The Wild Frontier: A Guide to the World of Goblins & Gunslingers

Welcome to the Wild Frontier

Before you shuffle your deck, before your creatures cross the lane divide — there is a world. A vast, sun-baked territory where six-shooters share the streets with spell-smoke, where lawmen pin badges over enchanted vests, and where ancient demons walk out of the desert heat like they never left. This is the Wild Frontier, and it is beautiful and brutal in equal measure.

Goblins & Gunslingers draws its factions from five distinct peoples who carved out territory in this land and now fight — through trade, politics, and outright battle — to hold it. This guide introduces the world's geography, each faction's origin story, and the web of territorial disputes that makes the Wild Frontier the most dangerous place in any known realm.

For more on how the factions play in-game, visit the Factions page. For the full lore experience, explore the Lore section.

The Land: A Territory Infused with Magic

The Wild Frontier is not a metaphor — it is a place. A sprawling continent of sun-cracked flatlands, deep desert canyons, ancient forests, and frontier towns that went up in a season and might come down in another. The land is old in ways that matter: beneath the dust and rock, mana veins thread through the bedrock like a root system, surfacing in places as glowing springs, enchanted ore deposits, or invisible concentrations of raw magical energy that any creature with sensitivity can feel.

This ambient mana is why the Wild Frontier drew settlers from every corner of the world. Magic here is available — not hoarded by a royal court or locked behind decades of academic study, but present in the ground, the water, and the air. The problem is that several very different peoples arrived at the same time and had very different ideas about what to do with it.

What followed was not a war — not exactly. It was a competition: for land, for magical resources, for trade routes, for the right to define what the Wild Frontier would become. That competition is still ongoing. And it is played out, most often, one card at a time.

The Humans: Settlers, Sheriffs, and Gunslingers

"This land has law now. You don't have to like it."

The Humans arrived on the Wild Frontier as settlers: wagon trains rolling in from distant civilized lands, carrying families, tools, and firearms. What they found was a territory already occupied — by Goblins in the hills, Desert Devils in the deep canyon country, Straw Elves in the ancient forests, and Beasts roaming every ungoverned mile. They built towns anyway.

Human civilization on the Wild Frontier is defined by its institutions. Sheriffs, marshals, bounty hunters, and deputies form a loose but functional legal system that tries to impose order on chaos. Their technology — firearms, mechanical gadgets, alchemical ammunition — gives them an edge over opponents who rely purely on magic. Their discipline gives them an edge over opponents who rely purely on brute force.

Humans don't have the raw magical power of Desert Devils or the sheer numbers of Goblin hordes. What they have is coordination, training, and the law — which, in the Wild Frontier, is often more powerful than either of those things. Human sheriffs don't just fight; they make the rules of fighting, and they enforce them with a Quickdraw pistol and a Warrant card when necessary.

What they want: Expansion, order, and legitimacy. The Humans want the Wild Frontier to be their Wild Frontier — named and mapped and taxed and governed. Every other faction is, to a Human lawman, either a potential citizen or a potential problem.

The Goblins: Chaotic Inventors of the Hill Country

"We didn't mean to blow up the bank. The bank was just in the way."

Goblins were on the Wild Frontier long before the Humans arrived. They live in the hill country — a tangle of rocky outcroppings, abandoned mine shafts, and improvised settlements that seem to violate every structural principle known to engineering. Goblin towns don't look like much from the outside. From the inside, they are wonders of chaotic, brilliant, occasionally exploding invention.

Goblins are natural tinkerers. They take things apart, understand how they work, and put them back together in ways nobody intended. This applies to weapons, machinery, magical artifacts, other people's discarded equipment, and sometimes the landscape itself. A Goblin engineer with a box of spare parts and an hour to work is more dangerous than most armies.

Their culture is organized chaos: no formal government, loose clan affiliations, and a social hierarchy determined almost entirely by who has the best idea at this exact moment. Goblin elders are respected not for their age but for their history of impressive explosions. Goblin children are respected when they blow up something impressive enough.

What they want: Resources, specifically the mana veins and ore deposits that fuel their experiments. Goblins don't want to govern the Wild Frontier — they want to take it apart and see what's inside. They clash with Humans over mining rights, with Desert Devils over canyon territory, and with Straw Elves over the occasional forest fire caused by an experiment gone wrong.

The Desert Devils: Ancient Demons of the Canyon Country

"We were here before your gods named this place. We will be here after."

The Desert Devils did not arrive on the Wild Frontier. They emerged from it — from the deep desert, the sunbaked canyon floors, the ancient places where the mana veins run so thick they warp reality around them. They are demonic in nature, born of heat and primordial magic, and they have a geological perspective on time: the Wild Frontier's current territorial disputes are, to the eldest Desert Devils, merely the latest in a long series of temporary disturbances.

Desert Devil society is organized around power, plainly and unapologetically. The strongest leads; the weak serve or leave. This sounds brutal, but in practice it produces extraordinarily efficient organizations — Desert Devil war bands move and strike with the precision of experienced professionals, because every member of the band earned their position through demonstrated capability.

