Western stories?

[Toadmaster]

I've seen my fair share of westerns (movies, TV), but not read even one.

Looking for suggestions, in particular stuff that would provide inspiration and motivation to run an old west themed game.


I know Robert E Howard wrote some western stories, I've not read anything of his I didn't like so I thought I'd start there.

Zane Grey, Louis L' Amour and Elmore Leonard are well known western writers, with a number of movies based off of their work. I assume those would also be a good jumping off point.


Looking for advice, in particular from people who have read at least some of an authors work. I expect you don't become a famous author by writing poorly, but then again there is always Dickens to throw water on that theory. Interesting tales, but painful reading.

 

[PolarBlues]

I'm currently play-testing a little Fudge-based Western game. So while I don't have reading suggestions, what I can offer a bunch of fresh Western adventure seeds, 5 for lawmen-style characters, 5 for outlaws, all of which follow a simple structure. I personally found that until I starting breaking things down into lawmen adventures and outlaw adventures, the sheer breadth of the genre was a little overwhelming.

The playtest doc is here: https://ukrpdc.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/lawmen-v-outlaws-playtest-draft-02.pdf the adventure seeds are towards the back.

As it's just a playtest doc all the usual caveats apply (not final, not proof-read and even the illustrations are just sketches at this stage) but for your purposes it ought be OK. Of while your there, any feedback would be welcome (that goes for anyone who stumbles on into this thread).

 

[under_score]

I grew up on Louis L'Amour paperbacks. Must have read dozens of them. Looking over his wikipedia page there's hardly a title I don't recognize. But I also couldn't tell you much about them or which are good. They all run together in my head. Still, they're collectively as responsible as any movie for shaping my image of the west, and formulaic stories are generally a good place to start for RPG inspiration since we often want to begin with the tropes and then put our own spin on it.

I'm a big fan of REH's Conan stories but have only recently started reading his other works. The Horror from the Mound is a really good horror western.

 

[Supervisor194]

I recently listened the audiobook Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. It was pretty good. I do plan to read more of his stuff.

 

[Toadmaster]

This question is partially due to finally succumbing to the evil known as Kindle. There are a huge number of collections of older writers available cheaply for Kindle that are difficult to find in print. I have a birthday coming up, I'm going to have my wife get me a Kindle and a selection of books for it as my birthday present.

I'm fairly well versed in fantasy / sci-fi and read a lot of history but western as a literary genre is an entirely new thing for me.

I've read all of R.E. Howard's Conan stories and a lot of his horror / weird fiction. No idea of what kind of angle he takes for his western stories, but I think he was a solid writer, much better than some give him credit for. Amazon has his complete works on Kindle for $2.99 so I'm not worried there.

There is a large Zane Grey collection available for $1.99 so that seems a safe bet as well.

From reading several reviews L'amour seems to have been a fairly average writer from a technical view point but knew the genre well which accounts for his success. He is also of a later period, so still out of public domain. There don't seem to be any clear "start here" books or stories for him, but I see there are several collections of short stories and groupings of novels. I'll probably just add in one of the short story collections as short stories can be great for getting into the right frame of mind.


Not so much looking for scenario ideas. While suggestions for those are welcome, I'm really looking more to get into the right frame of mind, setting a mood to motivate me.

 

[Dumarest]

When I get home I'll try to give you a list of my favorite Louis L'Amour novels and short story volumes. There is a lot of variety but so many tales that sometimes a theme will feel repetitive if you read too many too quickly. Also some of his short stories he later fleshed out into full novels. I'll try to give you a short list of some of the material I think is his best and/or would work best as useful resources and ideas for a Western RPG. You'll find he sets a tone and puts you in a time and place really well, I think, and he gets short shrift as a writer mainly because (1) he wrote genre fiction and (2) he was prolific, both of which are frowned upon by the literati.

 

[Supervisor194]

Nice! I would love to read L’Amour next.

