I built a one-shot around this idea on a heavily-modded Tiny D6 system, letting people choose which of the 4 they wanted to be with variants like wealthy or scientific Victorian, captain or gunner pirate, disgraced or retired Samurai, cattle driver or 49’er, and so forth. I set it in San Francisco to get some good conflux of cultures.
Of my 4 players, 3 of them chose to be rich Victorians. facepalm
Rip, gotta find new players
Well, you just gotta only allow one archetype per team, figure out a system for the players to draft their choice fairly, and then let the chips fall where they may.
There’s a holodeck episode in there somewhere
There’s a cowboy in Dracula
…that’s exactly where my imagination went first, and then onward to the league of extraordinary gentlemen, and then i started brainstorming elements for my eberron campaign…
Cool idea, except the pirates wouldn’t be part of it cuz the era you’re calling the “old west” didn’t start in 1800 - westward expansion was in its early beginnings then. The classic era of gunslingers and saloons and stuff was really a very brief period between the Civil War and the 1890s. Another forgotten bit of trivia about that time is that around 25% of cowboys then were black.
According to that image French privateering ended before two of those other things started, right?
Am I missing something?
I think that’s why they specified an “elderly” privateer - past their glory days.
That‘s the reason for elderly French pirate. The people involved didn’t just disappear because privateering ended.
Wait, you’re telling me that privateers don’t just grow into the hulls of their ships like Bill Turner?
Some say there are pirates to this very day, and that they sail a sea that holds no water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somalia
There are pirates right now, and they are sailing on water.
They just don’t , you know, dress up like old timey pirates.
And there’s also pirates right now who are downloading stuff they don’t own.
Elderly French pirate so they would be in in their 60s or more
I don’t think a pirate being as young as 12 would have been impossible, so they could be in their 50s too.
John King was somewhere from eight to eleven when he became a pirate.
“Gunslinger” is largely going to be after 1865, after the US Civil War. Revolvers as we know them in the old west only existed after the 1850s. The first revolvers that you would call a revolver would be about 1835. So you don’t really have the overlap for French privateer, unless it’s a former privateer.
…i think that’s why it says elderly french pirate: he was formidable in his youth, but that was four decades ago…
(revolvers may rule the day but a well-timed flintlock will still f*ck you up)
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[off topic?]
“Red Sun” Toshiro Mifune and Charles Bronson. After bandits steal a sword being carried to Washington, a samurai and a gunslinger must unite to bring it home.
This is one of my favorite underrated gems of a cowboy movie.
If you haven’t seen it, ‘The Wild Bunch’ with William Holden is a great ride.
I keep saying I’m going to play a PC based on Kingo Nonaka.
But in my version he would have also briefly been a Pacific ocean pirate during his journey from Japan to Mexico.
Or you play a system that has build a world where the age of exploration, king Arthur, the Russian revolution, the hanseatic league, the itialian city states, the spanish inquisition, and much more are all happening at the same time.
7th Sea has some wacky world building, but it stays realistic enough to be quite believable and coherent.
I was going to guess Rifts because I’ve heard crazy things about their setting, too.
RIFTS is set in the future, 300 years after an apocalypse brought magic back to earth
It’s fantasy + sci fi
There were gentleman thieves in the west too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bart_(outlaw)
I imagine he worked something like this
