Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[Pengowen]

Hello everyone, this is my first post here!

I'm a new Marshal of the Savage Worlds: Deadlands, running a two player game, and right now I need some help! This will be our 5th game so far and first time getting into a major town.

I've browsed the forums for information on how to structure the major towns on the map, ya know, for anything from simple goings on, to major plot threads.

Right now we just hit Memphis, and im building the town basics, and looking through all my books for more info and tasty bits to add in.

Anyone able to give a newbie some tips? C:

[McCurmudgeon]

Even though you're playing Savage Worlds there is a huge amount of information in Deadlands classic books.

Check out "River o' Blood". It has an entire section devoted to Memphis, a map, and don't forget about Mina Devlin.

As for create your own major city I've actually been wonder about that too. For a while I was trying to piece together information from different books about Denver, because it's a pretty important city, until I found a file with a bunch of stuff about it.

At some point I've always wanted to have my posse travel over to Great Britain for one reason or another (mainly so I can use Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes, even have Springheel Jack in his home environment) and have been trying to do some research about London in that time period (mainly city layout and which landmarks were built yet).

[RJack]

Real historical maps can be helpful too. Here's:

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/gmd:@field(NUMBER+@band(g3964m+pm009010))

a map of Memphis circa 1870, for instance. There's actually a whole series of panoramic maps like that. The pinnacle guys just modified the one for Salt Lake City for the City o' Gloom boxed set.

EDIT: Forum does not like that url.

[doomblade403x]

Hi also my first post...

I have found a lot of inspiration from old movies and shows depicting the old west. These days memphis is a huge city, while in those days it prolly didn't have more than a 1000 or so people in it. if it was me I wouldn't worry so much about maps and such, and concentrate on the creature comforts and necessities these towns would have.

Hotel and or Saloon: Perhaps more than one.

Blacksmith

General Goods Store

Undertaker

Church

Schoolhouse: Which depending on the towns size might be in the same building as the church.

Courthouse

Sheriff/Police Station

Stables

Gunsmith

Various houses

Perhaps a mill near the river

As a GM and a player, the little details aren't as important as the players having their needs met when they hit the BIG CITY.

For research I suggest

Video Game

Red Dead Redemption

Movie/TV

Lonesome Dove {Pay attention to their forays into San Antonio and Miles City}
Quick and the Dead
Any western with John Wayne or Clint Eastwood
Bonanza
Big Valley
Gunsmoke
Quick and the Undead {Kinda Deadlands based}

Hope I helped.

[Radical Ans]

The Knuckleduster Cowtown creator is an valuable resource, if you want to flesh out a frontier town. It's got info on what types of buildings would be in the town, layout of the buildings and town as a whole, as well as a slew of NPC personalities. It also has stats for those NPCs, but they are Deadlands Classic, rather than Reloaded. I used to have a PDF w/ notes for converting stats from DLC to DLR, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

The thing in that book that I've got the most use of however, is the random name tables. There's something like 900 first names and 500ish last names. Very handy.