Deadlands: Hell on Earth RPG

Overall score:

Publisher: Pinnacle Entertainment Group

I haven’t played Dead Lands: The Weird West. There – I admitted it and it felt good. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to play it – I have. It’s a very attractive RPG with a cool setting, unique mechanics, and high production values. Plus, I’ve wanted to believe in the existence of a really cool Old West RPG since the untimely demise of TSR’s Boot Hill in the early ‘80s (and subsequent painfully brief resurrection in the mid-90s). And, needless to say, White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Old West did nothing to ease my pain, and GURPS Old West and FGU’s Wild West were too derivative and flavorless. When I received a review copy of Hell On Earth, I began salivating uncontrollably at the prospect of a hybrid of Old West roleplaying and one of my other favorite genres: post-holocaust survival. I haven’t had a chance to play-test the game but, based on my reading of the book, this product is little more than mildly disappointing.

Hell On Earth is set in one possible future of the original Dead Lands setting, where bombs of a supernatural/radioactive material called Ghost Rock have been dropped on the cities of America, unleashing the Reckoners (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) and their hellish minions on the world. The game puts the players in the middle of this new "old west" setting, trying to fight off the forces of evil with their wits and a variety of supernatural powers (natural descendents of those found in the original Dead Lands game). Mechanically, this game’s a bit of a mess; thematically, it has its ups and downs, which is almost more upsetting to me than an outright failure because this material has quite a bit of potential.

Appearance
No, I’m not being shallow by addressing "looks" first – the outward appearance of this product is probably going to keep it out of the hands of gamers more than any other single factor. If you saw this book on the shelf at your local RPG shop, you probably wouldn’t feel like picking it up. The cover is a terrible mottled lemon-lime color with one of the most amateurish paintings I’ve seen on the front of a major-release RPG. In spite of this terrible cover, however, the interior of the book is up to Pinnacle’s high standards. The character archetypes and monsters receive full-color glossy plates, and several (much better than the cover) paintings are found inside as well. The other interior graphics are spotty but above average on the whole, and the book’s layout is nice and simple.

Mechanics & Rules
The rule system of the Dead Lands games is, if not overly impressive, at least quite novel. The rule system calls for dice (of course), but also a deck of cards, a box of poker chips (three colors), and multi-colored paper clips. That’s right – I said paper clips. I haven’t tried to run a game with this many physical components flying around the table, but I imagine it would take a gamemaster with quite a bit of administrative talent to keep everything in order. The use of playing cards is a cute touch and adds to the Old West feel as players cross their fingers hoping to draw that ace of spades, but the other props turn the game into an exercise in montessorian roleplaying.

The designers of the game tweaked the original Dead Lands rules a little, but these changes were apparently unsuccessful - the errata published later on Pinnacle’s website recommended ignoring these innovations and using the original Dead Lands rules without modification. The task-resolution system is fairly standard: players attempt to roll higher than a target number (which is modified based on the task’s difficulty). The open-ended rule for rerolling "aces" (high number on the die) and adding the results allows the characters to accomplish marvelous feats at times, but it can backfire as well. A flesh wound can cause a PC to pass out on the spot on a "lucky" roll by the GM against the character’s Wind (resilience) attribute.

The attribute system is a little odd as well, especially where the traditional Dexterity attribute is concerned. Hell On Earth uses three dexterity-related attributes: Deftness, Quickness, and Nimbleness. Some people complain that dexterity is too general to be a single attribute, but this three-way split shows that dividing dexterity into multiple traits can be problematic as well. The rules are never completely clear on where to draw the lines between the different characteristics, and the division of skills among them doesn’t really clarify things either. The skills seem to have been distributed without much consideration of where they actually belong in a lot of cases. Why does Bluff fall under Smarts instead of Mien (charisma)? Why does Artillery fall under Cognition when Shootin’ falls under Deftness? Why aren’t there any skills at all linked to Strength or Vigor?

Some of these choices seem a little odd, but they wouldn’t be terribly damaging to game play, and gamemasters who have played Dead Lands probably already have house rules in place to account for most quirks found here. In addition, Pinnacle recently released a version of the game for the d20 system, which probably replaces these peculiarities with a totally different set of problems.

Character Generation
The character generation system in Hell On Earth is an interesting mix of point allocation and "luck of the draw." It really is a "draw," too, because players draw cards to determine their attribute levels – the number of the card determines the type of die to be associated with that attribute, and the suit of the card determines the number of dice that get rolled. This means that the high card is not always better: drawing a six (d6) of spades (4 rolls) results in an attribute of 4d6, which is slightly better than an ace (d12) of diamonds (2 rolls). After this, players use points to buy edges and hindrances (advantages and disadvantages), as well as skills.

