That may partly be due to the English actors not making convincing Americans, and partly due to the comedic tone of the early episodes, but perhaps mainly because it is narrated using a repetitive song. Fortunately, few RPGs insist that the GM sing out descriptions of events, so we can at least escape that element.
Where & When
Because the gunfight is a famous historical event, this is another serial that we can date precisely: it takes place on the 25th and 26th of October 1881. Most of the story is set in the town of Tombstone in what was then the Arizona Territory of the United States.
Setting
At the time of the gunfight, Tombstone was a remarkably new town, having been established only two years previously, in March 1879. It had been built to support workers at nearby silver mines and was a rapidly expanding boomtown. With a population of around 100 at the time of its founding, living in a few newly built shacks, by 1881 it had four churches, a school, two banks, three newspapers, and a small opera house… so hardly insignificant.
In fact, with an official population of around 7,000, it was larger then than it is now, having been almost abandoned after the mines began to close in 1886. Most of the inhabitants were mineworkers, and most of them were single, so women were very much in the minority – although they, like the significant number of Chinese immigrants, were not counted among the official population. Even by the standards of boom towns, its rise and subsequent fall were meteoric, which may give it an odd feel to PCs used to more settled locations. Most of the buildings are wooden or adobe, with just a few made of stone or brick.
In February, it had been made the seat of the newly created Cochise County, which had been split off from the older Pima County in large part because of the booming population. It was part of the Arizona Territory, which had an organised internal government, but no representation in Congress or vote in presidential elections. The local capital was Prescott at the time, only moving to Phoenix later, while the total official population of the Territory was not much more than 40,000, making Tombstone one of the larger settlements.
Looking further afield for a more worldwide context, the president was Republican Chester A. Arthur, while William Gladstone was Queen Victoria’s prime minister. France is on its Third Republic, the German Empire is relatively new and significantly larger than the present country, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is still going strong, but the Ottomans have lost most of the Balkans. The British Empire is at its height with, for example, Australia still being a set of Crown Colonies rather than a single country. For that matter, Brazil is also an Empire, not a republic.
The TARDIS lands inside the OK Corral, a station loaning out horses to travellers as well as providing stabling to those with their own. However, other than a lot of the action taking place outside of it, the Corral itself plays little role in the proceedings.
Instead, the key location is the Last Chance Saloon, implied in the story to be the town’s only (or only significant) saloon. In reality, Tombstone had a staggering 110 saloons at the time, a product of its size and the nature of its population. The Last Chance is, of course, fictional, but if we want to use a real location as a stand-in, there are plenty of options. The most likely inspiration, however, was the Occidental Saloon, half a block from the Corral and a place that, in real life, was frequented by many of the characters in the story. Unlike most of the other local saloons, it was also a hotel with rooms, which fits with what we see. (There were, of course, many other boarding houses in the city, should the PCs wish to use one).
The dentistry just opened by Holliday is fictional – he was a qualified dentist, but there is no evidence he practised as such while he was living in Tombstone. Therefore, we can place it where we please, although it’s presumably not far from the saloon.
The jail plays a larger role, and this, of course, was a real place. Also including the courthouse, it was one of the few stone buildings in the town, and a couple of blocks from both the OK Corral and the Occidental Saloon. An adjoining jail yard for exercise was surrounded by a 12-foot wall.
A significant point about Tombstone at the time was that a city ordinance was in place prohibiting anyone from carrying weapons, unless they had just entered town and were on their way to deposit them at a livery or saloon for safekeeping. Unless they are lawmen, this rule will apply to the PCs as much as to anyone else, something that could well be significant in a game.
• A – O.K. Corall
• B – Last Chance Saloon (?)
• C – Jail
• D – Historical location of gunfight
• Brown – adobe buildings
• Yellow – wooden buildings
• Pink – stone buildings
• Green – other/mixed construction
We also see two locations outside the town. Pa Clanton’s ranch is easy to place since it really existed. It was located at Lewis Springs, about 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Tombstone, which fits with it being an hour’s ride away on horseback, as indicated in the final episode.
It’s harder to work out a precise location for the hotel where Holliday stays with Dodo and Kate when he leaves Tombstone for the night. The writers are careful not to give the place any name, since they won’t have had anywhere specific in mind, so all we can say is that it’s less than thirty miles away and the first settlement to be reached in whichever direction Holliday was travelling.
