The West that Wasn't: The History of the DTI
Contents
The Buy-In: An Introduction
The man turned his back to the group. The rest were seated around a table, its surface glossy and black, dominating the room like a fat coffin. At the head of the table, the only man standing wore a crisp, gray suitcoat, and faced a framed map on the wall. He took a draw on his pipe. The map showed North America. Crisp lines marked the boundaries of 38 states, with less clearly-defined markings carving off the rest of the map into foggy territories.
“Look at that, Gentlemen,” he drawled to the group behind him, “and tell me it ain’t a thang of beauty.” The gathering had no immediate reaction. Each man looked across and around the table at all the others called here for this meeting. Not one of them had expected to see any of the other notables assembled here. The people in this room accounted for approximately seventeen percent of the wealth of the United States. This would be a perfect place for a bitter Graycoat to firebomb, but here, in the palatial expanse of the Rathburne Manor outside Albany, there was unlikely to be any of them about. Their host—Clemson Rathburne, himself—only sounded like one of them. He had long abandoned hazy antebellum fantasies and heartily embraced the ways of the capitalist Yankees.
Clemson transferred the pipe to his left hand and pointed its stem at that side of the map. “Got us a pretty good bridgehead on the west coast, what with all the settlers pouring into Oregon, and the California gold rush, and all.” He swept his right hand across in front of him, back to the Missouri and Mississippi. “But ‘tween there and here,” he said, chopping the edge of his empty hand at the map like a tomahawk, “is ‘purt near a desolate wasteland. Ruled by savages who are slaves to myth and mysticism.” He turned to face the businessmen, sat his pipe down in an ornate dish that was handy and planted his palms firmly on the surface of the table. “Tell, me. When was the last time any a you ever heard of a Wendigo?” He took a moment to look each of them in the eyes, and affected a look of blank confusion to match their own. “Never? Me either, until some a the historians and sociologists I got on mah payroll told me about ‘em. Algonquins, Cree, Innu—all sorts of First Nations tribes believed in the Wendigo. An evil spirit that ate men alive and drove ‘em ta madness. Now, when was the last time you ever heard such a tall tale about some monster runnin’ wild in New York? Or Richmond? Hell, even Atlanta—exceptin’ maybe for William Tecumseh Sherman?” Clemson allowed himself a small chuckle, but the men before him didn’t seem to see the humor in his joke. He sighed. “You haven’t. And you won’t. And, if we take manifest destiny ta heart, gentlemen, we will see those wild lands tamed by the flame of reason, and tempered by the forge of civilization.” He saw that he was losing the attention of his audience, that his introduction was not grabbing them the way he needed. That was expected, of course; this sort of crowd was not easily impressed, and he was prepared. With the people he had on retainer, he was prepared for anything, as his current wealth and business success would attest.
“Compared to the rest of the civilized—and the not-so-civilized—world, America is a pretty young country,” he continued, undeterred. As if on cue, a young woman entered the room carrying a short stack of envelopes on a salver. She was scandalously dressed in black breeches and a long-tailed black jacket with a crisp white shirt beneath. Her hair was long, black and glossy, hanging low in the front to shadow her eyes like a short veil. Her skin was dusky, making it difficult to peg her origin. She made a show of shuffling the unmarked envelopes, then orbited the room and deposited one on the table before each of the guests. Without a word, she left the way she came. Several of the men shared looks with others they knew here. Those looks said that they were unimpressed with the tawdry parlor tricks, that they wondered what Rathburne was trying to get them to invest in. “The red Indians have been here for God knows how long, and all of ‘em have their tales and myths. Still believe ‘em, too. In every civilized place you’ll ever go—and my people have been to plenty—people have given up on that stuff, like children grown up who don’t believe in fairy tales no more. But plenty of those civilized cultures have a huge frontier or an interior where their population basically drops off to nothing. Deepest, darkest Africa, the heart of Asia,” he cited. “Almost like people there just want to stick to the edges of the continents by the sea. Now, you might say, ‘but the population isn’t great enough to warrant further expansion,’ or ‘it’s not cost-effective to colonize so far away from established population centers,’ to which I would say horse shit.” The influx of profanity made a couple of wandering eyes snap to. “Those places have been stagnant for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. They’ve had plenty a time for settlers to go out and discover the riches hidden by the land just out of reach. That sort of conclusion will not do for America. Our people will settle this land from sea to shining sea.”
