Actually there are several pretty good settings in the 1860s-80s, California, New York, London, Hong Kong, and Egypt (Suez Canal constructed 1859-1869). The more I looked into it the richer it got.
Eh, pirate sails around the world, picks up disgraced samurai who needs to leave Japan. Afterwards they'll sail to England at some point or another, and the thief is looking for passage to America (as a thief he needs to get abroad for a while). They sail over the Atlantic, where they meet the cowboy who's driven cattle from the West to sell at a better price on the East coast.
A call to adventure on top, aaand campaign is a go.
You wouldn't need anything that extravagant, you could reasonably find all these people in California in the late 1800's. The earliest Japanese immigrants to California happened in the 1860's. After the gold rush people from all over the world flocked to Cali.
Would make more sense if the thief was bound for Australia as a convict with the privateer,then some shit happened and they ended up in Japan, then sailed for the west coast of the US.
Gunslinger comes across the samurai who has escaped to America and is hiding as a railroad worker. Some kind of fuckery happens and they escape and go to San Francisco. They meet the English dandy and they get into some more fuckery and the privateer gets them back out to sea.
San Fransisco 1880 would be a plausible setting. The only one that would kinda be out there would be the Samurai and even that's not too far of a stretch.
It's actually pretty plausible, the first wave of Japanese people to immigrate to California and Hawaii was in the 1860s. By the 1900 census there were nearly 25k Japanese people living on the West Coast.
The samurai duels on the roof of the train while the gunslinger is forced to take their place in a complex tea ceremony being used as a distraction for the thief to steal an artifact. At the end, they escape by disconnecting the rest of the cars from the locomotive, which has been pirated.
Texas would be the perfect setting. The privateer settled by n Louisiana to enjoy retirement at her plantation. An English minor lord wants to partner with her for an expansion into the new fields west of the river (now Texas) and they hire a ronin that just arrived at the port of New Orleans. It once in Texas, they encounter the gunslinger.
I wish I'd paid attention to that show when I was a kid. Weird west + Bruce Campbell sounds pretty cool. I just never gave it a shot because I was distracted by the stupid name (who names a person "county‽").
But yes, I agree: weird west sounds like the perfect setting for this.
I made an adventure
for this based on the Tiny D6 Pirates system. They were in 1820s or so San Francisco so we've got robber barons, Emperor Norton, and all sorts of weird stuff thrown in. You can also have fun with cholera epidemics and floods and gold rushes.
Except if the French Privateers stopped operating in the 1830’s? Before two of the other eras even are said to have started… like it’s an amazing adventuring party idea but ‘100% historically accurate’ is hopeful at best.