The Alien Hideaway: cowboys and aliens
Western imagery, aliens, and pulp magazine design in a Shadowdark adventure with town tools, isometric exploration, and duel rules.
Weird West: The Alien Hideaway is a Shadowdark adventure for third-level characters, created for the 2024 Weird Tales Shadowdark Game Jam. I wrote the scenario and handled cartography, editing, and layout in Adobe InDesign. The final PDF contains 20 pages, combining a Western town, an alien-occupied mine, and tools for running that combination at the table.1
Three covers as a starting point
The module records the references behind its premise: three Weird Tales covers featuring abduction, escapology, and a cowboy facing an apparition. That combination becomes a setting where Western imagery meets supernatural strangeness and alien technology.
Entry hooks allow the party to arrive as travelers displaced through time, outlaws, or paranormal investigators. Houdini joins the adventure’s cast. These starting points accommodate both characters from a fantasy world and groups already associated with the Western setting.
A town to track throughout the session
The text introduces twenty inhabitants through names, occupations, relationships, and information that can enter play. They give the game master a recurring cast for encounters around town. A tracking sheet provides space to record who has been captured and add notes.
A table also contains twenty locations and events. It supports a single roll read across one row, or separate rolls that recombine the two columns. The same material can generate different situations, bringing a familiar location back with a new event.
Disappearances make time matter. The town changes as the party investigates, and the tracking sheet offers a concrete place to record that progression.
From investigation to the mine
The mine contains eight numbered areas on an isometric map, room descriptions, and an encounter table. Darkness, toxic air, and alarms shape exploration. Danger also depends on how the characters prepare and interact with their surroundings.
The map shares space with descriptions. Outlines, numbers, and visual callouts connect the text to individual rooms, while small annotations reinforce the atmosphere. Mechanisms and clues link different areas; their solutions remain in the module.
Rules to support the Western setting
The publication includes firearms, ammunition, equipment properties, and a Gunslinger class. These give mechanical support to the change of setting within Shadowdark.
The duel minigame starts with rock, paper, scissors before moving to opposed Dexterity checks. The first result can grant advantage on the check, and the procedure also handles disarming and ties. It supplies a specific sequence for a situation closely associated with Western stories.
Editorial design and credits
The magazine identity appears in the cover, paper texture, headings, and treatment of equipment pages. Inside, the layout alternates columns, stat blocks, tables, a map, and note-taking space. The composition accommodates both an initial read and reference during play.
I handled the adventure’s writing, cartography, editing, and design, with layout in InDesign. Lua Kami contributed cover art, design, and proofreading. It is an independent production published under the Shadowdark RPG Third Party License, without affiliation with The Arcane Library.
Find the adventure and maps on itch.io (opens in a new tab).
Footnotes
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Weird West: The Alien Hideaway — Final Version, 20 pages. This article presents the PDF’s content and composition while preserving the investigation’s secrets. The material is available on the adventure page (opens in a new tab). ↩