Video Game / 1866: A Mount & Blade Western

1866: A Mount & Blade Western is a mod for the videogame Mount & Blade (NOT Warband). It is set in the Texas-Mexico border area of 1866, and includes lots of elements and tropes from the Western genre (bounty hunting and "Wanted" posters, showdowns, bank jobs, Indians raiders, banditos, etc.).

The mod involves several factions, the major ones being USA, Mexico (the loyalist faction), and two Indian factions (Apache and Comanche). There are also a whole bunch of minor factions, representing Confederate soldiers who didn’t surrender, supporters of the Mexican emperor, and a dozen of bandit and raider factions.

While the game is functionnality the same, the change of setting results in some alterations of the gameplay. Firearms are now the master weapon on battlefield, most mêlée weapons have a very short reach (a lot of them are knives and small hatchets, though there still are spears and sabres), armours don't offer much protection against a bullet, and many siege scenes are much less enclosed due to Far West town not being built like walled medieval towns.

Some additional informations and a download link are available here.

Not to be confused with 1860's Old America, a similar mod for Mount & Blade (Warband only).

For tropes related to the gameplay which are unchanged from the unmodded game, refer to the Mount & Blade page.

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1866: Western Mod Mod Provides Examples Of:

• Action Girl: There are a few of them among the companions (Red Haired Sally, Mah-wis-ah, Catastrophe Jill). The player character can be one.
• An Axe To Grind: A few Indian units wield small hatchets and tomahawks. There's also some axe tools (from one-handed ones to big woodcutting axes).
• Armor Is Useless: Downplayed. There are functional armours and helmets in the mod, but due to the setting, they only consist in shirts / jackets (at best, hard leather clothes) and cow-boy hats, instead of chainmal and iron helmets. They just provide a very limited protection (the most protective ones protect less than most of the unmodded game's crappiest armours).
• The Artifact: Arenas and tournaments have been disabled, but the description of a town occasionally mentions that a tournament will happen soon. Tournaments are also occasionally mentioned in dialogs with lords.
• Badass Bandolier: A decorative feature on a couple of armours. Carl Brine starts the game while wearing one.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: A few armours are nice suits. State militiamen, Pinkerton agents, Jackie Luong, and Charles Huntington wear one.
• Badass Longcoat: It is one of the armours. Some hired guns and companions (Norm Finkleton, Hickory Jim, Oscar Harrison) start with one, and the outlaw Remington Robert (playable character in quick battle) too.
• Bandito:
  • There are actual faction of them (the scalphunters and random Bandas), and any party deserter party counting an important number of soldiers from the Mexico faction or the Bandas fits this trope. Peyote Pablo is a hirable stoned bandito.
  • The mod allows to hire prisoners and to choose which type of soldiers (American army, American lawmen, American outlaws, Mexican army, Mexican outlaws, Comanche, Apache) can be recruited in the settlements owned by the player. This and the possibility to play as a outlaw allows a player to lead a full bandito party.
• Bank Robbery:
  • The mod features a bank in a few of the big towns of the worldmap. Robbing the bank is an action in the contextual menu when going to one. Entering in it is automatic and looting the safe uses the same interface that the battlefield loot after a battle. The main part of the action consists in shooting the men who come in order to escape.
  • The bank belong to the lawmen / outlaws minor faction which has its headquarter in the same town. Robbing the bank is considered as a declaration of war by the faction. It is actually the easiest way to do it, instead of attacking a party of several dozen of men and risking heavy causualities.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: "Wanted for raping the horses and riding off on the women".
• Braids, Beads and Buckskins: In character's creation of an Indian player character, and among the available outfits.
• Camp Cook: Red Haired Sally describes herself as a cook during her hiring dialog. Like a lot of examples of the trope, she's a foreigner (Irish).
• Chef of Iron: Companion Red Haired Sally presents herself as a cook during her recruitment dialog. Beside fighting, she hasn't any effect on the food, though.