One of the men near the head of the table, a railroad tycoon who was responsible for truly impressive lines connecting nearly every state east of the Mississippi, spoke up. “While your business acumen is impressive, your theatrics here are wearing thin, Mr. Rathburne. I’m sure I speak for everyone at this table when I ask that you get to the point.” A few subtle nods around the table showed that he was correct. They wanted this pitch over with so they could go back to their successful businesses and put this waste of their collective time behind them. “Clearly, you want us to invest in some scheme of yours. You are an expansionist; nothing wrong with that. You certainly have a viable track record, and if you will simply state your case, some of us may well be interested in investing, but this introduction is beneath you. Rest assured, our interests will expand as settlers move west-”
Clemson Rathburne slapped his hand on the table, which caused the rail baron’s jaw to snap shut like a steel trap. “If ah may…interrupt,” he drawled with just a hint of menace, “would you do me the honor of opening that envelope and take a gander at the letter inside?” The man rolled his eyes and conceded to this request, as if accommodating a petulant child. He ripped open the envelope, and his eyes scanned over the few words written there…in what disturbingly appeared to be dried blood. His slight, elitist sneer faded further with every word until his face seemed to hang slack and grow ashen.
You let your oldest son die because you feared he wouldn’t be able to run your business when you are gone as well as his younger brother.
“Care to share with the rest of the group?” Rathburne asked flippantly.
“You bastard,” he seethed. “How dare you—is this some attempt at blackmail?” At this, everyone around the table was suddenly very interested in what was contained in their envelope, and they tore into them without further prompting. These were not the sort of men who waited for permission. Clemson waited for the shocked gasps as each of them read some deep sin from their lives that only they—and the seers who told him of the horrors lurking in the west—knew haunted them.
“Certainly not, sir,” Clemson soothed, his intensity fading away to be replaced by his earlier beaming, enterprising spirit. “for it to be effective as blackmail, I would have to have proof, and that I do not possess. I don’t want to turn the world against you, gentlemen, I just need to convince you in a very personal way that I…know certain things, so that you will believe me when make my pitch, which—I have to admit—is a bit much to take at face value. I have already convinced some friends at the new Department of Justice, and they are willing to back a new, clandestine, branch under the auspices of the U.S. Marshals, but their issue is funding and deniability, which is where all of you enter the scene. Hopefully now I have started to convince you, and maybe y’all will take me and the threat our nation faces a bit more seriously. Every word on each of those letters is just a little whisper from someone in my employ who is in touch with certain secrets of the world. She and her people have shared some of these secrets, which is why I have asked you here today. Without some intervention, westward expansion will soon stall. See, those campfire stories and Indian legends are based in fact, because where man has not trod and brought science and reason, mysticism is strong, the boundaries to the spirit worlds are a bit…fuzzy. If you don’t want to see your businesses halted at the Mississip’ for the next several centuries, I would invite each of you to listen to my proposal…”
Welcome to The West that Wasn’t. The Civil war is over, and while America struggles to heal, many eyes turn to the land of the setting sun, and the opportunities that await. Venturing away from civilization is fraught with danger, though, as settlers venture where no “civilized” people have gone before. As men forge into the unknown, many bring back tales both wondrous and terrible. The wealth and wonders entice more to follow, while the terrors threaten to steal men’s souls and churn their blood and bones into the earth. To prevent ghost stories and superstition from blunting the charge of Manifest Destiny, a handful of men have joined together and formed an expansionist cabal. This secret group has formed the DTI: The Department of Territorial Investigation. Their lot is drawn from all across American society, from soldiers and farmers to prospectors and businessmen. Their mission is to venture forth into the frontier and look into strange reports. So far into the dark, away from the light of civilization, the shadows are dangerous, and hide deadly secrets. The brave souls that venture into the West that Wasn’t will confront those shadows, and attempt to make the land safe for civilization to follow in the wake of America’s pioneers.
