

💀 Necro Western the RPG


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(this grew out of an off-hand "recommendation" in the Recommend Me a Western thread. The reason I'm putting "recommendation" within scare quotes is because this game is only available in Swedish).

Western Rollspelet is a venerable Swedish role-playing game that goes all the way back to the eighties. It is more alive than ever, though, with a glorious new fourth edition in all-color.

This game provides an insane amount of detail on the setting, which is nothing less than the whole of America in the year of 1876 :)

First a brief recap, then onto the main reason I broke this out of the original thread.


Since the thread has grown rather large, here's a "table of contents" of the thread to help you find what you need:

* Introduction to characters and their background
* Creating a character in 10 steps
* Skills - the core of the system
* The combat system of Western Rollspelet
* Miscellaneous (NPC stats, gun stats & more)

A special mention:
* A visit by Åskfågeln, explaining their design philosophy

Here's a thread discussing the 2017 crowdsourcing campaign to translate 4th edition into English: https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?803846-Western-is-Coming

Feel free to keep asking questions about my walk-through of the system here, in this thread :)

PS. The first few posts below used to showcase illustrations hotlinked directly from a site Åskfågeln used to promote the then upcoming 4th (Swedish) edition. Since then, that site has disappeared. This explains why these early posts are strangely empty. Luckily, that's just the very first posts - the thread is generally intact. DS
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El Ravager34

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I said it before so I'll say it again now that the game has its own thread...

If only the designers would translate this into English, I'd be happy to stand in line just to throw my money their way. I can honestly say the Artwork that I see here is really second to none!


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AFAIK they've kind of wanted to, seeing as there are few "normal" Western games out there that aren't really old. But they wanted to see how the 4th edition ran first, and so forth. WHether anything will come of it? Who knows. Start a campaign and ask them :p

Gorilla Zod

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They either need to translate this into English or I have to learn Swedish. And why yes, hogswaggle it, that is an ultimatum!

El Ravager34

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Is it weird that I'm actually starting to think about subscribing to Babbel just so I can learn to read Swedish?


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The game fully supports characters from five ethnic backgrounds: white people, black, mexicans, chinese and indians.

I should probably first say that this is, much like most contemporary Swedish games, an actively equal game where historic issues like discrimination and racism is fully acknowledged but not part of the character generation process. If you and your gaming group doesn't want to bring these issues into your game you certainly does not have to, and the game fully supports the idea of heroes of every gender and race.

To illustrate the depths to which the game goes when it comes to detailing your character's backstory, lets showcase a few examples.

The full experience (that you can skip in parts or in full) starts with your grandparents :)

Who were they? I mean, from where did they come to America? How successful were they? How did they lead their lives? You will track your maternal and paternal grandparents separately, and they can (obviously) be of different ethnicities.

Each ethnicity gets four pages of background tables. In order to not blatantly steal from the book, I've selected pages 1, 3 and half of 4 for the Mexican origin, as an example.

(if you know how to resize that last picture to be the same PPI as the other two, please tell me how)

Let me walk you through this, should your Swedish be a bit rusty... ;)

You begin by choosing or randomly rolling where your paternal grandparents came from. For white people this could be the United Kingdom or the Netherlands (rich lucky people: i.e. social group 1), Prussia or Sweden (social group 2) or Ireland or Poland (destitute looked-down-upon people of social group 3), for example. For black people the tables include three groups from Senegambia (Mandinka, Fula, Wolof) and many many more.

The notion of "social group" has a specific meaning in the game: the better your social group, the better chance of having a better social background. For whites primarily, your social group is also an indication of when your ancestors arrived to America - people in SG 1 have generally been around longer (=more time to amass wealth and social standing). Most mexicans and indians have of course been around much longer.

And in our case, we're rolling lots of d100s to decide: 42 means Mexico, and 88 means Tamaulipas. Not familiar with the geography of Mexico, I note this is right on the border with Texas. The specific ethnic group is 32, which is mestis, defined as "descendants of spanish/portuguese men and indian women". This is considered to place us into social group 2.

I didn't include page 3, but it discusses the following:

There is an overwhelming possibility we're catholic. To determine our social background I'm rolling 33 to get "grovarbetare" or manual laborer.

These social backgrounds are a kind of simplified roles, not fully detailed as for our hero, but sufficient for the purposes of fleshing out relatives. There are ten such backgrounds, from farmers and soldiers at the bottom, to land owners and industrialists at the top.

