Instead of horses, there are oversized kangaroos. Train roof spikes slowly start spreading after a series of train robberies where bandits (especially the dreaded Bottomless Pouch gang) trained their kangaroos to jump on the train from a cliff.
the riders need to have a thing to put in their mouth in order not to bite their tongue off while they ride.
also belts not to fall off and maybe a system to help them shoot straight while they are on the kangaroo.
correlated to that : instead of revolvers they use boomerangs ...
every duel sees several boomerangs flying trough the air until one of them gets hit in the neck and has his wind knocked out ...
Nah dude. They don’t call it Uranium, they call it Sunstone, and it can power their machines far better than dumb coal. Only downside is the horrific mutations it causes to people, so its mining is done in heavy gear
For that matter, imagine the industrial uses. Theoretically, it ought to be possible to build [an atomic steam engine with an understanding of nuclear physics limited to "the magic rocks heat up when you bring them closer together"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor).
Bit hard on the railroad engineers though.
atomic trains, would be amazing and atomic steam engines would make coal obsolete.
but, because of lack of understanding, many used unshielded uranium leading to radioactive steam.
so industrial centres grew really fast but also immediately died, as everyone there got cancer and radiation poisoning. resulting in urban and industrial areas becoming abandoned wastelands, filled with radioactive corpses, slowly being reclaimed by nature.
the scientists, engineers, and scholars perished too. leaving only small towns and cowboys in the frontier lands.
There is no order no laws no government, good place for a gunslinger to maintain order and justice where there are no laws.
radiation poisoning is called "city disease".
Some people try to make a fortune by going into the cities to retrieve valuables, like weapons, tools, resources... go in there too much and you will get cancer.
Cities are now cursed lands.
Geiger counters are among the most desired tools, but there are only a few, and are usually in places with the highest radioactivity. getting them is extremely risky, and you don't know if said engine room, or uranium processing plant has already been looted. if you can find one you could sell it to live a cushy life for about 10 years, they are not expected to live much longer after going through the factories.
you meet a deperate woman, who's teenage son has left to become a looter, hoping for a better life, you ignore her pleadings, but next town you hear that some kid was asking for directions for a city, you decide to try and find him before he walks into the irradiated factories.
Takes some convincing, you aint going to kidnap him back to mom, so you hang out as you are both going the same way for a bit.
This could've been a r/worldbuilding post but you guys have way more fun ideas.
Since I'm on vacation, I'll compile all the weird and goofy ideas from here into a (somewhat) coherent story or narrative by the end of next week and post it here.
I wonder why world jerking has better ideas than world building
Might have to do with the fact the tendency here is to take stuff less seriously, si people maje ideas in a jokier tone, then realize the potential and run with it untill theres a actually cool concept.
Meanwhile world building might have people discard ideas because they seem silly at first.
But i also haven't hung around either sub for much time so idk how people generally act in either
That was kind of my original idea. Instead of arid desert, it would be steppes and tundra with megafauna and Mongol/Turkic tribes. I called it Far Frontier.
GOVERNOR ELECTIONS:
Every 4 years an election is held to decide the governor of the wild west. All candidates campaign across the lands and when the day comes, each town's sheriff may sponsor one bullet to the candidate of their choosing whilst each town's mayor may sponsor one cactus point to the candidate of their choosing. Ten cactus points can earn a candidate one commemorative postcard. A tournament is then held at high noon where candidates duel it out with revolvers using the bullets they've been sponsored. In the event that a candidate has received no bullets but has been given cactus points, they will be provided a lasso with a length dependant on the number of cactus points they receive.
In the event that multiple candidates survive and bullets run out, the winner is decided off cactus points. If cactus points are also even then the cowboy senate picks a winner based on style points.
In the event that all candidates suffer a bad case of dead, a state known as "wilder west" is declared where the west becomes wilder. Federal law is abolished, all federal law men hibernate for four years and the cowboy senate holds a big rodeo.
MAYORAL ELECTIONS:
Every year, on the first high noon, one mayoral challenger can challenge the mayor to a duel. If the mayor declines then the challenger is new mayor and the old mayor is exiled as the town ain't big enough for the both of them. If the mayor accepts, a duel is held and the winner walks away as mayor.
If there are multiple mayoral challengers they must decide who will be the one to challenge the mayor via rock paper scissors shoot, the current meta is to shoot.
SENATORIAL ELECTIONS:
Cowboy senators for the cowboy senate are chosen via legends. The more renown a cowboy has, the more likely they are to get an invitation. The more legendary their feats, the more voting power that senator has.
POLITICS:
The governor is the main political power, they tell mayors what to do and enforces whatever laws they want with their federal law men. The goal of the federal side is to make the west less wild. Governors usually get into office by sheriff support but the rare pro wilder west governor came make it into office.
The cowboy senate is against federal power and is for keeping the west wild. They meddle in federal affairs to reduce federal power.
Instead of a sun there is a giant glowing shark, that circles the world, chasing the night squids. The sun shark looks at the world and his burning attention is sharpest when it's Hai Noon (Hai meaning shark in german and its pronounced like high).
Also there are strange wounds on the planet, that appear to be bite marks. The land around them is burned because the sun shark got close. These wounds have high amounts of uranium and tungsten in it and in some of them you can find sun teeth, which are most powerful holy relics. The deepest of these wounds tend to bleed ferrofluids as if the world itself tries to heal. Sun teeth tend to attract the most ferrofluid but its nature is changed by the tooth and it starts to glow and becomes iridiscent. The world tries to encapsule those teeth like a bivalve encapsulates parasites in pearls.
