by Cain.rpgorg in Nov 05,2011
Deadlands Reloaded - Trail Guide: Weird White North, by Matt Cutter, is a supplement for the award-winning Deadlands: Reloaded RPG. As the third book in the Trail Guide series, it offers you a closer look at the people, places, and very cold things in Alaska and British Columbia.  It's always good news if we receive an addition to an RPG, which offers us much more than critters to kill, or new ways to kill those critters, and as always since the first incarnation of the Deadlands RPG they deliver what we need : a good batch of background and adventure plots.

Maybe I should tell a few words to those who don't know the Deadlands RPG, so if you re a veteran fan you could skip to the next paragraph, where I strt to write some details about Deadlands Reloaded - Trail Guide: Weird White North itself. For those who are still reading, in short Deadlands is an alternate-history horror-western RPG, with some steampunk elements, and a very good one. It's history is the same as our real world, until July 3, 1863. On this date, a group of American Indians from various tribes, led by a Sioux Shaman known as Raven, performed a ritual in an effort to drive out the European settlers. This ritual created a conduit to a spiritual realm populated by powerful malicious entities known as the "Reckoners." The ultimate goal of the Reckoners is to turn the entire Earth into an evil, haunted wasteland — literally a Hell on Earth. Their mostly subtle machinations, and the close connection to  the spiritual realm, created a weird West steaming with risky magic, mad scientists,  strange creatures, and living nightmares in every dark corner. The game itself had many incarnations (original rules, d20, GURPS), and now it's using the Savage World system.

Deadlands Reloaded - Trail Guide: Weird White North, is the third book in the Trail guide series. It's focusing  mostly on Alaska and British Columbia expands our knowledge on the Weird West even further. This North is somewhat different as in the real world, as it's in perpetual winter for about eight years now, and only Dr. Darius Hellstrome's contraption, the Winterline holding the forces of nature at bay, while a new ice age seems to come to the world.

The book contains a lots of useful material in its 119 pages. Rules for the cold effects, a new mini-Plot Point Campaign and a lots of background information on the locales, critters and personalities of the area for both the Posse and the Marshall to discover. It opens with a full 17 pages of The Tombstone Epitath, and have a lots of Savage Tales connected to the setting.

All in all it seems a good expansion, and I really hope we will receive even more Trail Guides in the future.

Good luck in the Weird West !

Zoltán "Cain" Mészáros

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