'd prefer to just hire native writers and historians to help pen these things. Unfortunately I have neither the time nor the budget (of about $0) for this, so an allegorical peoples seems like a better fit. Especially when OD&D itself uses (sigh inducing) allegories in its fantasy "savages", it feels appropriate to use allegorical peoples to do the opposite.
• Thirdly I'm not going to try to roleplay as an actual historical Apache or Cherokee or any other Native person in America. Not as an NPC, not as a PC, and certainly not in that era of history. It'd all just feel waaaay too close to a white girl throwing on a feather headdress. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that way. There's a time and a place for stepping into the shoes of another real life culture (especially one that's faced such genocide and continued hardship), and a rules-lite wacky rootin' tootin' western OSR where you can blow someone's nuts off ain't it.

And yet it was these Native populations that helped shape the U.S. and its mythos just as much as the colonizers. To not include Natives in Aurelica would feel both like a disservice to the historical touchstone and frankly like erasure. By taking place in a fictional (if clearly allegorical but in some ways vastly different) setting, I can feel a little more comfortable approaching similar but fictional cultures that play such a key role in the American mythos (much like how Red Dead Redemption 2 wisely opts to use a fictional tribe in the Wapiti people). And to be clear I have no interest in portraying said native peoples as either "vicious primitives" nor "noble savages". While inspired by the fever dream of the west, it's not a game that'll send d4 whooping orcs locals at you who are out for blood, nor do I plan prepare adventures about defending against waves of natives. I simply want the Native factions of Aurelica to feel like a (albeit persecuted) people, with their own varied culture, magics, beliefs and multiplicities, just like anyone else and any other faction in this world. These Natives have similarly suffered atrocities and continued genocides, but their history is one that echoes the tragedies of U.S. history rather than attempting to accurately retell it.

The colonizers also will be getting a good deal of analogizing and amalgamating. America is a vast and diverse continent with so much detail and variation in its immigrant population that it's hard to capture it all. You'll get languages that feel like French (wip name: Francisoise) and Spanish (wip: Hispanialle) and of course English (Albish), and I'll be figuring out rough histories for what happens north and south of the frontier. But by being a fictional world I can make stuff up as I see fit to create an open world ready to tell its own history, full of new things to learn and plenty of adventures to go on.

Condensed Territory

(Again much like Red Dead Redemption) I plan on condensing this frontier a bit to cram a variety of biomes, factions, conflicts and goals onto one map. In the southern reaches you can cross the border out of Union into a country embroiled in its own civil war (yes, I know this isn't supposed to happen until 1910, these are the kinds of temporal liberties I want to take [[*2]] which is why I'm doing a fictional setting that isn't constrained by world history's timeline). In the northern reaches the fur trade is destroying the ecosystem and driving a variety of species into extinction. To the far west you'll find missionaries and a gold rush, to the east you'll see the increasingly industrialized Union in all its horrific capitalist glory. All this (hopefully) jammed on a single hexcrawl of paper, with an ocean to the West and grand river just barely visible on the Eastern border.

Horses can reasonably travel about 35 miles in a day, so my current thinking is that each hex would be 15 miles. The day itself will likely be broken into 3 or 4 chunks which I'll present my thoughts on here:

• If divided into 4 six-hour chunks, these chunks would be Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night. Dawn and Day are ideal for traveling, Dusk a perfect time to make camp and eat, and Night is when you sleep or check the stars. In havens, Dusk can also serve as ideal Saloon time. In this way a horse can travel for 2 of these Day Turns before needing rest, while an individual on foot can only travel one.
• If divided into 3 eight-hour chunks (Dawn, Day, Dusk), then Dusk becomes an all-in-one rest period. Travel per Day Turn would probably remain the same as well, which is why I'm leaning towards this division due to its simplicity.

Oh and There's Magic Too

So if this is all sounding a bit too historical, especially given that everyone is human, don't worry things do in fact get very weird. A big part of what I wanted to include is what I call Ritual Magic, which is to say magic exists but it's very delicate and often takes a lot of time and materials. If you want to blow a safe with a fireball you can do that! It just might take you a couple of hours, a live chicken and the heart of a fire elemental. Players can however learn these rituals to bless weapons, divine their location, build shelter, etx.

Additionally the world is full of Godlike beings known as Avatars that can warp reality and are often the source of worship. The Old World has plenty of Avatars that a PC might draw strength from, from Thunder Gods to River Spirits. Union itself has its own Avatar known as The Mint, which literally grants power to those who accumulate capital ((inspired by a Discord discussion on the idea of Capital as a Real God)). Avatars are physical, killable and very provable entities that drip with magic. If players are looking to do a bit of Godslaying, this is where they'd do it.