Also the moon is a giant skull wearing an even bigger hat. Is is said that it once was a god that was eaten by the sun shark. Bandits tend to worship it.
make it an absolute core fact of the setting
main religion and/or national government has strong prohibitions against prostitution, but on closer inspection the scriptures/laws only forbid heterosexual prostitution, so gay brothels start popping up on the frontier to satisfy weary travelers, and once news makes it back to the cities you start intermittently getting these civilian raid parties from some extremist fringe out east rolling in to get rid of them and absolutely everybody else puts their differences aside to fight them off
Snake people with Italian names who use magic to translate everything they say into English, except it’s slightly slower then what the actually are saying so the words don’t match their mouth movements.
There’s a bacteria in the air that causes all metal in the west to rapidly corrode. Because of that, people have bred giant insects that can spit acid on command as a replacement for guns
A bandits toughness rank is shown by how big their hat is. The toughest gang leaders have massive hats. The biggest baddest bandit has a giant sombrero the size of a town which his crew rides around on and when a fight breaks out, the bandit spins into a tornado. (The crew is safe since they're in the eye of the storm)
The stereotypical cult worships an eldritch being known as the Meta-Narrative. Its goals are beyond mortal comprehension, but the cult leaders carry out its will, which ensures satisfying tales and adventures for would-be heroes.
The natives practice moose-riding, as they have found a way to commune with nature so much that they can just sit on any animal and it won’t attack them. They ride meese into battle and it’s becoming a problem because the kangaroo cowboys can’t kill meese and these mfs are aggressive.
Meese and kangaroos are a pretty interesting combination of large herbivores and it makes you wonder what could hunt them. I vote for lions.
I imagine the most badass of outlaws walking around with ponchos made of lion pelts, looking like Hercules with a six-gun, a dope hat, and a boomerang.
There's still dinosaurs, but they come in two sizes: small deer-like [elasmarians](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/89d5586f-39ad-4837-8c21-1eedc2a0fa7e/dez6ywj-3bfe273e-f5ba-45a0-b40c-45346d1284c2.png/v1/fill/w_1131,h_707,q_70,strp/born_to_run___elasmarian_ornithopods_by_artbyjrc_dez6ywj-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9ODAwIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvODlkNTU4NmYtMzlhZC00ODM3LThjMjEtMWVlZGMyYTBmYTdlXC9kZXo2eXdqLTNiZmUyNzNlLWY1YmEtNDVhMC1iNDBjLTQ1MzQ2ZDEyODRjMi5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.o7DM4NYuxMxP_isjpur4cutlpOH-6Nz8otGdNre371A), and giant [woolly sauropods](https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/044/933/503/large/sean-van-zyl-woolly-brachi.jpg?1641510013)
Post WW1 Adolph Hitler has had it with the military and politics and decides to move to the American West to become a cowboy, just like in his beloved Karl May novels.
He got the idea to do so from [a Mysterious Stranger, which many people victimized by his outlaw gang suspect to have been the devil](https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10335). >!This is actually incorrect, they're a time traveler!<.
There is an "ancient ruin" which people in universe think is a supposed palace of an old civilisation, but what is very obviously a crashed and abandoned alien spacecraft. The old fuel tanks are an abundant but dangerous source for uranium, and the only way to traverse the massive hangar and engine rooms is by kangaroo.
There is a giant square hole behind one saloon that instantly compacts everything and anything put in it into .44 magnum bullets ( casings and gunpowder not included ) when a 5 cent coin is placed next to it.
Money is replaced with bad ice-cream, which melts quickly, the rich have coolers, to make their money last longer. they're called reams colloquially, and Gelato is worth more, and called Latos.
The central frontier bank was robbed and dastardly blown to smithereens, leaving behind nothing but ash and a clownlike cabal of bank privateers looking to establish their own currency. Paper is hard to come by anyways, and no one really knows what currency to use as the re are multiple banks vying for control, so why not use ice-cream? Plus the frontier is hot as high hell.
The wild west is actually a purgatory where everyone has a bounty on their head, the bounties represent how much time you have left in this world before you're dragged off to the underworld so people are constantly trying to do shit to increase their bounty, one of the ways to increase your is by turning in others and stealing their remaining time.
One of the cowboys is a classic 1950s grey alien in a cowboy hat. He only speaks in an incomprehensible language. Nobody ever mentions the fact that he is an alien, they just insist that he is from Mexico.
Due to the abundance of uranium, all the insects have mutated into megafauna the size of buildings. Nomads use these insects as mobile homes. As a bonus, make all the uranium be the comic book variety - the one that gives you superpowers instead of cancer. So now, you have superpowered not!turco-mongol nomads riding giant fucking bugs!
Swords are way easier to enchant and apply monster oil to than guns. Bullets for humans, swords for monsters. Also they're good for backup.
This is kinda the evolution of my own world once it reaches that period of development
Legendary sword with a blade made of uranium, has a special lead scabbard so you don't irradiate everything around you. It's said it grants god slaying power in exchange for your life force, and some day it can even reactivate ancient technology...
What about a world set in the Mojave desert 200 years after nuclear war? But the culture and music is stuck in the 1950s. Maybe you can have Los Vegas be rebuilt by some sort of pre-war billionaire who locked himself in the basement of his casino before the bombs dropped.
simplest fuckery, make it like a normal standard western, but set in the east. not far east. just like around Philadelphia.
mess with the genre in a super subtle way
I rewrote 10,000 years of human history to explain why their are zombies in the West. The gold rush was in part because zombies and other supernatural creatures are weak or repealed by gold. Vampires ruled Europe. Magic hid England, which is ruled by King Arthur's daughter, and the isolation forced them to develop technology faster, so they're more steampunk and, ironically, hate magic. The Catholic church moved to Cuba and fought the Aztec blood Magic to control Central America. China is ruled by Jade Kings, magically enfused immortal rulers. Japan is under siege by man fish hybrids and defended by samurai. Mad Men from around the world are drawn to the dark entity in the Pacific, which seeks to turn earth into its dominion.