They are drawn to burn — literal and figurative. Desert Devil magic manifests as heat, flame, and searing energy. Their most powerful creatures radiate heat that scorches the air around them. Their spells reduce obstacles to ash. And their control of the deep canyon country gives them access to the richest mana veins on the Frontier, which fuels everything else.

What they want: Sovereignty over the canyon country and recognition of their ancient claim to the deep Frontier. Desert Devils don't want to expand — they want others to stop encroaching. Every Human surveyor who appears at the canyon rim with a theodolite and a land deed is, to a Desert Devil warlord, a declaration of hostilities.

The Straw Elves: Scarecrow Guardians of the Ancient Forests

"The forest does not negotiate. Neither do we."

Before the Wild Frontier had a name, before any of the other factions arrived or emerged, the Straw Elves were keeping watch. They are the guardians of the ancient forests — tall, eerily quiet beings with straw-woven bodies and eyes that catch light like polished amber. They are not undead, not constructs, not cursed. They are a people, ancient and rooted, whose connection to the living forest is so deep that the boundary between Elf and ecosystem sometimes blurs entirely.

Straw Elf culture is defined by patience and protection. They do not strike first. They observe, they wait, and they respond — often with devastating precision — when the forest is threatened. Their magic is nature-based: they grow Cover Tokens from living wood and straw, they call down Healing energy from the forest's own reserves, and they can summon ancient forest spirits as guardian creatures.

Despite their gentle reputation, Straw Elves are not passive. A forest that has been burning for a week tends to produce Straw Elves who are very much done waiting. Their combat style is defensive until it suddenly, decisively, isn't — a hallmark of their cultural philosophy applied to warfare.

What they want: Preservation of the ancient forests and the magical ecosystems they contain. The Straw Elves are in conflict with every other faction that views the forest as a resource: Goblins mining under the roots, Desert Devil burns creeping at the treeline, Human logging operations, even Beasts that overgraze the understory. They are diplomatically neutral but ecologically militant.

The Beasts: Mutated Wildlife of the Open Frontier

"Call them monsters if it makes you feel better. They'll eat you either way."

The Beasts are not a faction in the conventional sense — they have no government, no culture, no territorial ambition. They are the mutated wildlife of the Wild Frontier, transformed by centuries of exposure to the ambient mana that permeates the land. A creature that would have been an ordinary wolf or eagle or lizard anywhere else becomes something else entirely on the Wild Frontier: larger, stranger, more dangerous, and occasionally more intelligent.

Beasts range from small and fast to enormous and nearly indestructible. Some have developed rudimentary intelligence — enough to be trained, hired, or allied with. Others are purely instinctual, responding to food, territory, and the strange call of the mana veins. The one thing all Beasts share is adaptability: they fill every ecological niche the Wild Frontier offers, from the hill country to the canyon floor to the forest canopy.

In the game, Beasts represent the neutral element of the Wild Frontier — creatures that any faction can recruit, ally with, or simply encounter. A Goblin engineer might tame a mana-charged lizard as a living explosive. A Human sheriff might deputize a particularly loyal Beast companion. A Desert Devil warlord might simply walk up to a canyon predator and understand each other by instinct.

What they want: Territory, food, and the mana-rich environments that fuel their mutations. Beasts aren't seeking to win the Wild Frontier's territorial war — but they complicate it significantly for everyone else.

The Conflict: A Web of Territorial Disputes

Every faction on the Wild Frontier is in conflict with every other faction, and the reasons are both specific and overlapping:

• Humans vs. Goblins: Mining rights and property law. Goblins mine wherever the ore is; Humans say the land has been claimed. Neither side agrees on whose legal system applies.
• Humans vs. Desert Devils: Expansion and sovereignty. Human settlers move toward the canyon country; Desert Devils consider this an invasion of their ancestral territory.
• Humans vs. Straw Elves: Resource extraction. Human logging and agriculture push into the ancient forests that Straw Elves are sworn to protect.
• Goblins vs. Desert Devils: Canyon territory and explosive incidents. Goblin experiments occasionally destabilize canyon geology; Desert Devils respond proportionally and then some.
• Goblins vs. Straw Elves: Accidental fires and intentional mining. Straw Elves have little patience for explosions near root systems.
• Desert Devils vs. Straw Elves: Burn vs. growth. Desert Devil fires don't stop at the forest edge; Straw Elf counter-growth doesn't stop at the canyon rim. This is the oldest conflict on the Frontier.

Into this web of disputes comes the card game itself — a formalized way of resolving territorial claims that all five factions, in a rare moment of agreement, recognized as preferable to total war. The lanes of the game board represent territory. The creatures are champions. The spells are leverage. And whoever holds the most ground at the end of the game gets to make a claim that, for now, the others will honor.

For now.

Explore Further

The Wild Frontier is larger than any single guide can cover. Dive deeper into the world:

• Full Lore Section — Stories, histories, and world-building essays
• Factions Overview — In-game stats, keywords, and faction-specific strategy
• Rules Reference — The complete game rules, including keyword glossary
• Interactive Tutorial — Learn the game in the world it's set in

The frontier is waiting. Pick your faction and ride.