Deadlands Page

Deadlands is a series of role playing games created by Pinnacle Entertainment Group; www.peginc.com

It started out as an alternate western; spirits & magic abound in a world of cowboys & indians. Not for nothing was it called "Deadlands; Weird West"! Then they brought out "Deadlands: Hell on Earth", a post apocalyptic game set in the same universe (or is it?), and in 2002, they will be releasing "Deadlands: Lost Colony", the third and final installment of the series set on the planet Banshee, in the same time as the Hell on Earth game. I'll probably post some LC stuff, but I'll keep it all on this page to be consistent.. There's Zombies, Pulp, Western & Horror! I recommend checking it out, if only for the innovative game mechanics (which revolve around a deck of cards, and the rules of Poker). My gaming group keep coming back to this setting..

The main reason this page is here is to provide a place for some rules additions I wrote. I'm also working on adapting my dice rolling programs to work with the deadlands mechanics, and I'd like to write a script that does card generation as well. However, after I put this page up, it turns out that other people have done a far better job than I would have, so I've put a link to thier page below. As to game material, there is only an additional Arcane Background that I wrote after being inspired by a paragraph in one of the rulebooks:

Arcane Background: Chinese Sorcerer
Part Taoist philosopher, part a character out of Big Trouble in Little China!

Dice Rolling Program

Update: All of the code mentioned at this page (and more) is now in its own GitHub Repository.

This is a script that rolls dice according to the pinnacle format. Its written in Perl so should be executible on any system that has a perl interpreter. not sure? Go to the Perl web page and find out more.. The program's source code is released under the GNU GPL, of which you can find out more here
It does some basic checking so you cant get it to roll dice that aren't used in the game (or indeed, are impossible, such as d7's :-) the useage is:
PinnaceDice.pl 3d6
in other words, run the script with an argument of the number, then type of dice you want to roll.
Download the script here

Phew! When I posted details of the program to the deadlands mailing list, it turns out that a couple of people have also written stuff, and very well, too! James A. McCarthy has a superb dice rolling program here:
www.thebrogue.com (Dice Rolling Program)
and a really nice deadland's character generation card draw routine here:
www.thebrogue.com (Card Drawing Program)

Update! I have also written a series of scripts that manage the chips used in Deadlands. Since our group was often forgetting how many chip were in the pot, I put this together. When I started to use my laptop more for the game, I found the generation of random draws usefull. You can still give the players the chips, but now they're easier to manage (the chips, not the players. Theres only so much I can do with a program you know...:-)
The .tar.gz file (readable by winzip for you windows people!) contains the following programs:

Initialise.pl Create a database with the default number of starting chips
Show.pl list all the chips in the specified database.
Modify.pl Allows additions and deletions to the specified database.
Pick.pl Generates a specified number of chips randomly.

Since you can specify the database to use, you can have one generic "pot" for people to draw from, and one pot for the chips available to the Marshal..
Downlod it here