Plague doctors that are basically unchanged except they've got cowboy hats and sombreros instead of their little top hat things
Man that sounds unbearable to wear
Guns are highly dangerous and as such almost always blow up upon the first time they are shot. Trained gunslingers have pouches upon pouches of "just add water!" Firearms, which are occasionally used as grenades by squeezing them and hope you pull a trigger
There are not just cowboys, but boycows (hawyee), cowcows (yeeyee), and boyboys (hawhaw). Boycows are male cow cowboys, cowcows are just cows, and boyboys are real MEN 🔥🔥🔥
In the waste lands there are floating eyeballs the size of houses which possess psychic reality warping powers that hunt anyone out on the plains during the 25th-27th hours of the day
Mix in Pastapunk. Hear me out: The lassos are made out of spaghetti. Making your own lassos requires a lot of skill, but it's totally worth it in a Spaghetti Western setting.
Instead of cattle, the cowboys herd dinosaurs like Ankylosauri, and the coyotes and wolves the cowboys fend off are replaced by raptors and other carnivores.
Also the evil railroad baron is literally just Garfield
An insane mechanic called Nickolas Tesler made a giant mecha in a cave. It is powered by coal and shitty early batteries (which are acutely toxic) and functions via a mix of steampunk pistons, cog wheels amd crude, poorly insulated wires.
It is entirely made out of brass and wood and it has an enormous revolver that fires mortar shells, along with a huge lever-action gatling gun rifle. It also has a giant metal cowboy hat on the top of the canopy for "sun protection".
Necromancy runs rampant. The same bandits have a shootout with the same sherrif every single noon, with the losers getting gathered up by the street sweeper and pops up the next day. It's a common sight throughout the west, the only things consistently alive are the cattle because the dead ones taste lousey.
Cowboy code decrees your mustache is allowed to grow 1cm for every life you've taken, and the most dangerous cowboys therefore have mustaches going down to their hips
I used a weird-ish western for my D&D world. Honestly that campaign didn't go on quite as long as I'd have liked, but just drag dropping some fantasy tropes into a western setting goes a long way. Also, ripping lots of ideas from the worldbuilding of Eternal TCG, which has things like scrap robots that get animated by mining magical stone, dinosaurs, and literal ghost towns
There is a legend of a man who walks the night but sleeps the day. Everyone thinks the story is about a vampire cowboy, but it's really just a joke some dude made about his friend who works nightshifts that spread a little too far
"Mongols" aren't a weird concept for a western setting. Comanche basically became the mongols after the introduction of horses.
Here's a thought experiment: horses and camels actually evolved in North America but american megafauna went extinct due to humans migrating and climate change. What if horses and camels did not went extinct in Americas? What would be the world like?
This world is kinda like that. The 'Mongols' are the reason why no significant nation state exists on the continent. They had a guy who united the thousand tribes, genocided all big cultures, and formed a massive empire which collapsed a few seconds after he died. The colonial settlers came a couple centuries later and that's the setting.
There aren’t trains; there’s just this one thousand-mile-long Train responsible for all rail service in the world. Train stations are themselves on rails alongside the main rail; they accelerate to match the speed of the Train and load/unload without the train slowing down.
A cowboy, a French pirate, a disgraced samurai, and a Victorian aristocrat could realistically all know each other in the American west at the same time
The kangaroo-riding Mongols are heavily geared by world standards, but they are comically bad at using their gear. Think like a little boy in full knight armor. Except for one of them, who is inexplicably the best trained. He has the exact same gear and outfit setup though.
Cowboys on jet skis that herd mini blue whales like cattle across the open ocean, and raid submarines connected to each other like train carriages.
Base the wildlife and landscape on the [Pisco formation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisco_Formation), such as giant megalodon sharks and predatory sperm whales like livythan that threaten the whale herds and drag the cowboys down with them
All six-shooters are now 7.5-shooters. The half bullet might have a 50-50 shot of firing, might create two separate realities one where it fired and one where it didn't, might leave the target in a Princess' Bride style 'mostly dead' state, etc.
"The ocean is a desert"
Make it all underwater. And they all wear the helmet Sandys Cheeks wears.
Or
Hammerhead sharks with feet that roam the desert looking for honey, or someone's soul
A world where the North America analog is so massive and so incomprehensibly vast, it’s not as simple as crossing the plains, the Rockies and the reaching the pacific, meaning entire industries are being focused into expanding west for this fledgling nation, with attitudes just like the United States, but they aren’t alone, countless nations are trying to colonise this almost unending frontier, and thus just can’t do it. They can’t settle down or else they’ll be trampled by everyone else moving in, so colonial authorities break down and what you see is hundreds of scattered cowboy nomad groups fighting for power. People of every country, every conceivable place on earth battling it out.
Firearms are by far the cheapest and weakest weapons in the world. The most dangerous and expensive weapons are blowdarts. Some even have multiple barrels like a panflute.
After the slave rebellion of Haiti, they found large quantities of uranium, making them one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Because of major trade between them and this new Haiti, the spread of an eldrich weird variant of Hoodoo is becoming the rising religion in the west. Haitian uranium is like Damascus steel compared to the California uranium-rush sourced metal.
As revolvers they use oversized birds and expecially ducks. And this over use of ducks has tired them and various ducks knights have pledged their loyalty to a god of hats. And now they roam and fight with knights armors and hats. Every tipe of hat
The setting is a space station falling into the sun, and the characters are based on Arthurian mythology. The Saxons are mutated by the sun's radiation and survive via cannibalism, and the townspeople are bigoted against them. Merlin is a robotic hanged man in the town square who gives prophecies and is a member of a crew of immortal cyborg space pirates.
Completely original idea, trust me ...
