Frontier Scum – all-new Acid Western action through Mon 31 Aug

Through Monday, August 31 we present the Frontier Scum Bundle featuring Frontier Scum, the rules-lite Acid Western RPG from Games Omnivorous about helter-skelter gunfights in guttermucked streets, with death following 2d6 days later. You’re no-good outlaws on a fictional Lost Frontier – Discharged Deputies, Ghoulish Undertakers, Recurrent Jailbirds, Highfalutin Inventor Sorts – all drifting from one flyspeck town to the next, chasing a payday, a grudge, or just the next sundown. What keeps you from getting clear? The law, rival gangs, and your own bad impulses. You spend your ill-gotten coin on bad whiskey and worse ideas, stay an inch ahead of the marshals, and hope you can ditch this one-horse town afore the gentlefolk figger it were you.

Karl Druid’s Frontier Scum started as a scrappy Mörk Borg hack, then grew into its own ENNIE-winning game (Silver, Best Layout & Design, 2023). The stripped-down ruleset is styled as a 19C mail-order catalogue or almanac. Out in these parts, guns hit almost automatically – pull the trigger and go straight to a damage roll – so the only thing between you and a bullet is the Hat Rule. (Instead of losing hit points, you say the shot knocked off your hat. After the gunfight, roll to see if your hat survived.) Burn an Ace to reroll a bad result – get Drunk and watch your stats swap places – fail a Death Check and go out in a d10-minute blaze of glory (or rot from a d4-week mortal wound). Frontier Scum dishes out one-shot bloodbaths and chaotic campaigns for fans of Deadwood, Tombstone, and long one-way rides into the sunset.

What makes Frontier Scum an “Acid Western” and not “Weird”? It’s in the baseline, the background level of strange. For most Lost Frontier folk, life is mundane. Ghouls and goblins belong in supernatural stories told around the fire, and only lunatics say otherwise. The real everyday dangers are plain unbridled greed and violence.

But the weird is out there. Stories begin somewhere ordinary, then turn progressively bizarre. Tides of Rot starts as a heist in Dredge-upon-Rock, a port town crumbling into the bay under a storm that won’t quit. Floodwaters unearth the folk buried there, and then the dead decide they’re not done with the place. Corpse Trail to Hell hires your scum out to the Battercod Lubricate Company to cross the frozen Jetty Sheets and reclaim the ice-locked whaling ship Ichabod Noster – one-tenth of the cargo’s value if you hold the ship till spring. The first act is a frosty journey across the ice, following a trail of bodies; the second is a crawl through the abandoned ship, where the howling Flaywinds are the least of what’s waiting belowdecks. There is no third act.

“The fantastical should feel fantastical,” as the Frontier Scum corebook puts it; “if everything is weird, nothing is.” Frontier Scum has no bestiary of supernatural creatures. These exist, but each is custom-made for a given scenario. No two ghosts play by the same rules.

This all-new Frontier Scum Bundle presents almost the entire line for less than the price of a Duke of Death Deluxe Explosives Thrower from the Dalliance Dynamite Co. (grenades sold separately). Pay just US$7.95 to get all four titles in our Frontier Collection (retail value $39) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Frontier Scum corebook, the splattercrawl adventure (with soundtrack!) Tides of Rot, the frozen-wastes scenario Corpse Trail to Hell, and the gunsmith’s pamphlet Scumslinger’s Arsenal issue #1.