• Chinese Launderer: Jackie Luong is a former one.
• Cool Sword: US army sabre.
• Cow Boy: Everywhere.
• Cool Guns: Several variants of Winchester rifles, LeMat revolver, Colt 1851 Navy, a couple of Sharps variants. The iconic Single Action Army revolver doesn't appear in the game (it didn't exist yet).
• Creepy Mortician: The Cottonwood's undertaker takes the player characters' measurement when you talk to him for the first time.
• Critical Existence Failure: Averted. A wounded unit can eventually die from blood loss if the battle last too long. Weirdly, it only affects the units which are still fit for battle, not the ones which have been stunned.
• Dashingly Dapper Derby:
  • It is one of the numerous helmets in the game. It is especially worn by Jackie Luong, Charles Huntington, and the state militia troops.
  • Dastardly Dapper Derby: Can arguably apply to some state militia troops, as they are mostly used by the (corrupt) Lawmen factions.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Having an archer as player character. At low level, the character is a lot less effective than a rifleman. At high level, the character has a lot of hit points (to have a high level in the archery skill, it is necessary to have an high strenght stat, which gives bonus hitpoints), inflicts the same damages as an average carbine, and doens’t have to reload at all (especially interesting since, like in the Native Mount & Blade, being hit in battle has a chance to interrupt the reloading action , which then has to be done again).
• Dirty Cop: The mod features several minor factions of bandits, some of them being described as corrupted lawmen who act exactly like the mini factions of non-ambiguously criminal gangs.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Wanted Posters sometimes mention that the target is wanted for eating chewing-gum, "wanton buffoonery", "wearing a hat indoors", or spiting on someone’s shoes.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Wearing some specific items related to them gives a chance to not be spotted by the bandit factions when travelling on the worldmap. For example, wearing a Confederate uniform will have this effect for Renegade Confederate parties.
• Drop The Hammer: The large railwork hammer in one of the few two-handed weapons. Handsome Hank starts the game with one.
• Easter Egg:
  • One of the modders added a skeleton wearing a bowler hat in every scenes he created.
  • The Dark Tower Shout-Out mentioned below.
• Evil Counterpart: In term of lore, each of the major faction have a minor faction as an Evil Counterpart, which form an antagonistic relationship in which both parties are always at war against each other:
  • USA against Confederate renegades.
  • Mexico (Mexican rebels) against Imperialists (Mexican supporters of the Emperor Maximilian).
  • Comanche / Apache against Indian raiders.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It is a Western-themed mod for Mount & Blade set in 1866.
• Expy:
  • Bartholomew Jones is one to Sheriff Bart from Blazing Saddles.
  • Tears-in-his-Eyes is one to Loved By the Buffalo from Into the West.
  • Handsome Hank is one for the legendary figure John Henry.
• Fighting Clown: The Clown, of course. He starts the game with no clothing at all except a red nose and a white collar.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Backstory of the Scalphunters bandit faction mentions they scalp people then sell the scalps. Scalp items never appear in their loots after defeatng them, and the game doesn't allow to scalp your own prisoners (even if you wield the specific "scalping knife").
  • Some saloons have a poster stating that all guns must be stored next to the barman. Everyone inside have they personal weapons ostensibly hung on they hip or their back, and noone reacts when the player characters (also openly carrying a gun) enters.
  • A few non-white companions mention being victims of racism in their dialogs. One of the faces available at character's creation when playing as an American is black, but choosing it has absolutely no consequence on the game.
  • Carl Brine swore revenge against the Indians after the slaughter of his family. He still will occasionally appear in an Indian settlement.
  • Red Haired Sally explains she's a cook when she's met in a saloon, and the dialog shows that she's indeedmore skilled in cooking than the player character. Hiring her hasn't any effect on the party's food, it's spoilage rate, or the food's morale buffs. Strangely enough, her starting stats make her useful as the Tactics skill's advisor for the party.
• Ghost Town: Tull.
