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I was working at a game distributor when Deadlands came out, and the first copy I pulled out of the box went into the \u201cmine\u201d pile as soon as I skimmed a few pages. While the game didn\u2019t quite live up to my expectations in actual play (mostly because the system had so many moving parts that it slowed the story to a crawl), I was just happy to see I wasn\u2019t the only one who enjoyed Joe Lansdale and Tim Truman\u2019s take on Jonah Hex way too much. I even read through the preview copy of Werewolf: Wild West that White Wolf sent us at a time when White Wolf players annoyed me almost as much as they annoy…well, pretty much everyone I\u2019ve ever met who worked for White Wolf.<\/p>\n
Side note: at the time, I thought that maybe the hole in the book was there to mark it as a \u201cnot for sale\u201d copy or something, but when the shipment arrived we discovered that they not only meant to do that, but probably paid the printer extra to drill a goddamn hole in the book. I think it was supposed to be a bullet hole, but some kind of art around the hole (maybe scorch marks or \u201cedge of a bullet hole\u201d art or something) probably would have made it clearer that the books hadn\u2019t been part of a bizarre drill press accident.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the point is that Clanbook: Tzimiisce\u2019s back cover art wasn\u2019t the only really stupid idea White Wolf had in the 90s. Wait….that\u2019s not the point. That can\u2019t be the point. If I start making fun of White Wolf, we\u2019ll be here all night making \u201cOh, such hair!\u201d jokes. The point is I like the weird west genre enough to read most of a World of Darkness book with a dumbass hole drilled through it when I didn\u2019t have anything better to do at work. I like the Cowboys & Dead Things genre, so it was really inevitable that eventually I\u2019d decide to do my own thing with it. That thing was the Six-Gun Seven.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember the exact origin of the Six-Gun Seven, but the modern-day version of them made its first appearance in the \u201cother monster hunters\u201d section of M-Force and the Old West version was a Qik Start game in QAGS 2E, where their fearless leader Jake \u201cSix-Gun\u201d Sawyer appeared as a sample character. Since then they\u2019ve been mentioned in a handful of Hex products and I\u2019ve run a few con games featuring them, but that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n
In terms of Idea Debt, The Six-Gun Seven is kind of like a credit card that\u2019s had a $1 balance for the last 20 years. There\u2019s probably an outline and a few notes somewhere on my hard drive, but most of the \u201cwork\u201d I\u2019ve put into it outside of entries for other books has been idle speculation. For example, to get around the fact that most people don\u2019t want to play pre-gens, the game will be set up with an ever-shifting membership with the only constants being that Jake Sawyer is the leader (though he can be more of an M\/Old Man With An Eyepatch type of character if nobody wants to play him) and there are seven members. I\u2019ve also got ideas for (way more than seven) sample members, some sample adventures, settings, and all that good stuff, but nothing\u2019s down on paper. It\u2019s an idea I want to do something with, but haven\u2019t really put much work into.<\/p>\n
So why haven\u2019t I? Part of it is the \u201cold idea\u201d thing where it\u2019s been around so long that the initial excitement is long gone until I watch a Western and start thinking about it again. Unfortunately, that usually happens when I\u2019m knee-deep in some other project that I need to get done. Another reason it\u2019s never really made it to even the Books of Lore stage is that there\u2019s an element of the \u201cit\u2019s D&D, ONLY BETTER!\u201d problem. While the idea isn\u2019t a Deadlands clone (I’ve been doing Old West horror since before Deadlands existed, and there a lot of things I\u2019d do differently in terms of tone and world design), it fills the same niche as Deadlands, and Deadlands has been the standard for 20 years or so. That means the potential audience isn\u2019t so much \u201cgamers who like the weird west\u201d as \u201cgamers who like the weird west and aren\u2019t already playing Deadlands.\u201d So I\u2019d basically be writing it for me, a few of the other Hex folks, and a handful of QAGS fans. While anyone familiar with the Hex product line<\/a> already knows that we have no qualms about writing games that exist mostly for our own amusement (it’s not like Fratboys, magical hobos, and the comics of Fletcher Hanks are wildly popular among gamers), we tend to stick to ideas that fit a niche that isn\u2019t already filled with an 800-pound gorilla.<\/p>\n The Six Gun Seven would fit in nicely with Hobomancer, American Artifacts, and a few other pieces of Idea Debt I\u2019ve got floating around, but since the basic concept has already been done well by someone else, it\u2019s at the end of the line. The ideas that haven\u2019t been done as RPGs will come first because they\u2019re more exciting to work on and more likely to sell. Since a couple of those are Hobomancer-size projects, my weird west game idea isn\u2019t going to become an Actual Product any time soon (but I still hope to do it one of these days).<\/p>\n
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