GURPS: Old West, Adventure Ideas

Yee-haw! Today, we are rustlin' up adventures and adventure ideas from a few different Western-themed RPGs and converting them all over to GURPS. There is a severe shortage of stock, no high-falutin' magic, none of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo, rough and tumble Western adventures, but there is gold in them thar hills if you know where to look.

So we are looking for Wild West adventures with no magic, and they don't have to be for GURPS. They just need a plot, characters, situations, and an adventure progression. A great campaign starting location is also a massive plus for our adventure cattle drive. We will do all the converting to GURPS ourselves; getting our hands dirty down here on the wagon train isn't anything new to us 3d6 cowboys.

The fact that I started this roundup with the classic Boot Hill meant something. Well, there are five solid adventures for that system, y'all can throw a lasso around and round up for your Old West adventure collections. These also have the advantage of being free from all that hocus-pocus magic and weird west tomfoolery, and they are a straight-shootin, rootin-tootin good time.

Now, Mad Mesa here is a solo adventure! This means you can create yourself a GURPS 4th Edition cowpoke, saddle hand, saloon gal, vagrant, cattle rustler, bank robber, or some other man with no name and run him or her through this adventure all by your lonesome! You can read the entries, make your choices, and perform minimal conversions to make all this work according to GURPS rules.

Heck, rustle up a free copy of GURPS Ultra Lite (GUL) if you wanna create bad guys for your six-gun to blast at! This is right fine for creating NPCs as well, and even vamints like wolves and rattlesnakes can be quickly thrown together using this little book of guidelines. This works seamlessly with the full GURPS rules, and will get you quick stats for any character in this here solo adventure, or any of these other adventures you rustle up.

I hear you saying, Prove it! Alrighty, here's my GUL rattlesnake for ya, using three levels as my base:

• ST: Weak (8 HP, d6/2 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Rattlesnake Skill: 2 levels (+8)
• Rattler Poison: 1 level (+4)

Wut? Reading GUL, that rattler will attack at a -6 for a skill that needs training, so that blasted snake in the grass's base attack will be DX + skill - 6, or doing the math we get: 12 + 8 - 6, or a 14- to-hit. Pretty dangerous! It doesn't do much damage (d6/2 + 2), but the poison is where it gets you.

I used a skill level to give that varmint a special ability for rattler poison, which I am sure you could find in one of the GURPS bestiaries, but I treated it like a skill here for a quick-and-dirty pick. If a creature has a special attack or ability, treat it like a skill and throw a level or two at it. Note: Use a contested roll with the skill level for poison creature HT + skill - 6 versus character HT, which is 14 + 4 - 6 = 12- on a contested roll.

Yes, skills can utilize any ability, and even multiple ones, such as a giant spider with a web attack that has a to-hit based on DX and an entanglement level based on ST. And skill levels can be used to buy creature special abilities, attacks, and defenses. Damage? Use the STR table for the ability, plus levels of skill.

Of course, that snake is dumb as a box of rocks, so you could distract it by tossing a river stone past it and watching it snap at it, and that may give you a chance to bean that scaley viper with a camp shovel. Just remember to skin the thing for meat and its hide; the town trading post may give you a few buffalo nickels for that.

That rattler works with the full GURPS rules, too! And your players will be none the wiser, you are building these with the quick ruleset and not flipping through books to find this critter. This will mean faster play, a still true-to-GURPS experience, and using a supported and official system to guesstimate NPC and creature statistics. Guesstimate is one of those words that those folks from Philly use, and it means to spit in the wind and get a hankerin'.

If yer' not using GURPS Ultra Lite fer' your games, you are doin' a whole lotta work you don't need to be doin. Most NPCs and critters don't need to be designed using a fancy character sheet program, and these rules we got in this one-page game work just fine for 95% of anything you need.

Want more proof? Here's my GUL grizzly bear, and I will use five levels since these are supposed to be very dangerous predators of the wilds:

• ST: Very Strong (18 HP, 3d6 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Grizzly Skill: 2 levels (+8)

Woo doggy! That grizzly attacks on a 12 + 8 - 6 = 14- but does a whalloping 3d6+2 damage per hit.  This is a massive, legendary bear; for normal ones, I could do one less level of ST for 2d6+2 damage and 14 HP, and up the DX by a level.

Wait one second! You designed a rattler and a grizzly using the same GUL design system, and did it in less than a minute? And these work well enough with the main rules; no one knows the difference? That's faster than flipping through a 5E Monster Manual and taking 30 minutes to read a whole stat block! People who say GURPS is too complicated are full of hogwash. Making NPCs and monsters in GURPS is easier than 5E, B/X, or any other game on the market.

