The Weird West Review!

First of all, I've been working twelve hour days and thus have fallen way behind on the September of Short Adventures challenge. I honestly don't know if I will be able to find the time to get back to it.
I don't want to just dump out crappy stuff. (Hopefully that hasn't been the case so far.)

Now to the good stuff.

Weird West is a small game with big potential. It is simple yet innovative and written straight to the point. It has to be. The rules are six pages long plus one page for the fighting chart.

Character creation is very easy. Assign four points between four attributes and choose a path. A path is basically a class and determines how the character's attributes will improve as they gain levels.
The paths are Adventurer, Gifted, Fighter and Magician.

The cool part is any of the character paths are also able to choose magic and weird abilities. The origin of these abilities are not defined in the rules themselves, so you could describe them as magic, psychic, weird science, exotic martial arts or whatever else you could imagine.

Fighting in the weird West is detailed in two pages. And that is just enough to explain initiative, typical combat options, defences, weapons and non-lethal combat.

The character's path determines how much maximum damage they could do with any weapon. For example, while an Adventurer could do 1D8 with a sword, a Magician could only do 1D4 with it.
I suppose this simulates combat training and it makes sense. It's balanced by the fact that the Magician gets a point for their Magic attribute and so can get those weird and magic abilities I mentioned earlier.
Pretty cool.

Dying! Your character may not be dying when they reach zero Stamina points. At that point you would roll a D6 and check a table to see whether they may be stunned, wounded to some degree or really kick the bucket.

Resolving non-combat actions is really easy. Notice a theme here?

Overall this game is very quick and fun to play. It would also be easy to add in stuff from other games or even adapt the genre to your own tastes.

For more information, please check out the Strange Magic blog.

[OSR Challenge Adventure #3] Desperate Measurements

Desperate Measurements
An adventure idea for the Weird West Roleplaying Game. See the Strange Magic blog for more information on this great game.
This is my attempt to write a mystery scenario. I apologize for not setting up a bunch of red herrings and plot twists, but hopefully it's enough to get started.

Get Ready: Things have settled down in Silver Gulch in the past year or so. But for a struggling undertaker, the good life can be bad for the death business.

Get Set: About a year ago people got so peaceable that the local undertaker was losing a lot of business. Deciding to take matters into his own hands he started setting up accidents, secretly goading men into duels with ugly rumors and occasionally poisoning folks. The undertaker is getting greedy. People start dropping like flies and the Sheriff is starting to smell low down dirty skunk, or some such wild west term.

Go!: Okay, this is where my idea gets sketchy. Sorry. Some clues:
1. The deceased mainly come from rich families who would spend the most on a fancy casket and funeral.
2. Physical evidence at the scene of the crime such as pinewood saw dust, a handkerchief reeking of formaldehyde or a particular brand of cigar butt stamped out.
3. The undertaker is known to be a high stakes gambler. It's rumored he owes some mighty dangerous people a heap of money.
4. The local doctor gets suspicious when he finds out the undertaker is ordering poisonous chemicals through the general store.
5. In his final act before trying to escape town, the undertaker is starting to kill anyone whom he thinks is romantic competition for the attentions of a local schoolmarm. If he realizes his crimes are close to being solved he will kidnap her and hit the trail. While twisting his pencil-thin black mustache.

Notable NPCs: Undertaker, sheriff, doctor, schoolmarm, townsfolk.