Cowboys and Samurai: my TTRPG Setting Introduction
There’s an incredibly strong media connection between Westerns and what are known in the West as “Samurai flicks,” (actual term Chanbara or Chambara, samurai-specific sub-genre of “Jidaigeki,” period dramas). It’s really kind of everywhere, even in this modern media era where neither genre is especially popular.
There’s the well-known story of Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars being effectively a complete recreation of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but that wasn’t really the first instance: Kurosawa was himself explicitly inspired by John Ford, known for films like Stagecoach and The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance.
Seven Samurai has been re-made into Westerns several times. Films like Ronin and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai show a clear desire to connect ronin with American-style gunslinger rogues. Novels like Cloud of Sparrows go out of their way to bring Western and Chanbara characters together. Video-games like Red Steel and the cleverly-named Samurai Western exist with cult followings. There are anime like Afro Samurai that are clearly inspired by mixing the East and West together; the first fight in the show is literally a ronin and wandering gunslinger throwing down for the title “Number One.” Star Wars is the result of Westerns and Samurai flicks blending together with space-opera science fantasy acting as the mixture base.
The genres are so effectively glued together that it’s almost impossible to discuss one without bringing up the other. I'm pushing them together for a setting. The idea here is to enable RPG opportunities and short stories. While this blog won’t be exclusively about the setting, I’ll likely add posts about it as time goes on, expanding on and adding elements.
I don’t have a clever setting name yet. Such is life.
Being an example of alternate history, we require a divergence point. In our case, it is that the Tokugawa Shogunate begins its own reforms in the late 1700s without the external pressure of actors like Commodore Perry. These reforms are focused primarily around re-establishing trade and occasional travel out-of-country with the intent to gaining the upper hand against those with eyes on Japan itself. A group of particularly adventurous merchant-pirates hear of the Americas—and in particular, the "great island," of California—from Portuguese traders while docked in the Spice Islands.
How convenient.
Initial exploration of what would come to be known by Americans (and at this point after very early Spanish influence, the locals) as California but these new Japanese immigrants as eventually “Nambokudo,” (translating as roughly “north-south road,”) looked incredibly promising. On reading reports, the Shogun decides to capitalize on such good fortune. He settles the newly discovered land, sending several minor nobles who had fallen out of favor to lead the “glorious effort,” with expectations that failures would not be missed terribly.
It backfires on him: despite little to no real support from the Home Islands, colonization efforts somehow make it work, and now don't feel too favorable on sending wealth back across Earth's widest ocean. Many rural poor and landless Japanese looking for a better life, from lowly eta to villager to ronin to minor lord and their retaining samurai, embark on the one way journey across the Taiheiyodo (roughly “Pacific road,”) to this new land full of opportunity.
Smash cut to a few generations later: Mormons arriving in what we know as Utah are rather confused to find Japanese explorers and settlers coming in from the opposite direction. Settlers and frontiersmen from the East Coast headed down the Oregon Trail soon encounter Japanese-style forts and villages in what we would call Idaho.
Where East and West meet in the middle, you find Old West timber saloons with noren curtains, where California-born Japanese women spin silk lassos. Baby-face cowpokes ask for amazake and are sometimes paid for their droves in hansatsu. Occasionally quarrels at high-noon involve swords instead of guns, and every ronin worth his salt carries a repeater in his saddle-holster. The straw kasa hat is likely to be seen on a farmstead or horse ranch, and exposure to vaqueros has begun a fad of silk serapes and leather hakama for riding. You’re just as likely to be greeted “Konnichiwa, pilgrim,” as you are “Howdy, tomodachi.” “Badii,” (often pronounced "bah-dee,") is a popular loan-word making the rounds, used the same way we’re using to hearing cowboys call people “partner.”
Politically, the North American Continent is very unfamiliar to someone from our timeline. The descendants of those same nobles sent from Japan and left out to dry have not quite announced full independence from the Shogunate, but they don’t really listen to the Home Islands either. Understanding themselves as a sort of “Australian Experiment,” where undesirables are encouraged—or occasionally forced—to relocate, these nobles have formed a pair of cooperative grand councils: the lords of Nambokudo (what we know as California, Baja California, some of Nevada, and southern Oregon) and the lords of Kyokuhokudo (translating as “far north road,” and what we know as northern Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and some of Montana and British Columbia). Truth be told, neither council is really an effective government; it mostly exists so the various lords know they aren’t alone. People sitting in a room and making sure they’re all on the same page, but on a grand scale.
Back east, America is less powerful than we know. While the book that coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” was still written in this parallel, it didn’t quite hit the same way. Moving west and finding it was already lived in by natives and other colonizers has made the timeline do something of a double-take, and the America we know has been mostly contained east of the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase was still made, and colonization efforts are underway, but the impetus isn’t as powerful and the presence of potential rivals further west has dampened the national drive; the Frontier is a confusing place.
There’s so much to discuss in this setting, and so much I’m wildly excited to talk about. I’ve always been interested in the history of “the West,” and the world in this rough era (what the British know as the Georgian and Victorian eras, but to many Americans it doesn’t quite connect that these ran parallel to our Wild West). Coming up with this setting has scratched a story-telling itch I’ve had for ages, but it’s also been a fresh excuse to keep reading more history books. I’m stoked to share what I’ve come up with with you guys.
Another instance of Toshiro Mifune showing up in this article. This time with Alain Delon, I believe on the set of Red Sun.
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