DODGING TROPES

  Hello, folks! Like the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, after a japanese hack I ended turning my eyes to a western hack. Although it seems natural sequence, it wasn't planned at first

After Muramasa, I wondered if there was enought time for me to submit a second hack at the 24XX Jam. What you should I use as basis?...Hmmm...What if it's something I can somehow mix the previous one...*Spark* Wasn't there a sentence about samurai, gunslinger and other 'historical rpg classes' coulb be all at a scenario/campaign and still be historically accurate?

Then I came to my first set of data: the samurai and old west era both existed during the 1800s. Perfect! *Spark* Maybe i can do a series of games in this century >.>...

Back to Beeple portfolio I started looking for an image that could go as western setting and I came by this one. It fitted perfectly except there was no cowboy hat at the image, but it was so close to a western that I was able concot a solution

Original version by Beeple

Just like Muramasa had some fantasy flavor to it, I choose to go with weird west, so I could just drop anything between magic and dinossaurs (?!). 

Even so, when I was doing my research, I came across some tropes that I wanted to get apart from (like native american was frequentlty the villain in old 50s movies). Also, to avoid being just the vanilla law officers I opted to make the players outlaws...Which doesn't necessarily implicate they are bad or evil...is just they dont fit in how the law was handle at the in-game world. Hence, named the game Outlaw.

Even with all that in my mind, the fisrt version was still somewhat biased in some sensitive ways that I was totally unaware of. Blesse be the jam hosts, who were kind enough to warn and advice me that the game would be better with some tweaks. I promptly changed it and a note regarding ethnicity. I felt much more comfortable with the final version. So this is a heads-up from a beginner, even when you think you know what you doing, if you're writing about sensitive topics (like how ethnic groups are portrayied in any kund of media), think twice. Some may say that's discouragement to make games around those. I particularly like to think of it as much as challenge to be a better designer as an exercise to put myself in the shoes of another.

Wow, that was a much more serious tone than I intended. *coughs*.

Like I said, I wanted to give the player some magical trinkets too. Wondering which kind to do made remember a movie from the 90s: Lightning Jack, a western outlaw comedy with Paul Hogan and Cuba Gooding Jr. Paul Hogan character is very supertitious and have some charms/amulets that help or protect him. So, in Outlaw, the gunslingers have access to charms that protect them even when they are unaware of danger. The setback is that there is a cooldown to recharge.

Lightning Jack (1994) - 'never miss' amulet

 Armed with guns and trinkets, all was missing was mounts. Instead of creating other animals beside horses, I just went with a mesh with classical and bonkers colors. Wanna a purple body horse with red hair? Be my guest. It doesnt travel dimensions though.

The back pages/GM session, I tried something maybe bold confusing: the jobs are situations where any party involved might want to hire the players. So if the situation is 'Cattle being escorted through a long distance', the players cand either do the escorting or do the robbery. That way the players can be 'as outlaws as they want'

This one I'm satisfied with final game but maybe I tweak a detail here or there.