In fact, GUL is the key to quickly playing and converting these adventures on the fly, with a minimum of fuss and reference. Yes, if you have the GURPS Bestiary and want to run a full rattlesnake, be my guest, but this works just fine for our needs.

Pardner, I ain't doin' any more work than I have to so I can run these here Old West adventures, nor does having perfect stats matter all that much. Just look over yonder at D&D-land; they keep changing their monster stats every five years for the last fifty.

We got Mad Mesa, The Lost Conquistador Mine, Ballots and Bullets, Burned Bush Wells, and Range War for a complete campaign of adventures to play with GURPS Old West and the 4th Edition rules. You will get a decade of campaign gaming out of these five adventures alone, and they are worth checking out.

Some of these are right excellent campaign starters and home bases in their own right, with Ballots and Bullets featuring a small city as its home base of operations. While you can play through the main adventure, creating linked adventures for an epic campaign set in any one of these adventures would fill out a whole pickle barrel of adventure time for your cowpokes.

BH4 and BH5 are from the third edition Boot Hill, but they are still fine additions to your Wild West adventure library.

If I were looking for adventures and campaign starters, you couldn't get any more classic and good old-fashioned clean fun than these classic Boot Hill adventures. The old game's rules are so simple that they don't take up too much of the book, and you can just drop GURPS right in and make your own stories with one of the best generic universal role-playing games this side of the Rio Grande.

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-TV-Western-Collection-Television/dp/B003ANP8CO/

Another downright mother lode of adventure ideas is any of these huge DVD collections featuring westerns, cowboy TV shows, and all sorts of rough-ridin' adventures. Sure, you've got to mess with those old-fashioned "movie disc" thingies, and maybe round up one of those movie disc players. If y'all can operate a remote and hook up one of those HDMI cables, you are gonna have a good time.

The quality won't be like a new-fangled 4K masterpiece, since some of these shows are as old as the hills, but all the work is gonna be done for you when you pop in a disc and turn an episode of some random TV show into a GURPS adventure idea.

Those writers from the golden age of Hollywood, creating these "moving pictures," will probably be tickled pink that you are reusing their plots and stories for your "silly dice games." And these TV shows are so old; none of your players are going to know better. Use the GURPS Ultra Lite system and create characters, no good outlaws, and critters from the stock footage included in these films, and you will have some right good gaming.

And if you can't get your hands on this, there are loads of 10 and 25 Western movie collections to get your grubby hands on, and you can score them used or dirt cheap at places like Oldies.com.

https://www.oldies.com/Western-Movies/collection.cfm

What is this? A place you can pick up Western TV shows on DVD for as cheap as $2 per disc? And the Blu-rays are $4 each? I will stop trying to sell you things now, and I won't be getting any money for it. However, deals are available, and there are some amazing collections and affordable discs to own. If you are a fan of the genre, you will love having these to enjoy. 

Additionally, physical media remains a viable option in an age of streaming services, where content can be easily taken away. People have lost entire libraries of films they thought they owned forever.

Popping in a TV show or movie you never saw in your favorite genre is a far better experience than YouTube or random scrolling to find entertainment. Plus, all these do qualify as adventure ideas, NPCs, locations, and scenarios for you to use in your games.

Other western games are hit and miss for adventures, such as the 2d6-based Rider and the Hero System Western Hero (WH). The WH game does have a 44-page section in the back with campaign information, a few scenarios, and adventure seeds, so this is still a worthwhile idea book for creating period adventures using Western tropes. This is not as useful a book as the Boot Hill adventures, which I recommend getting first, but it still has a few good bits in the campaign section, as well as maps of trains, buildings, houses, and other period locations.

Rider has a dozen pages of basic information on adventure creation, along with the familiar act structure. Most of the book is 2d6 rules and careers, so it is not as useful as adventures written for the genre. This is not as helpful for GURPS referees and is more akin to a 2d6 version of the Cepheus Engine, designed for playing Wild West games.

The book is enormous; most of it consists of 2d6 rules, but there are some nice d66 charts for encounters, patrons, and rumors. I wish there were more charts for creating solo adventures, plots, factions, and other Wild West scenario pieces. This one is not as useful, but it is still an interesting game. Western Hero is the better buy.

https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-West-Stephen-Hyslop/dp/142621555X

I know I am done selling things, but this is another book in my collection. There are times when beautiful coffee table books, like the one above, inspire me. Just looking at the illustrations, pictures, and reading the stories is worth more than a written adventure, film, TV show, or a game designed to cover the subject, but you need that extra thing to make it feel real to you.