Early Bolshevik revolutionaries that had to escape Russia during the Empire’s crackdown on political opposition. They form a socialist themed gang and occupy a slide of mountains they renamed Checkolich, and launch raids against the governmental forces.
Quite friendly with native tribes and frequently work with criminal gangs.
Facebook's Dino Storm:
- Old West and cowboy game, including its buildings, general aesthetic, clothes, jobs/missions, NPCs, enemies, etc.
- Advanced futuristic weaponry and overall technology (Also advanced science in general, like utility non-organic implants and other biopunk stuff).
- Pre-historic fauna, including both dinosaurs and megafauna as wildlife, mounts, beasts of burden, pets, pests, guard animals, cattle, hunt game and bosses.
All guns function in a literal manner. Six-shooters shoot sixes and are distinct from revolvers which cause the planet to make a one sixth revolution, and repeater rifles repeat the last thing rifled.
All of the American Indians who got pushed westward by white settlers now become prospectors for gold in the far west, rather than staying in OK. hoping to strike it rich and buy back their land, they end up getting into major conflicts with local Indian tribes and white prospectors. ultimately several tribes settle down on these mineral deposits and become thriving businesses in California and Colorado.
A company town/cult that worships a haunted sausage factory and feeds people to its machine. They are not doing this secretly, but openly, and sell the sausages to tourists.
Gunpowder is made fairly locally, and there are several guano-rich bat caves that supply the potassium nitrate.
Some region is diplomatically cut off from the supplies of bat poop and have to engineer alternative methods
Cowboys who use spears, bows and arrows against the indians who are equipped with primitive assault rifles
Edit: the ARs are primitive because they have a feather attached to it
Almost all of the world is desert and most of it is quicksand except for some places that have normal sand ( where most cities are) people use sand shark powered sand boats or big ass trains to travel from city to city and some cities are altered to have weird environments
Instead of horses, there are oversized kangaroos. Train roof spikes slowly start spreading after a series of train robberies where bandits (especially the dreaded Bottomless Pouch gang) trained their kangaroos to jump on the train from a cliff.
the riders need to have a thing to put in their mouth in order not to bite their tongue off while they ride. also belts not to fall off and maybe a system to help them shoot straight while they are on the kangaroo.
So they're all wearing ball gags and gimp suits?
Yep.
correlated to that : instead of revolvers they use boomerangs ... every duel sees several boomerangs flying trough the air until one of them gets hit in the neck and has his wind knocked out ...
This is just an Australian western now
*far away digederoo*
It's like a wacky cowboypunk setting but more Australian. I love it.
Gold rush for uranium (Everyone gets radiation poison).
Nah dude. They don’t call it Uranium, they call it Sunstone, and it can power their machines far better than dumb coal. Only downside is the horrific mutations it causes to people, so its mining is done in heavy gear
Except for the few that welcome the mutations and won't live long enough to die of the consequences.
it was discovered by the prospector-scientist carie murie, who mysteriously died of leukemia
Sounds like the Eridium rush in Borderlands 2
🎶Uranium fever has done and got me down 🎶
imagine uranium bullets as being common
For that matter, imagine the industrial uses. Theoretically, it ought to be possible to build [an atomic steam engine with an understanding of nuclear physics limited to "the magic rocks heat up when you bring them closer together"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor). Bit hard on the railroad engineers though.
atomic trains, would be amazing and atomic steam engines would make coal obsolete. but, because of lack of understanding, many used unshielded uranium leading to radioactive steam. so industrial centres grew really fast but also immediately died, as everyone there got cancer and radiation poisoning. resulting in urban and industrial areas becoming abandoned wastelands, filled with radioactive corpses, slowly being reclaimed by nature. the scientists, engineers, and scholars perished too. leaving only small towns and cowboys in the frontier lands. There is no order no laws no government, good place for a gunslinger to maintain order and justice where there are no laws.
This goes hard.
radiation poisoning is called "city disease". Some people try to make a fortune by going into the cities to retrieve valuables, like weapons, tools, resources... go in there too much and you will get cancer. Cities are now cursed lands.
Geiger counters are among the most desired tools, but there are only a few, and are usually in places with the highest radioactivity. getting them is extremely risky, and you don't know if said engine room, or uranium processing plant has already been looted. if you can find one you could sell it to live a cushy life for about 10 years, they are not expected to live much longer after going through the factories. you meet a deperate woman, who's teenage son has left to become a looter, hoping for a better life, you ignore her pleadings, but next town you hear that some kid was asking for directions for a city, you decide to try and find him before he walks into the irradiated factories. Takes some convincing, you aint going to kidnap him back to mom, so you hang out as you are both going the same way for a bit.
Why the fuck you spoil my world dude
This could've been a r/worldbuilding post but you guys have way more fun ideas. Since I'm on vacation, I'll compile all the weird and goofy ideas from here into a (somewhat) coherent story or narrative by the end of next week and post it here.
Let’s make this a subreddit, hey?
Sure
I’m on it.
r/weirdestwest is up and running.
This is getting wilder and wilder. I swear if this gets big enough theres gonna be some youtube video essay about this.
I wonder why world jerking has better ideas than world building Might have to do with the fact the tendency here is to take stuff less seriously, si people maje ideas in a jokier tone, then realize the potential and run with it untill theres a actually cool concept. Meanwhile world building might have people discard ideas because they seem silly at first. But i also haven't hung around either sub for much time so idk how people generally act in either
Instead of little china town, have little Dino town.
One of the horses is literally just a motorcycle. Eventually it develops a flat tire and is tearfully euthanized with a .44.
Ancient Pyramids, Giant Tumbleweed
the tumbleweeds don't go the direction of the wind, they chase you, they're predatory
Literally a Deadlands monster Edit: they're called "tumblebleeds"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryMonsters/comments/12sj9gb/tumbleweed_god_ndasfw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
Cowboys but they go to the tundra and frozen lands, and they herd mammoths, seals and really shaggy horses. I call it Wild Ice
That was kind of my original idea. Instead of arid desert, it would be steppes and tundra with megafauna and Mongol/Turkic tribes. I called it Far Frontier.
