Flying Lead: Blood & Gold

Basic Information and Concept

Flying Lead: Blood & Gold is a Live Action Roleplay game based in wild west of America in the 1890s The main inspirations are Red Dead Redemption 2, The Magnificent Seven, The Legend of Zorro, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Gilded Age, Yellowjackets, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and various movies of the treasure hunting genre.

As always with EyeLarp’s FilmSim games, we are encouraging high production values and will be striving for a cinematic feel and look to everything we do. The main rule is: react to everything and don’t expect a specific reaction.

Themes

Blood & Gold is going to be a little different to Smoke & Brass, our long-running cowboy game that ran from 2019-2024.

The setting, as a travelling party with a shared goal, hopes to be able to showcase a more episodic “monster-of-the-week” feel, where each episode is set in a different town or camp with different problems.

We’re deriving inspiration, not just from westerns, but from the more hopeful historical adventure movies and games of our youths. The 1890s were a decade of change, and also inequality, right on the cusp of the 20th century and all the modernisation that came with it.

It was the start of modern archeology, and we’re also inspired by all the rip-roaring stories of finding lost treasure and ancient mysteries from that period. Discovering tombs, shipwrecks and ruins around the world is a very rich seam of action adventure, and the genre of films and games based on it is a big part of the inspiration for this one.

This is not planned to be a straight up western, but nor is it a Nightmare game like the Flying Lead: Nightmare events that ran alongside Smoke & Brass. There will be some delving into mysticism and strange events, but along real historical lines and with the lens of things probably having a rational explanation!

Setting

It’s 1890s America. The Gilded Age is in full swing, with those at the top richer than they’ve ever been, and the poor… well the poor are the same everywhere. The railroads cut a beaten path through the country from east to west and north to south, but there are still pockets of unruliness, still regions that have no interest in being folded into the ever expanding United States. The railroads bring jobs to many, but also destitution to those of the Old West who made their living by their wits. With Montana and Washington state joining in late ’89 as the 41st and 42nd States, the world is getting smaller.

From Seattle to San Antonio, a newspaper advert is the talk of the town. B.C. Vanderbilt, that eccentric black sheep of the society family, is seeking those down on their luck to go on some sort of mysterious expedition in his name. Rumours abound – he’s searching for one of the lost cities of gold; seeking treasure stolen by a missing Confederate general; finding an heir worthy of leaving his share of the Vanderbilt fortune to; even trying to find the mythical fountain of youth.

We have chosen the setting and the use of a fictional state – New Columbia – to allow us to be creative to the stories and not so closely tied to historical events. 

Players will take the roles of those people that have travelled or live in New Columbia, who have been drawn by B.C Vanderbilt’s mysterious expedition and take up the call. The game will follow a party sent out searching for treasure by their mysterious benefactor, with each episode set in a different camp, village or town along the way, helping out locals and finding clues to take them to the next step on the way.