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My prompt:

"15) From train robberies to cattle rustling and Indian wars, tell a story from the Wild West."

I have a tenuous grasp of the Wild West, but I feel like I can put together a compelling story in the lawless lands regardless.

I'm assuming it doesn't have to be a literal real-life tale that actually happened in the Wild West, but I am assuming that train robberies, cattle rustling, and Indian wars would all have to play a part somewhere.

I'm pretty sure there we no limits here, so you can have a wild west with magic and dwarves if you really want to go weird.

Correct.

For some prep, I looked up some common cowboy/wild-west phrases, curses, jargon, and all that.

What's funny is that I already use half of them in regular conversation. I am from Texas though, so perhaps those words stuck around.

It just has to be set in the Wild West. Though all three of those in the story would probably mean a lot of fun paths.

While coming up with ideas for this game, I've found that listening to this song helps put me in the correct atmosphere.

Never heard that one, nice.

I always had a love for the classics though.

Iconic.

I would have gone with Ballad of Billy the Kid or Blaze of Glory, by Billy Joel and Bon Jovi respectively.

Oh snap! It's an update!

My latest brainstorming session came up with these ideas:

- Items will be usable in the story

- There will be multiple points where the player can choose to put on or take off a holster to hold their revolver in.

----- Having the holster on will add the revolver as an item to your inventory, and you can whip it out at many points in there story. You can point it at people, and shoot it at them too... Even though it will likely cause a game over for many points of the story (but perhaps I can make an "outlaw" path specifically for the situations where you manage to get away with it).

----- Having the holster off will increase your mobility.and make people more likely to trust that you aren't going to hurt anyone... But you won't have the revolver on you.

- I will build one Main plot-line first, and then branch off from it with the time remaining.

- The main plot-line will revolve around traveling to an abandoned(?) hideout of a gang of outlaws. One of the outlaws came to town, scared for his life after a large, casualty-ridden battle with local Indians. After he is promptly jailed, the protagonist and a group of newfound acquaintances are asked to accompany the local sheriff to the hideout, with the promise that they can keep whatever they can carry back.

- I don't have names for the characters yet. The names won't be hard to come up with at all, given the types of names in the Wild West are pretty natural to me. However, I'll go ahead and leave the descriptions of the main characters of the main plot-line here, to see if any of you can think of any clever names that you'd want to be used.

----- The Protagonist - I'm probably going to avoid giving them a name. Just a 2nd-person-perspective "you". They were probably a cattle rancher with a want for adventure. So they head to a saloon, and the rest is history...

----- The Sheriff - Lost his left arm. Always has his pistol holstered. Slow and lumbering, but quick and accurate on the draw. Has a looser sense of social morals than his (late) predecessors, but will crack down hard on anything he finds unlawful.

----- The Widow - A jaded widow with a penchant for gunslinging and a distrust for authority. A reasonable trait, given that a group of officers had her entire family hanged on false charges - a fate she only barely escaped herself. She has a vendetta against those officers, though she doesn't expect to find them. And she sort of doesn't want to, since she's still getting used to the concept of committing violence.

----- The City Slicker - A nervous banker/white-collar criminal who came to the West to set up a property business, and to get away from his ever-present, borderline-yandere wife. He is increasingly regretting his decision, and wants to go back home. But he can't. Not without having some sort of future set up for himself. Incapable of violence, outside of a mental breakdown.

----- The Bodyguard - A filthy, horny, grizzled, enormous beast of a man. By far the most athletic of the group, and by far the least charismatic. He has a soft side for animals, but is otherwise kind of a huge asshole. Hired by the City Slicker to act as his bodyguard for a hefty pay. Loves money, women, rotgut alcohol, and well-bred horses.

----- The Bandit - Put in jail by The Sheriff when he came running back towards town after the Indians raided their outlaw camp. Extremely amenable - not at all a leader, and will follow whoever will give him the most stability in life.

I've been playing through my head a scenario where you end up shooting the sheriff in an attempt to swap him and the prisoner out as party members.

I'm pretty excited at this prospect.

The gunshot would be loud, prompting the widow to check it out. If you manage to make her not suspect anything, and call her back, she probably will, and you'll be on your way with the prisoner instead, but with some interesting consequences if you return to that town.

Of course, most scenarios would result in the widow checking the situation. Fight or flight at this point, with flight being the only way to get out of it, what with the bodyguard being present.

And thus, one potential route to the Outlaw path is born.

Perhaps the most efficient path of flight would be the bodyguard's prized horse, once the widow has already gone inside, as then both of the most likely people to gun you down would no longer want to - one of them because you're riding an animal they cannot bring themselves to harm, and the other because they can't see you fleeing until it's too late.

You shot the sheriff...but you did not shoot no deputy.

I'm interested to see how this one pans out. :)

On an unrelated note: Nice Fallen London avatar! I haven't been on that site in a year. Has anything changed, or is it still roughly the same?

Thanks.   I made the avatar when the kickstarter for Sunless Skies was going on.  

As for the site, I'm not sure. I've played Sunless Seas, but I never actually participated in the Fallen London website.  I need to play that game again sometime, now that I think of it.

A story about the wild west sounds fun. How's your writing coming along? You've been strangely quiet ...