The Deal: The Setting
The year is 1880. Colorado became the 38th state in the union four years ago. The American Civil war has been over for only 15 years, and tensions still haven’t completely cooled. Alexander Graham Bell was awarded a patent for the “telephone” four years ago, but distant communications are still mostly conveyed by telegraph and couriers. Air travel is still a generation away, but steamships and locomotives plow through the waves and thunder across the plains. Nearly half a million Americans have set out westward from Independence, Missouri down the Oregon Trail, but with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, travel to the west coast by wagon has declined, and more and more settlers are pouring into the new territories and building all along the routes of travel, pushing deeper into the unknown.
This is the backdrop for adventures set in the West that Wasn’t. On the surface, it is a world physically and historically very much like one we know today, as presented to us by writers and historians. But what if, in the name of capitalist expansion and the pursuit of Manifest Destiny—at any cost—the record of events from that time were…sanitized? Molded into a narrative that better suited the goals of politicians and businessmen back east? We all know the adage about who writes the history books, and anyone can tell—from taking a brief glance at the skylines of any number of today’s metropolises from Denver to San Francisco to Seattle—who won the west.
The West that Wasn’t allows you to play out the stories and adventures that didn’t make it to the presses, the ones that were deemed unfit or too inconvenient to lay down in the historical record.
The Population
Players will explore the West that Wasn’t as agents of the Department of Territorial Investigations. DTI agents are fully sworn and empowered members of the U.S. Marshals, and they advertise themselves as such, because the DTI is an organization as secret as the truths they wish to hide. DTI agents’ backgrounds tend to be far more wide and varied than your typical U.S. Marshal. Part of this is to allow DTI teams to blend in wherever their investigations may take them and not be outed as Pinkertons, and partly because the DTI requires a certain drive and experience for its agents. As such, DTI agents might be former soldiers, miners, farmers, cowboys, Pony Express riders, stagecoach drivers, journalists, Indian scouts or settlers, just to name a few examples. What they all tend to have in common is a brush with something unnatural, a belief that something unknown lurks in the shadows beyond man’s understanding. They might be seekers or suppressors of truth, or modern-day inquisitors that want to put evil to the torch, but they all start out sharing one goal: Make the West safe for colonization.
The Stories
Who can really say what didn’t happen? Or why it didn’t happen? Or what did happen that no one heard about? Since you have read this far, we—as the writers of this material—will assume that you have at least a passing familiarity of what a “pen and paper,” tabletop role-playing game is, and not pedantically beat you over the head with basic terminology as if you had just stepped out of 1974 and don’t know what an RPG is. Before going any further, please allow us a small aside:
Many RPGs have a thematically appropriate name for its players, and following suit, we have chosen to hew to this tradition. Typically, one of the players in an RPG is the general-purpose “Gamemaster,” or GM, whom we will call the Judge. This is the person who details the plots and setting, performs the roles of the characters not controlled by the other players, and generally interprets the rules and keeps the story moving. The other players, each in control of one (or sometimes more) characters are known as members of the Posse, as DTI agents are typically sent out in teams, and these teams are informally known as posses. Naturally, if you don’t like these terms, feel free to substitute your own; we will count ourselves lucky if we can merely convince you to buy and play our game. We certainly can’t make you use our terminology if you don’t like it. Suffice to say, however, that these terms will be used throughout this supplement.
