The Blessed can call upon Miracles to do the work of the Lord, Shamans bargain with spirits for magical favours, whilst Hucksters have learned the real secrets of Hoyle’s Book of Games to cast ‘Hexes’ that they hide behind hands of playing cards. In the years since, evil has spread across and infected the land, literally altering it be a darker, twisted place monsters and other things stalk the land, including hostile Indian spirits, undead gunslingers, and strange cults and magic has returned, practised by the Blessed, Hucksters, and Shamans. Specifically it described an America in its centennial year, 1876, with the appearance and then spread of horrors at Gettysburg on July 3rd, 1863, having served to prolong the Civil War and permanently divide the United States of America into the United States of America and the Confederate States of America with great swathes of disputed territory between them. Released at GenCon that year, Deadlands: The Weird West Roleplaying Game, the first RPG from Pinnacle Entertainment Group, heralded a renaissance in the hobby and the industry that would last until the release of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition and into the d20 System bubble beyond.įamously inspired by Brom’s cover for the then-unreleased Necropolis: Atlanta, a supplement for White Wolf Publishing’s Wraith: The Oblivion RPG, the setting for Deadlands: The Weird West Roleplaying Game combined two genres-horror with the wild west. Certainly the year 1995 will not be remembered for any RPG of note, but 1996 would be a whole other matter as would the years that followed in the lead up to the end of the millennium. Its popularity meant that the sales of other games, such as RPGs, suffered, whilst other publishers focused their attention of replicating the success of Magic: the Gathering instead of on either their existing games or on developing new games.

Primarily this was due to the effect of the first collectable card game, Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: the Gathering.

By 1996, the Roleplaying industry was in the doldrums.

Deadlands weird west