• Global Currency: Denars have been replaced by American currency, who is accepted in Mexico.
• Gun Porn: The Wild West variant. There are several dozens of pistols and rifles from the era.
• The Gunfighter Wannabe: Hickory Jim presents himself as a revolver ace who is sick of being challenged by amateurs who he is regularly forced to kill in duel because of their own foolishness.
• Guns Are Worthless: Downplayed. Pistols aren’t much more powerful than some mêlée weapons, but rifles are very powerful. Also, most of the companions (and the player character) starts the game with proficiency a lot higher in long guns than in pistols.
• The Gunslinger:
  • Playing as a pistol-specialist is a viable tactics.
  • There are some Mexican outlaw units named Pistolero, which is an equivalent of Gunslinger in Spanish and French. Also, some outlaw and mercenary units are named Gunslinger.
  • Hickory Jim is In-Universe a famous revolver expert.
• Historical Domain Character: The main factions commanders are historical characters (Ulysse S. Grant, George A. Custer, Benito Juarez, Porfirio Diaz, Geronimo, etc). Interestingly, the companions feature few real obscure historical characters (Black-Indian metis scout Romero, Indian squaw Mah-wis-ah, Irish cook Red Haired Sally) but some more famous Wild West historical characters appear as companions in a No Celebrities Were Harmed style (see below).
• Horse Archer: Some Indian units. Technically, shooting a rifle or a pistol from horseback is related, as it involves the same skill.
• Human Resources: The scalphunters received their name because they are bandits which scalps their victims and sell the scalp.
• Improvised Weapon: Rifle-stock used as club, meat cleaver, pickaxe, railworker hammer, shovel.
• Injun Country
• Interservice Rivalry: The lawmen factions are independent from each others, which mean that they can fight against each others.
• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Averted. An easy way of making money is to buy Whiskey and Tequila in the non-Indian territory to sell them in the Indian towns.
• Knife Nut:
  • There is a wide array of mêlée knives (and a throwing knives weapon) in the mod.
  • Romeo’s default fighting skills are focused on throwing knives.
• The Medic: Dr. Valentine.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Very borderline example. There are no antagonisms at all inside the party, but eight of the eighteen party members can’t be recruted by every player character, depending of the race chosen by the player during the creation of his character. For example, Peyote Pete can only be recruited by a Mexican player character, Hickory Jim by an American, Carl Bine refuses to follow an Indian (his backstory states that he lost his family because of an Indian raid), etc.
• Nice Hat: Since it's a Western-themed game, this has to be expected.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Among the companions:
  • Dr. Valentine is inspired by Valentine McGillycuddy.
  • Hickory Jim is inspired by Wild Bill Hickok.
  • Catastrophe Jill is inspired by Calamity Jane (of course).
• No Name Given:
  • Among the companions, a few of them are called by obvious nicknames or incomplete names: The Clown, Red Haired Sally, and Catastrophe Jill
  • There’s also the characters Man with no Name and Mysterious European, playable in the quick battle scenarios.
• The Oldest Profession: There are prostitutes in the towns. Sleeping with one provides a morale boost to the party.
• One Stat to Rule Them All / Dump Stat: It depends on the character. The modders advice to put most of the player character stat points into agility and charisma, to have high martial skills and a numerous army (strenght being the dump state). For the other party members, it depends on the role intended: full intelligence for the medic, the scout, and the engineer, full agility for the looter, and a standard fighting build for the other members of the party.
• Outlaw: Several factions of them (literal outlaws, bandits), which can be joined by the player (or you can play as your own independant outlaw faction). Word of God stats that Norm Finkleton has been created to fit this trope.
• Pet the Dog: At completion of a bounty hunting quest, you can either accept the reward or ask it to be given to the targets' victims (which gives honor points).
• Pistol-Whipping: Sort of. One of the blunt weapons is a club made from a rifle stock.
• Pinkerton Detective: They are one of the units of the Lawmen factions. They are top-tier units armed with six-shot carbines.
