What happens when you mix The Old American West with Folkloric Horror? A First Look at Huckleberry

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming cowboy chap. Yeehaa.

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TL;DR:

Huckleberry: A Wyrd West RPG blends the grit of the Old West with creeping folkloric horror. Players take on the role of Mavericks; wandering bounty hunters chasing bounties through a world tainted by the supernatural Wyrd. Its poker-inspired Ante system, luck driven Wyrd Die, and flexible core mechanic make it quick to learn and richly thematic.

Disclaimer

Now then! You know the drill by now, so here’s the disclosure: I’m not calling this a review because I haven’t played Huckleberry yet. I’ve definitely not received any financial incentive to write about it, but I did receive a copy of the PDF to share my thoughts on without any actual obligation to do so.

Additionally, I will be including links to both the Backerkit crowdfunding page for the physical edition and affiliate links where you can pick up the PDF, which scores me a small kickback at no extra cost to you.

So saddle up partner, and let’s ride.

What Is Huckleberry?

Just the Facts

| Type | TTRPG |

| Theme | Western, Horror |

| Players | 2-6 |

| Ages | Teens and up |

| Dev | Steven Alexander |

| Pages | 161 |

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With the physical release launching on Backerkit on October 7th, 2025, Huckleberry: A Wyrd West RPG marks the debut tabletop release from Adventures in Lollygagging Publishing, written and designed by Steven Alexander with layout by Nathan D. Paoletta.

Originally conceived as a 1930s supernatural FBI investigation game inspired by Hellboy, Alexander’s design evolved after a session of Chris Spivey’s Haunted West revealed the perfect home for his mechanics - a dark frontier where the veil between worlds has thinned. Drawing influence from Powered by the Apocalypse’s 2d6 structure, Forbidden Lands’ approach to Traits and monsters, and the Blade Runner RPG’s step-die system, Huckleberry reimagines those ideas through a gritty Weird West lens.

The project was developed in collaboration with Adventures in Lollygagging, an indie Actual Play collective known for showcasing narrative-forward systems. According to Alexander, the partnership was a natural fit: “When it came time to be serious about self-publishing Huckleberry, it was an easy choice to publish under a label I already loved and wanted to contribute to.”

What’s it Trying to Do?

Here we come, reach for your gun and you better listen well my friend, you see; it's been slow, down below, aimed at you we're the cowboys from hell. Deed is done, again we've won, ain't talking no tall tales friend - 'cause; high noon, your doom, comin' for you - we're the: cowboys from hell.

--Pantera, Cowboys from Hell

I can’t help but have Pantera on as I write this all up. You see; Huckleberry is a weird west cowboy setting, where a corrupting maleficent force called “Wyrd” has been unleashed upon the “Fifth World”, introducing mutations to the local flora and fauna and everything between. In this setting, you play as “Mavericks”; bounty hunters, and the game play loop supports an episodic play style where each session is a new job as you and your team hunt for a new mark.

Alexander has clearly directed the game to be as player facing as possible; in a way that is reminiscent of Mork Borg, the players rolls for both attack and defence, and with a fixed target number of ten to aim for. Additionally, the GM (“Trailblazer“) is given tools to randomise events and situations in an effort to reduce GM cognitive load and keep the exciting decision making in the players hands.

Whilst the Mavericks certainly do not have the kind of longevity and power of a D&D 5e character, they aren’t going to typically be going down to one hit. Instead, the game encourages a cinematic play style, forgoing a lot of crunch in favour of fast play and building your legend as much as possible, before you inevitably hang your hat for the final time.

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What Stands Out to Me?

Here’s a selection of elements that really call out to me as being particularly cool features of the game:

The Core Mechanic

I know I always say this, but I chuffin’ love a well-done core mechanic. Elegance and versatility are essential in establishing a ‘rules language’ that can be broadly applied to the whole game, and there’s no prizes from me for complexity for the sake of it.