The Old West is more than "playing generic fantasy" and spinning up cowboys to shoot things. It is a love of the genre, the tropes, being a part of a massive sweeping change, and those frontier stories of seeing the last open expanse on Earth being settled. This wasn't just "them 'mericans" doing the settling, either; this was the entire world flooding in as immigrants, the European powers, banks, and the crushing power of the world moving in on a massive land rush for what would become a nation.

But in this grand, sweeping, oil painting of moving West, one you would see on a saloon wall, there are moments for personal stories, struggles to survive, tales of souls fallen to evil, lawmen and those who bring justice, pioneers, settlers, trappers and hunters, wagon trains, cattle drives, saloon gals, railroad workers, share croppers, townsfolk so poor they lived in dirt hovels and sewed clothing out of burlap sacks, farmers, ranchers, investors, schoommarms, cowboys, marshals, bandits, and so many others living a dream in a grand experiment and moment in time that did not last forever, but left its mark on us all.

Playing an Old West game is more than simulating a cowboy movie or screaming yee-haw!

It is about a more profound love of the genre, of this being a uniquely "American fantasy" with legends, myths, stories, giants, gunfights, and a mythology all its own.

GURPS: Boot Hill

This will be a brief article.

Done.

Joking aside, the GURPS Old West book is a far more comprehensive resource for Old West gaming than can ever be imagined. Even if all you are doing is a casual, generic, Wild West gunfight simulation, GURPS has you covered. There is far more information, history, factions, technology, and functional adventure information in the GURPS book than Boot Hill could ever hope to deliver.

I like the GURPS Old West book a lot, and this is very well written. It is helpful for more pulp, TV shows, and serial cowboy action films as it is for a more gritty and realistic treatment of the genre. It is excellent reading and one of my favorite GURPS guides. You gain an appreciation for the hardships of life, the plight of the Native Americans, and the sweeping scope of change that moved across the country.

The period was part of the nation's formation, encompassing both its positive and negative aspects, as well as the transition from one way of life to the one we know in the modern centuries that followed. The story of every settlement, town, city, and place out West was one forged in fire and blood, a mass movement of people and settlers seeking a better life, some finding it, and many not.

The time was both the end of the strife of the Civil War, during which a nation forged the meaning of the word "freedom," and the beginning of a very hungry Industrial Age, where those freedoms were eventually realized after long struggles and hardships. The entry of the world into the Industrial Age led to displacement, a hyper-aggressive rush for resources, food, and land. The pressures of a shrinking world doomed those in its ravenous path.

Progress was the enemy.

If I were to play this, I would maintain that perspective. I would not gloss over the bad parts. Ignoring the struggle is a disservice to the entire fight, erasing the hardships that have brought us to our current state. We can't forget this and pretend it never happened. If the struggle is there, I want to acknowledge it and remember those who made sacrifices.

This may be why the safe opiates of fantasy are more popular.

https://www.amazon.com/Famous-Gunfights-American-West-Southworth/dp/1890778176

Boot Hill does have scenarios, but you could always find real-world accounts in history books to pull from. I would go by the history books for the classic gunfights, and don't worry about getting every weapon perfect. Stick to the most common types of guns, such as six-guns, shotguns, rifles, thrown knives, and lever-action guns, and things will work out fine.

I do feel the Western has held up as a genre stronger than Gangster movies, as we see the influence of the Western even today in modern films and TV shows, where that "gunslinger influence" and "Code of the Old West" can be seen in TV shows like the early Mandalorian seasons, and even TV shows like Fallout. If the traditional fantasy genre is "European D&D," then the Old West is "American D&D," at least in mythology, the role of the hero, and lore.

Plus, gunfights are tense, epic, and cool. In GURPS, they mean something, and you are not using a short rest to heal off a shotgun blast to the face. I swear, modern 5E has a reality disconnect that drives me up a wall, and while they may present realistic art (and even games that pretend this is gritty and real), none of it is true. D&D 5E lies to you in that you can get seriously hurt, die, and it doesn't matter.

You respawn in 5E like a video game.

In GURPS, injury and death are real and matter. The stakes are raised. The battles are tense.

Gunfight mechanics and weapons matter. Track shots and reloads! Part of the calculus of Western gunfights is not "spamming bullets" like in an FPS game, but being careful about shots and making each bullet count. Knowing the combat system and how to get and stack bonuses helps, even if that means taking a few seconds to brace and aim.

