Welcome to the website for the Mad Dogs roleplaying game.

Sections

Mad Dogs RPG
A Cortex Plus-based campaign and associated game system.
For Inspiration
Places to look for ideas and local color.

Useful Links

Other sites with helpful related content.

Note that if there's anything you'd like added to either of the lists below, just let me know.

Noteworthy elements.

Below is a list of links to various interesting resources that I came across while thinking about and planning the campaign narrative. If you see them on this list, there's a good chance something related to them will show up in the story eventually.

  • Dog Soldiers: Militant band of Cheyenne who resisted the westward expansion of the United States in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming.

  • Exodusters: African-American refugees fleeing to Kansas and neighboring areas to escape violence and oppression in Reconstruction-era southern states.

  • First Transcontinental Railroad: Completed in 1869 with the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory; connecting the Atlantic- and Pacific-coast rail networks to each other.

  • Great Plains: Broad expanse of prairie, steppe, and grasslands, extending two thousand miles north to south from Canada to Mexico, and five hundred miles east to west from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.

  • Indian Territory: Land area (evolving over time) set aside by the United States for relocation of Native American tribes, from the early 1800s through the end of the Civil War (when the US changed from a policy of relocation to one of assimilation; during the campaign start year of 1875, Indian Territory corresponds to present-day Oklahoma.

  • Juneteenth: American holiday marking the official abolition of slavery in the state of Texas on June 19th, 1865, two years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the surrender of the major armies of the Confederacy.

  • Mascogos: Afro-Mexican descendents of Black Seminole tribes that escaped from slavery and settled in Mexico in the mid-19th century.

  • Panic of 1873: Financial crisis that spread an economic depression throughout the United States and Europe from 1873 to 1877.

  • Placer Mining: Tradition method of mining stream bed deposits for gold, gemstones, or other precious minerals; includes panning for gold as the simplest version.

  • Red River War: Fought in 1874-1875 across the north Texas panhandle, the last of the Texas Indian wars marked the final defeat of the Southern Plains tribes.

  • Rocky Mountain Locust: Swarming insect that damaged crops and farms across the Great Plains during the 19th century, before being driven to extinction by settlement and irrigation.

  • Sand Creek Massacre: Massacre of hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho by U.S. Army Colonel John Chivington in southeast Colorado Territory in 1864.

Slang, jargon, and other authentic vocabulary.

Here are some resources to peruse if you want to get a feel for the version of English in use in the Old West during the campaign time period.

Pages

Other Stories
Movies, television shows, and other media.
Useful Links
Other sites with helpful related content.

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