Between a Stone and a hard place.
Deadlands: Reloaded is a Weird West role-playing game published by Great White Games in 2005 under their Pinnacle Entertainment Group imprint. The game is a revision of the Deadlands role-playing game published nine years earlier. The original game had a custom rule set; this revision uses using the cross-genre Savage Worlds game rules.
The game is notable for moving the timeline forward to 1879 and also making the game signficantly less focused on metaplot as well as the canon NPCs. It attempted to address some of the issues by downplaying the previous post-racial progressive attitudes of the surviving Confederacy (before getting rid of the CSA altogether). It also had four Plot Point campaigns that attempted to address the Invincible Villain elements of the Servitors.
The game was eventually updated and replaced in 2021 by the Deadlands: The Weird West (Savage Worlds Adventure Edition).
This game contains the following tropes:
- Awful Truth: The PCs can discover that all of Hellstromme's automatons are powered by human brains. This will bankrupt him if it gets out as it is easily verifiable if you own an automaton.
- Brain in a Jar: The secret to Hellstromme's automatons.
- Cattle Drive: The basis for the Blood Drive trilogy of adventures. The protagonists herd a thousand steers across the Weird West.
- Corporate Warfare: The Railway Wars are conducted by the corporations using actual soldiers and explosives.
- Darker and Edgier: Despite the previous version of the setting leading to a post-apocalyptic hellhole, it is actually darker than Classic in some respects because it removes the idea the Confederacy voluntarily ended slavery and society was now post-racial.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The PCs in the Plot Point campaigns successfully destroy one of the Servitors, kill the future self of another, and cripple the plans of two more. As such, the Reckoners plans are indefinitely postponed.
- Future Me Scares Me: Stone, of all people, has this opinion of his invincible future self and decides to recruit the PCs to take him down.
- Government Agency of Fiction: The Pinkertons have officially become the Agency now.
- The Great Flood: A Wild West version is triggered by the PCs to wash the city of Lost Angeles clean of evil.
- Heel Realization: Darius Hellstromme, of all people, has one of these with the help of the PCs.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: Chief Sitting Bull turns out to be the leader of the Order of Raven. Working with Darius Hellstrom, he gained vast numbers of weapons to fight the white man and killed George Armstrong Custer (who rose as a Harrowed). He was later defeated by Crazy Horse.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: The Plot Point Campaigns involving the Servitors all result in the previously invincible servants to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are all brought low.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Stone (at least one of them) is finally killed after a decade of running wild on PCs as well as in-universe heroes.
- Killed Off for Real: Wild Bill Hicock, Doc Holliday, and others by Stone.
- Lighter and Softer: The Servitors of the Reckoners can be beaten and there are four Plot Point campaigns devoted to achieving exactly that. While only one of them is permanently killed (technically two), the results potentially avert the Deadlands: Hell on Earth timeline.
- Ms. Fanservice: The Witchita Witches are women in dress in tight revealing leather and carry whips. Unsurprisingly, fan artists love them.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: A part of Pinnacle Entertainment's design philosophy was to avoid this as they believed Classic had way too much happening in the metaplot that didn't involve the players.
- Politically Correct History: Subverted and downplayed, the South never gave up slavery as the Reckoners supported it due to the sheer amount of suffering the institution caused, and was ultimately destroyed after a longer Civil War after the Texas Rangers defected to the North.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The increasingly common automatons employed by Hellstromme Industries are all operated by picked human brains.
- Shoot the Dog: The PCs in The Flood have to kill a lot of innocent people to destroy Brother Grimme and his 13 Apostles.
- Space Cold War: What the conflict between the North and South has become.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Whenever Unionists and Confederates have to work together against the Reckoners.
- Time Skip: Classic takes place in 1876 and ends in 1878. Reloaded takes place in 1879.
- Updated Re-release: Reloaded had the second printing, both of which revised a number of rules and split the single book into Player's and Marshal's books.
