Description
Tales of the Old West Core Rulebook
Welcome to Tales of the Old West. Where life is hard, life is short, and don’t owe you a goddamn thing.
But you are extraordinary. Neither race nor gender can limit what you can become. It don’t matter where you come from, it’s the West that makes you. There are no monsters but other folk, and only the dead forget the land is your enemy.
What’s in Tales of the West?
This comprehensive core book contains everything you need to create an adventure for you and your compadres in the American West of fiction, film and history. The rules expand the acclaimed Year Zero Engine to help you create diverse characters, to build your reputation, your home, your business, your family, and a thriving community.
A note on history from the authors
The nineteenth century American West is a challenging place to set a roleplaying game. The period includes a civil war dominated by the clash over whether dark-skinned people were people or not. It’s also marked by the treatment of Native Americans as “savages”. It sidelines the millennia of Native American influence on the land, along with that of Mexican and Hispanic cultures.
The myth of the West, particularly in cinema, has tended to portray the protagonists as exclusively of white European descent. The history is overlaid with iconic representations that whitewash the cowboy, and for the most part portrayed Native American culture as antithetical to Anglo civilization. As two white boys from England, we can’t expect to do justice to all these issues, but we hope to make this game accessible to as wide an audience as possible. So, we have done our best to be respectful of the real history, and to reflect all the people in the US and the western territories at that time, without stereotyping anyone. We have, however, made a game that is intended to be fun, and we hope we got the balance right. If you think we can do better, tell us. We are keen to learn.
Dave & Matthew