 

[Voros]

This question is partially due to finally succumbing to the evil known as Kindle. There are a huge number of collections of older writers available cheaply for Kindle that are difficult to find in print. I have a birthday coming up, I'm going to have my wife get me a Kindle and a selection of books for it as my birthday present.

I'm fairly well versed in fantasy / sci-fi and read a lot of history but western as a literary genre is an entirely new thing for me.

I've read all of R.E. Howard's Conan stories and a lot of his horror / weird fiction. No idea of what kind of angle he takes for his western stories, but I think he was a solid writer, much better than some give him credit for. Amazon has his complete works on Kindle for $2.99 so I'm not worried there.

There is a large Zane Grey collection available for $1.99 so that seems a safe bet as well.

From reading several reviews L'amour seems to have been a fairly average writer from a technical view point but knew the genre well which accounts for his success. He is also of a later period, so still out of public domain. There don't seem to be any clear "start here" books or stories for him, but I see there are several collections of short stories and groupings of novels. I'll probably just add in one of the short story collections as short stories can be great for getting into the right frame of mind.


Not so much looking for scenario ideas. While suggestions for those are welcome, I'm really looking more to get into the right frame of mind, setting a mood to motivate me.

I'd be careful picking up those cheap compilations of public domain writers on Kindle as the formating is often garbage. I regret picking up a collection of REH horror stories that even has spelling errors in it.

I think REH's best piece of writing period is the Western novella 'Vultures of Whapeton.' It is available in The End of the Trail collection from the University of Nebraska Press and in the excellent John Clute edited collection of REH fantasy, horror and western stories Heroes in the Wind: from Kull to Conan.

Del Rey has been doing a good job collecting REH stories in quality editions that are available on Kindle but I'm unsure if there is a Western collection yet.

I'd highly recommend Leonard's Westerns, Valdez is Coming and Hombre are particularly good (and were adapted into good films as well).

 

[Lunar Ronin]

Delphi Classics is a very good classic eBook publisher. They publish a bunch of works that is 50+ years old, and keep adding new works. About a third of my eBook collection is from them. I haven't found a misspelled word yet. I'm not going to say it's not going to happen as I've only scratched the surface of their library, but it should be rare at best.

They have collected editions on Amazon Kindle. If you prefer one book = one file, you can buy that directly on their website here. Once you download them from the Delphi Classics site, unzip them to a folder. Then you can use the "Send to Kindle" app to upload them to your Amazon Kindle account so you have them on your Kindle eReader.

Edit: You can get a complete collection of Robert E. Howard's output for $6 here.

 

[Dumarest]

In...
Last Stand at Papago Wells (1957)
Hondo (1953)
The First Fast Draw (1959)
Hanging Woman Creek (1964)
Passin' Through (1985)
Mountain Valley War (1978)
The Burning Hills (1956)
High Lonesome (1962)
Shalako (1962)
Radigan (1958)
Under the Sweetwater Rim (1971)
Guns of the Timberlands (1955)
Flint (1960)
Showdown at Yellow Butte (1953)
...you'll find homesteaders, ranchers, prospectors, gunfighters, wanted men, bank robbers, lawmen, and soldiers from Arizona to Wyoming to Mexico to Colorado and everywhere in between. I'd take a quick look at the map usually included after the title page to see if the region interests you, and then glance at the back cover description to see if it sounds appealing. All of these are ones I found enjoyable. You'll also learn a lot of factual information incidental to the story, which comes in handy running a Western campaign. If you want tales of a Texas Ranger, Frontier Stories Volume 2 has a heap of Bowdrie reaching for iron and untangling mysteries mostly in southwest Texas.

 

[Toadmaster]

Great, so are there any other authors beside those mentioned in my first post I might want to consider? I've also got James Fenimore Cooper saved as an option, although his stories are set in an earlier frontier than most traditional westerns.

I'd be careful picking up those cheap compilations of public domain writers on Kindle as the formating is often garbage. I regret picking up a collection of REH horror stories that even has spelling errors in it.