There are of course monotheistic belief systems as well, whose "Avatar" (re; God / The One Above) shows no apparent signs of corporeal existence, but who can (supposedly) save your mortal soul after death. In the far west and south of the border you'll find plenty of monasteries of the more traditional and hierarchical Ecclesio, you can even find the occasional knight who wanders the wastes in search of the redemption of their soul. But the most popular sect is that of Salvationists who claim their baptismal ritual is all you need to be purified and enter into Heaven.

Believers in the One Above all agree on one thing; The existence of Saints and their role as agents of the One Above. Saints are individuals who have been blessed by Miracles (eg: Magic that can't be traced, explained or replicated). Saints vary in scrupulousness, but the concept feels like something that can make for some exciting encounters. ((In no small part inspired by the Saint of Guns from my recent reading of the first two volumes of the Preacher comics)).

Tack onto this portals from an ancient civilization that lead into a living dungeon beneath Aurelica, lycanthropy, vampires and a fantastical ore known as Eldranium, and this world starts looking drastically less like our own. This was also a major factor of why I decided to be less-than-historical. Often Weird West stuff loses me in the ways that it changes and revises history. It all feels remarkably icky in comparison to making a clearly historically inspired setting that takes as many liberties and creative additions as it likes.

The Thing About Domain Play and Colonialism...

So speaking about icky play: Domain Play is just kinda micro imperialism and colonialism ain't it? Taking and staking land out that isn't yours in the wilderness. Establishing a base of operations. Hiring, managing. Making more money, spreading your influence. Kinda makes you the bad guy to some extent no matter how small you cut it. They can certainly join up with the native peoples to fight an encroaching empire, but I'd largely like to avoid accidentally recreating a white savior narrative (even if only a few of my PCs so far sound like they're going to be white), so that empire would likely be unbeatable for a small gaggle of fragile PCs. Even if they're working a small homestead commune it brings up environmental and land entitlement issues that are beyond the scope of this post.  But maybe being that lesser of all evils and doing your best is the best end for your PCs? Much like how Cyberpunk PCs are powerless to bring the system down (kind of).

Most of my PCs (given what I've heard from my players interested in helping me test this) will be immigrants from every which part of the globe (or the descendants thereof). This brings up the obvious issue of this whole game replicating the colonialism of the western American Frontier, much like how OD&D did the same on its borderlands. OD&D often gallantly affirmed that colonialism as the righteous (and often only written) option, and WILD is certainly trying to avoid that. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to tackle this yet as it's a complex issue; Often U.S. history looks like colonizers' freedom at the cost of natives' (and often those colonizers' freedom in and of itself is a bit of a lie as an encroaching modernized state and its capitalist industry begin to roll westward as well). There was the temptation (given it's a fictional setting) to have the land be truly empty to begin with, but not having any native presence feels icky in its own way. It's something that (from what I can tell) Frontier Scum does and I don't know how to feel about it. I do like the way the game plays with revisionist themes (despite labeling itself as an Acid Western, which I do admittedly also see) best summarized by the website's own quote:

“...it's not 'I'm a cowboy who's gonna save the town'. It's 'my socioeconomic situation has forced me into a world of murder and death, and my life is determined by the luck of the draw'.”

And I especially enjoy the looming presence of the Incorporation (and its general world building). In many respects, it's a setting whose weirdness and originality I want to take a serious page out of, as it makes the campaign feel distinct from actual history, while still clearly echoing and commenting on it. But the absence of natives (and really any distinct cultures that don't feel notably anglo) feels kind of off for a genre inspired by an era in history where so many different cultures and peoples were being stirred together. Hell, to my awareness the first cowboys were all Spanish Vaqueros. And credit where credit is due, a fair number of the names on the name table are absolute gibberish and some are even vaguely Latin sounding, but ehhhhhh.

That said, what Frontier Scum does manage to do is tactfully dodge the more colonial side of the wild west, instead dealing with an era where industry was oppressing the new common man. But I don't want to just ignore that colonialism, I almost want to engage with it to some extent. I want my players to feel like rotten barons if they start ripping up the landscape to mine for Eldranium. I'm a believer that doing the right thing often comes from the option to do the wrong thing. See also why I think a lot of the Corpo and Cop options in Cyberpunk are incredibly integral to that game's world and ethical message. The Wild West and Cyberpunk feels like they're operating under the similar logic; The pressures of survival under capitalism make monsters of us all, but how much of a monster are you willing to let yourself be? And often the ones who look the most put together and elegant are leagues more monstrous than the gruff fellow in the woods living off raw fish and elk meat.

