I wrote a western!
Half a decade ago, I agreed to write a story for a role playing game sourcebook for the then-on-Kickstarter Wild West Horse Opera RPG. I haven’t gamed for years, but I’ve always loved role playing games, so it intrigued me. The book would be a collection of character profiles for the game mixed with new and classic stories featuring those characters. While it took over five years, “West’s Revenge” is now available in the pages of Six Gun Red from Scaldcrow Games.
Of the list of characters featured, one stuck out for me as a character I considered using myself over the years. Her name was Kit West, a public domain character with origins in the amazingly titled Cowpuncher Comics. Now like so many golden age comic characters, Kit was little more than a cipher. But the thing that interested me about the frontier woman was her determination to help “Indians” far more than she fought them. In an era when “savages” were always attacking villages in western stories, the book played with tropes not quite as common.
Of course, it was still a comic series from 1947, so any progressiveness stopped there. But I saw a character I could build a story around, and the frontier setting allowed me to drop in a few connections to my home state.
“West’s Revenge” drops Kit into a regular position for any wilderness scout, at the head of a caravan of settlers heading for a new future. Only in her situation, things go bad as quickly as they come.
The story touches on a whole bevy of topics, from the place of any woman in mid-nineteenth century America to the fear of Native Americans to the importance of sex workers in that era of American history. But ultimately, it’s a rip-roaring yarn starring a badass woman of the range.