The edges and hindrances allow players to create interesting, quirky, well-rounded characters with individualized backgrounds. The book gives many ideas for character concepts: gunslingers, road warriors, Native Americans, savages, taletellers, etc. Players can mix and match things to make these character types their own with a lot of flexibility. However, there are four very rigid special character types that are offered as well, and these "classes" are interesting enough that the majority of players will gravitate toward them and ignore the more general character types. These classes are Doomsayers (mutant radiation wizards), Junkers (jury-rigging mad scientists), Templars (religious healer/heroes), and Psykers (psychic warriors bred by the government to fight aliens). These special classes each have their own set of rules and special requirements, but they also offer a wide range of supernatural powers. These high-powered classes require the player to make a specific allocation of points; as a result, players don’t get as much latitude in personalizing their characters.

Given the choice between playing a normal person with a lot of individuality or a character with little inherent personality but the power to nuke things with his/her mind, players will usually go for the latter. It’s unfortunate that Hell On Earth forces players to make that choice, and I think there must be a way to have avoided this problem (as Wizards attempted to do by beefing up the non-Jedi classes in the new Star Wars RPG). Also, it seems like Pinnacle has intentionally left other high-powered character classes like toxic shamans and cyborgs out, to make later expansion books more attractive. The character generation system has everything you need to make a good player character, but it’s a flawed system with a serious lack of balance.

Setting
The setting is really what makes this game – it provides a unique flavor of apocalyptic roleplaying that you are not going to be able to create easily outside of this game. However, the setting is conspicuously absent from this book – tidbits of information are scattered through the different sections, but no single chapter gives a well-rounded vision of what’s going on in the world. To make it worse, details of the setting described in Dead Lands: The Weird West are mentioned in vague terms (The Maze? Hellstromme? Hunting Grounds?), further frustrating players who took a chance on this product without playing its predecessor first. The circumstances surrounding the setting are murky in places, but the lack of specific geography is even more frustrating. No single place is described with enough detail to make it a playable milieu without extensive work on the part of the gamemaster.

Why is everything so vague? It was done purposefully by Pinnacle to necessitate the purchase of the Hell On Earth World Book, which the rulebook promises is the only expansion book you’ll ever need to buy for Hell On Earth. I don’t know about you, but I don’t buy that for one second – Pinnacle has long been famous for telling you that you only need to buy this one book and that’s it, and then that book contains some frustrating hole that "encourages" you to buy the next book. For instance, the rulebook purports to be a self-contained RPG, but really it contains the rules but not the setting for a game where the setting IS the whole game. The setting is very specific, and it helps to have a good understanding of the original Dead Lands, but it can be a very rewarding setting if you can really get into it. It’s not a good game for running a very generic Road Warrior-type game, but it allows for a unique mix of mutant cowboys, messianic fanatics, and radioactive cultists that couldn’t be recreated by any other game.

The setting also creates a very easy structure for creating elementary adventures. The Reckoners (Four Horsemen) have gained power over the country and turned it into a Dead Land through fear, and their minions are charged with keeping the people in this state of fear. As the player characters destroy these minions and free the people from this tyranny of terror, the land slowly becomes a living, healthy land again. A new gamemaster can design adventures to fit this concept simply by coming up with a terrorized community and a terrorizing monster. This scenario would become tedious if repeated ad nauseum, but there is plenty of material alluded here to allow more experienced gamemasters to design complex epic campaigns.

A gamemaster’s greatest challenge in running Hell On Earth would likely be balancing the competing tones of post-war anarchy, supernatural horror, bucolic Old West nostalgia, and campy humor. The rulebook pushes all of these themes at different points, and it would be hard to run a campaign serving up each in equal portions. Horror is an inherent part of the setting, so it cannot be eliminated, and the game is too Old West-centric to avoid that aspect entirely. Doing so would defeat the game’s purpose, anyway. As I mentioned earlier, this game seems to challenge a gamemaster’s managerial skills, and this juggling of themes is simply another set of variables for him/her to keep straight.

Conclusion
There’s no doubt that a roleplaying group could have a ton of fun playing this game. The problem is that the designers of the game haven’t made it particularly easy to enjoy. The game’s setting is rich and unique, though, and the effort required to make this game playable could be worthwhile and tremendously rewarding, especially for players with the benefit of previous Dead Lands experience. The book’s $30 price tag is a bit heavy for the hit-and-miss content, but Pinnacle’s current special offer (unloading their unsuccessful products to make some quick cash) provides the World Book and Gamemaster’s Screen with the rulebook for that same price. This offer provides a much better value, but I still can’t wholeheartedly endorse the game as an advisable purchase. In my opinion, it’s an interesting oddity that comes up one card short of an inside straight.

Written by Nathan Jennings on July 31st, 2002