• Public Domain Soundtrack:
  • Tavern themes for American towns include piano instrumental versions of "The Happy Farmer Returning from Work"and "Turkey in the Straw".
  • One of the victory themes is a short instrumental cover of "The Yellow Rose of Texas".
• Rail Shooter: The sidequest of protecting a train. The player character stands on the plateform of a moving train and shoots bandits.
• Randomly Generated Levels: The worldmap is mostly the same (settlements' location is static), but there are some random generation concerning the main bandit factions. They are 8 factions: Bennett, Collins, Cottonwood, Davidson, Hoffman, Miles, Morris, Price. When starting a new game, they randomly receive a colour, a banner, a starting location, and a full name ("Gang", "Banda", or "Lawmen"), which correspond to their culture (respectively American oultaws, Mexican Outlaws, and American lawmen).^note Cottonwood is partly an exception. It's always named "the Cottonwood Gang" and its starting location is static (for obvious reasons: it's Cottonwood's local gang).
• Rare Guns: The most powerful handgun is a Walker Colt.
• The Remnant: The Renegade Confederates minor faction is composed of CSA soldiers who didn’t surrender after the end of the Secession War. They are small parties of bandits who rob travellers in order to amass money and weapons. They dialog lines state that they do it to keep on fighting against the Union.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Downplayed. While revolvers are the best handguns (almost all the non-revolver guns are crap, though there is a flintlock pistol among the top-three pistols), rifles are more powerful, more accurate, and the repeater rifles can carry at least as much ammunition as the revolvers.
• The Savage Indian:
  • The Indian raiders bandits. The actual Indian major factions (Comanches and Apaches) have the same dialogs and behaviours that USA and Mexico.
  • There are two quick battles scenarios (actually, it is the same with a Perspective Flip) involving Indians raiding a convoy.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: It is one of the pistol-type weapons.
• The Sheriff: Sheriffs appear in the American settlements, where they have the role of quest givers (they are basically the mod's equivalent of guild masters and village elders for the US settlements). Sheriffs are also a unit of the American Lawmen troop tree.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The game features a few short range rifles (and a Sawed-Off Shotgun), with magazines of one or two rounds, which play this trope straight. Their low magazine capacity is balanced by their power and radius blast at short range.
• Shout-Out:
  • There is an abandoned town which main street is full of desiccated corpses. It is named Tull. The zombies don’t come from the book, though. It is also an Easter Egg, as the town appears on the map only if the player’s party comes close enough.
  • The "Man with no name" quick battle scenario, which puts the player in the middle of a shooting in a town, playing the Clint Eastwood character (name, face, and clothes) from a series of famous movies. He also can be played in a custom battle.
  • One of the bounty hunting targets refers to a man "Wanted for rape, murder, arson, and rape". It refers to a line from Blazing Saddles.
• Shovel Strike: It is one of the mêlée weapons.
• Showdown at High Noon:
  • During a bounty hunting quest, the player has the choice between shooting the target on the spot or proposing a duel. If the duel is chosen, the player character must back off from the adversary, then wait for the local bell to be allowed to draw and begin the gunfight. Completing those quests by choosing the duel grants more experience that merely shooting the target. Drawing a gun before the bell rang results in honor's loss.
  • Jack the Serpent, a NPC located in San Casteabro, gives a sidequest consisting in fighting duel in the nearby graveyard. It's actually a kind of modern tourney, since it is fought in the middle of a crowd of spectators.
• Sniper Rifle: One of the rifle looks like one. It is the most powerful and accurate ranged weapon of the game, but its magazine can only hold one bullet at a time, its reload time is very long, and the rifle can only be reloaded by a unit which is standing still.
• The Stoic: There is an option allowing to manually change the soundset used by the player character when giving orders during a battle. One of them ("silent killer") mutes the character.
• The Stoner: Peyote Pablo consumes huge amount of peyote (hence his name) to cope with the loss of his family. Trying to talk to him if the player character is American instead of Mexican just results in no reaction from him, with a laconic description implying that he is high as a kite.
