TEXT: © 2016 Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Savage Worlds, Deadlands, and 
  all related original characters, marks and logos are trademarks of Pinnacle 
  Entertainment Group. All rights reserved.
  The Deadlands 20th Anniversary and Good Intentions 
  Kickstarters are roaring toward their conclusion. 
  Thanks so much for your support, compadres! Now 
  we’re gonna set for a spell and talk about the Servitor 
  Plot Points—how they came about, the thorny 
  quandaries they presented, and how we solved them.
  A DEADLANDS SUMMIT
  Scene: Origins 2008, at a leather-upholstered booth in 
  the Big Bar on Two. Shane, Clint and Jodi Black, Yours 
  Truly, and a few other attendees (whose identities 
  have slipped my mind; bourbon was on the menu) 
  gathered to map out a brand strategy for Deadlands. 
  Looking at the sheet of notes I took, over the following 
  eight years we managed to hit just about every target 
  we laid out for the game line. A few fell by the wayside 
  because the time to write them never materialized (like 
  the Back East Trail Guides), while others were perhaps 
  a little too outré even for us (to wit: a fantasy version of 
  Deadlands called Hexslÿnger).
  We talked about how the players of our Plot Points 
  could have agency, really feel like they were making 
  a difference, in a setting where so much of the future 
  history had already been established in Hell on Earth 
  and Lost Colony. Plus, the Plot Points had to pay 
  off a dizzying number of stories and subplots 
  from earlier Weird West adventures and 
  sourcebooks. But most important were the 
  ideas and insights I gained from the team 
  regarding what makes Deadlands tick.
  We had a fairly solid idea in mind for 
  The Last Sons, with the assumption that the 
  heroes wouldn’t face Raven directly—he 
  ends up chained to a mountain, after 
  all, and the chronology demanded that 
  binding happen in the 1980s. Short of 
  releasing a new Deadlands setting with 
  a New Wave soundtrack, we couldn’t 
  make that happen. Luckily, Raven’s 
  servants all looked and acted just 
  like him, giving the heroes a 
  way to fight “Raven” without 
  invalidating other stories.
  Clint threw out some 
  brilliant ideas for Stone, most 
  of which ended up in Stone 
  PERILOUS PLOTS
  Deadlands Brand Manager Matthew Cutter
  talks about writing the Weird West
  In the second of three design diaries, the Big Bug recounts the design process behind our Plot Points.
  and a Hard Place. The conversation then turned to the 
  last Servitor Plot Point, which we knew would focus on 
  Darius Hellstromme. I was scribbling furiously in an 
  attempt to keep up, when Shane smiled wistfully and 
  said something that forever changed my perspective 
  on the metaplot:
  “At its heart,” he said, “Deadlands is a love story.”
  I must have dropped my pen and taken a slug of 
  bourbon before I asked him to elaborate. I won’t spoil 
  it for you here—longtime fans can likely guess what he 
  was getting at; for those who can’t, it’s spelled out in 
  Good Intentions—but it was a statement that informed 
  everything I wrote from then on. The idea that a tale 
  of Harrowed gunslingers, science gone mad, and Hell 
  brought screaming to the Earth could be about a love 
  affair for the ages...well, that fired the creative furnace 
  and kept it burnin’, amigo.
  BACK TO BIGNESS
  Hindsight’s 20/20, to hackney a phrase. If I had The 
  Last Sons to do over again, it would be a smaller book. At 
  the time, I deluded myself into thinking I was 
  writing a future-classic RPG tome in 
  the style of Chaosium’s Beyond 
  the Mountains of Madness. Sure, 
  it would be huge—with a price 
  tag to match—but it would 
  cover the Disputed Territories 
  and the Sioux Nations, as well 
  as recounting how the Great 
  Summoning 
  came 
  about 
  (well-known 
  to 
  Marshals 
  and players of Hell on Earth). 
  And to be honest, Shane’s 
  attention was elsewhere at 
  the time so there was no one 
  to stop me at the brink. We 
  took the plunge.
  I’m happy with how it turned 
  out—we found a fairly satisfying 
  way for players to participate in one of 
  Weird West’s greatest alterations after 
  the Great Deluge of The Flood—but it 
  might have benefited from a tighter focus on 
  the heroes of the story: the player characters. 
  Next time around, we aimed to fix that.
  
  TEMPORAL ODDITIES
  At the end of The Flood, the Great Deluge just 
  about wiped Lost Angels off the map and Reverend 
  Grimme vanished forever in the chaos. The Last Sons 
  tells of a similarly massive (if much less well-known 
  to the general populace) event, the Great Summoning. 
  Technology would never again function inside the 
  Sioux Nations’ boundaries, as told in the Hell on Earth 
  sourcebook Spirit Warriors. The heroes of these tales 
  shook the pillars of Heaven and clobbered the bad 
  guys in a big way.
