Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Gunslingers and Percentile Throws

Boot Hill was TSR's wilden west skirmish/role-playing game. Back when we were kids my crew played a few shoot-outs with it, at least before we discovered BattleTech. One of the neat touches in the rulebook is that each gun has a listed year it first becomes available. For a long time I wanted to put together random starting weapon charts sorted by the year the gunfight was taking place, mainly for two-bit NPCs. A few months ago I did just that, but only this morning did it occur to me that someone else might be interested in my charts. I don't know how many people play Boot Hill nowadays, but I went ahead and typed my charts up. They're now uploaded onto scribd.

9 comments:

  1. Thanks! I'd love to have a chance to play Boot Hill.

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  2. I'm running a Weird West / D&D game this Saturday! Thanks for the great timing in sharing this. :)

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  3. Back in the early eighties I combined the rules for Boot Hill and Villains & Vigilantes (I think...it might might have been another game) and ran a short but very memorable campaign resembling the cowboy comics of DC.

    The 'party' (posse?)consisted of a Singing Cowboy (who could effect encounters by with the songs he sang), a 'Lone Ranger' style masked cowboy, a Native American Shaman, a Half-African/Half-Mexican Gunfighter/Merc and a mysterious red garbed cowboy who may or may not have been a ghost.

    Ah to be 13, a comic book fan, a gamer and have a Dad and a Grandpa who both loved Westerns.

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  4. @Barking Alien: I need to track down those comics! :D

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  5. Nice. Gotta love Boot Hill. The fast, brutal and deadly nature of the system is a perfect match to the setting. I've run it numerous times. Your update will find a place if I get the opportunity to do so again.

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  6. Boot Hill and the Original Gamma World were, and still are, the highlights of collection of games. Mostly because those two, along with Traveler, were my first attempts to stray a bit from D&D ;)

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  7. @Stuart or anyone else interested...

    The inspiration for most of my Western ideas come from DC and Marvel Comics character such as Bat Lash, Cinnamon, Jonah Hex, The Two-Gun Kid, Scalphunter, The Rawhide Kid, etc.

    More of a DC fan growing up I'd have to say that companies characters and stories had more of an impact.

    Check out http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/western.html

    Y'all be careful out'chere ya'hear.

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  8. Hey. Great Blog. I totally agree!

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  9. Boot Hill: definitely in my favorite top 5 RPGs of all time.

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