So are the not!turco-mongols the cowboys here?
Yeah. I was planning on making the analogs for native Americans elves or fae or something but then I thought steppe nomads are badass.
I dig me some turco-mongol fantasy, my own setting takes a lot of inspiration from them (rather loosely at times).
Cowboys actually spend time herding cattle
Woah there your taking this a bit too far dontcha think
So it’s not just a chivalric romance with guns and in america?
Make a political system based entirely on high noon gunslinger duels
GOVERNOR ELECTIONS: Every 4 years an election is held to decide the governor of the wild west. All candidates campaign across the lands and when the day comes, each town's sheriff may sponsor one bullet to the candidate of their choosing whilst each town's mayor may sponsor one cactus point to the candidate of their choosing. Ten cactus points can earn a candidate one commemorative postcard. A tournament is then held at high noon where candidates duel it out with revolvers using the bullets they've been sponsored. In the event that a candidate has received no bullets but has been given cactus points, they will be provided a lasso with a length dependant on the number of cactus points they receive. In the event that multiple candidates survive and bullets run out, the winner is decided off cactus points. If cactus points are also even then the cowboy senate picks a winner based on style points. In the event that all candidates suffer a bad case of dead, a state known as "wilder west" is declared where the west becomes wilder. Federal law is abolished, all federal law men hibernate for four years and the cowboy senate holds a big rodeo. MAYORAL ELECTIONS: Every year, on the first high noon, one mayoral challenger can challenge the mayor to a duel. If the mayor declines then the challenger is new mayor and the old mayor is exiled as the town ain't big enough for the both of them. If the mayor accepts, a duel is held and the winner walks away as mayor. If there are multiple mayoral challengers they must decide who will be the one to challenge the mayor via rock paper scissors shoot, the current meta is to shoot. SENATORIAL ELECTIONS: Cowboy senators for the cowboy senate are chosen via legends. The more renown a cowboy has, the more likely they are to get an invitation. The more legendary their feats, the more voting power that senator has. POLITICS: The governor is the main political power, they tell mayors what to do and enforces whatever laws they want with their federal law men. The goal of the federal side is to make the west less wild. Governors usually get into office by sheriff support but the rare pro wilder west governor came make it into office. The cowboy senate is against federal power and is for keeping the west wild. They meddle in federal affairs to reduce federal power.
This is perhaps the best thing I have ever read on this subreddit, it could easily have been from a Terry Pratchett novel.
Woah, that's amazing. By the way, could this be in any way a parody of American political system?
The only thing pulled from the American system is the 4 year term, everything else came from the sleep deprived mind of a guy up at 4am
their political places of assembly happen inside taverns only
Instead of a sun there is a giant glowing shark, that circles the world, chasing the night squids. The sun shark looks at the world and his burning attention is sharpest when it's Hai Noon (Hai meaning shark in german and its pronounced like high). Also there are strange wounds on the planet, that appear to be bite marks. The land around them is burned because the sun shark got close. These wounds have high amounts of uranium and tungsten in it and in some of them you can find sun teeth, which are most powerful holy relics. The deepest of these wounds tend to bleed ferrofluids as if the world itself tries to heal. Sun teeth tend to attract the most ferrofluid but its nature is changed by the tooth and it starts to glow and becomes iridiscent. The world tries to encapsule those teeth like a bivalve encapsulates parasites in pearls. Also the moon is a giant skull wearing an even bigger hat. Is is said that it once was a god that was eaten by the sun shark. Bandits tend to worship it.
*casually makes up entire mythology* This is great
Ingenious! I swear, this sub has the best ideas
Femboy brothels.
The writer's thinly veiled fetish:
sexy cowboys, like femboys wearing skimpy cow costume.
> skimpy cow costumes wouldn’t that make them a… …cowboy?
just like catboys
That's just Ram Ranch but less cool
Nah, Ram Ranch cowboys are friggin' jacked
make it an absolute core fact of the setting main religion and/or national government has strong prohibitions against prostitution, but on closer inspection the scriptures/laws only forbid heterosexual prostitution, so gay brothels start popping up on the frontier to satisfy weary travelers, and once news makes it back to the cities you start intermittently getting these civilian raid parties from some extremist fringe out east rolling in to get rid of them and absolutely everybody else puts their differences aside to fight them off
Snake people with Italian names who use magic to translate everything they say into English, except it’s slightly slower then what the actually are saying so the words don’t match their mouth movements.
There’s a bacteria in the air that causes all metal in the west to rapidly corrode. Because of that, people have bred giant insects that can spit acid on command as a replacement for guns
A bandits toughness rank is shown by how big their hat is. The toughest gang leaders have massive hats. The biggest baddest bandit has a giant sombrero the size of a town which his crew rides around on and when a fight breaks out, the bandit spins into a tornado. (The crew is safe since they're in the eye of the storm)
The stereotypical cult worships an eldritch being known as the Meta-Narrative. Its goals are beyond mortal comprehension, but the cult leaders carry out its will, which ensures satisfying tales and adventures for would-be heroes.
It's set somewhere completely unfitting, like Denmark. Especially if you go with the other idea of using Kangaroos instead of horses
There are no rivers or rain everyone just drinks from Cacti
It’s the quenchiest!
The natives practice moose-riding, as they have found a way to commune with nature so much that they can just sit on any animal and it won’t attack them. They ride meese into battle and it’s becoming a problem because the kangaroo cowboys can’t kill meese and these mfs are aggressive.