This gives us a few possibilities, even if we don’t just make one up, but a real-world option that fits the bill is Fairbank, a village constructed earlier in the year to support the closest stop on the Mexico-Tucson railroad. It’s about six miles (10 km) west of Tombstone as the crow flies and is significant today as a long-abandoned ghost town operated as a tourist attraction.
They may not be kings or revolutionary leaders, but most of the speaking guest characters in the serial are real historical figures. Despite not showing up until episode three, at the time of the story, Virgil Earp was the city marshal, or chief of police, as well as a Deputy US Marshal. He had appointed Wyatt as a deputy only a day or so before the story starts. Although Wyatt Earp had held law enforcement positions earlier in his life, he was effectively unemployed at the time, making a living as a gambler and occasional enforcer for his brother. The brothers are in their 30s, both living in Tombstone with their common-law wives.
Warren Earp is the odd one out. The youngest brother, at 26, he was, in fact, living in California at the time of the gunfight and did not die until 1900. On the other hand, two other Earp brothers, James and Morgan, were living in Tombstone; the former was a saloon owner who had no involvement in the gunfight, while the latter had been appointed as deputy along with Wyatt.
Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson was a friend of Wyatt’s, and a former lawman himself, but he was nowhere near Tombstone at the time of the gunfight. Instead, the real sheriff was a man named Johnny Behan, and more friendly with the Clantons than the Earps, presenting a rather more complex picture than the one in the serial.
Despite being depicted as an elderly man in the serial, John Henry “Doc” Holliday was only aged 30 at the time of the gunfight. He was living in Tucson, but Wyatt had called him to Tombstone on the 20th specifically to help deal with the Clantons, and, rather than a dentist’s shop, he was staying at a boarding house.
The story presents the Clanton family as the main villains, although the reality is more complex. They were members of a much larger and loosely organised cattle-rustling gang colloquially named ‘the Cowboys’. Although the Clantons owned a legitimate (if unregistered) ranch, they made much of their living by stealing cattle from Mexico and smuggling them across the border. Ike and Phineas were in their 30s, but Billy was only 19 – younger than he appears in the serial.
Newman “Old Man” Clanton, referred to as ‘Pa Clanton’ in the serial, was not involved in the events around the gunfight, having been shot dead in a failed cattle raid two months previously. Had he still been alive, he would have been in his mid-60s and widowed; he was a former Tennessee slave owner and Confederate soldier who had moved into the area with his family in 1873.
The other historical character in the story is gunslinger Johnny Ringo. Born in Indiana, he had moved to Arizona in 1879 and was a known associate of the ‘Cowboys’ gang alongside the Clantons; rustling and robbery may have been his only significant source of income at the time. He was not, however, in town at the time of the real gunfight and had nothing to do with it.
Scenario
Perhaps the first thing to say about The Gunfighters is that, unlike, say, The Massacre, the plot bears little resemblance to the historical events it’s ostensibly based on. Instead, it’s loosely based on a 1957 film that was itself a loose adaptation of the real events. So, if we do want to use it as the basis for a time travel story, we would, as a minimum, have to decide whether we’re happy with this version of the legend or we’d rather use something more historical.
It's also difficult to know how to involve the PCs in the story, unless they are stumbling into it by accident, as happens in the TV serial. This is a small-scale event in historical terms, involving a specific set of individuals, lasting only a short time and having no particular repercussions in the longer term beyond the loss of a few Hollywood movies. Events such as the Third Crusade or the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre are things that PCs can get swept up in, or that time-altering villains might plausibly wish to change; neither of those factors really applies to a single gunfight, no matter how iconic.
There are, however, some possibilities. It’s likely that if time travel were widely available, even if only to the very rich, many people would like to witness the gunfight. After all, Tombstone’s main revenue today comes from tourism, and they put on daily re-enactments. Too many people coming, as with any historic event (one thinks of the Gettysburg Address or Woodstock, for instance), would surely change things. A huge crowd of time travellers from different eras hanging out to watch could well end up preventing what they had come to see.
But a careful research organisation might send in agents to observe events, maybe with miniaturised or cloaked recording devices. Here, the PCs wouldn’t want to get involved, but might end up doing so anyway, forcing them to try to keep events on track.