I think REH's best piece of writing period is the Western novella 'Vultures of Whapeton.' It is available in The End of the Trail collection from the University of Nebraska Press and in the excellent John Clute edited collection of REH fantasy, horror and western stories Heroes in the Wind: from Kull to Conan.

Del Rey has been doing a good job collecting REH stories in quality editions that are available on Kindle but I'm unsure if there is a Western collection yet.

I'd highly recommend Leonard's Westerns, Valdez is Coming and Hombre are particularly good (and were adapted into good films as well).

Yes, I have the paper Del Ray Conan collections from a few (ok, 10+) years ago. I've seen that there was a supposed to be a collection of his Western stories done by Del Ray, but haven't been able to find it.

I have been using my tablet for several years to download ebooks when work has me stuck someplace waiting. I don't really like reading on the tablet, so most have been of the free variety. My Wife's Kindle is much less annoying, which is why I'm finally coming around.

Anyway, I am aware that some are just thrown together. I do look at the reviews to see if there are issues with that, that is something reviewers tend to be critical of. You often find the same kind of things with music on greatest hits albums, poor quality or off sounding remastered tracks are not uncommon, so again reviews help a lot.

Also cheap in comparison to getting the same in paper, I'm not so cheap as to always go for the lowest price, it just happens some like the Howard collection I mentioned are almost embarrassingly cheap.

Delphi Classics is a very good classic eBook publisher. They publish a bunch of works that is 50+ years old, and keep adding new works. About a third of my eBook collection is from them. I haven't found a misspelled word yet. I'm not going to say it's not going to happen as I've only scratched the surface of their library, but it should be rare at best.

They have collected editions on Amazon Kindle. If you prefer one book = one file, you can buy that directly on their website here. Once you download them from the Delphi Classics site, unzip them to a folder. Then you can use the "Send to Kindle" app to upload them to your Amazon Kindle account so you have them on your Kindle eReader.

Edit: You can get a complete collection of Robert E. Howard's output for $6 here.

Thanks for the heads up on Delphi, that is a nice long list of older authors.

In...
Last Stand at Papago Wells (1957)
Hondo (1953)
The First Fast Draw (1959)
Hanging Woman Creek (1964)
Passin' Through (1985)
Mountain Valley War (1978)
The Burning Hills (1956)
High Lonesome (1962)
Shalako (1962)
Radigan (1958)
Under the Sweetwater Rim (1971)
Guns of the Timberlands (1955)
Flint (1960)
Showdown at Yellow Butte (1953)
...you'll find homesteaders, ranchers, prospectors, gunfighters, wanted men, bank robbers, lawmen, and soldiers from Arizona to Wyoming to Mexico to Colorado and everywhere in between. I'd take a quick look at the map usually included after the title page to see if the region interests you, and then glance at the back cover description to see if it sounds appealing. All of these are ones I found enjoyable. You'll also learn a lot of factual information incidental to the story, which comes in handy running a Western campaign. If you want tales of a Texas Ranger, Frontier Stories Volume 2 has a heap of Bowdrie reaching for iron and untangling mysteries mostly in southwest Texas.

Thanks, that is helpful, he has a large body of work, but descriptions of the individual stories are fairly scarce.

What you are saying here and above fits with what I've been reading about his writing. Most of the less complementary comments indicate that they like reading his stories, and complement how well he captures the feel of the period, just that they tend to follow the same themes. Nothing wrong with following a formula that works, and really when he was writing, people were not reading 35 of his stories back to back. It is only when reading large volumes of an authors work that such things might become apparent.

 

[Voros]

Other Westerns I've read and enjoyed include True Grit by Charles Portis and Warlock by Oakley Hall. And of course there's Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy.

 

[under_score]

Don't forget Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty.

 

[Wild Goose]

If you're looking for something more violent in the vein of a spaghetti western give George G. Gilman's Edge books a try.

 

[Voros]

Don't forget Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty.

I loved the TV series and read the book at a teen but haven't revisited it since.