Welcome to Clearmont

One of my favourite genres for wargaming is the Ol’ West. It has a neat mix of fiction and real events that interests me, mostly the fiction. Recently the family went on holiday to the South Island and we had a fair amount of driving. Long hours in the car with two young kids can be a trying time for all but I found an old radio series from the States called “Powder River”. What a fabulous story and great bunch of characters in a tale (over 9 series) spreading over just after the American Civil War to the early 1900s. It develops along really nicely from a time of “Injun Troubles” to the introduction of the railway, telephones and even the mention of flight. It even has a sprinkling of historical characters making cameos, such as Mark Twain and Custer. This inspired me to create the township where “Powder River” was set, a town called Clearmont. So I have slowly built up a collection of wild west building from a variety of sources. Some I have built myself, some are from Game Craft Miniatures, I have one from 4ground and one from Sarissa. I am awaiting a game mat to finish the whole town off.

The collection of figures is wide and varied too, including Artisan, Copplestone, Battleflag, and Northstar. The original rules we ran were the GW Historical Legends of the Old West. This had a campaign system that worked for a couple of rounds but fell down if anyone got a bit of a lead on. In the great tradition of GW they stopped supporting there good rulesets and the updates fell away, and so a vacuum was left in Old West gaming. That is until Dead Man’s Hand arrived. Over the last few years a whole new raft of rules have come out for the Old West and I took a shine to Dead Man’s Hand. It is a card driven initiative game with nice mix and randomness and control. The gameplay is fast and resolution of combat quick and effective.

The books have a nice cinematic feel and the campaign works ok for the limited time we have had to have a go. One of the really cool aspects of Legends of the Old West was a couple of really funky scenarios - one being a train robbery where the terrain moved as part of the turn (simulating the train steaming along the tracks). These are the things I want to bring into the Dead Man’s Hand universe. I also found a nice simple Old West RPG that could be a vehicle to get the conflicts going in the setting - all pie in the sky at the moment but when I get some time I will put some effort into this project, you know - when the kids have left home :)

Cheers Tom