Deadlands: Hell on Earth is a genre-mixing Weird West Alternate Timeline roleplaying game which combines the post-apocalyptic and horror genres. It is part of the larger Deadlands timeline. Western tropes and magitech elements are also prominent. It was written by Shane Lacy Hensley and originally published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. As part of the original marketing campaign in August 1998, the game had a green leatherbound hardcover edition run, limited to about 750 copies.
As the name implies, this book is set in the same exact place as the original Deadlands roleplaying game. Specifically, it is set in a post-apocalyptic future of the original "Weird West" setting of Deadlands, also known as the "Wasted West."
Through a series of machinations, the Reckoners from the original Deadlands setting contrive to spark a nuclear war between the United States and the still-existent Confederate States, in which the weapons are not only powered by nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, but are also powered by a supernatural element known as "Ghost Rock." The combination of multi-megaton explosives, radiation, and supernatural devastation serves to turn large portions of the United States into hellish wastelands filled with radiation and deadly supernatural monsters.
The formation of these large "deadlands" allows the Reckoners to enter the realm of Earth, where they are revealed to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They ravage across the globe, destroying civilization and turning most of the Earth into a wasted landscape of nightmares and death. Then they mysteriously vanish.
Thirteen years have passed since the Reckoners appeared, and civilization is once more attempting to assert itself in small, isolated pockets. Players take on the roles of characters struggling to survive the nightmarish wasteland that the Reckoners left behind. A variety of mundane and arcane archetypes are available, including "Sykers" (characters with deadly psychic powers), "Doomsayers" (magical priests of radiation), "Templars" (members of a martial organization patterned after the Knights Templar), "Junkers" (humans with the supernatural ability to create working devices from the scavenged debris of pre-apocalypse civilization), and even just plain-old everyday humans, surviving by their wits and their gun.
This series contains the following trope:
- After the End: Ghost-rock enhanced nukes dropped on virtually every major city.
- Big Boo's Haunt: The Eastern Seaboard.
- The Blank: The abominations known as the Nowhere Men appear as man-shaped humanoids; their build and rough features matching men's exactly, but they are devoid of facial features. Their eyes and mouths are sealed up and their noses and ears merge seamlessly into their skulls.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: During the war, dogs were used to identify infiltrator cyborgs.
- Gasoline Lasts Forever: Averted. There are survivor settlements located at the few oil fields not hit during the war. These settlements produce crude oil and refine gasoline and diesel that they export across the Wasted West. This makes them major economic powers, and their convoys are often targets for the warlords and bandits that haunt the highways.
- Good Is Not Nice: The Templars are firmly on the side of Good, but also refuse to aid those that fail to live up to their arbitrary standards, and may even use their powers to turn the unworthy into Cannon Fodder if the situation demands it. The Templars can be so harsh that the Anti-Templars, who attempt to use the power of setting's Big Bad to Pay Evil unto Evil, knowing full well that they are doomed to turn into worse monsters than the ones they fight, are generally seen as more heroic. The Templars argue that resources are scarce, trained Templars are scarcer that most resources, and they need to be used where the knock-on effects will be greatest and not thrown away to save some random ungrateful jerkwad. God continues to empower the Templars, so He apparently agrees.
- Heel–Face Turn: Hellstromme. Witches have also switched sides.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Because it's actually the Hunting Grounds. And the technology needed to travel through it is equally scary. The grand finale adventure for Hell on Earth culminates with the player characters hitching a ride on the totally-not-Event Horizon with the trapped Reckoners in tow. It's not pretty.
- Motorcycle Jousting: The Omega Knights are a group based in Junkyard. They ride motorcycles and battle other biker gangs with lances.
- Pirate Girl: The leader of the River Rats - a gang of Ruthless Modern Pirates who prey on survivor settlements on the Mississippi - is a woman named Elvira.
- Possession Burnout: Inverted, the cyborgs are actually reanimated corpses that consume the soul of the possessing demon.
- Practical Currency: Although the game itself uses dollar values for convenience, the rulebook mentions that most places operate on a barter system and any spare 'cash' the characters have is usually in the form of easily transportable luxury items. Also, bullets are hard currency pretty much everywhere, due to consistently high demand and low or non-existent production.
- Pro-Human Transhuman: Doomsayers, wizards who worship the power of the Atom, tend to view the mutation caused by the war as a good thing. Player Doomsayers are the ones who think this means being the next evolution Comes Great Responsibility.
- Psycho Serum: Red Rum, a rare accidental example. A seemingly innocent hooch that turns you into a hulking brute.
- Ruthless Modern Pirates: The River Rats are band of ruthless river pirates who prey on survivor settlements on the western banks of the Mississippi.
- Scavenger World: It's pretty much assumed that you'll be doing this all the time.
- Sky Pirate: Sky pirates are one of the hazards.
- These particular sky pirates are decent folks. They enjoy a little raiding, but they help the war effort when Throckmorton attacks.
- Soul-Cutting Blade: Junkers can create Spirit Weapons, which target the soul directly. Notably, you can build this function into any weapon, so a sufficiently well-supplied Junker can create anti-soul missiles!
- Super-Soldier: Sykers (also appear in Lost Colony and the Noir Companion)
- Stable Time Loop: On July 3, 2063 - the day Darius Hellstromme revealed the Ghost Rock Missile to the world - the manitous stopped inspiring mad scientists, as the G-Bomb was assured to turn the entire world into a Deadland. When some of the smarter mad scientists got together and tried to make them cough up more technology, it was discovered that the manitous had been Giving Radio to the Romans the whole time by stealing inventions from the future. And since they stopped sending them back, there was no more to steal. Deconstructed in that the past two centuries of technological civilization have been an utter waste as a result; it has reached a dead end and no new tech can be invented with ghost rock!
- Stealth Pun: The definitive spellbook for the Witches is entitled "Serving Your Fellow Man". Think about it.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The setting resulted from this due to Time Travel.
- Unholy Nuke: Actual demonic Magitek nukes that destroy the world.
- Weird Currency: Any "cash" is in fact small tradeable items of no particular use to the PC. There are places with more regular currencies (Junkyard prints paper money, backed by scavenged pre-war artifacts) but barter is far more common. Bullets are the closest thing to a universal currency due to limited supply, low production and high demand.
- Wretched Hive: Junkyard.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The adventure Unity, when Raven finally crosses the Mississippi River and invades the west.
