From the beginning, we tried as much as possible to focus the story around just a few characters, the "voices" of the game if you will. We wanted people to care about the characters a bit and have some investment in seeing what happens to them. We ALSO didn't want to inundate the players with so much fiction that it became an obstacle to new players ("Oh you want to understand why Lane Healey said this one quote in the flavor text on this card? Here are links to 400 pages of fiction that you'll need to read before you can make sense of it."), which caused us to limit the fiction to about 5-6k words per release.
In order to keep the story moving, that meant that we needed to use our fiction slots wisely. Which also meant that some stories would just never have been told, including elaborating on some of the characters. Some characters were just fillers ... but others had some kind of general story premise that could have produced some pretty fun stories given the opportunity.
Margaret and the Wretched were a design requirement. They needed a Drifter Union Mad Scientist and had a place for the Wretched with it. IIRC, it had been put off for some time, but when Faith and Fear came along, it couldn't wait any longer. I always saw it as being a filler character, but Paul Durant really took the character and ran with it.
The idea is that she was a desperate woman who'd lost her husband (if you look REAL closely, you should be able to see they wear the same rings in Margaret's picture) to the dangers of the Weird West. In her despair, she believed she could only ever be happy again with her husband by her side, so she easily bought into the manitous' whisperings that he could live again. This was his request for her artwork ... "The expression on her face is an almost terrified glee, like she’s going to start laughing or crying or both and won’t even know which one she should be doing. What she is about to do will be horrible and blasphemous, and will either bring her happiness when nothing else would, or it will obliterate her completely."
The Wretched just kind of fell into place along with her as her resurrected husband, now some kind of horrible Frankenstein's monster.
Truth be told, it would have been a great story to tell, but it had no connection to the broader story that we needed to keep developing in order to bring it to its climax at the right time. So instead, it became one of those story pieces that players would have to imagine for themselves.
To be honest, El Grajo was a request of mine, based off the character of Yang from the move, The Warrior's Way. A ninja assassin who gives up his life of killing and tries to hide from his past in the Americas, only to eventually be forced into drawing his sword again in defense of his new home. I had wanted him to remain largely hidden for a while until eventually he and Abram came to blows before realizing they were both warriors for good in the town. That meant requesting some pretty low-key artwork for the time being.
However, Todd Rowland, the brand manager and art director at the time, (rightly) asserted that this character needed to be more exciting than that. He said, and I'm quoting, "I mean, come on, we have a 'master swordsman' card in Doomtown. It HAS to be a Zorro character. There is no discussion." The result was a super-cool action hero to add to the game.
Again, we didn't get to do much with him because we didn't envision a big role for him in the larger story. However, I was tossing around the idea of involving him as an ally for the Law Dogs going forward as they were forced underground into a vigilante-type role. But alas, that was not meant to be.
