I’m fine with fireballs and lightsabers. It’s the Powerful Artifacts That Can End The World that I’m worried about.
A couple of examples to further all of that.
You don’t have everyone walking around with an enchanted six-shooter, but you do get people using things like Gatling pistols and Static guns, mad science that was made possible due to developments in chemistry and metallurgy following the discovery of ghost rock (which is evil magic super coal made from the souls of the damned - that’s why it makes a screaming sound when burned - and placed on earth by the Reckoners in places where it’ll cause the most trouble). You might also get Hexslingers, who are a type of huckster that uses a weapon as a magical focus (Maria Kingsford looks like an example of this). They would appear to have a magical gun. Magic isn’t a common, widely available or known about thing, but it does exist. Mad Science is basically inspired by demons and fuelled by magic, but the majority of people (including most scientists) don’t know that yet…
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Sitgraves is trying to fix that, if he survives the Los Diablo that is after him…
The masquerade around magic is strong at this time, however there is enough weirdness that people are scared. As well they should be.
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Opening a portal to the Hunting Grounds or the Deadlands, or making a place into a Deadland isn’t going to end the world. At the time Doomtown is set, there are several Deadlands in the world and a load of portals dotted around. It’s when large areas become Deadlands that you have to worry about the end of the world, and that’s not going to happen for a while yet… (Check out Deadlands: Hell on Earth for more on that front)
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I’m not certain that anything in Doomtown has end of the world written on it. Demons trying to be made manifest in the real world, sure, but one city in the maze isn’t going to end the world…
Unless it does.
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Gomorra is basically a distillation of the RPG. It has every aspect of the game world in it… for some reason.
A Demon trying to be made real or a portal opening to hell is a big deal, but possibly not as big a deal as the ongoing civil war to the higher ups of both the Union and the Confederacy.
(Even though Davis isn’t who he says he is)
At this point in the timeline (I think Doomtown Reloaded takes place in the early 1880s), the war has ground to a halt and ‘President Davis’ met with a little accident a year or so ago 
It’s very doubtful that whatever ivor has planned is world ending. The Reckoners and their agents don’t want to destroy the world, they want to make it so heavily fear induced that they can turn the whole world into a hell on earth Deadlands. Even the penultimate plotline in Classic, the Storm, wasn’t really ‘world ending’ as much as it was linking up the Gomorra plotline to the bigger metaverse issue of the Reckoners trying to screw up things for the Good Guys in even the Hunting Grounds.
As it stands, we’re still not that far into the mystery of what’s going on with the town’s current residents. The Law Dogs/Sloane dust up has really just been a business as usual side show. But it’s done it’s job of raising the fear level of the town, between having a Whately mayor and acing the latest Sheriff.
So far there hasn’t been any major connection revealed between the several items Ivor has collected so far, aside from the Holy Wheel gun and Sabre both being used by Austin Stoker, the Stone Idol and Hoyle’s are unrelated as far as we’re aware.
Whatever the plan is though, it does seem like the 108 and the Wardens are likely to put a crimp in it between the Righteous Bandits having a ‘what’s yours is ours’ mentality and the Wardens actively on a mission to do some good and clean up Gomorra.
As for which Reckoner this is, I’d say it’s hard to put a real finger to it. Gomorra has been a Deadland a few times in the past but even then we haven’t seen any direct hand of the Reckoners or any evidence of exactly who they were serving. At least in Classic it wasn’t that overt about the Reckoners, we were just dealing with minions and underlings who, even then, didn’t reveal their affiliation (Well, we know by now the Lost Angels are under Famine, and the original arc was Knicknevin doing things on his own). I don’t think we’re going to get a lot of direct action vis a vis the Reckoners, they’re big players and Gomorra is still small potatoes by any standard. We’d be more likely to see a servitor make an appearance, like Stone.
I still think ‘Sloane’ might just be the spirit of the original bandit possessing one of his lieutenants.
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The Lost Angels belonged to Famine, and most of the Maze is Famine’s territory. That said, I don’t think we’re going to see a Reckoner’s direct involvement either, or even their prime servitors getting involved. I was thinking more along the lines that many abominations and fearmongers are serving the goals of a particular Reckoner, sometimes unwittingly, and this is reflected in the type of chaos they sow.
AFAIK, the reckoners after this point start taking turns messing the world up. War gets WW1, Pestilence gets the flu outbreak after that, then famine with the dusbowl.
Death comes after that with WW2, though that is up for debate.
The Reckoners are also prone to cheating. Famines greatest servitor isn’t even human.
In terms of where Doomtown Reloaded fits in the Deadlands timeline, I just checked the rulebook and it’s 1878, which I believe puts it after the events of the Deadlands classic books but before the events of the Deadlands Reloaded campaign books
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Classic went up to 77 IIRC.
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This is news to me. I never read anything that suggested that they each got their turn, but it’s certainly possible that you’ve read something that I haven’t.
The way that HoE establishes the division between the four is geographically … each has their “domain” in the West. The Maze is Famine’s … The Midwest is War … the southwest is Death … and the Great Plains is Pestilence. That’s where each Reckoner emerges once the apocalypse finally happens. This is then further established in Deadlands: Reloaded as they are specifically called “XXXXX’s Domain” even back in the Weird West.
The assumption is always that stuff is happening in other places around the world, but I’ve never really read much that talks about it. The Cackler will surely shed a little bit of light on it, but I don’t know if that story will ever be fully told.
The Reckoners ‘taking turns’ is mentioned in the Deadlands Noir book (Doomtown Noir? That would totally rock! ). That starts with WW1, so it’s quite a way off as far as Doomtown (and Deadlands, for that matter) is concerned.
Judging from comments Shane Hensley’s been making following the Cackler graphic novel Kickstarter, it looks like that plotline is finally going somewhere and there are big things in store for the weird west!
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Ahhhh … I admit that I haven’t gotten to delve too deeply into Noir yet, so that explains it.
Thanks so much for the share!
The lore of Deadlands is one of my favorite meta plots in Role Playing. I own most of the books in dead tree. I own all of the Hell on Earth books (sans adventures).
If I don’t know it I can find it easily.
This is why I’m so glad Doomtown is back. More plot!
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On a side note I’m tooling around with an inclusive fan set for Hell on Earth.
Oop, yeah meant Famine, s’what I get for posting when tired.
Anyway, yeah, the metaplot is really pretty neat, especially as things move forward in Reloaded and the eventual Hell on Earth (and Lost Colony) settings.
DTR though is definitely waaaay more lowkey. The Ghost was really one of the biggest players in Classic and he was much more the exception than the rule though with the 2nd arc we were seeing a lot more influence from Rail War players, including Hellstrome Industries and the Black Circle. I’m totally for opening elements of Gomorra up to the larger world, but I still think the game generally works well keeping things local and low key, even if, for a lot of major players in the current story, the cat is ‘out of the bag’ in terms of things being weird and wild. Even including more areas like Soddum, Ghost Creek, Devil’s Armpit, etc, we don’t need major deadlands players rolling into town, it works best as a valuable resource folks are interested in but not as a ‘fate of the world’ kind of thing. I know the Wardens feel they’re going to save the world, but I took that as a general ‘we fight evil’ mission statement.
Yeah, what Gomorra doesn’t need is an Apocalypse of the week like Rokugan had six years in a row.