An amazing art piece that deserves to have its story told, I wanted to share with the community how this promo came to be and why it was chosen for the upcoming Tombstone Series.
To provide some history, I was very much previously into Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), which I discuss a little in a previous article I wrote for AEG (Magical Samurai to Cosmic Cowboy: Bridging the Gap from Legend of the Five Rings to Doomtown: Reloaded). If memory serves correctly, I won my first top of clan playmat at the Grove City Kotei in 2011, handed to me by the artist, Charles Urbach. I got to speak with Charles at several other events in the years to follow and was gracious when he and my other favorite L5R artist (Drew Baker) attended Tanukifest in 2016, an event I co-host to bring the community together.
For the Origins Game Fair in 2016, Dan Dineen had brought me out to volunteer for AEG to host the Doomtown events for the convention. I ran into Charles in the artist hall and he talked about having interest in doing an art piece for Doomtown. Shortly after it was announced the game would be discontinued, and thus Pine Box Entertainment started to form. I asked Charles a couple months later at GenCon that if somehow the game were to keep going, would he still have that interest.
Fast forward one year later where the first Doomtown European Championship was held under Pine Box Entertainment, where we gave the winner, Robert Campbell, a choice on where to move the Doomtown setting to, with members of the outfit most represented in our first organized play series being featured as characters moving to the new setting: the Law Dogs. Robert talked about wanting to get an art piece that truly commemorated this change. I approached Charles again at GenCon50 to talk about this and found that like myself, he was also a fan of the film ‘Tombstone’ and would love to do a piece featuring the Earps and Holliday, but ‘with a twist.’ I explained how in the Deadlands RPG setting, Holliday is a ‘hexslinger,’ a kind of spellcaster in the Weird West, and how that might be a distinct feature shown through his weapon.
While working on updating rules and errata, an issue came up involving Resolution abilities and the card, ‘No Turning Back.’ While everyone played the card correctly in applying the stud bonus until the end of the shootout, the card itself is not a shootout action and thus the duration had to be specified. In continuing with releasing promotional cards for those requiring an errata, this was the perfect opportunity to use this art. The name and art not only reflect the Street Fight of October 26, 1881, but also represents Pine Box’s tenacity in working towards the continuation of Doomtown: Reloaded into a new era.
Historical events alter greatly in the Deadlands universe, as you folks will find out in the coming fiction pieces in the new setting (and those already familiar with Deadlands), but the flavor text was abridged directly from Wyatt Earp’s testimony. “I knew it was a fight for life, and I drew and fired in defense of my own life and the lives of my brothers and Doc Holliday.”
We hope you enjoy this piece as much as I do. I very much thank Charles for bringing this to life and indulging our nonstop efforts to make it happen.