Let's use Grovarbetare as our example.

To keep this example from getting insanely complex, we'll simply roll once for our (paternal) grampa. You can obviously detail your grandmother separately, and indeed if the random tables indicate a divorce of some sort (death perhaps being more likely than actual divorce) you are encouraged to! :)

14 - Arbetslös = Unemployed. The worst result, with quarter pay.

67 on the table for grovarbetare (manual laborers) män (men) in the "mex" column gives us "murare" or bricklayer. This specific job title has no game effect, the jobs are there for color and atmospheric detail.

Moving to the second page (page 67) we randomly roll the following:

20 on the table of grupptillhörighet män (again reading the "mex" column) gives us "frivillig brandkår" - that our grandpa was part of the voluntary fire brigade (at least at some point).

Most other tables are primarily meant for the hero character, and not his ancestors.

(Making a post break here)

El Ravager34

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So, I threw some of the words on the table under Grovarbetare into Google translator, and I see that you roll again to see exactly what type of laborer your character is like you mentioned. That's some pretty cool attention to detail. I'm guessing that all the general occupations have tables of their own to see what exact profession you have. Is that right?

I see that there are organizations involved here like the Free Masons. Are all the general occupations tables this in depth? If so, I'm thinking more seriously about learning Swedish! I love in depth RPGs!
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At this point, let's go back to page 46 (the number within the spades symbol at the bottom of each page).

The game provides a random life result for four periods of time. Again, there are different tables for blacks or indians - the above concerns our chosen ethnicity (mexicans). The four time periods are the same, however.

1) Before 1851 (called "guldrush" or gold rush) - you only roll for your grandparents here (since they're the only ones adult at this time).
2) 1851-1860 (called expansion westward) - this table applies to your grandparents (if they survived) as well as their children (your parents and their siblings)
3) 1861-1865 (called, appropriately enough, civil war) - this table also applies to your elder siblings (if you have any).
4) 1866-1875 (reconstruction) - this table applies to every (living) relative of yours, since the game starts in 1876

Let's explore! :)

Obviously I can't create a full family tree here, but then again, that's not the point - just enough to show you that yes, the game does indeed fully support one. (And all this even before we begin creating our hero :D I did use the word "insane" to describe the level of detail of this game, and I did not do so lightly :p)

Let's roll for grampa:
Guld rush: 06 - "försämrad hälsa" detoriating health (success -1)
This means we look at the following page for details. As I said I only included the top half of this page, but "försämrad hälsa" is included. I could just pick a result, but I like randomly rolling, so 77 - "alkoholiserad" (remember to look in the men's column). There's a 2 in 6 risk that this kills our grandpa, but I rolled a 3. Phew! Grampa survives into the next era!

Expansion: 25 - "tragedi" (or, as I'm sure you guessed, tragedy in English)
Again flipping to the next page, and rolling 16 - "apaches". The footnote didn't make the cut, so trust me when I roll a d6 and get 2 - "killed". Our grampa was killed by apache, it seems. This can provide your hero with a character trait, perhaps hating indians, or wanting to find out more about your grandfather's fate.

In my example, I'm not tracking your grandmother separately, figuring she's bound to your grandpa's fate. But since he died, let's continue her history now.

Gold rush: no significant event
Expansion: 55 - "flyttar" Moves/relocates. In our case, the straightforward interpretation is that she moves after her husband's death. I'm rolling 2 on the d6, which means "western". This, in turn, references the original table (page 44) and I roll 12. This means she moves to Colorado.

Continuing on...

Civil War: 55 - "ändrat civilstånd" change in marital status. Essentially you marry unless you were married, then you split up or remarry. Since our grandmother is a widow at this stage, the default is that she remarries and gets +1d6 children.

What children you might ask? Well, what I haven't said yet is that the number of children is kept exceptionally simple: always 1d6 (but remember, you may choose any number if you prefer not to roll). The chain of events leading to remarriage is the one that leads to more children. The idea is that generally, each marriage will result in a new family.

You can easily see how this can create very complex family trees, and how you can spend hours if not days on tinkering away with your relatives.

Let's just assume your grandmother got 2 children with your grandfather, and 2 more children with her new husband.

Whether you care enough to follow her new family or not is for you to decide. The important thing here and now is to note down that your father (remember this was your grandparents on the paternal side) had one sibling, let's make that a sister.
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