In the case of Huckleberry, I’m happy to report that the central mechanic is lush. To begin with, all your character attributes (quick, grit, reckon, and spirit) and skills (Education, Brawl, Wrangling etc etc) are represented by a single step dice each (that is, d6, d8, d10 or d12). To make a check, you roll two dice. One from the relevant attribute, and one from the relevant skill.

For example, to roll a check for fighting in a pistol duel the Trailblazer would call for “quick” and “hand guns”, they might be d10, and d8 respectively. You’d roll those dice together and add up the total. If it’s greater than ten (the TN is always ten) - you succeed.

The Wyrd Die

Every Maverick has a Wyrd Die, starting at a d10, representing their luck, grit, and connection to the supernatural. It’s rolled alongside an Attribute when you’re reacting to danger, such as a save against bullets, curses, or rocks falling. In this way, it echoes the core mechanic above.

The interesting thing though is that the die’s size shifts up or down as you burn through Wyrd. For instance, you can shrink it by one step to reroll a check (pushing your luck) or spend four Aces (the game’s meta currency) to raise it again. When it’s high, Not only does the Maverick become more likely to make their saves, but they’ve also essentially got re-rolls in the bank too. When it’s low however, you’re courting disaster.

It’s a clever little tension gauge that links narrative risk to mechanical pressure.

The Ante System

Instead of rolling dice for enemies or hazards, the Trailblazer flips cards from a poker deck. The suit tells the Maverick which Attribute they must save with (Spades = Quick, Clubs = Grit, Diamonds = Reckon, Hearts = Spirit).

Number cards mean ordinary danger, and the monster’s ‘stat block’ gives you examples of how to describe this, but face cards twist the knife by dropping a Maverick’s Wyrd Die or escalating the threat. On the plus side, Aces and Jokers throw boons upon the Mavericks in the form of meta currency and Wyrd die promotions.

Now, because every monster in the game includes bespoke face card effects, the same deck produces wildly different encounters: a King of Hearts from a Brute might mean their attack becomes an AoE assault, while the same card from an Outlaw Thug unleashes a hail of bullets and a major injury.

I’m particularly fond of this idea, having written about GM conflict of interest and cognitive load before; any game system that takes some decisions out of the GMs hands when they need a rest are a welcome inclusion as far as I’m concerned.

Three Tiers of Environment Description

I’ve written about this idea before - that all environments should have three tiers of information. In this way GMs learn that environmental descriptions should be concise, and players should learn to engage with their surroundings in order to get the juiciest information.

I’m very happy to see that Huckleberry shares my views on this with it’s explicit inclusion of Open, Hidden, and Locked clues. The first layer is freely available information upon entering an area. The second tier is free also, but requires the player to specifically ask about a given tier one element. The final tier contains the most valuable information about, or within a known element and is consequently locked behind a dice roll of some kind.

Not only does this make for good game play, but it also results in a much easier and more concise experience for the GM taking pre-game notes for preparation.

Clint Eastwood would be proud of this, someone should tell him.

Potential Friction Points

Look, I really don’t want to be critical of this game as I think it’s pretty nifty and my mates have already added it to the ever growing list of games that I absolutely 100% have to run for them, but I’d not be doing you any favours if I wasn’t up front with you about some of the things I would have done differently, or that you should be very clear on before you buy. So I just gotta bite the bullet and crack on:

Rulebook Organisation

The rulebook references keywords and denotes them with a leading capital letter as if a proper noun. Unfortunately it then often doesn’t define these keywords until much later. Being a monotropic thinker, I find that quite a frustrating experience to sort of have to stick a pin in the thread I was currently following, and to then have to go blindly searching through the book to grab a definition, before returning to my original position and trying to carry on with the original chain of thought.

Two simple fixes here would do more than pull their weight - bolded keywords, and then page references immediately afterwards. I recently reviewed Ravaged by Storms, a Pirate Borg supplement by Golem Games, and it’s a great example of this philosophy.

