Friday, September 9, 2011

Strange Western Tales #1 - The House Always Wins

The House Always Wins, a Strange Western Tale for the Savage Worlds and Weird West systems in the Bullets and Tequila setting

Get Ready: There are anachronistic old-timey billboards advertising a 'Gambler's Paradise' called Hutter's Fortune in the Nevada Territory. When the PCs arrive, they find a small town built around a massive casino called the Silverlode. Are the odds really fair?

Get Set: Hutter's Fortune mostly consists of rows of hotels and boarding houses, a general store or two, some cafes and a church, all radiating off from the Silverlode casino. The Silverlode is basically a modern casino if built in the Wild West. There are tables for every game you can think of, showgirls and saloon music, a gigantic bar offering Eastern and European delicacies like absinthe alongside the bar whiskey and tequila and much more. Table monitors dressed in the style of Pinkerton agents keep the peace and remove gamblers who accuse the house of cheating. The casino's owner, Jacob Hutter, comes out onto the casino floor every once in a while and interacts with patrons and staff before retreating once more into the lower levels of the casino.

Go!: The basement of the Silverlode is one gigantic Bond-villain-lair level con operation. Dozens of operators, statisticians and guards work at rigging the outcome of each table through the use of magnets, trick decks and any other nefarious dealings that you can think of. At the center of it all is a constantly clicking Babbage Engine-style machine, spitting out a line of tickertape calculating profits and losses.

Weird Western Twist: The central Babbage machine is actually sentient and will attempt to protect itself with claw grabbers and other industrial machinery should it be attacked.

Notable NPCs

Jacob Hutter, Casino owner
Casino guards
(*) Sentient Babbage engine

1 comment:

  1. Hey Jamie! This is great stuff! I am a big steampunk fan, so the Babbage engine angle is a big bonus for me.

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