Cool idea, except the pirates wouldn't be part of it cuz the era you're calling the "old west" didn't start in 1800 - westward expansion was in its early beginnings then. The classic era of gunslingers and saloons and stuff was really a very brief period between the Civil War and the 1890s. Another forgotten bit of trivia about that time is that around 25% of cowboys then were black.
Was that the samurai that sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln?
I built a one-shot around this idea on a heavily-modded Tiny D6 system, letting people choose which of the 4 they wanted to be with variants like wealthy or scientific Victorian, captain or gunner pirate, disgraced or retired Samurai, cattle driver or 49'er, and so forth. I set it in San Francisco to get some good conflux of cultures.
Of my 4 players, 3 of them chose to be rich Victorians. facepalm
Well, you just gotta only allow one archetype per team, figure out a system for the players to draft their choice fairly, and then let the chips fall where they may.
Rip, gotta find new players
Or you play a system that has build a world where the age of exploration, king Arthur, the Russian revolution, the hanseatic league, the itialian city states, the spanish inquisition, and much more are all happening at the same time.
7th Sea has some wacky world building, but it stays realistic enough to be quite believable and coherent.
There's a holodeck episode in there somewhere
There's a cowboy in Dracula
There were gentleman thieves in the west too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bart_(outlaw)
I imagine he worked something like this
According to that image French privateering ended before two of those other things started, right?
Am I missing something?
I think that's why they specified an "elderly" privateer - past their glory days.
That‘s the reason for elderly French pirate. The people involved didn’t just disappear because privateering ended.
[off topic?]
"Red Sun" Toshiro Mifune and Charles Bronson. After bandits steal a sword being carried to Washington, a samurai and a gunslinger must unite to bring it home.
This is one of my favorite underrated gems of a cowboy movie.
If you haven't seen it, 'The Wild Bunch' with William Holden is a great ride.
I keep saying I'm going to play a PC based on Kingo Nonaka.
But in my version he would have also briefly been a Pacific ocean pirate during his journey from Japan to Mexico.
Oh please please please!! Come and write a short story from it on [email protected] !! Please 🥺
