As you’ll note, I’m a big fan of Keith Baker’s Eberron setting. One of his key design decisions is that no sentient race of people in Eberron is inherently evil. I like this, but his solution in making it work in D&D is creating factions and organizations that are evil and can be killed without remorse, and using unintelligent threats for let 's-kill-it xp fodder. However, he also did this in order to make Eberron have a noir thematic vibe, which goes against a lot of what I want for B&B. Westerns work great with complex characters and motivations, but not with “we’re all a little bit evil” shades of grey.

I’d love for the Wyld Frontier to be dangerous, a land that wants to kill you. But there’s only so many man eating plants and rampaging packs of wolves one can throw at a party. The moment you make their foes intelligent, it treads into cowboys vs indians territory.

My solution to this has been to make many things demonic and devilish, but this design decision has unintentionally altered the vibe. (See Is this a Game about the Devil?) It might stick, it is Bullets and Brimstone after all, and boy do I love my Devil at The Crossroads tropes.

I am debating on whether I lean into the Hellish vibes further, or whether I create more threats like the Tarry Boys and Starshine, heavily Omesa themed fantasy/western trope hybrids with their own lore. I’m sure we’ll do both, but I am unsure how to weight it.