The removal of a Native population brings up some unique monstrosities though, ones that I'm not so interested in having Players participate in or otherwise incite. In a historical setting even the most well-meaning non-Native PCs are walking time bombs full of diseases that could wipe out First Peoples even if they attempt peaceful contact. That part I'm happy to write out of a fictional setting, but I'm not sure if I should go so far as to say "Hey, in this fictional New World there's actually tons of empty land you can ethically homestead on without negotiating with the Natives! It's actually just all there empty and ripe for settling on!" Because that feels like the Manifest Destiny talking. Ugh. 

It's a complicated issue for sure, and one that's got me wondering if Domain Play (much like OD&D) is on some level always intrinsically tied to romanticizing colonialism and imperial violence. Playing a match of Sid Meier's Civilization can't detach itself from the realities of empires and the people who (sometimes unwittingly) spread them, and Domain Play largely seems to be about empire building and territory control. But maybe that's the fun? Getting to play the villain for a bit? And the ethical work comes in not condoning it, in the same way Cyberpunk doesn't condone being a sell-out Corpo, but will sure as hell let you do it. In Civ me and my friends often revel in being leaders who wage war, send missionaries  and settle new lands from our armchairs detached from the realities we're replicating. But we never feel like the good guys when we're doing it. In fact we often lean into how fucked the whole endeavor is, taking on (almost comically) megalomaniacal personas. Perhaps so too is there a joy to be found in being the union-busting railway-owning bastard getting into shoot-outs with the desperate scum who's trying to rob you (and in playing the scum trying to rob the railways). Frontier Scum only taps into the latter part for obvious reasons, but I think there's value in playing as the bigger monster in this situation. Especially if WILD is is trying to reflect OD&D, a game that's all about rising to be the biggest, strongest monster in the room. D&D largely frames that as a noble pursuit, but in WILD I'd prefer to frame it as a There Will Be Blood styled loss of humanity in the pursuit of profits. 

It's just the "land theft from a peoples being eradicated" part that I mind. I think this is an advantage of setting things during the closing of the West, when much of the killing and relocations had already taken their toll and the colonization had largely been done. Granted this might be another temporal liberty I take, accelerating the process a bit on that end and instead having players dealing with weight and living in the fallout of an ethnic cleanse that's nearly run its course. The land is empty and ripe for the taking, but you can meet the heartless NPCs who did the emptying (and they probably fancy themselves heroes despite them clearly being monsters). Feels like a good middle ground. Sure beats giving the natives green skin, portraying them as primitive savages, telling you to take the land by force then calling it a day. sigh.

Regardless I really do keep coming back Cyberpunk and the way its grim world remains mildly hopeful. The circumstances may push you to do awful things, but you can always push back and maybe make a small difference, if only for a moment, even if it costs you everything. I think in the same way Cyberpunk captures that feeling in the shadow of capitalism in the urban sprawl, I'd like to try to at least try to touch on that feeling in the shadow of both capitalism and colonialism in the vast frontier.

Some Final Notes

I'll probably do another post like this when I make more substantive progress, but hopefully this has given you a fun glimpse into my process and the world of WILD! 

Lastly I wanted to give some shout-outs:

Firstly is Ava for introducing me to Noah Caldwell-Gervais' excellent video on video game portrayals of the wild west: "Home, Home on the Console: From Red Dead Revolver to Red Dead Redemption 2" ((the Red Deads have been influential to me and this video was a great refresher and analysis)).

Nextly is Nova who's doing an ongoing series on the "Fantasy post-apocalypse western(?)" which has been a treat to follow along with (Part 1 | Part 2)

The Prismatic Wasteland series about Hexcrawls has also been hugely helpful in imagining what makes this frontier exciting to explore, and how to break it up (Part 1 | Part 2)

Lastly is Ty whose Pirate Crew post got me thinking about PCs riding out with posses of shifting morale (given the best way to get an edge in a gunfight is to have more guns).

Alright it's like 4:20 a.m. - So until next time, ride 'em cowboy~

[[*1 : As a historical aside, I decided to name the continents Aurelica in the same way America was named; as a slight modification of an Italian name. America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a scholar who deduced the New World was actually a new world. Thus I took the similar sounding Aurelio and applied a similar logic. Additionally Aurelio has associations with being "golden", thus Aurelica gains the nickname of the "Golden Lands".]]

[[*2 : A question you may ask here is "Why add in an analogous Mexican Civil War early?" Especially given that it creates such an interesting dynamic during the closing of the frontier rather than its heyday. Well initially I'd considered the setting taking place during the closing of the frontier, but that didn't quite feel like the vibe, especially if Domain Play was to be a key component there needed to be lots of uncolonized lawless land. That said having a war nearby to which the party is ostensibly neutral can create interesting play opportunities. Duck, You Sucker is also quite possibly my favorite Western so y'know, I couldn't not.]]