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What I have come up with is a “cascade”of three levels of umpire-controlledintervention. Indeed the first levelcan also be handled by willing andconsenting players without the need foran umpire. Essentially the first level is asimple random reaction to events aroundthem by unnamed civilians, passers-byand animals. The second level sees theintroduction of “civilian” characters withtheir own storylines and player statisticswho can be controlled by the umpire in amore or less random fashion. The thirdlevel is where insanity may truly set in!At this level what is envisaged is ascenario within a scenario. At a random,or pre-determined, point in the gamethe inhabitants of the board suddenlycommence upon their own scenario.This will impact upon the playersplaying, ideally, a multi-player game toa greater or lesser extent. The rest of thisarticle sets out how each of these threelevels works, together with examples ofcharacters, storylines and scenarios whichpeople are welcome to use, either lock,stock and smoking barrel, or merely asexamples to fuel their own imagination.This article, and the ideas and scenarios,are written from two basic start points.Firstly they are written with theWarhammer Historical rules in mind andtherefore the character statistics usedare designed for use with that game.Secondly they are designed for use inmy own western town of Desolationso please excuse some of the “locality”based references. I am sure that the ideaswould transfer to other rules systems and,indeed, hope that they do provide someamusement for players using other rules.Simple Randomised EventsThe basic concept here is to produce aneasy way of making random charactersreact during the game. One of the greatappeals to me about western gunfights isto produce a town that is crowdedwith buildings and populatedby civilians. Fighting agame around these obstaclesis much more fun than doingso over a terrain made up of a couple ofodd shacks in a strangely deserted setting.Nonetheless there is a downside to this.If the civilians and/or animals do notreact or move then they are no more thansmall pieces of terrain.A simple way of dealing with thisproblem is to take a dice throw whenevera violent incident occurs near to a civilianor animal. A simple throw of one on aD6 would suffice. It is, however, muchmore fun to use a “smiley face” diceif you can find one. These have sixdifferent expressions from very happy tovery irritated and enable you to determinewhich expression makes the figure react.Once a figure has “reacted” then throwa GW scatter dice and a single D6 for acivilian or 2D6 for an animal. Move thecivilian or animal the distance on the dicein inches in the direction of the arrow.If an explosion is shown then the civilianor animal dives or falls to the groundand whimpers!How this works out in reality lies largelyin the hands of an umpire. Commonsense should be used. Except in cartoonsand poor computer games people andanimals do not run slap bang into thewalls of buildings. They move aroundthem. Accordingly characters shouldbe made to move with the semblanceof realism. (It has to be acknowledgedhowever that there is occasionally much“fun” to be derived from something verysilly indeed happening!) Given that thistype of event is largely dictated by diceroll you can understand why I say thatthis can be used without an umpire at all.It does require players to share a similarview of how the game should be playedto work properly.Random CharactersBy adding this level of detail umpirecontrolled characters with their ownstatistics become involved in the game.The intention here is that each turn theumpire will roll a D6. On a roll of‘one’ one of the characters below willbecome “live”.In my own game I have continuedthe theme set out in the WarhammerHistorical rules of using playing cards. Ihave put these details and statistics on toa separate playing card for each randomcharacter. Once a roll of ‘one’ hashappened, the card is drawn by chancefrom the pack and that character entersthe fray. From that point on it is down tothe umpire to use that character as closelyas possible within his other storylinesor, alternatively, to achieve the greatestamusement for all the participants!The list of random characters grows.To try to make the system work I havegenerally expanded them as the townof Desolation expands. Each time anew building or accessory is added Idream up a new random participant.When my steam train was added the twoWelsh railway workers appeared. Theschool room was accompanied by MissMacdonald and Little Britches. A fewof the characters just appeared withoutthe need to be supported by a particularbuilding and are part of the background“colour” of any western town. Someof the characters have however beenprovided by friends whose insanityappears to exceed my own. (Even Iwould not have dreamt up an Eskimo ina western town!) These additions havesometimes actually led to the purchaseof a building or accessory in order togive a good excuse for that character toappear. Other ideas are in the pipeline.A Chinese laundry with its owner, WanHung Lo, will appear before long, aswill a set of town Meeting Roomswith some slightly more upper-classdancers etc. Of course amongst thosedancers will be some with worryinglypsychotic tendencies.Illustration by Kenson Low:kenson_low@hotmail.com