It falls upon the Judge to determine the version of the West wasn’t. To put it in a less obtuse way, the Judge has broad discretion on how wild, crazy and supernatural the setting is, and the nature and motives of the DTI. Is your old west setting full of werewolves and wendigo? chupacabras and sasquatches? Undead gunslingers and vengeful manitou? Or is your setting set more firmly in the “real world,” where there may only be stories of these horrors, and it is up to the DTI agents to dispel the myths rather than defeat them and cover them up? Likewise, is your version of the DTI benevolent, or do they have a more sinister motivation and employ villainous tactics in pursuit of the greater good? And whose good does the DTI serve? Whatever the answer is to any of those questions, we suggest the Judge play the cards close to the vest, and not reveal too much about the nature of the world to members of the Posse. Part of the fun of the story is the notion of the players not knowing exactly what to expect of the unknown world they are venturing into. If they are investigating reports of a rancher’s cattle being mutilated and drained of blood, is it because of mundane predators? Is it a cult? Is it aliens? Is it a moustache-twirling railroad tycoon who wants to create a false panic so the rancher will sell his haunted land on the cheap?
If you plan on running the west “straight,” then your Posse will likely have adventures that are somewhat “Scooby Doo-ish” in nature, where they investigate mysterious happenings and attempt to reveal the truth and calm the population. As things get weirder and more supernatural, the stories can venture into the realm of fighting monsters and the undead, foiling apocalyptic plots, or Machiavellian scheming to hide, suppress or even subvert supernatural forces for the cause of an agency whose leaders may have dreams of world conquest…All of which are stories that aren’t told today.
Welcome to the West that Wasn’t.
The Draw: Tone and Mood
One of the many driving factors for westward expansion of the United States came down to class. With the eastern regions of North America being more and more extensively explored, claimed and settled, it became increasingly difficult for your average American to rise up at all within society. People often found themselves stuck in service or factory work, with no real opportunies for economic betterment. The frontier offered an opportunity to many in the form of free or cheap land. Over the course of years, different factions within the federal government had differing ideas as to how the lands west should be parceled out, of course; they didn't want everybody in the established states just picking up stakes and squatting on land out west. This would have been disastrous to the economy, and would have caused no end of headaches later down the road.
Still, some people did just that, and traveled westward, camped out and hoped that their claim would hold when civilization finally caught up to them. Eventually the government settled on a middle road sort of approach. They sold parcels of land in the western territories to raise funds for the government, and they also honored squatters in the form of 160 acre parcels (a plot of land 1/2 a mile on a side, or 1/4 of a square mile), provided they worked the land for at least five years.
Even with all this expansion and settling going on, the population density of the west was miniscule for many, many years. Even if 160-acre plots were settled shoulder-to-shoulder, this meant that your nearest neighbor was likely half a mile away or more, and the nearest town could be miles and miles away. If one opted to settle in a town (which could easily spring up almost overnight with hundreds or thousands of settlers), living in a tent for upwards of a year was a real possibility as people waited for the assessors to parcel out the land and sign off on deeds. When towns were initially built, the buildings were often thrown up quickly. They were made almost exclusively of wood and were built close together, frequently sharing walls (like a primitive sort of strip mall). This also meant that many early settlements frequently burned down, partly or even entirely, only to be built back up again, the planks and beams dripping pitch. When a town had survived a few fires without everyone abandoning it, a sense of permanence began to seep in, and sometimes people would throw up a masonry wall here and there to serve as a firebreak--but before then, spending time building things was about the last thing people wanted to do when they could be out there farming, ranching or digging for gold and silver.
So, life in an established settlement in the old west might seem fairly normal, what with a variety of goods and services within easy reach. Life on the frontier and away from civilization could be anything but. Structures would be limited by the available materials and one's building skills. Some frontier homes were little more than a peaked roof built over a hole dug in the ground. Others might have been rough-hewn log uprights with plank walls and piles of foliage on the exterior to provide some kind of windbreak or insulation. If you didn't have a resource or skill, there was often no way to aquire it or hire a professional; you simply went without. If you needed help, there were no emergency services to call upon. Frontier life sometimes meant being trapped alone in a seemingly endless sea of the plains, and if you were in certain types of trouble, you might as well have been lost at sea, clinging to an odd bit of flotsam.