Character Sheets

The PDF doesn’t include a character sheet. Obviously, it’s available for free online, but I find an annotated character sheet is a useful thing to have in a book as it tends to tell you a lot about a game system and the elements that are important. It would have been nice to include one for the sake of taking up an extra page at the back.

Built For Episodic Play

The Injury slot health system, limited advancement, and slow healing make Mavericks short lived by design. It’s brilliant for one shots and serial tales, but less so for your traditional epic D&D style sagas taking years.

This absolutely works for me, as I believe that the episodic style of running games is the best way to go anyway. It keeps the adventures action focused, helps fight against GM burnout, and prevents the players from meandering into one of those off sessions where they take two hours to go shopping for new swords.

Do You Want to Know More?

Hey what’s this, other people have thoughts about Huckleberry too? What sorcery is this?! Checkout these videos if you fancy going deeper down the rabbit hole:

Conclusion

So, I’m definitely adding Huckleberry to my shelf and I’m already thinking about ways to mine the Dark Tower books by Stephen King for adventure inspiration!

So you know - Huckleberry has just launched their crowdfunding Backerkit for the physical edition of the game (7th Oct 2025), and if you’ve been tempted by the devilish succubus of this first-look, might I suggest that sir/madam takes a sniff over at the Backerkit page and make any pledges within the first 48 hours of launch in order to receive an exclusive neoprene Huckleberry dice tray?

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Catch you laters, alligators.

campaign modules drag on, run episodic games instead

Yo. Before I begin, this article makes a critical point about modern TTRPG campaigns, and I’m drawing on my lived in experience to do so.

So dear reader, I don’t know about you, but I think that there’s a cultural expectation that RPG campaigns should go on for months - I’ve ran a few myself over the years this way, and despite them starting out strongly, 5+ sessions in, I start to find myself losing interest and I suspect that my players do too. Do you think that’s a common experience? I think it might be.

That got me speculating as to why, and I have conclusions. I also think that Episodic play might be the solution.

Event Based Campaigns

Campaigns in the modern “I just picked up a module for my game and it’s the size of a university text book” sense often follow a predefined interactive story. They’re “event based”, which means they’re formatted so that ‘this’ happens, and then ‘this’ happens, and then “this” happens, and it’s all packed with filler between these set story beats.

D&D 5e literally trains DMs to run games like this with it’s various linear starter sets and modules.

I theorise that running campaigns this way also demonstrates to your players that they should expect to be passive consumers of whatever you have planned for the evening, rather than lead actors with agency, driving their own experience.

For example, Lost Mines of Phandelver is often considered a great module for 5e, and indeed it’s first two chapters are very enjoyable as quasi one shot experiences, both can be completed in an evening and both are simple enough so that the players know what they’re doing - Rescue Sildar Hallwinter from the Goblin Cave, and save Phandalin from the tyranny of the Red Brands respectively.

However, when the third act begins, the story introduces a number of tangents - the game opens up and the players are expected to investigate Phandalin themselves to identify adventure opportunities and follow whatever path they like. Only… we’ve just spent the last couple of sessions very obviously pointing at the objective and saying “this is where the adventure goes next”, and now, without warning we whip the training wheels off the railroad and expect the players not to fall over? It’s a big ask.

Inevitably this results in a whole lot of nothing, to recap - the players have been primed to believe that the DM is going to hit them over the head with the next quest, and instead they’re just being fed a series of small off-plot hooks about things going on in the wider world. Analysis paralysis kicks in, and the session slows down to a crawl. Engagement takes a hit.

Losing the plot

If the players are expected to engage enthusiastically with prewritten story beats, then it needs to be focused - like a one shot. In fact, in one shots I think pre-defined stories work really well because the players get a satisfying hook and resolution all whilst they still have interest.

Contrast that against the real time gap between sessions in Event Based Campaigns where the players and GMs can lose track of plot threads and hooks, and questions like “I don’t know what’s going on?” or “Why are we going over here again?” start creeping into play. Not to mention how it becomes increasingly difficult to have each session end on a cliffhanger and start with a bang!

