Defiant: Native Americans in Rider has arrived!
Wow. A LOT of work has gone into this book and it, for the most part, represents about six months of my life working on it every day for 8-10 hours a day. There's a lot of history in this book and, while it was tough, it was also hugely rewarding for me to get back to historical writing and research.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Here's the introduction from Defiant: Native Americans in Rider.
Welcome to Defiant: Native Americans in Rider!
When I first wrote Rider, the intention was to have an entire chapter devoted to Native Americans as well as a few Native American-only careers. That chapter just kept getting larger and it finally became obvious that, to do any justice to the subject matter, it would need to be its own volume. After all, I’ve already made the Clement Sector roleplaying game which is over 670 pages long and it seemed like one volume large enough to be used for self-defense was likely enough.
So I cut it.
I left in the Native American Warrior career as well as a few references to Native Americans, but the bulk of what I’d written then was cut out of Rider for the sake of page count. After reading this book, you can decide if I made the right decision or not. However, one of the mistakes made by cutting this material was that I omitted the bow as a weapon in Rider. I didn’t note this error until much later and it is a question which I am frequently asked on our Discord server (If you’re not a member of that, you should be. It’s an outstanding community of people and we’d love to add you to the community. The Discord invite link is on the credits page.) and it’s been a bit of an embarrassment to create a great Western RPG only to leave the bow out of the weapons in the finished product. Well, that’s fixed now. Sorry about that.
Much of what follows shows the preferences of the author. For instance, the word “Indian” is only used in places where it is the official title of something such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The terms “tribe” or “tribal” are also only used in such instances. In addition, the use of “AD” and “BC” within the book is also a preference of the author over the use of “CE” and “BCE”. If this sort of thing bothers you, please try to overlook it as you can.
There is a lot of history presented here. Indeed, it’s the majority of the book. This is provided with the hope that this will give players an idea of what the members of the Nation that is chosen by the player have endured and experienced over the years before their character was born or being played. This history is extensive, but it is not exhaustive. A large book than that which you hold now could be written on any of the various subjects which are covered in a paragraph or two. Indeed, similar books on individual subjects or individuals are on the shelf behind me as I write this. I certainly encourage you to look deeper into anything mentioned here as it is all fascinating.
While you may be familiar with Rider, you may not be familiar with other roleplaying games. So let me take a moment and let you know that this book uses d10s. Specifically, it uses the d100 version in which a person rolls 2 10-sided dice and reads one (usually a darker one or one specifically designed to have tens on it) as the tens place and the other as the ones place. So a “5” on the darker die and a “7” on the lighter die would be “57” on a d100 roll. If you don’t have d10s, there’s lot of places on the internet or at game stores near you that sell them. Perhaps even the place where you purchased this book.
John Watts
February 5, 2025