Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Tomb of the Ghost Rider in The Last Train to Gravestone

​A dungeon by Nameless Designer, level 1
Written for The Last Train to Gravestone
   Okay, that post title was a mouthful. This a review of the sample adventure contained in the Nameless Designer’s Weird West game The Last Train to Gavestone, which is, in a breathtaking bit of self-effacement, a “minimum viable product for running a weird west game”. The man ain’t getting rich off his hype train here, but that’s okay, he’s also not selling these very AI-art-laden productions at all. Not even PWYW, just free. But how’s the play?
   Weird West is a strange genre. The appeal is obvious, of course…Westerns are a distinctive genre with cool visuals, wonderful sounds and soundtracks, and a huge number of cultural touchstones. Why not add magic too? Well, part of the issue is that if you want stories about violent amoral drifters with complicated relationships with the law who blow in and out of town looking for gold, that’s just D&D. Then add the fact that the things that make westerns distinct from D&D are guns and trains, and, well, you can see how adding magic makes it a touch awkward at times. Everyone likes the Weird West idea, but when you ask them to stay a while for a long campaign, the cracks start to show, particularly if the mechanics are grown from the rich nightsoil left by D&D over the decades.
   So, this game. Well, I’m not doing a full system review, but it’s…fine. Like Heroes of Adventure, the system that spawned it, you have a pretty flat leveling curve (this one with only 5 levels), simple classes with decent modularity, and a d20 math core without a lot of desperation. The one neat bit of…if not innovation, at least cross-breeding…is that you have defense items like “cowboy hat” that roll a die (d6 in the hat’s case) to get rid of that much damage instead of your taking it. I like that, it’s basically like items out of the classic card game Bang!, which is a fun game to kill 30 minutes with.
   But what about the adventure, Mr. Reviewer? Ah. Yes. That. I have commented before that a sample adventure is an oft-neglected essential for any proper fully-fledged game system, as it shows us how the designer expects us to use his document in active play. Here, we’ve been given a wild-west adventure where…an undead zombie wanders into town from an underground tomb dungeon in the town’s graveyard. Oh. Sure, it’s the burial site of a famous desperado, the Ghost Rider, and there are cowboy hats on the zombies, but this is a very recognizable Standard D&D Adventure Site. Just, you know, with a few more spurs.
   Eh, I’ll begin what I like with the fundamental design of the map, it’s simple but there’s enough complexity between the branching paths and those secret doors to make exploring kind of fun. The secret doors are also well designed, with one to the north in that last room tipped off easily, which then indicates the rest due to symmetry. There’s a ghost in the well at the end that’s pretty rough to face at first level, but ghost-bullets are present in the early portion. Not bad. Random encounters are fine.
   You know what can be improved in the main is GIVE US A WESTERN ADVENTURE. A dungeon crawl in an undead tomb, really? If we were forced to crawl around underground, couldn’t we at least get an old mine with rail carts? It’s not an uncommon problem, but it is disappointing here. If you are going to force us into a tomb, there’s also more for the different genre that could be done in the encounter design as well. Everyone has guns, give us shooting galleries. Beyond that, my design quibbles are just quibbles, like wanting more interesting loot and more enemy variety. That’s deck-chair rearrangement, though.
   I don’t know if this is damning or praising the adventure, but I think the best use case for Tomb of the Ghost Rider is actually using it as an adventure site in a standard D&D-like. It’s nothing special, but if you’re desperate for a tomb, it’ll work fine and dandy. Unfortunately, it’s not something that handles Western tropes particularly well, so I wouldn’t use it there.
   Final Rating? */***** with a star added if it’s being used with the fantasy game that it really wants to be used in. Next time give us a train job…