I do believe that this is inevitable too - almost by definition, in large event based campaigns that take months, the plot, the players and GMs will lose focus, and that will damage the game.

Again in LMoP, by the time everyone has adjusted to the total change of pace and investigated the Thundertree and Old Owl Well tangents in the third act, that’s been maybe 4 or 5 sessions. That could easily be about 2 months in real time! Of course everyone has forgotten about the central premise surrounding Gundren Rockseeker, the Black Spider, and Wave Echo Cave!

Sandbox play

Sandbox play is something we often hear about, and it’s something I wish I could get to work correctly, but I think it requires everyone to fully buy in to an exploration focused game up front. Essentially it places the onus on the players to explore and find their own adventure, and the GM has no sense of what’s going to happen more than one session in advance because the game’s narrative is driven by whatever the players discover and are interested in pursuing.

However, games like 5e fight against this with no real mechanics to support exploration, and plenty of mechanics that actively nullify the challenge that exploration should present. These all combine to make a 5e sandbox game quite the hard sell.

Conversely, if everyone at the table is up for this type of game, and you’ve got a game engine that supports it, then I think that sandbox style play is one solution to the problem of campaign games losing momentum, because there’s no overarching plot to lose track of, and the players have 100% agency over the direction of the game.

I should note, I do not think you can “sandboxify” a linear module. It’s got to be one or the other to maintain player expectations - either the campaign has predefined story beats that the players expect to receive, or the players expect to drive their own story. Any combination of the two creates a contradiction in expectations, and leads to unsatisfying games. Trust me, I’m guilty of this and it doesn’t work.

Episodic Play

OK, I firmly believe that there’s nothing wrong with predefined story beats, and in fact my only criticism of this style is that it’s easy to lose interest when it goes on too long, and this is where episodic play comes in.

Episodic play is best thought of as a series of one shots, kind of like a pre Netflix TV show, where it is understood that a suitable chunk of time has elapsed between each loosely connected episode. In this new zeitgeist, BBEG’s rarely last longer than a couple of sessions, and neither do plots.

It’s a style particularly suited to games where the content is clearly defined up front and a clear resolution is available after just one or two sessions. For example, I have an ongoing Call of Cthulhu game that works like this - the players all know that they’re part of an investigative agency, and when we want to play, I offer them up a choice of one shots that I’m interested in running.

When it comes to game time, I give them some background to say how long has passed since the last adventure, and point out any relevant things that might have happened off screen, then I reiterate what this adventure is about and throw them straight into the action.

When run in this way, I find episodic play has huge advantages:

• Each session starts with a clear hook and players can jump straight into the action and wrap up with a satisfying conclusion.

• Players with conflicting schedules can drop in and out from one game to the next without disrupting the verisimilitude.

• As a GM, you can explore a wide variety of themes, locations, and even BBEGs without being tied to a rigid continuous storyline. You can even seamlessly integrate published one shots.

• Players can try new PCs or revisit old favorites whenever they like.

• PCs don’t have plot armour anymore, and will be played according to these stakes.

• Players get to choose the type of session they want to play next.

• You can even play different games altogether between episodes, there’s nothing complicated to remember regarding a plot so there’s no harm in it.

There is a potential downside though - depending on your groups availability. In order to get a satisfying story in, I find that you have to set aside 5 or 6 hours of play. Of course you can break it up into smaller sessions, but then we run the risk of us all losing the plot and the focus, so perhaps be prepared to play for longer, but less frequently.

Conclusion

If you have GM burn out, or the game lacks focus, or if you just want to try lots of new TTRPGs or adventures, then you should try running episodic style games. You can even use this as a low barrier to entry way of getting new players involved, or for converting players into GMs!

Please reach out with your opinions if you have them, I’m always interested in what you have to say. I’m on Bluesky or you could use my contact form.

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