Cowboy Design

With the Space Western being such a diverse genre, writing rules has proved to be difficult and it has taken years of revisions and lessons learnt to get to a solid place. Through that, a set of design principles have emerged to help guide the formation of the current rule set. In this post, I'll go over some of those concepts and also reveal some of the mechanics that these concepts have informed.

This is part 2 of a series detailing Drier Deserts, Hotter Suns, a space western rpg. Click here for part 1

DD/HS is now out on itch.io! Go download it here

Modularity, The rules should be light enough and not bound together so tightly that tearing things out or adding them screws the game. Systems should be loose while the game remains cohesive. This means that hopefully you can fit the rules to your style of play or world. There are no rules for alien species as player characters, but it should be easy enough to add that to your game. Meanwhile, removing the swordplay rules is quick and easy and doesn't kill anything else in the process. The rules are guidelines and not facts.

Rulings over Rules, in a genre as diverse as science fiction, covering all possible scenarios of play is impossible without a massive book. Instead, DD/HS encourages the referee to rule decisions on the fly. This is a classic OSR tenet which keeps the pace of the game fast.

Fast Pacing, gunfights, ship flight, and adventure in a wild-west-esque setting should be fast and the game should be able to handle that kind of speed. Combat is about as simple as a war-game, with characters rolling guns checks to beat swiftness checks.

Lethality, characters are expendable. A major part of the game is being able to fill roles (the game's versions of skills) and multitask between jobs. Losing a character means having to take on more roles and fill the holes left by a dead character, then having to train new characters in the gaps filled by switching a crew's roles around. Characters only have 6 health and guns deal 1d6 damage, so death (which may be delayed through toughness checks) is possibly quite frequent.

Feel & Theme, you should feel like your favourite planet hopping heroes and the referee should be able to use the system to convey that. Systems like Luck, quick draw, and the Captain keep add to the feel.

Easy to Use, the game is easy to use with methods for adding rules as you play more of the game. A brief intro section outlines major differences between the game and other RPGs.

These design goals should give you an idea of the rules behind DD/HS, but what is it actually like to play the game? But first! Let's tease the character sheet:

'Route all available power to the engines! Valaria, engage in evasive maneuvers'

The core of any sci-fi action game should be the action. As such, the game makes a point to be fast paced in both ground and ship combat. A main feature here is the reliance on a leader system which pits the captain into making quick and decisive calls on what his crew should be doing in any given moment of combat. If this sounds even slower and more complicated than the alternative, think about the role of a real life captain: no captain needs to know X, Y, or Z, they simply must under the native behaviors and features of each task and delegate them accordingly. While there are rules for an “Action economy” of sorts in this framework, it becomes the role of the captain to handle any consequences whilst his crew resolves individual commands. This makes the game a touch asymmetrical.

A jolt knocks Rocco nearly off the gunner seat. Blast- another hit. He fires off a final round of bolts before grabbing the spanner off the bag on his seat. Quickly springing from his seat he rushes to the rear side of the craft hoping he can cover some ground before the cap calls on him to fix the engines.

The millennium falcon serves as a prime example of how a spat of space combat works. Frantically running around trying to deal with the threat, outnumbered in all ways possible. With a tough and powerful ship, roles have to be covered by multiple people, even the captain taking double duty as the ship’s navigator planning the last second jump to hyperspace. But while the falcon can serve as a single extreme, the USS enterprise is the other. A well managed and crewed ship perfect and stoic. While my personal favourite is the more ragtag crews, any size of vessel or crew fits well into the system. And other inspirations have played a major role in forming the core concepts of the game. Ground combat comes from the quick and performative stylings of “Cowboy Bebop”, while lethal duck and cover gunplay comes from “Firefly” and more traditional westerns (“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” helps fill out the Appendix N roster). Taken together, this emulates that distinct, lawless, edge of space feel. Older iterations had "WIS" and "Constitution checks", which do little to service that feel. Your ship-based “Roles” dictate your primary skillset and the ways in which your character can contribute, while minimal other stats help aid the dire situations in which a die roll really makes sense.

Carla had just been ejected from the airlock. She has just mere moments before she dies. She’s tough, but not tough enough to handle the vacuums of space. Scippio in his sleek gold and white fighter zips around, trying desperately to reach her in time. Dawning his exo-suit helmet, he opens the glass cockpit and reaches for her, pulling her in. He closes the lid and lets his ship drift. Despite his efforts, she is already dead.

Toughness provides the ability to survive in space and on the edges of life and death. Swiftness is the ability to never get there in the first place. These two stats are fundamental to all combat with every character, ship, vehicle, and horse having a toughness and swiftness score. Another stat, Luck, grants the ability to succeed when all else fails, even running out of luck still offers chances at success: spending luck down into the negatives gives the referee a handy excuse to have a character's luck run out for good.

Hopefully this has given you, dear reader, a better idea of what Drier Deserts, Hotter Suns is all about. It was a while since the last post but for good reason, I have finally completed a first, readable version of the rules! If you are among those dying to take a look, please reach out. Otherwise, keep an eye out for the next post in this series!

The cover for this blogpost also appears as the cover for that first version of the rules. It's a schematic drawing of SkyLab. 

In part 3 I go over the making of the game, the failed prototypes, and talk about the release. Click here to read it!