These are not high-capacity firearms, and even bullet belts should be limited in how much ammunition they can hold (typically 50). Reloading a revolver with the fastest gun to operate takes a full nine seconds! Make each shot count.

There is a gritty realism to gunfights where you must perform "mental math" to determine if a shot is worth it or not, and take actions to aim and slow your rate of fire. You do not have many rounds before you have to duck under cover and reload. Making shots matter, while avoiding getting hit and not being too careful, is the gunfight calculus you need to master.

You will use every point of those firearm skills.

You will remember those ranged combat rules.

Even the fighters can be mostly done with bang skills, or quickly designed characters from GURPS Ultra Lite, which I am a massive fan of. These will work with the full GURPS game just fine, and this gives you a bit of customization to personalize your gunfighter. The most armor anyone will ever have is a DR 1 leather jacket or overcoat, and most fights can be done without any armor at all.

It is what it is.

Now, this assumes that you think "Westerns are all about gunfights." This is like thinking "fantasy is about combat," which is the legacy we live with, given D&D is turning more into a wargame these days than a roleplaying game. While classic Old West gunfights are amazing and fun, they are not something an entire campaign can live on.

This "roleplaying is combat" feeling with 5E turns the hobby into a tabletop video game. I am more drawn to characters, story, skills, and a deeper plot, as well as a sense of character development. In GURPS, my cleric can become an Arctic survival expert specializing in exploring ruins and ancient history. In 5E, they are a cleric. Need to survive? Find a ranger. Need exploration? Find a rogue.

In a Wild West game, my sheep herder or preacher can become an outlaw, lawman, gunfighter, treasure hunter, or go in any direction the story takes me. Yes, I started here, but in GURPS, I can go anywhere. This is why I love GURPS: you are not going down a set class progression path, and anything is possible.

While progression is essential, you need more. I will say this about fantasy, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, science fiction, gangster settings, modern games, or any other historical or speculative roleplaying. You need characters doing something compelling, a story that they will tell together, a goal, and a reason why you are playing.

You need more than a "let's create cowboys" theme for your game. While that "random adventurers" thing may work in D&D, for most GURPS games, you need a little more.

You need to know the focus of your game, and your characters need to fit that theme. The character concepts have to work together. You need a story and a current situation. The story can't be set in stone and unchanging; there needs to be enough freedom for the players to solve it with creativity, wits, and grit. There may be other answers they come up with. They may also want to do different things, and your game becomes a sandbox.

Take a favorite western movie, set up the characters, and let the players resolve the entire film the way they want to. If you get stuck, simply send them to the next scene to stumble through and have a laugh. Play the whole movie like that, having them solve each scene, wrap it up early, or go completely off the rails. Make adjustments to reflect how the characters impact the plot. Go with it. Make "High Noon" into "Your Noon."

A love of the genre and its conventions always helps a great deal. If you are not into Westerns, then this genre won't appeal to you. But most of science fiction these days is a play on the classic Western tropes, so if you like science fiction, you may find a lot in Westerns to be very familiar, except with laser swords and blasters, and lots of fantastical aliens. You could watch a Western and replace the guns and characters in your mind with lasers and aliens, and make the evil army "space troopers," and you will begin to recognize things quite quickly.

There is also a nice town map in the Boot Hill game, which can be helpful for campaign setting purposes. Other than that, the Boot Hill game itself is rather slim, more of a tactical miniatures game than a full-fledged RPG. There is a fun list of characters from Western fiction in the Boot Hill games, which is also an interesting note.

The 3rd Edition of the game is more meaty and a more complete game, but then again, why do I want to learn a dead game that isn't supported, with limited options, when I have GURPS?  I am not learning and supporting a new game that won't go anywhere, and I have all the best and most familiar rules right here in GURPS.

Also, watch some movies and TV shows for inspiration! You can do classic "Lone Ranger" games and singing cowboys, where the bad guys "fall down" when they are hit, or you can do a more realistic and gritty game. You can make your game as "Hollywood" as you want, do pulp adventure games, or as "tall tale" as you can imagine. This is not always about realism, and you can do comedy and lighthearted gaming if you want.

And, we have an entire line of GURPS Deadlands books! If you're looking for Weird West games, we have them here. So, not only do we have the best RPG with the best character options, but we also have an entire setting with supernatural elements. We want magic or Steampunk? Airships and steam-powered robots? We got it. We want to cross over to Mars and venture forth with an alien princess? We got that too. We wish to run this gritty and realistic? That is possible too. Cowboys and Cthulhu? It works here. Unlike other games that force a single way of play, GURPS lets you customize your game in any way you can imagine.

