Re: [HOE] Good, Evil, And The American Way

[NsideYerHead@aol.com]

I've spent a lot of years playing games...
Different games have different genres...
When I played D&D, in any form, the genre was that of a fantasy setting, 
generally European in ideal...
Oriental Adventures brought the flavor of the East to those games...
The Masque of the Red Death brought a bit of mystery to the world we know as 
ours, and focused generally on Ancient locations around the world, Several 
places in Europe, Egypt, etc...
Shadowrun took the entire world and focused on a few key areas of popularity, 
rather than expanding on Each and Every location possible...
Star Wars Focused on an ideal, and covered an entire Galaxy...

Each of the Genres give a tradeoff:
D&D focused on High Fantasy, and generally European ideals, and neglected 
most of the rest of the world for many years, until Expansion was all that 
could be done...
Oriental Adventured brought D&D to the East, but lowered the High Fantasy to 
an extreme low...
The Masque setting in D&D focused on the mysterious power type points of the 
world, but generally ignored everywhere else...
Shadowrun focused on a few HUGE Metroplexes around the world, but ignored the 
rest of it...
Star Wars allowed for growth and exploration of anywhere in the Galaxy, but 
only gave very little information about it...

My judgement on this whole aspect of whether America is more important, or 
just ignoring the rest of the world is this:
When you narrow the scope of a genre, you also allow it to be much more 
intricate.  The broader the scope, the less intricate all the locations 
become... It's a tradeoff.

Perhaps, in the future, it will make sense to expand the Deadlands world to 
incorporate more than just North America... as I am not it's creator, or the 
mind behind it, I cannot be sure... but I can say this:
Americans of the later 1800's knew very very little of the world outside 
their own country... This lends to the old world mystery and sophistication 
that the rest of the world flavored America with.

I know that what I am saying is focusing more on the Weird West, not Hell on 
Earth, but my reasoning is sound.  Hell on Earth was designed to bring 
another Setting to the Deadlands world... another age of lack of 
communication... where the only news you get is what you get from people, not 
TV's, or Newspapers, or National Syndication... Perhaps the rest of the world 
is dealing with it's own problems in the Deadlands version of History and the 
Future, but in both settings, Few would even have a clue if there are still 
living breathing people in those places... or if those places and countries, 
and continents even exist anymore.

I don't know if the original design was intended to give this feeling or not, 
but it fits... America is not the only place in the world that has it's set 
of heros, and the mindset that the one small normal person can strive to 
triumph over the big bad evil of the lands... but it is the setting of the 
Genre in the Deadlands gaming system.  And I, for one, appreciate the 
sentiment given in the original post... though it might be prejudiced toward 
the American viewpoint... it is also correct for the Deadlands setting, as it 
is currently written.