The Wild West on the Planes

Sorry, I keep thinking of things.

Some potential characters for wandering gunslingers, outlaws and lawmen:
-Jessie Gensai
-The Teifling with No Name (Clint Eastwood type)
-Wyatt Twerp (halfling lawman)
-Drake Holliday (reptilian lawman)
-Kiddy the Xill or Bully(wug) the Kid
-Bleak Cassidy and the Sensate Kid (what a comically mismatched pair!)
-The Good, the Bad and the Flumph

Cimmaron in the Savage Coast setting (for 2nd edition AD&D, part of the world of Mystara) was based on the Wild West. The AD&D version used smokepowder weapons, though the original Dragon Magazine article it was based on used six-shooter mini-crossbows instead of firearms. Mystara is connected to Planescape through Farrow from Uncaged, of course.

The other "official" connection would be Murlynd, a demigod cowboy from the Greyhawk setting. He's probably too divine to enter Sigil, but he could be encountered elsewhere, and act as a guide to whatever world inspired him to dress like that (possibly the Masque of the Red Death setting).

The Harmonium, riding in to save the day!

I was thinking about the gun-slinging aspect last night and I think I came up with a solution that would allow a "controlled" introduction of firearms to a campaign, if a DM so desired. (Although the Western themes could easily work without them)

The potential solution would be for the "smokepowder" (or whatever name you use for gunpowder) to work inversely to magic on the Outlands.

So at the radius of the gatetowns, smokepowder is a mostly inert material (maybe it burns like incense) so there would be no functional firearms in the gatetowns (or in Sigil which always has its own rules) so nothing in the canonical material is changed

At the base of the Spire, smokepowder becomes so volitile and excessively explosive that it is effectively useless (meaning that you'd be more likely to blow yourself up transporting a small pouch of the material before you got to use it) - although maybe some prospectors use it like dynamite, blowing up large chunks of the Outlands - which would tic off both the rilmani and the gods of nature in the area.

But in the middle areas, it would behave like gunpowder and allow for firearms. This way, you could play out the traditional fictional Western tropes (e.g. the showdown at noon in the main street of town) without it causing your game to go off the tracks with the introduction of firearms.
I might even be an enjoyable to have some burly sword-wielding PCs ride into town only to run away in fear from some scrawny young guy ("The Kidd") when he starts shooting at them with his exotic weapon that they've never seen before.
And it might be as equally funny if the PCs load up on firearms and then go back to a gatetown and try to push someone around only to find out that their guns don't work there.

A second aspect I thought of was the "robber baron" of this period. The stranglehold that the railroads and other limited means of transportation and communication (e.g. the Pony Express) meant that a few BIG corporations had a LOT of money coming in because the settlers had nowhere else to turn to get many needed items.
Because of this, these businesses were often the targets of robberies (the classic train robbery or stagecoach chase).
And because the settlers knew that they were being exploited by the big monopolies, they often romanticized the robbers of the trains and the remotely-owned banks as heroic Robin Hood types that were fighting back for the little guy.

Whether you buy into this depiction or not, it is a strong element of the Wild West in fiction. So my question is: who would make a good choice for the evil robber barons?
The Fated? The Planar Trading Consortium? Any other suggestions?

And while I'm thinking of it (and to hopefully exhaust this theme for me), would a railroad system make sense for the Outlands?
It is a classic staple of the genre and would probably be something that your players would like to do (either to rob or protect it)
I know that Jem suggested (if you were pursuing the Outlands = Wild West theme) giving the Outlands the higest technology level you could stomach (in which case, a train would be no problem); but for most DMs would this be too much?
Any suggestions that would allow for a choo-choo but which wouldn't bump up tech levels throughout the Planes (like the way I tried to allow for firearms without them affecting the multiverse at large)?
Remember that magic gets weaker in the Outlands so a Lightning Rail type solution might not make the most sense.
Would my smokepowder solution above also make for a reasonable fuel for the trains and explain their limited appearance on the planes. Maybe a Lightning Rail - smokepowder hybrid (magic used to reach the gatetowns and smokepowder to reach the Wild West towns)
(I was suddenly struck by the idea of the trains being operated by a bunch of gnomes -dressed up like "Conjunction Junction"- who were constantly tinkering with their design to maximize it efficiency)

A point in time that balances somewhat between these two is the conquistador era. Envision the mission sites flung across Central America and the southern part of North America.