Other possibilities move further away from the idea of this as a pure historical. If an alien or supernatural entity has possessed one of the Clantons, that could add to the struggle to keep historical events on track. Or there could be some entirely unrelated supernatural or Cthuloid event going on in the town at the same time, leading the PCs to track that down against the backdrop of the real-world events.
We could explicitly set the story in an alternate universe, allowing us to smooth over inconsistencies between the serial and historical events. Here, if it’s a one-off, the PCs could be the Earps and Holliday, with added powers if the alternate reality in question is, say, that of Deadlands. To move things even further away, Westerns in general are a good source of inspiration for fantasy games, sharing some plot tropes and, with some serial numbers scrubbed off, that might also work here.
The serial opens with the Clantons coming to town to get revenge on Doc Holliday for killing their brother, Reuben. In reality, Reuben never existed, and the feud had a long history, including the involvement of the ‘Cowboys’ in a couple of stagecoach robberies earlier in the year, as well as their usual rustling activities. Moreover, Phineas Clanton was not in town for the real events, and Billy Clanton had yet to arrive when the story opens, with Ike instead being accompanied only by fellow ‘Cowboy’ Tom McLaury. Seth ‘Snake Eyes’ Harper, the hired gunman in the serial, is entirely fictional.
The first part of the serial relies on the Doctor being mistaken for Holliday. This may be something of a stretch in-game and obviously makes no sense at all if, as in the historical event, the Clantons already know what their target looks like. In a game with magic, conceivably, a PC might be cursed to look like Holliday, in which case part of the story is figuring out how to undo that, although we’d also need to deal with why it happened in the first place.
In straight-up fantasy, if one of the PCs looks unusual (and it’s a rare party where nobody does), the Holliday-substitute might coincidentally appear similar, which could more naturally lead to the confusion. How many (say) well-armed red-haired dark-skinned tiefling women can there be in the land around a small frontier town? The similarity might be enough to give the PCs pause and could genuinely mean something – a long-lost relative, somebody with a connected backstory, etc.
In the original, the party is split at this point, with one being locked up in jail for their protection, one being kidnapped by the Clantons, and one fleeing with Holliday. If we do want to keep this element, it obviously doesn’t have to be one each, but we probably wouldn’t, and it would be hard to arrange if we did. Instead, whichever plot the PCs are really here for takes over, or, if we’re sticking with the original random arrival, we need to find some way to stop them simply leaving town – which is all the time travellers are trying to do in the story.
For instance, whatever they’re using to time travel or reality-hop might need to recharge and not be easily portable. Or one side or the other might have stolen it, forcing the PCs to stay until they can get it back. Hopefully, if the game is of this type, and not a one-off, this sort of circumstance is already part of the trope, since the issue would probably come up regularly.
One way or the other, eventually, we get to the gunfight. In an alternate reality or straight fantasy setting, the PCs may well be taking the role of the Earps, in which case, now is the time for the climactic battle, playing out however it does.
If we want to stick to the real events, most likely as a combat between NPCs, there are several differences between them and those in the serial. Ike and Tom McLaury had been joined by their respective brothers, Billy and Frank, and by a fifth cowboy, Billy Claibourne. After previous confrontations throughout the day, they were armed, despite the city ordinance banning weapons, and the Earps and Holliday were planning to arrest or disarm them.
In the serial, the fight takes place in front of the OK Corral just after dawn. In reality, it was at the other end of the block, a few doors down from the Corral’s rear entrance, and took place in the mid-afternoon. Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were both shot dead, while Ike and Billy Claibourne, who were unarmed, fled the scene. In the real world, Ike Clanton, who dies in the serial, was killed while cattle rustling six years later.
Rules
Westerns are a sufficiently common genre that any generic RPG should be able to handle them without difficulty, even if it doesn’t have a specific rule supplement. Dedicated science fiction RPGs should also be able to cope without much modification unless they are closely restricted to a particular setting. The tech level is 3 in Traveller, 4 in Doctors & Daleks, and 5 in GURPS.
As a result, possibly the only rules we are likely to need are for the weapons used in what is an unusually violent Doctor Who story for the time. For the most part, these are .44 revolvers, although some may also have carried smaller concealed weapons, and, in real life, Doc Holliday killed Tom McLaury with a double-barrelled shotgun before switching to his pistol for the remainder of the fight. None of these are likely to present an issue in most applicable rules systems.
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