The Wild Frontier: Lore of Goblins & Gunslingers

Where Gunpowder Meets Magic

Every great card game has a world behind it — a reason why these creatures are fighting, why these factions are at war, why the stakes feel real even through a deck of illustrated cards. Goblins & Gunslingers is no exception. The Wild Frontier is a living, breathing setting with centuries of history, fractured alliances, and enough unresolved conflict to fuel ten card sets.

This is that world. Welcome to it.

The Setting: A Frontier Between Worlds

The Wild Frontier is a vast, sun-scorched expanse that sits at the collision point of two eras: the age of gunpowder and the age of magic. Neither has won. Neither will. Instead, they've fused — imperfectly, violently, beautifully — into something entirely new.

Gunslingers ride alongside spellcasters. Enchanted revolvers fire rounds that burst into elemental fire. Locomotives run on mana-powered engines. The saloon in every frontier town has a back room where bounty hunters and warlocks negotiate over spell-infused whiskey. It is, in a word, extraordinary.

The Frontier itself stretches from the Ashfields in the south — a blistering expanse of volcanic rock where the Desert Devils hold dominion — to the Ironwood Ranges in the north, where ancient forests have grown sentient in ways that make even seasoned scouts nervous. Between them lie scattered townships, contested valleys, and the ever-shifting No Man's Land at the center of the continent, where every faction's borders meet and none agree on who controls what.

A Brief History of the Frontier

The Frontier wasn't always contested. A century ago, it was sparsely populated — mostly Beasts and the ancient Straw Elves who tended the land's harvest fields in quiet communion with the magic that ran through the soil.

Then the Great Crossing happened.

Humans arrived from the eastern coasts, bringing repeating rifles, steam engines, and the economic hunger of an expanding civilization. They built towns fast — faster than anything the Frontier had seen. They called it progress. The factions already living there called it something else entirely.

The Goblins came next, drawn by the smell of gunpowder and opportunity. Where Humans saw settlement, Goblins saw a playground. They began acquiring Human technology, modifying it in their characteristically chaotic way, and selling it back at a markup — or simply using it to cause maximum chaos for profit.

The Desert Devils, ancient and contemptuous, watched all of this from the Ashfields with burning patience. They had been here since before memory, and they would be here when the newcomers were dust. But they were not above accelerating that process when the mood struck them.

And the Straw Elves, oldest of all, withdrew further into the Ironwood, weaving their Cover Tokens and tending their dying groves, and waited for the moment to remind everyone that nature has a longer memory than any civilization.

The Factions: Narrative Roles

The Humans — Civilization's Sharp Edge

Human settlements dot the Frontier like constellations — some thriving, some struggling, all fiercely independent. The sheriff's badge is the highest symbol of order on the Frontier, but order is hard to maintain when your jurisdiction borders goblin territory to one side and demon-haunted wasteland to the other. Human gunslingers are pragmatic survivors: loyal to law when law works, and loyal to themselves when it doesn't.

Their ongoing struggle is the tension between building something that lasts and the Frontier's stubborn refusal to be tamed.

The Goblins — Chaos with a Business Plan

Don't mistake Goblin chaos for stupidity. It isn't. Goblin society is surprisingly sophisticated — just organized around entirely different priorities than Human civilization. Where Humans value stability, Goblins value interesting. Every explosion is an experiment. Every heist is a story. The best Goblins are engineers, inventors, and con artists of breathtaking talent.

Their relationship with Human technology is GNG's most fascinating ongoing narrative: what happens when a culture with no respect for safety warnings gets access to the most dangerous tools in the world? The Frontier finds out, regularly, at considerable cost to surrounding property.

The Desert Devils — The Ancient Grudge

The Desert Devils predate the other factions on the Frontier by millennia. They remember a time before roads, before towns, before anything that smelled like civilization. That memory is not nostalgic — it is territorial. Every Human town built on Ashfield-adjacent land is an affront. Every Goblin mine that tunnels too deep is a declaration of war.

Desert Devils don't rush. They wait. They accumulate. And when they act, they do so with the weight of centuries behind every move. Their heat-based powers are not flashy — they're inevitable, the way erosion is inevitable, the way the desert wins eventually.

The Straw Elves — Memory and Loss

The Straw Elves are the most enigmatic faction on the Frontier. They appear scarecrow-like at first glance — lanky, straw-stuffed figures with hollow eyes — but their magic is among the deepest on the continent. They are tied to the harvest: to cycles of growth and death, to the turning of seasons, to the slow patient wisdom of things that grow in the ground and wait for rain.

Their current situation is one of diminishment. The Ironwood retreats each year. Their ancient groves thin. The magic in the soil that sustained them for millennia is being pulled out by Goblin mines and Human irrigation projects. The Straw Elves are not yet desperate — but they are paying attention. Their Deathrattle abilities reflect this philosophy: even in death, they leave something behind.

The Beasts — The Frontier's True Owners

Before any of the factions arrived with their banners and borders, the Beasts were here. Coyotes, mountain lions, wyverns, thunderbirds — creatures of every shape that never needed politics to define their territory. They align with no faction. They survive regardless of who wins any particular war. Ironically, this makes them invaluable allies to everyone — and loyal to no one.

The RPG Sourcebook

The Wild Frontier is bigger than the card game. The GNG Wild Frontier RPG Sourcebook expands the setting into a full tabletop roleplaying game — complete with character creation rules, faction lore in exhaustive detail, a campaign framework, and the kind of world-building that fills in every corner of the map the card game leaves blank.

Whether you want to run a session as a goblin demolitions crew on a heist or a human sheriff investigating supernatural murders, the RPG sourcebook has the tools to make it real.

Explore more of the world at the Lore page, or see how the factions play in-game at Factions.