If one lived on a farmstead, out in the middle of Nowhere, Central U.S Territories, take a moment to imagine stepping outside your tiny hovel for a moment to visualize a possible environment. Just a gently rolling plain as far as the eye can see. Perhaps, somewhere off in the distance, there might be a copse of small, scrubby trees, but there is nothing to break your line of sight from one horizon to the next. There is nowhere to hide, and everything can see you. One might begin to feel vulnerable and exposed in an unforgiving world.
As the first settlers rode into the West, claiming free land, another thing to consider is that it was not really free at all. The U.S. government acted as though they held sole dominion over hundreds of millions of acres of land, and that they could parcel it out at will. When settlers arrived in an area, they inevitably came into contact with the indigenous peoples that had been living there for thousands of years, and these meetings often did not go well. Depending on the ferocity of the local tribes, settlers often lived in fear of Indian attacks. The Army set up territorial forts all over the land from which companies of soldiers could sortie to respond to raids and attacks. Settlers often gathered near these forts for safety and protection, like terrified children huddling next to a campfire for warmth. In The West that Wasn't, settlers had more to be terrified of than mundane native reprisals; there is plenty more in the dark for characters in this setting to be afraid of. There were many differing native tribes, each with their own systems of belief; multiple pantheons across the land of various gods, spirits and hierarchies of legendary figures. These higher powers were completely alien to the minds of European-descended Americans first encountering them. They really had no analogous counterpart in the Judeo-Christian system of belief.
As a settlement became more established, more permanent, life began to approach a level of quality and stability that was more on par with what people were used to in the lands that they had come from back east. Most all of the terrors described in the previous passages still existed to some extent, but by this point people were not having to face them alone and without supply. One thing that would not change for many years to come was that no matter how big and stable a frontier town became, it was on the frontier, and it was still far from "civilization" and other such bastions. The greed and wickedness of men call no particular land home. It is a curse we bring with us wherever we go, and it seems there is no escaping it. Out on the frontier, it just means that help to stop it is just that much further away. A relatively small number of men could terrorize a much larger community, and there were precious few lawmen to oppose such desperadoes. Old wounds and grievances from the Civil War often bled onto the plains, and the settlers formed their own tribes within settlements based on their political sympathies and which side of the Mason-Dixon line their ancestors were born on. If the right scoundrel found himself in the proper position of power, it was often all too easy for them to usher in corruption that could plague a community for years. Giving certain criminals a pass, extorting the locals and rigging provincial elections were just a few of the favorite ploys of wicked men who found themselves in power with no oversight in the West.
These are just a few of the terrors and troubles of the West that settlers faced. With the goal of populating the land from sea to shining sea, some forward-thinkers foresaw some of these difficulties (and maybe were warned of some others), and--by hook or crook--created the secretive Department of Territorial Investigation. The field agents of same were charged with assisting locals all across the land. Helping settlers resolve their problems and disputes would be a key step in creating stability regardless of whether the source of the instability is mystical or mundane. Another purpose of the DTI was to minimize panic, and though field agents had different methods of achieving this end, it often amounted to dealing with issues and covering them up so no one was the wiser. Why tell the townsfolk that a few of their young men had been possessed and abducted by evil spirits when it could just as easily have been blamed on something they understood better and could relate to? As the theories went, once the spirits were dealt with and the shared understanding of science and reason settled long enough in the minds of people nearby, the power of the supernatural would fade because it thrived on fear and the irrational. As an agent of the DTI, you will have to deal with all manner of disturbance wherever you are posted. You will deal with these issues where you can, and act as the eyes of the U.S. Government in recording this clandestine history and research.
