Pyramid Pick
The Knuckleduster Firearms Shop
Published by Knuckleduster Publications
Written by Forrest Harris
122 pages; $19.95
One of the great difficulties I personally have with many Western RPGs is that I have a hard time, as a player, coming up with different and unique characters. The solitary gunman wandering the prairie, looking for vengeance? Seen it. Especially in realistic campaigns, where you don't have magic or other abilities to differentiate yourself, how do you keep everyone from melding together?
One way is to choose trademark gear. Jesse James' Schofield, J.E.B. Stuart's LeMat, The Lone Ranger with his silver bullets. The problem is, most of us don't have the knowledge necessary to know what that means. Many games provide stats for a dizzying array of guns, but what do they look like? What makes them different and special?
Knuckleduster Publications has come to the rescue with the Knuckleduster Firearms Shop, chock full of real-world Western information that will do wonders for many campaigns in making it all feel real.
The book opens with an explanation of its rating system. Since this is a generic book, it uses a seven-word rating system (Superb, Great, Good, Fair, Mediocre, Poor, Terrible) that should look immediately familiar to users of Fudge. It also includes worthwhile notes for converting to most systems by aligning those seven words with similar items that should be common for most systems; for example, "Terrible" damage is the equivalent of a fist . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: December 15, 2000
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