Plot
As the name implies, Deadlands: Hell on Earth is set in the same exact place as the original Deadlands roleplaying game. Specifically, it is set in a post-apocalyptic future of the original "Weird West" setting of Deadlands, also known as the "Wasted West."
Through a series of machinations, the Reckoners from the original Deadlands setting contrive to spark a nuclear war between the United States and the still-existent Confederate States, in which the weapons are not only powered by nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, but are also powered by a supernatural element known as "Ghost Rock." The combination of multi-megaton explosives, radiation, and supernatural devastation serves to turn large portions of the United States into hellish wastelands filled with radiation and deadly supernatural monsters.
The formation of these large "deadlands" allows the Reckoners to enter the realm of Earth, where they are revealed to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They ravage across the globe, destroying civilization and turning most of the Earth into a wasted landscape of nightmares and death. Then they mysteriously vanish.
Thirteen years have passed since the Reckoners appeared, and civilization is once more attempting to assert itself in small, isolated pockets. Players take on the roles of characters struggling to survive the nightmarish wasteland that the Reckoners left behind. A variety of mundane and arcane archetypes are available, including "Sykers" (characters with deadly psychic powers), "Doomsayers" (magical priests of radiation), "Templars" (members of a martial organization patterned after the Knights Templar), "Junkers" (humans with the supernatural ability to create working devices from the scavenged debris of pre-apocalypse civilization), and even just plain-old everyday humans, surviving by their wits and their gun.
Read more about this topic: Deadlands: Hell On Earth
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
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The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)