We truly have the best of all worlds with GURPS, allowing us to mix and match options and books to our heart's content. Do we want furries or fantastical races? Elves and dwarves? We have them here. All the sourcebooks from GURPS can be used, from Horror to Zombies, and many others can be mixed and matched. Even the martial arts book is handy for a Kung Fu Cowboys-style game out of the 1970s drive-in movie genre.

Generally speaking, historical gaming is easier with GURPS than with games written for the same period in other systems. With other Old West games, I feel a sense of being lost, and the energy drains from the game as the motivation wanes. The original Boot Hill was only 44 pages of tactical combat rules and very light campaign support, which served only to string together gunfights. Some of the OSR and 2d6 games in the Old West genre are nice, but they still lack the motivation and driving force of "why play this" beyond the gunfights.

I can easily create unforgettable characters and have a classic campaign using GURPS.

As long as I have a theme and a story to go on.

Western Realm Atlas, Worldbuilding

I like converting campaign worlds to GURPS, but I often feel the original systems were just "made" for them. My current campaign is set in the Aquilae world, which is an extraordinary setting over on DriveThruRPG, which is a system-neutral setting where you can do anything you want. It's just maps, roads, towns, cities, kingdoms, ruins, and terrain, and you fill in the rest. For creative people who want to fill in "what goes where," this setting is a fantastic canvas. Those who want a fully developed setting will find this lacking. I love worldbuilding given a set of parameters, and having a setting where I can just "fill in what I am given" is endless enjoyment for me.

Aquilae is sort of like a "paint by numbers" campaign setting, where you are given a premade picture, paints, what color goes where, and you fill in all the rest. True artists will hate these, but they can be fun projects that are relaxing and low-key chill. It doesn't matter if it looks different than the picture, as skill varies and people may make other choices. Do you want to put in a fluffy cloud layer in the middle ground? That is your choice, go watch a few videos on how this is done, practice, and add that to your masterpiece. Want to blend colors and create a pretty shade of green (for color 45) with a hint of blue and purple? Go for it! The guidelines are here, but you can be infinitely creative within them. In the end, you will have something you made by hand, with your own personal touches.

Everyone can feel like a world builder, just like everyone can feel like an artist.

Yes, GURPS: Forgotten Realms is fun, and it plays very nicely, but a part of me will always see that as the AD&D world, before all the novels, that it was in our campaigns. The same with Dark Sun or Greyhawk, those will always be tied to one version of AD&D or another. GURPS versions of these are fun, but I feel at home in them with a decent first-edition game, such as Adventures Dark & Deep, or even Castles & Crusades.

Also, other settings that were designed to fit a theme are fun, such as the Conan-inspired Savage Thule, but if I am playing GURPS, I am playing GURPS Conan. Some of the "flavored" 5E settings are very well detailed and make fine GURPS settings, but given a choice, I will play GURPS: Vikings over a Viking-themed 5E setting. While these are fun, they are more "best of" and "tribute" settings when GURPS can give you the real thing.

And Harnworld is also a fantastic GURPS setting, one of the best. This is my dream GURPS setting for a serious, meaty, political game. It is not so much a "dungeon" setting as it is a "Game of Thrones" one. I could put dungeons on the map, but the world is far more interesting to explore and meet the people of. Everything you can ever want in a classic Middle Ages setting is here.

Something keeps me coming back to the very strange and almost quirky Aquilae setting, a system-neutral setting by design, that lets you fill in all the blanks. It is nothing more than a giant hex map of cities, roads, and optional GM's information on ruins and other secret places. You do with it what you want. Harnworld assumes "you read the books," where this setting "has nothing." 

That is a freedom I like, since there is no required reading (while fun), and if I want this city to be one thing, and that another, I can just have it. This kingdom in the middle can be the evil one, and the two on each side are good, but weaker. There are plots and motivations in my head. If I need NPCs or taverns, I have plenty of random charts. Maybe the evil king has a black dragon he rides and sends on missions. There are ruins and dungeons out there, and I get to make them myself.

It is much more of a sandbox canvas for my ideas than it is anything else. It gives me a map and names, and I do whatever I want with them. Another thing I like is that the world does not rely on a set of monsters being the villains; I can use whatever I like, the monsters from Dungeon Fantasy, some of the excellent GURPS bestiary conversions on the Internet, my B/X converted monsters, or any other monster I want. Also, there are no assumptions on fantasy races here; if I wanted this to be all human, I could have that. I can put the standard four here, or go all out with the modern mix.

Anything I want, I can have.

Just like GURPS.