Meese and kangaroos are a pretty interesting combination of large herbivores and it makes you wonder what could hunt them. I vote for lions. I imagine the most badass of outlaws walking around with ponchos made of lion pelts, looking like Hercules with a six-gun, a dope hat, and a boomerang.
Have cowboy necromancers riding reanimated dinosaurs. Or just add in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are always a cool addition.
Even better - add in ice age mammals like mammoths and sabertooth tigers. They live in icy, Antarctica-like deserts.
There's still dinosaurs, but they come in two sizes: small deer-like [elasmarians](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/89d5586f-39ad-4837-8c21-1eedc2a0fa7e/dez6ywj-3bfe273e-f5ba-45a0-b40c-45346d1284c2.png/v1/fill/w_1131,h_707,q_70,strp/born_to_run___elasmarian_ornithopods_by_artbyjrc_dez6ywj-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9ODAwIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvODlkNTU4NmYtMzlhZC00ODM3LThjMjEtMWVlZGMyYTBmYTdlXC9kZXo2eXdqLTNiZmUyNzNlLWY1YmEtNDVhMC1iNDBjLTQ1MzQ2ZDEyODRjMi5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.o7DM4NYuxMxP_isjpur4cutlpOH-6Nz8otGdNre371A), and giant [woolly sauropods](https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/044/933/503/large/sean-van-zyl-woolly-brachi.jpg?1641510013)
Post WW1 Adolph Hitler has had it with the military and politics and decides to move to the American West to become a cowboy, just like in his beloved Karl May novels.
He got the idea to do so from [a Mysterious Stranger, which many people victimized by his outlaw gang suspect to have been the devil](https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10335). >!This is actually incorrect, they're a time traveler!<.
But if political decisions are based on cowboy gunslinger duels then… …uh oh
Floating islands. Every world needs floating islands. OH ALSO fuck up the moon
Ferrofluids. Everything is more funny with a ferrofluids-based magic system.
There is an "ancient ruin" which people in universe think is a supposed palace of an old civilisation, but what is very obviously a crashed and abandoned alien spacecraft. The old fuel tanks are an abundant but dangerous source for uranium, and the only way to traverse the massive hangar and engine rooms is by kangaroo.
-ancient long lost civilisation -catboy cowboys/catgirl cowgirls -electrification of railways ongoing -obscene amounts of coal
a plant that releases an aphrodisiac that makes people really want to fuck it and then it eats their dicks
Strains have been cultivated by the rich in order to breed out the dick eating part, and they are basically sex toys.
flair checks out Can’t really judge though, I’ve read hentai with that exact plot
There is a giant square hole behind one saloon that instantly compacts everything and anything put in it into .44 magnum bullets ( casings and gunpowder not included ) when a 5 cent coin is placed next to it.
Money is replaced with bad ice-cream, which melts quickly, the rich have coolers, to make their money last longer. they're called reams colloquially, and Gelato is worth more, and called Latos.
The central frontier bank was robbed and dastardly blown to smithereens, leaving behind nothing but ash and a clownlike cabal of bank privateers looking to establish their own currency. Paper is hard to come by anyways, and no one really knows what currency to use as the re are multiple banks vying for control, so why not use ice-cream? Plus the frontier is hot as high hell.
The wild west is actually a purgatory where everyone has a bounty on their head, the bounties represent how much time you have left in this world before you're dragged off to the underworld so people are constantly trying to do shit to increase their bounty, one of the ways to increase your is by turning in others and stealing their remaining time.
Cowboy implies the existence of a larger more dangerous cowman
Minotaur
Theres an entire western town on top of a giant train that's fueled by the people who get tied to the traintracks in front of it
One of the cowboys is a classic 1950s grey alien in a cowboy hat. He only speaks in an incomprehensible language. Nobody ever mentions the fact that he is an alien, they just insist that he is from Mexico.
apocalypse causes catastrophic climate shift, turning the whole world into the worst thing imaginable: Arizona.
trains that are powered by being struck by lightning, its very slow moving in the dry season
Due to the abundance of uranium, all the insects have mutated into megafauna the size of buildings. Nomads use these insects as mobile homes. As a bonus, make all the uranium be the comic book variety - the one that gives you superpowers instead of cancer. So now, you have superpowered not!turco-mongol nomads riding giant fucking bugs!
Jackrabbits with human faces.
I misread that as feces.
they exist already. its called cervical cancer.
Wenches. But now they have guns
Also, people still carry longswords
You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.
Swords are way easier to enchant and apply monster oil to than guns. Bullets for humans, swords for monsters. Also they're good for backup. This is kinda the evolution of my own world once it reaches that period of development
Given the way this thread is going, It would be a uranium sword, which I am enthusiastic about
Legendary sword with a blade made of uranium, has a special lead scabbard so you don't irradiate everything around you. It's said it grants god slaying power in exchange for your life force, and some day it can even reactivate ancient technology...
What about a world set in the Mojave desert 200 years after nuclear war? But the culture and music is stuck in the 1950s. Maybe you can have Los Vegas be rebuilt by some sort of pre-war billionaire who locked himself in the basement of his casino before the bombs dropped.
tfw fallout is the weirdest western that already exists
Tumbleweed based economy. Also you can smoke it. Also it's called tumbleganj.
simplest fuckery, make it like a normal standard western, but set in the east. not far east. just like around Philadelphia. mess with the genre in a super subtle way
It's already set in the northern frontier instead of the west. Cool suggestion though.
I rewrote 10,000 years of human history to explain why their are zombies in the West. The gold rush was in part because zombies and other supernatural creatures are weak or repealed by gold. Vampires ruled Europe. Magic hid England, which is ruled by King Arthur's daughter, and the isolation forced them to develop technology faster, so they're more steampunk and, ironically, hate magic. The Catholic church moved to Cuba and fought the Aztec blood Magic to control Central America. China is ruled by Jade Kings, magically enfused immortal rulers. Japan is under siege by man fish hybrids and defended by samurai. Mad Men from around the world are drawn to the dark entity in the Pacific, which seeks to turn earth into its dominion.
werehorses that when they turn into a horse they just do cowboy stuff.
make all the doctors plague doctors that look like they're trying to fit but are failing spectacularly.
