Breaking News: The Confederacy Falls Again In Deadlands

So, Pinnacle have kicked off a significant spring-cleaning of the Deadlands setting, and as part of this they’ve kicked off a metaplot event called the Morgana Effect, which has provided them with an excuse to go back and retcon some aspects of the setting. The big news, as extensively explained by game creator Shane Hensley, is that whereas in the previous version of the setting the Confederacy survived the Civil War, in the new version of the setting it fell.

Given that the continuation of the Confederacy – in an unfortunately sanitised non-slaveowning form that made an absolute mockery of the Confederacy’s cause, at that – was one of the main problems I’d previously had with the game, obviously I find this development very welcome, and this decision makes me markedly more likely to both play/run Deadlands in the future and take a look at the revised game line, even if I prefer the old system to Savage Worlds.

Hensley, I think, does a good job in his Facebook post of explaining why the Confederacy was there in the game in the first place, and why he’s made the call to remove it now. Initially it was meant to be a pawn for the Reckoners to use, but with the intervening time the setting’s been developed to the point where the CSA is redundant – there’s other factions that can play its role just as handily. Game materials directly dealing with the Confederacy were actually thinner on the ground than you’d expect, and so it doesn’t actually do that much damage to the setting to have the Confederacy defeated, particularly when one notes that nothing stops tensions between North and South continuing to be a thing in the setting, just as they were in the Reconstruction era – it’s just that the South doesn’t have its own government and army any more.

And most importantly, Hensley has recognised – perhaps late, but still recognised – that there’s been an ongoing cost to having the reformed CSA as part of the game. And as he puts it, “it’s one I don’t have to pay…someone else does. And I don’t want that.” As long as it remained an option in the game to play a dyed-in-the-wool CSA loyalist – even one loyal to an anti-slavery CSA which stands in jarring contradiction to the CSA’s actual values – that’d make some uncomfortable at the gaming table, inevitably and with good reason. Removing the option makes the game more fun for those who don’t want a loud and proud Confederate being one of the “heroes” – and I think Hensley has realised that if denying someone the opportunity to use the game as neo-Confederate wish-fulfillment loses him customers, those are customers that he’s entirely happy to lose.

As it stands, the Civil War is still a bit counterfactual in Deadlands; the CSA lasts longer than it did historically, dragging on another 7 years until a brutal defeat in 1871’s Battle of Washington in the Deadlands timeline. Post-Morgana Effect, the Battle of Washington is now the point where the CSA collapsed entirely. Frankly, I have no problem with this treatment of it, even if they retain the point about the CSA abandoning slavery in the mid-1860s. In this setup it’s possible to spin that as a feint – a cheap trick to get some motivated fighters to the front line as things got increasingly desperate, with the CSA leaders planning to reimpose slavery should circumstances permit.

What’s most important about it is that it means the Confederacy is out of the picture as of the assumed starting date for Deadlands campaigns. It’s one thing to say “The Confederates abolished slavery, but too late to turn things around for them, and so the CSA collapsed.” It’s a beast of a whole different stripe to say “The Confederates abolished slavery, and as a result they survived the Civil War and forced a stalemate with the Union”, and a whole other thing to have that Confederacy present as a feature of the setting, and a whole other thing still to have it be a viable faction for player characters to support.

Ultimately, none of the great Western stories we still love today – conventional, spaghetti, or Weird – ask us to accept ideological loyalists to the Confederacy as heroes, so not offering that as a player character option in Deadlands is no great loss – and if anything, throwing that bit of politics out there just confuses discussion of the game and distracts from the supernatural horror and mayhem which is the game’s stock in trade. So let’s raise a glass at the saloon to Pinnacle, for finally correcting course on what’s been a long-standing point of contention with the game line.