+Mark Hunt posted this example of creating a Ganbusters character sheet using this great link for actual personal photos. Makes me want to run a Ganbuster game for sure, but more importantly it made me dig up some copy I copied to keep my head straight when trying to world build in the Pulp Fiction state of mind. I forget where I grabbed this text from. Could have been from Hero Games Pulp Hero, but the author of the text is notated at the bottom of this article.
Adventure, excitement and danger in the manner of The Shadow, Indiana Jones, Doc Savage and Flash Gordon are the hallmarks of the Hard Boiled RPG genre. While the genre gains its name from the adventure fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, in gaming terms it also includes the hair-raising adventures of the "stay tuned for next week's episode" brand of radio and movie serials. Hard Boiled may even be more correctly described as a meta-genre, as it covers the broad gamut of Horror, SF, Fantasy, Western, Aviation, and many other story genres.
Hard Boiled is not simply a genre or era fixed in stone. It is really a state of mind. Fast paced and energetic adventures. Exotic
locales, and two fisted action. A wistful and nostalgic glimpse of an era that seems familiar; but simpler, innocent, and daring.
Hard Boiled is all these and more. Some features of the Hard Boiled genre include its simple morality of good versus evil,
masked and cloaked heroes and heroines, devious villains and their schemes, gun-wielding desperados, cliffhanger endings, weird science, and a world still lush with unexplored places and lost races. Understanding the nostalgic
elements of the material and the stylistic conventions used are essential in squeezing the most enjoyment out of this rip-snorting and adrenaline-laced gaming genre.
On corner newsstands during the Golden Age Hard Boiled could be found literally in dozens of different fiction magazine titles and topics. An alphabet run through
a few of these titles will give you some idea of the incredible diversity that could be found: Air Trails, Argosy, Black Mask, Crack Shot, Dime Mystery, Excitement, Far East Stories,
Foreign Legion Stories, G-Men, Hollywood Detective, Imaginary Worlds, Jungle Stories, Ka-Zar, Love Story, Magic Carpet Magazine, Nickel Western, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Quick Trigger, Rapid Fire Action Stories, Six
Gun, Spicy Mystery, Strange Detective Mysteries, The Thrill Book, Underworld Romance, Weird Tales, Youth, Wings and Zing.
Genres covered included Detective-mystery, Flying, Jungle, War, Western, Sports, Horror, Science
Fiction, Romance, "Spicy", Adventure, Spy, and Fantasy of all types. Sometimes these genres were crossbred to produce such unlikely genres as Weird-Menace, War-Horror, Space-Western and Jungle-Detective. Even bizarre
niche subjects as "Racketeer", "Financial-Wizardry" and "Zeppelin" found a brief life during this period, providing magazine titles that are highly sought by collectors today.
The "single character" or "Hero" appeared early in these genre magazines.
Certain characters were so popular with readers that they had appearances in many issues, and even different magazines. Examples of these included the detective-mystery pulp Black Mask where Dashiell Hammett's "Sam Spade" and Raymond Chandler's "Philip Marlowe" hard-boiled fiction first
appeared. If fantasy and horror was more to your taste, the magazine Weird Tales had both, being home to the very popular Conan sword and sorcery stories of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft's terrifying Cthulhu mythos cycle of tales, and Seabury Quinn's ghost-breaking
stories about occult detective Jules de Grandin.
RPG Systems for Hard Boiled Gaming
RPG Systems for Hard Boiled Gaming
The furious-paced thrills, deadly perils, exotic globe-spanning adventures, and rough-and-tumble excitement of the Hard
Boiled are a natural topic for role-playing adventures. While there has in the past been a few RPGs devoted entirely to the pulps or some aspect of this genre--games such as Justice Inc., Daredevils, Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes, Gurps: Cliffhangers, and Top Secret S.I.'s "Agent 13 Sourcebook"--these systems are all out of print or have not been supported with additional supplements or scenarios. As perhaps the only commercially available
RPG aimed at least partially towards the pulp genre, West End Game's multi-cosmed Torg RPG, with its "Nile Empire" and "Terra" source books of pulp reality go quite far towards capturing the spirit of the pulps within its rules and supplements.
