Retrospective: Ballots & Bullets

Since Boot Hill has unexpectedly caught my interest this month, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at one of its better adventure modules, Ballots & Bullets. Written by David James Ritchie – whose name I most strongly associate with the second edition of Gamma World, as well as some of the Blackmoor modules for D&D – this "special campaign module" first appeared in 1982, just as TSR was transitioning between one era in its history and another. That makes Ballots & Bullets notable on multiple levels and, therefore, a worthy subject of examination.

Like most TSR modules of its era, this one consists of a 32-page staple-bound booklet wrapped inside a cardstock cover. The inside of that cover contains a map of Promise City, Arizona in the year 1882. The map is designed to be used in conjunction with the foldout map included in the Boot Hill boxed set, which forms the central "hub" of Promise City. There are over 200 locales on the combined map and each is described in at least a couple of sentences in the module's booklet. 

Though he's not mentioned in the credits, Jim Holloway provides all the art for Ballots & Bullets, including its front and back covers. Though there aren't as many individual pieces in this module as there might be in most TSR modules of the era, what art there is plays to Holloway's strengths as an illustrator of dubious, unscrupulous, and faintly ridiculous roughnecks. In many ways, Holloway is the perfect artist to depict the Old West, especially as depicted in a roleplaying game. I feel compelled to point out that many of the characters in Holloway's pieces are based on TSR employees at the time, including Holloway himself. I suspect that's also true of rustler Mongo Bailly, who features on the module's back cover, but, if so, I'm not sure which staffer he's based upon. If anyone knows his identity, I'd be grateful.

Making off with the ballot box ...

Slightly more than half of the module – 18 pages – consists of the "Guide to Promise City" and "The People of Promise City." I alluded to the former earlier: it describes every locale on the map, from the Great Western Boarding House and Cafe to the County Assay Office to the Silverbell Mining Company and more. Some locales are detailed more extensively than others, but all provide information not just on the locale itself but also on the NPCs found there. "The People of Promise City" is an alphabetical listing of nearly all 250+ people who live there, along with their Boot Hill game statistics. Also listed is each person's associated faction within the town, how committed he is to that faction, and whether or not he is a registered voter (or candidate).

These factions are important and play a part in "The Election Campaign," which provides the backbone of the module. Promise City is preparing to hold its first election after its town charter was approved by the Territorial Governor of Arizona. The election is three months in the future and two factions face off against each other in the upcoming contest. The first is the Law and Order Faction, supported by merchants and land owners, who want an end to the lawlessness of Promise City. The second is the Cowboy faction, supported by miners and prospectors, who believe the Law and Order faction is just a front for Big Business. The player characters enter Promise City just as things are heating up.

The characters can become involved in a variety of ways, supporting – or undermining – one of the factions for their own purposes. There are discussions and guidelines for handling canvassing the town, putting up campaign posters, running rallies, heckling the opposition, and outright bribery, not to mention spreading rumors and hiring goons to intimidate the voters. The characters can likewise make use of newspapers, churches, and endorsements to advance their chosen cause. At the end of it, there's voting day itself, for which the module also provides rules to adjudicate. Whichever faction wins will impact the subsequent development of Promise City and the fortunes of its inhabitants.

I have never made use of this module, so I can't rightly say how well its contents work in play. I can only say that I found the scenario presented and the information provided to support it quite compelling. In some ways, it reminded me of Trouble Brewing for Gangbusters, a favorite module of mine from my youth and one I used extensively. Despite some surface level similarities, Ballots & Bullets is less a description of Promise City – though it is that – and more of an outline for an entire campaign set during a major event within the city. It's also a great example of the kind of thing that, according to the game's introduction, you're supposed to do with Boot Hill. I found it very compelling and wished I had the time and players to give it a proper whirl.

It's been a long time since I've read a module that made me feel that way. Make of that what you will.

Would you trust this man with the future of Promise City?

Retrospective: City of the Gods

The earliest roleplaying game campaigns – Greyhawk, Tékumel, Glorantha – fascinate me, but none more so than Blackmoor. Blackmoor was the first fantasy campaign and yet, compared to most of those that followed in its immediate wake, it's one of the least well documented. Certainly there are published products from the pen of Dave Arneson that shed a little light on what that venerable campaign was like, but what we mostly have are lots of stories and reminiscences from the people who participated in those foundational adventures rather than anything more systematic.

That's a big part of why the DA-series of Blackmoor modules TSR started publishing in 1986 still hold a lot of interest for me. I see them as a possible source of insight into the campaign setting where it all began, so to speak. Unfortunately, as I would later learn, the presentation of Blackmoor in these modules often bears little to no resemblance to Arneson's actual setting. Precisely why this is the case I couldn't say, but I suspect at least part of it has to do with the exigencies of TSR's publishing plans at the time. 

Even so, I happily purchased modules DA1 and DA2, both of which offered up some additional insights into Blackmoor as a setting. One of the things that both these modules made clear was that Arneson was not at all bothered by the inclusion of science fictional elements in his fantasy setting – quite the contrary! So, when the third module in the series, City of the Gods, was released in 1987, I was very interested. Based on its cover illustration by Doug Chaffee alone, it was clear that this one would feature even more explicitly sci-fi material and that intrigued me greatly, despite my ambivalence toward this at the time. 

City of the Gods details a crashed spacecraft called the FSS Beagle, a vessel of the Survey Bureau of the Galactic Federation. The Beagle crashed on Blackmoor five years before the events of the module and had suffered enough damage that nothing short of a rescue by another starship could return its crew to the Federation. As established in the background material, the Federation is notoriously slow to locate missing Survey Bureau vessels. Consequently, some of the Beagle's crew felt the best course of action would be to contact the inhabitants of Blackmoor, establish cultural ascendancy over them, and the mobiliize them to create an industrialized civilization, one capable of repairing their ship. 

This, however, violated the Federation's principle of non-interference, leading to a schism in the Beagle's crew. Those who favored interference were ultimately defeated, but not before a few of them, led by the ship's chief of security, Stephen Rocklin, escaped. The failed mutineers eventually set themselves up in the swamp that held the Temple of the Frog, which forms the background of the module of the same name. Meanwhile, the other crewmembers simply avoided local contact and waited for help from the Federation to arrive. This is the situation into which the player characters stumble when the explore rumors of a strange "city of the gods" in the desert south of Blackmoor.

City of the Gods is, in many ways, similar to the earlier module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, right down to the inclusion of lots of weird-looking advanced technology. What separates it from its predecessor is context. We know know very little about the circumstances of the starship's crash in Barrier Peaks. More than that, all of its crew is dead, leaving behind only robotic servants and alien monsters aboard the vessel. In City of the Gods, though, the crew is still very much alive and divided into two antagonistic camps. Even beyond that, one of those factions has had a lasting impact on the world of Blackmoor. This is in stark contrast to Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which is a much more self-contained scenario.

On the other hand, the presentation of the titular City of the Gods, as the Beagle comes to be known, is isn't very detailed or indeed interesting. I don't believe this is at all reflective of the original "City of the Gods" adventure that Arneson famously refereed first for his own players and then later for Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. This is sadly a common problem when it comes to published Blackmoor material. So much of it seems invented by a collaborator – in this case David J. Ritchie – rather than instead presenting what Arneson used in his own campaign. It's a shame, both in this particular case and more generally. I'd love to learn more about the Blackmoor setting as Dave Arneson imagined it. Sadly, the City of the Gods doesn't do that.