Wild West Campaign 2025-2026 (October-January).
Back in late October I corralled 4 men of good character and cajoled them into joining another one of these campaigns.
Remembrance of the Wild West (partial) ACKs Campaign 2025-2026 (October-January).
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| This what the players saw after the campaign ended. There is a lot of information on the map that I as judge was the only one parsing, which probably could have been handled differently. The map is a chunk of the midwest, a chunk southwest desert and a chunk of mountains from Utah, moved a bit closer to the Mississippi for the right mix. |
Back in late October I corralled 4 men of good character and cajoled them into joining another one of these campaigns.
Given previous successes and failures (not recorded to the blog) I wanted a system that would minimize player vs player conflict, yet allowing that to occur if the players were especially interested in the system. As such much of the rules were explicitly intended to work without referee oversight and let the players solo play the logistical elements of the campaign, and use our homegrown quest system as this has consistently one of the most beloved parts of campaigns by both the players and referee. Following lessons learned from previous campaigns I had some success with asking the player to write out a number of quest entries and generating a few of the outlaws that would haunt this timeline.
The ruleset can be read here but it is best summarized as a victory point collector, through money collection, farming, hunting, building infrastructure (railways), winning skirmishes (using a modified version of ACKs domains of War) and show downs (using a horribly vicious mortal wounds table of my own design.). The whole effect was meant to allow us to potentially play 2 turns in a week, with 1 turn a week being the expected norm.
From a referee’s perspective this was not quite achieved. While technically one of the lighter cognitive loads in a campaign, the Wild West is not my most preferred area of history and the lack of military level maneuvers was starting to grate on me… aside from some IRL traveling that made processing the turns even slower (instead of the hoped for 2 turns per week, we actuated closer to 2 turns per 3 weeks). We also took just about 2 and half weeks off due to mutual sickness around Christmas and the New Year. A different, more hardbitten gun-slinger Judge could have made a much better Wild West out of this than I managed.
Per the wisdom of BROSR I decided to close the campaign with a CONVERGENCE. That is to say, the regular rules are put into an abeyance and are superseded by a concluding set of rules with a phone call with the available players. Essentially, the players were asked to shift from regular cowpuncher, to cattle barons of such importance that they could provide a governing hand to the prairie and fight off a coalition of chaotic tribesmen. Not everyone joined in on the CONVERGENCE, but those who were able to really seemed to enjoy it.
The actual campaign’s events, are recorded in scoring order by three out of the players for this campaign, if you go here.
Campaign Art and Generated Art
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| A sort of stylistic interpretation/generation of one of the more rough 'quests' on the prairie. 'The Painted Bear' ended up killing 30 cowboys and injuring the woman with them. |
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| A screenshot one of my friends found that shows how one of the players was solving his problems. |
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| Some characters added to expand the milieu of the campaign, less recognizable than the Lone Ranger cameos that also occurred. |
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| The image of the final army going out to defend one of the U.S. Forts. |
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| One of the factions set the prairie on fire to avoid direct conflict. They were not attacked, so by that metric they made the correct choice! |
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