Alright, allow me to forward some ideas:
I mentioned before the idea of a heist. As the overarching Big Bad, we might have a powerful moneybags-type character (A corrupt frontier governor, a Doc Durant*-style railroad tycoon, or maybe a Space-Casino owner?) and his Dragon would be a brutish and unsympathetic security chief (whether gleefully cruel like The Swede*, or a steely consummate professional - maybe a Pinkerton Detective.) Your main character would lead a team out to hit the Big Bad where it hurts : in his wallet. Your character would have been wronged by the man in the past, so it's personal (and sympathetic, from a meta perspective), but the other characters can be either opportunistic or altruistic in their motives. I'd happily volunteer to play the Enforcer bad guy, in addition to a team member. A lot of this is from
War Wagon; they had a back-to-back Kirk Douglas double feature on the TV -
sue me.Next idea is also a revenge story. In the vein of
Murder on the Orient Express and
Bullet Train a cast of characters enter a train or other mass transit seeking to kill a target or complete some other objective. If you want something like
Express, they all want to kill the same man, but don't know each other.
I think the Civil War gives a good pretext for this kind of revenge killing, if you want a traditional western setting. IRL, many of the blood feuds which broke out in the Wild West found their origin in the War Between the States. Perhaps you've got a Cullen Bohannon* type my-wife-is-dead schtick. If it's a chaotic web of conflicting goals, you have lots of tension since, by it's nature, the characters are stuck in close proximity and are far away from help.
Another team-oriented, goal-oriented premise would be a cattle drive (or setting-appropriate equivalent) whereby the team has to make a difficult journey over a large distance and encounter some difficulties. These could be light-hearted moments like an unfortunate cowboy getting bucked off onto a cactus, or brutal scalped-by-Apaches violence. Depending on the setting, this one might be an all-male cast and focus on themes of mentorship, coming of age, brotherhood, and sonship. Lots of banter between crusty old drovers and wet-behind-the-ears greenhorns just off the train from the east.
Something like this.So, those are some plots. I had an idea for an open-world setting, but it's a little esoteric and bends the definition of Western. An "Eastern," as it were. I like historically-grounded settings, so if you want hear my pitch of a gunslinger saga in the interwar far east, let me know.
*from
Hell on Wheels
