I don't want to just dump out crappy stuff. (Hopefully that hasn't been the case so far.)
Now to the good stuff.
Weird West is a small game with big potential. It is simple yet innovative and written straight to the point. It has to be. The rules are six pages long plus one page for the fighting chart.
Character creation is very easy. Assign four points between four attributes and choose a path. A path is basically a class and determines how the character's attributes will improve as they gain levels.
The paths are Adventurer, Gifted, Fighter and Magician.
The cool part is any of the character paths are also able to choose magic and weird abilities. The origin of these abilities are not defined in the rules themselves, so you could describe them as magic, psychic, weird science, exotic martial arts or whatever else you could imagine.
Fighting in the weird West is detailed in two pages. And that is just enough to explain initiative, typical combat options, defences, weapons and non-lethal combat.
The character's path determines how much maximum damage they could do with any weapon. For example, while an Adventurer could do 1D8 with a sword, a Magician could only do 1D4 with it.
I suppose this simulates combat training and it makes sense. It's balanced by the fact that the Magician gets a point for their Magic attribute and so can get those weird and magic abilities I mentioned earlier.
Pretty cool.
Dying! Your character may not be dying when they reach zero Stamina points. At that point you would roll a D6 and check a table to see whether they may be stunned, wounded to some degree or really kick the bucket.
Resolving non-combat actions is really easy. Notice a theme here?
Overall this game is very quick and fun to play. It would also be easy to add in stuff from other games or even adapt the genre to your own tastes.
For more information, please check out the Strange Magic blog.
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