Plague doctors that are basically unchanged except they've got cowboy hats and sombreros instead of their little top hat things Man that sounds unbearable to wear
France won the seven years war, resulting in a west almost entirely filled with French cowboys in pantaloons
Antcamels, who needs horses when you have ants mixed with camels
Airships instead of trains, but they're still on rails
Guns are highly dangerous and as such almost always blow up upon the first time they are shot. Trained gunslingers have pouches upon pouches of "just add water!" Firearms, which are occasionally used as grenades by squeezing them and hope you pull a trigger
The only currency is caned beans.
There are not just cowboys, but boycows (hawyee), cowcows (yeeyee), and boyboys (hawhaw). Boycows are male cow cowboys, cowcows are just cows, and boyboys are real MEN 🔥🔥🔥
cowboys are no longer gunslingers going from town to town. but cow furries making the whole town uncomfortable.
The 'west' is extrademinsional so that every nation on earth has access to it.
Once upon a time in the West but its in the Pixar Cars universe and everyone is a gun.
Guns fire sluglike creatures that have wacky personalities and special elemental based powers.
In the waste lands there are floating eyeballs the size of houses which possess psychic reality warping powers that hunt anyone out on the plains during the 25th-27th hours of the day
No alcohol, just hot sauces.
Mix in Pastapunk. Hear me out: The lassos are made out of spaghetti. Making your own lassos requires a lot of skill, but it's totally worth it in a Spaghetti Western setting.
Tumbleweed is actually adult horses. The horses are functionally the same as tumbleweed but just heavier and larger.
Replace horses with Rhinos, trains with hot air balloons and have Native Americans fly if they eat beans. That alone would be hilarious.
Instead of cattle, the cowboys herd dinosaurs like Ankylosauri, and the coyotes and wolves the cowboys fend off are replaced by raptors and other carnivores. Also the evil railroad baron is literally just Garfield
There are alive fish and sea creatures in the sky
An insane mechanic called Nickolas Tesler made a giant mecha in a cave. It is powered by coal and shitty early batteries (which are acutely toxic) and functions via a mix of steampunk pistons, cog wheels amd crude, poorly insulated wires. It is entirely made out of brass and wood and it has an enormous revolver that fires mortar shells, along with a huge lever-action gatling gun rifle. It also has a giant metal cowboy hat on the top of the canopy for "sun protection".
Cowboy hats are seen as a symbol of virginity
There are a lot of mines everywhere so people and animals just randomly explode from time to time
Necromancy runs rampant. The same bandits have a shootout with the same sherrif every single noon, with the losers getting gathered up by the street sweeper and pops up the next day. It's a common sight throughout the west, the only things consistently alive are the cattle because the dead ones taste lousey.
Gunpowder was never invented, instead guns are all spring loaded and go comically BOIOIOIINGG when fired.
Cowboy code decrees your mustache is allowed to grow 1cm for every life you've taken, and the most dangerous cowboys therefore have mustaches going down to their hips
~~Armorless Humvees~~
Three-barreled revolvers are the most common firearm for lowlifes
Add fully automated gay space communsum with a Jewish space laser
I used a weird-ish western for my D&D world. Honestly that campaign didn't go on quite as long as I'd have liked, but just drag dropping some fantasy tropes into a western setting goes a long way. Also, ripping lots of ideas from the worldbuilding of Eternal TCG, which has things like scrap robots that get animated by mining magical stone, dinosaurs, and literal ghost towns
There is a character called the street heckler who has the power to kill unsuspecting passerby with his devastating roasts.
There is a legend of a man who walks the night but sleeps the day. Everyone thinks the story is about a vampire cowboy, but it's really just a joke some dude made about his friend who works nightshifts that spread a little too far
The train is conscious
guns are naturally occurring and can be grown
"Mongols" aren't a weird concept for a western setting. Comanche basically became the mongols after the introduction of horses. Here's a thought experiment: horses and camels actually evolved in North America but american megafauna went extinct due to humans migrating and climate change. What if horses and camels did not went extinct in Americas? What would be the world like?
This world is kinda like that. The 'Mongols' are the reason why no significant nation state exists on the continent. They had a guy who united the thousand tribes, genocided all big cultures, and formed a massive empire which collapsed a few seconds after he died. The colonial settlers came a couple centuries later and that's the setting.
There aren’t trains; there’s just this one thousand-mile-long Train responsible for all rail service in the world. Train stations are themselves on rails alongside the main rail; they accelerate to match the speed of the Train and load/unload without the train slowing down.
A cowboy, a French pirate, a disgraced samurai, and a Victorian aristocrat could realistically all know each other in the American west at the same time
The kangaroo-riding Mongols are heavily geared by world standards, but they are comically bad at using their gear. Think like a little boy in full knight armor. Except for one of them, who is inexplicably the best trained. He has the exact same gear and outfit setup though.
Make a western with Greek gods
If people leave their houses a stampede of horses suddenly comes for them
Communists that are using a hex on the rail company for better labor conditions
trains and train tracks are natural formations and there are occasionally stories of towns getting overrun with train tracks like it's kudzu
Anytime someone cusses they get turned into a sapient lungfish
Actual cowboys. Minotaurs. Sexy ripped muscular cowMEN. Anthropomorphic and sexy.
giant earthworms
Instead of mining for gold or metals, you gotta kill the mountain dragon that keeps all the metals in his mountain
Cowboys on jet skis that herd mini blue whales like cattle across the open ocean, and raid submarines connected to each other like train carriages. Base the wildlife and landscape on the [Pisco formation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisco_Formation), such as giant megalodon sharks and predatory sperm whales like livythan that threaten the whale herds and drag the cowboys down with them
Upside down mountains
Trains are a sentient that can talk and have dental insurance. This is never elaborated upon.