• Thriving Ghost Town: Justified, the mod tries to reproduce the small settlements of the frontier, giving no real difference between towns and villages (especially in Indian territories), except the presence of a saloon and of a commanding room. Although that said, it's more obvious the more the player goes east, where larger towns and cities are located.
• Throw-Away Guns: Depending on the items owned, on the party’s average level, and on the respective balance between the player’s party and the enemies than are coming close.
  • Generic principle: Each firearm in the inventory slots is fully loaded and starts consuming relevant ammunitions from other inventory slots only after being reloaded once. Being hit when reloading stops the reloading action, which have to be done again from its beginning. There are several different ammunition items, corresponding to the number of bullets inside the item slot. The maximum amount of ammunitions per bag the heroes are allowed to use is determined by a party skill named "stockpiling". For all those reasons, it can be more useful to keep two identical firearms instead of just one with its ammunitions.
  • Here is a specific example in which this trope is especially useful. With a 0 level in stockpiling, the party can only use bags of about thirty pistol bullets and about twenty rifle bullets. One of the best repeating rifle of the mod is a Winchester-like repeater rifle with a magazine capacity of fifteen rounds. So, with such a rifle and an ammunition bag, the member of a low level party benefits from fifty already loaded shots, plus fifty shots after reloading, plus five last shots after his last reloading. In the same party, having two of those Winchesters grants two times fifteen shots, which are only separated by the unstoppable and nearly immediate action of switching gun, instead of the uncertain reloading.
• Train Job:
  • Some sidequests requires the player to protect a train and shoot the outlaws who are trying to ambush it.
  • One of the quick battles places the player as an outlaw taking part in a raid against a Mexican train which is immobilized on the railway.
• Tribal Facepaint: The Indians (including the player character) wear some, not only on the face but also on the chest and the back. It can be customized at will but requires to wear a special armour item whuch offers no chest and legs protection at all. This item allows to travel unotified by the Indian raiders.
• Unexplained Recovery: Sometimes in battle, when a companion is injured enough, the battle report states that said companion isn't "knocked inconscious" but "killed". "Dead" companions anyway remain in the party, though they obviously are lost most of their health once the battle ends; they then are healed like usual, and no comment is made about their resurrection. It can also happen to the player character.
• Universal Ammunition: There are only three kinds of ammunitions: arrows, pistol bullets (including revolvers, Derringers, flintlock pistols, and sawed-off shotguns), rifle bullets (including Winchester-like rifles, shotguns, and musket-like rifles). On the same time, the rifles and pistols supposed to share ammunitions don’t.
• U.S. Marshal: They are a high tier ranged mounted unit in the Lawmen troop tree.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Loot and plunder enough stagecoaches and/or villages, and the Commoners special faction will turn hostile to the player. Once it happens, the towns will forbid the player's party to enter them (you'll have to sneak inside), no matter the town's faction and the factions of the raided caravans and villages. This can be fixed if you destroy enough parties of the various wandering outlaws minifactions.
• Voodoo Zombie: It is unclear if voodoo is the actual cause (they don’t fit the other zombie tropes and act like standard AI-controlled hostile NPC), but this kind of zombies is encountered in the "Zombie Fun" quick battle scenario (their coming is implied to be caused by the building of the town above an Indian graveyard) and in Tull in the campaign.
• "Wanted!" Poster: There is one in major cities, it triggers some bounty hunting quests and tells why the man has been wanted, sometimes in a humourous way ("raping the horses and riding off on the women"). Note that the quest is completed wheither the target is killed or captured alive.
• Weird West: If the player character explores Tull deeply enough, he will have to fight against a horde of undead. There is also a quick battle involving a zombie outbreak in a small town build on an Indian graveyard.
• The Western
• The Wild West
• You No Take Candle: It is how speaks Jackie Luong, a Chinese immigrant and former railroad worker.