You need to bear in mind that the areas that become the Wild West became so solely due to the goldrush. NW Oregon and Washington for instance, did not become part of the wild west, even though it was certainly a frontier area.
The Wild West became what it was because the gold rush caused a huge influx of white settlers and more importantly, unsavory characters.
The Amerindians of the Wild West by far suffered the worst treatment at the hands of white settlers during the 19th century, and it would be difficult to encorporate a wild west scenario without primitive or savage groups being uprooted from their land and genocided (and likewise returning the treatment in kind-- the wild west areas had more Indian Wars than any other. This encompassed Califoria, the SW states, the Rocky States, and the Dakotas, and to a lesser extent eastern Washington and Oregon.)
At the same time, you can't have a Wild West scenario without uber-corrupt mining companies dumping their toxic waste into the water supply, cutting corners in safety (mine collapses and subsequent rescues are a classical mainstay of wild west storytelling.), and in some cases, the company CEO turns out to be a notorious outlaw from 10-20 years ago, or maybe he murdered a few of his employees who tried to blow the whistle on his safety violations or poisoning of the watertable.
Then of course there's the obligatory corrupt statesman or aristocrat who's screwing over the low-income folk.
The whole "Sheriff vs. outlaw" thing was your classic power struggle between an impotent local government and criminals who wish to form a syndicate or become warlords.

I'm not sure I'm on-board for a train made of modrons; but a train of modron design that could shift and morph to some degree (short of going into full Transformers mode) does create a cool visual (I'm thinking of the partial transformation of Doc Brown's train at the end of the "Back to the Future" films taken up a few degrees).
I'd have to give up my little gnome engineers for some little modron engineers; but it still works for me.

I definitely like the idea of a make-shift train instead of (or as an alternative to) a standard "March". If you do keep the concept of a train made of modrons, would you have them combine into other forms of transport elsewhere (e.g. into a titanic ship to sail the seas of the Upper Planes (on which one might book passage), into a submarine in the Plane of Water, etc.)?

I just wanted to mention, we collectively have milked a lot of interesting ideas (even if not all of them appeal to everyone) out of a thread that was largely inspired by a flumph in a cowboy hat!

I should have thought of Zorro. One usually lumps him under "Robin Hood" or "Batman" types; but while it doesn't fit a lot of the usual Westerns cliches, he definitely is of that era and locale. And he serves as a good example of "medieval themes" applied to a different setting. [And if he doesn't have trains, so what. I'm just throwing out any idea on the topic and seeing what sticks]

Since the Outlands are overall neutral, and since people have sort of re-iterated the idea of gatetowns being the outpost of "civilization" that has less authority as one moves away from them, I think we should remember that "authority" will mean different things around the Ring.

On the lawful side, the outlaws will be typical "black hat" goons willing to shoot a man just for snoring. And the authority will be the "white hat" sheriff/Harmonium officer
Here if the PCs are beseiged, they might hear a bugle call and literally see the cavalry ride to their rescue
(i.e. the typical western from the 1950's)

On the chaotic side of the Ring, the outlaws will more often be greedy corporations or ranch bosses trying to make everyone subservient to them. In this case, the "authority" would more likely be the (chaotic) loner who drifts into town and fights to preserve the freedoms of the "little guys"
(i.e. like westerns from the late 1970's on)

That's the nice thing about westerns. They've been around long enough that they have evolved to the point where you can adapt them to whatever need you have.

Here we go: /forum/the-order-knights-errant

Actually, I generally thought of the corporations as more lawful or even more likely-- neutral evil.
A lawful one OTOH would be more likely to exploit legal loopholes (or lack of laws) up the wazoo and use bribes.
The chaotic ones are more likely to kill (or banish) folks who snoop around their territory. Though the chaotic neutral ones are more likely to resort to intimidation tactics and confusion than direct force.

What about wands or rods (pre-4e) implements (in 4e), or arcane bonded items (in 4e) serving as replacements for guns?

For that matter, you could just reskin bows or crossbows (particularly repeating crossbows) as guns.

Another idea for the frontier might be the Far Realms for a unique twist on things. Could definately accentuate the man vs. (un)nature there. And we often say the Far Realm is hostile to the humanoids of the material plane, but what if it in this case it was the other way around?

In Gary Gygax's original home game, Murlynd was a magic-user PC who dressed like a cowboy and wielded magic wands that happened to look like six-shooters.

Oh, I've always thought that was absolutely the most likely theory. I elaborated a little on the way Heward and Murlynd first met on an alternate, Wild West world here, though I wrote that before the whole Company of Seven idea had appeared in canon. If I revisited it now, I'd have Heward, Murlynd, Zagig, and so on companions since their early dungeon-crawling days.

One change I might make, though, is that Murlynd didn't pick up his Wild West apparel on our Earth, but on the Gothic Earth of the Masque of the Red Death setting.