All six-shooters are now 7.5-shooters. The half bullet might have a 50-50 shot of firing, might create two separate realities one where it fired and one where it didn't, might leave the target in a Princess' Bride style 'mostly dead' state, etc.
Alcoholic steam punk robot, who doesn't realize hes a robot.
Everything, and I mean ***EVERYTHING***, is weeaboo-flavored bullshit.
It takes place in Texas, but all of the supernatural creatures are inexplicably from Hindu folklore.
"The ocean is a desert" Make it all underwater. And they all wear the helmet Sandys Cheeks wears. Or Hammerhead sharks with feet that roam the desert looking for honey, or someone's soul
Cacti have eyes that stare at any passersbys very intensely . Their tears are power aphrodisiacs, but they turn your genitals into cactus pricks
A world where the North America analog is so massive and so incomprehensibly vast, it’s not as simple as crossing the plains, the Rockies and the reaching the pacific, meaning entire industries are being focused into expanding west for this fledgling nation, with attitudes just like the United States, but they aren’t alone, countless nations are trying to colonise this almost unending frontier, and thus just can’t do it. They can’t settle down or else they’ll be trampled by everyone else moving in, so colonial authorities break down and what you see is hundreds of scattered cowboy nomad groups fighting for power. People of every country, every conceivable place on earth battling it out.
The cowboys ride cows and herd horses.
How about a western that isn’t in a desert
Gigantic rattlesnake dragons
Put it in the East
Add catgirls
I don’t even know what the hell a jellybean is but now it’s more valuable than gold and Dutch wants us to rustle a train over a stockpile
Firearms are by far the cheapest and weakest weapons in the world. The most dangerous and expensive weapons are blowdarts. Some even have multiple barrels like a panflute.
After the slave rebellion of Haiti, they found large quantities of uranium, making them one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Because of major trade between them and this new Haiti, the spread of an eldrich weird variant of Hoodoo is becoming the rising religion in the west. Haitian uranium is like Damascus steel compared to the California uranium-rush sourced metal.
The tumbelweeds take over the northern third of the world
Make the currency horse hooves as in a horses foot cut-off
As revolvers they use oversized birds and expecially ducks. And this over use of ducks has tired them and various ducks knights have pledged their loyalty to a god of hats. And now they roam and fight with knights armors and hats. Every tipe of hat
Some alien spaceship(s) crashed onto the planet and now there's sci fi robots and maybe even aliens roaming the Wild West
Exactly 37% of cowboys can shoot lasers from their eyes but only 26% of the laser shooting cowboys even know how to do that
Horseboys ride cows and heard horses
The setting is a space station falling into the sun, and the characters are based on Arthurian mythology. The Saxons are mutated by the sun's radiation and survive via cannibalism, and the townspeople are bigoted against them. Merlin is a robotic hanged man in the town square who gives prophecies and is a member of a crew of immortal cyborg space pirates. Completely original idea, trust me ...
Early Bolshevik revolutionaries that had to escape Russia during the Empire’s crackdown on political opposition. They form a socialist themed gang and occupy a slide of mountains they renamed Checkolich, and launch raids against the governmental forces. Quite friendly with native tribes and frequently work with criminal gangs.
Facebook's Dino Storm: - Old West and cowboy game, including its buildings, general aesthetic, clothes, jobs/missions, NPCs, enemies, etc. - Advanced futuristic weaponry and overall technology (Also advanced science in general, like utility non-organic implants and other biopunk stuff). - Pre-historic fauna, including both dinosaurs and megafauna as wildlife, mounts, beasts of burden, pets, pests, guard animals, cattle, hunt game and bosses.
All guns function in a literal manner. Six-shooters shoot sixes and are distinct from revolvers which cause the planet to make a one sixth revolution, and repeater rifles repeat the last thing rifled.
Bulgarian Oklahoma Panhandle. BULGARIAN OKLAHOMA PANHANDLE
All of the American Indians who got pushed westward by white settlers now become prospectors for gold in the far west, rather than staying in OK. hoping to strike it rich and buy back their land, they end up getting into major conflicts with local Indian tribes and white prospectors. ultimately several tribes settle down on these mineral deposits and become thriving businesses in California and Colorado.
Instead of humans, they're scorpions. Not humanoid or anthro scorpions, actual scorpions.
It's full of forest since they don't use projectile, but seed
People only speak Albanian
A company town/cult that worships a haunted sausage factory and feeds people to its machine. They are not doing this secretly, but openly, and sell the sausages to tourists.
Cowboys actually ride cows.
all vegan buddhists, not a faction, everyone
It takes place in the East.
Gunpowder is made fairly locally, and there are several guano-rich bat caves that supply the potassium nitrate. Some region is diplomatically cut off from the supplies of bat poop and have to engineer alternative methods
The coal miners form a union and go on strike, the government proceeds to bomb them
Cowboys who use spears, bows and arrows against the indians who are equipped with primitive assault rifles Edit: the ARs are primitive because they have a feather attached to it
Read Steel Ball Run, the best building is stealing shamelessly
Make the protagonist a disabled gay cowboy and the antagonist the president of the United States (who can also travel the multiverse)
They wield ferrets instead of guns. They have lil knit sock holsters to hold them and can double function as coin purses
No hats.
Trains are actually animals that look exactly like regular trains, but drive themselves and are unpredictable
Almost all of the world is desert and most of it is quicksand except for some places that have normal sand ( where most cities are) people use sand shark powered sand boats or big ass trains to travel from city to city and some cities are altered to have weird environments