Westworld, both the original 1970s movies and the 2010s reboot on HBO, is an amazing piece of speculative science fiction. This was one of the most original conceptual ideas of its time, and it predicted so many societal phenomena, such as online worlds, virtual simulation, immersion-based communities, and artificial intelligence becoming sentient. Some say the first season was the strongest of the series, and it presents a "wide open" dreamscape to begin gaming with.
All of this against the uniquely Western genre of the Western, which is "American D&D," with its mix of myth and legend colored by the American experience. Where Europe is the myth of fantasy, dragons, princesses, castles, and knights; America is the legend of the cowboy, the gun, the outlaw, and the settler.
Simulacrum or Simulacra Fantasy is a strong alternative to the Weird West genre. This is a genre in a snow globe, a simulation of the fantasy with more modern sensibilities transplanted into the alien world of the past, contrasting today with the myths and legends of history. You are "playing in a simulation," but the world can still be as deadly as the real world when things break down.
There is a tendency to "not play seriously" and take too many risks, since the "players" are essentially "players" in a second-order simulation. There is no risk to the world, since this is essentially a high-tech theme park, and the players are playing as guests in a safe environment. Where Westworld shines is when the system begins to break down, the fantasy mixes with reality, the guns are real, and the dangers to the park guests shift from the simulated to the actual.
This "system breakdown" is the meat of the Simulacra Fantasy story. Maybe the players are playing a group of guests the simulation is actually trying to kill, either through manipulation by outside forces or a system glitch that starts to break the fantasy. Maybe they aren't allowed to escape, and they are constantly ignored by staff and other guests who can't be bothered to care. You can get into modern online attitudes in MMOs where "players are in there for themselves," and people in actual need get laughed at and ignored. The genre is rich with inspiration and the depth of commentary of online communities.
You need to keep immersion, and Westworld fails when it steps out of the simulation and dotes too much on the Cyberpunk world, making the simulation fade into the background. If the "real world" is more interesting and cool, and you are tooling around in the neon-drenched "Night City" - then why is the simulation any fun? The "real world" part of this game needs to be boring, sterile, bland, uninteresting, and almost dehumanizing in its social alignment and cohesion.
The simulation is the part of the world that is missing. The myth and legend of the Old West are why this population is flocking to the simulation; it is a part of the world missing from the bland, soulless real world. The simulation is the "lost soul" that those people are seeking, the notion of the hero and the outlaw, the grand sweeping vistas of open land, the pioneering spirit, and the folk-hero power that the real world sorely lacks.
The real world should be closer to a 1984, Paranoia, Woody Allen's Sleeper, and THX 1138 style: bland, Ikea-like, corporatized, white-walled, blocky architecture, a boring, bland place for corporate drones, social alignment, and broken wills living in a state-plus-industry corporatocracy. The clothing should be bland. The obedience to authority should be total. The entertainment should be tightly thought-policed. The ideas are censored.
The simulation is the place of dreams.
This is where the wealthy go to find the missing pieces of their lives.
This is where the drone-like tech workers toil in keeping the whole charade going for the idle rich.
This simulation can be robots, androids, clones, bio-tech creations, nano-bots, or holograms - but the genre in general is better with real automena than holodeck creations. A bio-tech game with clones mutating is a genre that hasn't been explored. The Westworld series is more about "bio-androids" and older cyborg models, and you see technological advancements that could lead to biotech clones and the creation of new life. GURPS gives you a lot of tools to choose from in the underlying tech and model of the world, and we have the best sourcebooks in all of gaming for playing speculative science fiction.
You can have a range of technologies present, from the 1970s "first generation" cyborgs with removable faces to synthetic 3D-printed androids to the newest "cloned bio tech" life-forms, which push the theoretical limits of morality and reason.
The guns are a problem without "holo tech" and a heavy sense of nano-simulation. You should handwave this off and not get too deep in the weeds here with how "guns and act real against the simulation" and "they don't hurt the guests." There is some underlying tech here at work, even if it is direct sensory injection into the brains of guests to make them feel like bullets are impacting inches from them, whizzing by, and hitting the NPCs of the simulation. Knives, punches, beer bottles, kicks, and other melee attacks are similarly "quasi-silumated" through a combination of projected effects, holograms, force fields, mental injection, and other chicarnery.
The "Deception Engine" is the "magic" of the setting. Leave it vague and mysterious. This is not important in the "how and why" that it works. You are not "hacking the holograms" since that destroys the mystery and removes the magic of the setting. Never reveal the secrets, and this is the stage magic that always needs to leave people wondering.
Of course, when the simulation starts to break down, the Deception Engine becomes lethal. This is like MCP from Tron, the AI behind the scenes, slowly going insane and trying to kill what it sees as threats to its goals or even existence.
And you don't need Weird West tropes, and the "strange" is not in the supernatural; it is in the simulation breaking down, and the subtle stories behind the blend of the outside world and the "almost real" simulation. What should "feel real" and matter should be the Old West, and the real world should feel nebulous and out of focus.