  For the next Plot Point, Stone and a Hard Place, we 
  wanted to do two things: make the story smaller 
  and more personal, and get back to that spaghetti-
  Western feel that informed some of the greatest 
  Classic sourcebooks. But we also had a few tangled 
  knots to unravel: how to tell a satisfying story about 
  an unstoppable killer, and how to resolve the story 
  of Stone and his mysterious benefactor, building on 
  events from the Classic Road to Hell adventure trilogy. 
  Whether we achieved those ends without leaving any 
  gaping paradoxes in our wake, I’ll leave it to you to 
  decide. Likewise, I’ll spare you our endless discussions 
  about whether Deadlands time travel works like it did 
  in Back to the Future (short version: it doesn’t).
  What I’d like to talk about is what ended up being 
  my biggest misstep as Big Bug. Backers of the Stone and 
  a Hard Place Kickstarter—those who got a good look at 
  the initial PDF release—know it was a little different 
  from the final version we published. This was the third 
  Plot Point, so in narrative terms I felt it had to take 
  heroes to a low point. The main enemy was a stone-
  cold killer, and I didn’t want to dial back that ruthless 
  nastiness. It had to go to The Empire Strikes Back levels 
  of brutality. I wanted a story as rough and hard as 
  Jasper Stone himself.
  So, to underline just how badass Stone was—and also 
  to “clear the decks” for whatever phase of Deadlands 
  might come next—we included a sidebar describing 
  how the Deathly Drifter murdered just about every one 
  of the Weird West’s enduring (and endearing) Classic 
  heroes. One by one they went down, shot through the 
  head and the badge: Hank “One-Eye” Ketchum, Ronan 
  Lynch, Nevada Smith, Six-Hundred-Pound Sally, cut 
  down in a hail of mystical bullets and gunsmoke.
  And boy did I screw the pooch there, amigos.
  It wasn’t so much that they died. After all, Hell on 
  Earth describes how Ronan Lynch’s skull ends up in 
  future Lost Angels, so we know he had to go at some 
  point. No, the problem was that they died off-camera, 
  in a sidebar. Their deaths had no meaning or resonance. 
  And in the end, my lack of history with Classic came 
  back to bite me in the ass; I’d sorely underestimated 
  the sheer amount of love for these characters.
  Lucky for me, Kickstarter is a forgiving medium. We 
  were able to dial that sidebar way back, portraying the 
  killings as events reported in the Tombstone Epitaph...
  but not necessarily true at every game table. We also 
  punched up the final scene so the players had more 
  cool things to do in their final confrontation with Stone.
  In the end, we were happy with how it turned out. 
  The element I enjoy most about Stone and a Hard Place 
  is its use of Tombstone’s history (or at least legend) of 
  the Earps and Cowboys as a jumping-off point into our 
  imagined events. Best of all, the fans taught me a very 
  valuable lesson I could put to use on the next and final 
  Servitor Plot Point.
  GRAND INTENTIONS!
  If Stone and a Hard Place was intended to show just 
  how brutal the Servitors could be, Good Intentions was 
  conceived as a love letter to you, our fans. To balance 
  out our two world-shaking Plot Points, we’d do 
  another story that was more personal, whose outcome 
  might never become common knowledge in the Weird 
  West. Moreover, everything would come full circle. 
  The Servitors’ tales began with Darius Hellstromme 
  winning the Great Rail Wars at the Battle of Lost 
  Angels; they would end with the Bad Doctor once more 
  taking the stage, as the greatest and most important of 
  his plots came to a fiery conclusion.
  We also completed a process we’d been working 
  on since The Flood: reintroducing a lot of the concepts 
  and flavor that had been lost in the translation from 
  Classic to Reloaded. Over the course of three Plot 
  Points, players got the ships of the Great Maze, more 
  options for chi masters, expanded powers and abilities 
  for native shamans, gear and gadgets for U.S. Agents 
  and Texas Rangers, the option to begin the game with a 
  Harrowed character and a passel of Harrowed Edges, 
  and one of my personal favorite Arcane Backgrounds, 
  the hexslinger (but not the hexslÿnger).
  Good Intentions brings back the metal mage, updates 
  the blessed, and brings Divine Interventions to the 
  table, allowing the forces of good to call down the 
  thunder even though they’re now bound to Power 
  Points and a more limited selection of powers.
  Most of all, Good Intentions plays on Shane’s defining 
  statement from all those years ago: that Deadlands is, in 
  the end, a love story.
  Does love conquer all? Well, amigo, that’s something 
  you’ll have to figure out for yourself at your own game 
  table, surrounded by friends. We can’t wait to hear the 
  answer.
  Next: What a Big Bug does...and what’s next for 
  Deadlands!
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Deadlands [multi]/Deadlands Reloaded/Misc/Deadlands Reloaded - 1882 - Good Intentions - Design Diary 2 - Perilous Plots.pdf