So I set up a moddb page for this, finally news - Bail Up mod for Mount & Blade: Warband

Another gun mod for mount and blade.

Not really, this setting has never actually been done before, neither in mount and blade, or to my knowledge, in any other game - (to be fair, there was "GOLDFIELDS" - a text adventure I played in primary school, set about 15 years earlier than Bail Up - and my recent unearthing of it gave me a few ideas to use in the mod, but I doubt anyone remembers it.)

The basic premise is you're in southeast Australia, some time between 1875 and 1880. "The Colonies" at this time were undergoing huge development after the discovery of vast quantities of gold in various places throughout the country. Whether you're a "new chum" or an "old hand" will be your own decision, and will effect your skills and social standing.

Besides guns being the main weapon in the game, there will be a few other notable deviations from standard M&B gameplay...

• Belligerent parties will be generally smaller. Usually, European settlers or descendants of convicts would travel in tight groups of 3-5 when working and living in the bush. Police will travel in somewhat larger groups most of the time, and tribesmen in larger groups still. If you take up a reasonably honest line of work, don't expect to be in huge battles much more than minor altercations. Maintaining a party will be more costly than in regular M&B, in an effort to maintain humble party sizes for the player, and in turn, make police encounters more of a trouble.
• Ammunition depletes permanently. There's a system in place to restock your supplies while out in the field. You will carry generally less ammo into any particular battle. My hopes are to deter players from filling the air with lead but rather taking careful shots, lest they be forced to retreat or attempt a physical struggle.
• Death will, in some cases, be permanent. You will effectively have a few "lives" - that is, a limit on how many convictions you can have. Depending how serious your crimes are, when caught, you might have only a single conviction struck from your limit, or you might have many. When you reach maximum conviction, you'll be executed any time the police manage to overwhelm your party. The idea behind this is firstly to keep the player cautious and conservative in his endeavours, and to maintain a level of believability (that is to say, I'd rather avoid having a player who massacres 500 people, escapes from prison only to massacre another 500.

There are other planned changes, but until I'm totally sure how I'm going to implement them, I'll leave them for another update.
Anyway, about the page. I set this Moddb page up because I wanna do some more public musing on game features and the history behind the mod.
I'll be posting snippets of historical material in the "features" section which will act as both a kind of bibliography for the mod, and an introduction to the real life premise which establishes the mod (as I doubt many non-Australians will be privy to it) It's also a nice way to organise my research for my own use.
Generally, I will explain how the historical material will be tied into actual gameplay.

I'm pretty excited