Dust Devils (game)

Dust Devils is an independently published role-playing game set in the Old West, written by Matt Snyder. It was voted the 2002 Indie RPG of the Year; it also won the Best Synergy of Game and Rules category, as well as placing in the Best Production and Most Innovative Game categories.

The game uses playing cards and Poker mechanics to resolve scenes and situations. Players create poker hands using their character's scores to earn cards. Then, they compare poker hands to see how their characters perform in a scene. The game was the first RPG to introduce a randomized narrator. In the game, whoever plays the highest single card during a scene becomes the narrator for how the scene ends and what happens in it.

New edition

Matt Snyder republished Dust Devils in expanded form in 2007. The new edition, called Dust Devils Revenged, includes updated rules, play advice, and a brief examination of the Old West in film and history. The new edition also included three different settings for the game.

Dust devil

A dust devil is a strong, well-formed, and relatively long-lived whirlwind, ranging from small (half a meter wide and a few meters tall) to large (more than 10 meters wide and more than 1000 meters tall). The primary vertical motion is upward. Dust devils are usually harmless, but can on rare occasions grow large enough to pose a threat to both people and property.

They are comparable to tornadoes in that both are a weather phenomenon of a vertically oriented rotating column of wind. Most tornadoes are associated with a larger parent circulation, the mesocyclone on the back of a supercell thunderstorm. Dust devils form as a swirling updraft under sunny conditions during fair weather, rarely coming close to the intensity of a tornado.

Names

In the southwestern United States, a dust devil is sometimes called a "dancing devil". In Death Valley, California, it may be called a "sand auger" or a "dust whirl".

The Navajo refer to them as chiindii, ghosts or spirits of dead Navajos. If a chindi spins clockwise, it is said to be a good spirit; if it spins counterclockwise, it is said to be a bad spirit.

Dust devil (disambiguation)

A dust devil is a strong, well-formed, and relatively long-lived whirlwind.

Dust devil may also refer to:

In music: