These supplements often provide for adventures set in urban areas such as New Orleans, New York City, or Boston. However, later supplements expanded the in-game adventuring area to include places such as the Deep South, the Mississippi River, Mexico, and the Northeastern United States. The basic rules provide for characters and settings that could be expected to appear in the ' Wild West' genre of movies and pulp fiction, and most of the in-game action is presumed to occur in the wild frontiers of the American West, or in barely tamed frontier towns like Tombstone, Arizona or Dodge City, Kansas. Deadlands: Reloaded further updates the backstory and advances the canonical starting point to 1879. The second edition of Deadlands uses the updated backstory of 1877 as the canonical starting point.

A later supplement, Tales o' Terror, advances the game's backstory and metaplot ahead one year, to 1877. The canonical year for the first edition of Deadlands is 1876. The game is set in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Shane Lacy Hensley had the idea for a new game focusing on cowboys and zombies in 1994 as he was setting up his company Pinnacle Entertainment Group, when he saw a painting by Brom of a Confederate vampire on the cover of White Wolf Publishing's soon-to-be released Necropolis: Atlanta supplement he then began writing the game that became Deadlands, and after completing a first draft, Hensley flew in two game designer friends of his, Greg Gorden and Matt Forbeck, and both of them liked the game enough that they asked to buy into Pinnacle. The eight-time Origins Award–winning setting has been converted to many other systems over the years and is available in the original Classic Rules, the revised Classic Rules, d20 System and GURPS adaptations, and a Savage Worlds version called Deadlands: Reloaded.

The original game was written by Shane Lacy Hensley and published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 1996. Alternate history, Western, Horror, Steampunk, Fantasy, Weird Westĭeadlands is a genre-mixing alternate history role-playing game which combines the Western and horror genres, with some steampunk elements.

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