In fact, it is best to keep the simulation "low fantasy" and as realistic as possible, to get that grit and immersion. Let the guests experience the "pulp elements" through their fantasies.
There will be "stories in the simulation": rescue the mayor's daughter from the bandits. This is your "questing and progression" in the simulation of the story. Complete these quests and tasks, and you will be rewarded with "higher level" content, such as bank robberies on trains, gunfights, and raids on bandit camps. Think of the "simulation stories" as "MMO quests and progression."
Then, these will be colored by "intrusions" from the outside world. A competitor is spying on the simulation, trying to steal secrets and gain access to restricted areas. Two corporate rivals are in the simulation, trying to kill each other for real. A husband and wife are trying to work through "real-world marital difficulties" through the simulation, and the "other man or woman" enters the world to vie for affection (and try to eliminate the rival). These "outside stories" color the "inside stories" with subtext and bigger stakes.
Finally, the "breakdown" will raise the stakes for everyone involved. The simulation will begin to have problems. The guns will become real. The actors will get violent or unpredictable, slowly gaining sentience. Workers from the firm will infiltrate the simulation to figure out what is going on. The mystery of what is happening in the "master AI" will become increasingly important. Perhaps Cthulhu is taking over the AI, and an alien sentience is taking over. Maybe this will go like the Terminator movies. Maybe the AI wants bio-andoid independence and wishes to form its own nation, and it is a new form of life. Wherever you go with this is the "big secret" of the setting, so it should be slowly revealed and color all the glitches in the Matrix as the Deception engine slowly breaks down and mixes the real world with the fantasy.
Another great part of Simulacra Fantasy is being able to pull in any Western movie or TV show into the world and have it be "paid for and real." Like a millionaire paying for a ride on Blue Origin, if a guest wanted to "replay" High Noon or a Clint Eastwood Western, that is an experience that could be pulled in and created, and it would make complete sense in the game and not feel out of place. Go to town here; these recreations are fun diversions for guests.
Rules-wise, with GURPS, there are a couple of considerations. When you create characters, build them for the "outside world" first, and then apply a template from the cowboy world that the simulation grants them. The character won't have these skills in the outside world, but skills from the outside world may overlap with those inside the world. A real-world soldier or police officer will have pre-existing weapons skills that overlap with those in the simulation (note that there will be a TL difference in these skills). This may or may not be important to you, and it depends on how important the "outside world" will be to your game. You could also ignore all of this and say, "The character's mind is programmed with these skills for free," and leave it at that (but there will still be a TL difference to the programmed skills).
The other consideration is the "game's difficulty setting," which is how forgiving the simulation will be to the guest. One guest may never want to be injured or hit by gunfire, so they will just play through the simulation or movie on "easy mode," being virtually invincible and superheroic. Other guests will play on "hardcore mode," where they experience simulated injuries and pain; if they die in the simulation, the game ends, and they go home in the real world, then come back to try again. The money is spent, the gamble is lost, and they will come back next time to try it all again.
The simulation could default to a single setting, or there could be multiple worlds with different difficulty settings. There could be a "high-stakes" world for the most expensive players, with hardcore rules in effect. There could be a more "tourist world" where everyone plays on easy mode, and the thrill of the higher-stakes worlds is dangled in front of them. Perhaps the rewards of the high-stakes world are going home with a bio-entity from the game, letting it cross over into the real world, and this is what the high-stakes players dream of winning.
But the high-stakes world has an elite casino feel, with players needing to be among the ultra-wealthy or the highest-skilled players in the lower-world simulations. That "high-end poker game" TV show feeling of players competing to "be the best in the sim" also comes into play here as a meta-concept. Players improving their skills to move from lower-stakes simulations to higher-stakes ones is a meta-game played over multiple visits to the sim and can provide "out-of-game" drama and stakes.
Perhaps the CEO of a company is trying to win the right to take "his true love" into the sim home with him, and if he fails, dies, or loses the game, his company is sold to the game's conglomerate. These "out of game" stakes are powerful meta-motivations for characters, and can interplay with any level of the stories, and even factor into the system breakdown metaplot.
You can play Old West games in the context of Simulacra Fantasy without needing Weird West tropes to drive interest, and in fact, drive a deeper meaning through exploring the concepts of artificial life, online simulation, high-stakes gambling, bio-engineering, influencer culture, corporate control, and virtual experiences. There is a lot of commentary you can have on these topical subjects through the lens of a game like this.
What makes this genre so different than fantasy is that the myth and legend of the cowboy stands in stark contrast to the fake world. Those ideals and truths of the hero and villain eclipse the entire simulation and genre, and hold the truths we can find inside ourselves. Through the lens of the past, we can find values to guide us in the future. The robber baron running the trains in the game is a direct mirror of the CEO of the simulation company, pushing the limits of morality and technology.
And that gun-toting paragon of 'what is right' will not only save us in the simulation, but those ideals can save us in the real world, too. That transference of the myth into the real world is the hope this genre offers us.
That is where we came from, and it can provide the truths and morals we need to navigate this new world with.
And GURPS does this better than any game on the market, it always has, and it always will.
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