Other readily available and in print RPG systems can be tweaked to become a satisfying platform for pulp adventuring, although the GM must provide nearly all the background information for the period. Currently available generic rules systems that fit this category include Steve Jackson Games' Gurps, Ice's Hero System, and R. Talsorium's Dream Park; all are routes that a GM can use to present pulpish-hued adventures for their players, and each having several useful supplements for this purpose.Chaosium's Basic Role Playing System, as provided in their 1920s horror RPG Call of Cthulhu, can be easily updated to cover the 1930s-40s Pulp era with a bit of background work. TSR's Buck Rogers: High Adventure Cliffhangers, while set in a variant 25th Century future as depicted according to the famous 1930s comic strip of the same name, can also be used to play more typical pulp adventures with a GM expanded skill list and more appropriate background information. Finally, Atlas Games' modern-surreal RPG Over the Edge is admirably suited to playing pulp adventures. with its highly versatile free-form character generation and cinematically friendly storytelling combat system.
Other readily available and in print RPG systems can be tweaked to become a satisfying platform for pulp adventuring, although the GM must provide nearly all the background information for the period. Currently available generic rules systems that fit this category include Steve Jackson Games' Gurps, Ice's Hero System, and R. Talsorium's Dream Park; all are routes that a GM can use to present pulpish-hued adventures for their players, and each having several useful supplements for this purpose.Chaosium's Basic Role Playing System, as provided in their 1920s horror RPG Call of Cthulhu, can be easily updated to cover the 1930s-40s Pulp era with a bit of background work. TSR's Buck Rogers: High Adventure Cliffhangers, while set in a variant 25th Century future as depicted according to the famous 1930s comic strip of the same name, can also be used to play more typical pulp adventures with a GM expanded skill list and more appropriate background information. Finally, Atlas Games' modern-surreal RPG Over the Edge is admirably suited to playing pulp adventures. with its highly versatile free-form character generation and cinematically friendly storytelling combat system.
No matter which game system is used, all pulp RPG adventures rest on mixing many of the following adventure ingredients;
I. Larger than Life Heroes.
II. Reduced Hero Deaths.
III. Colourful Villains.
IV. Gadgets and Weird Science.
V. Bizarre Crimes and Mystery.
VI. Exotic Settings and Locations.
VII. Lost Worlds.
VIII. Cliffhangers
IX. Deathtraps.
X. The "Feel" of the 1930s-1940s Pulp Era.
I LARGER THAN LIFE HEROES
It may be obvious to say so, but the heroes of the pulps were heroes! No quibbling or ambiguity about good and evil, morality was monochromatic, with the hero in the white and the villain in the black. Heroes of pulp magazines were cast in a mold of nobility and bravery, the final product perhaps a little tarnished and rough around the edges, but still with a core that was solid, rare and pure. Adventurers in the pulp magazines were larger than life, being the strongest, the most athletic, the smartest, and naturally the most heroic.
Ensure that your players recognize this pulp convention of the hero being role-models of bravery, honesty and integrity. This will allow you to avoid such problems as out of genre characterizations and actions from cropping up later in your game. Your players' PC acts of self-sacrifice, gallantry and daring should be encouraged with appropriate rewards specific to the pulp game world. Give them praise on the front page of city newspapers, ticker-tape parades held in their honor, have the mayor bestowing to them the key to the city, and even have children begin adoring PC hero fan-clubs complete with secret passwords and secret-decoder rings! Let them earn the friendship of powerful patrons inside the game world that can provide them with super-scientific gadgets, help them cut through pesky government red-tape, or smooth things over with the law when things go horribly wrong. Hand out such games mechanic rewards as increased skill and experience levels, luck points, and other "player cookies" as your rule system allows for. Players who persist in having their PCs perform less than noble actions may find to their surprise NPC pulp heroes showing them up and getting all the goodies mentioned above. Even worse, NPC pulp villains may try to recruit them as allies for their own nefarious plots!
Pulp heroes often had unusual powers and abilities granted to them as a result of a strange experience or an eccentric background. A stint in the Far East gave weird powers of the mind and body to the more mystically oriented. Having been orphaned and raised by animals in the jungles, deserts and polar regions of the world conferred to certain heroes amazing abilities in strength, agility and athletic prowess. Or a strange gadget or device invented by the hero may be the source of their unique powers and weird talents. These powers were much milder in comparison to the extravagances typical of the "long-underwear" superheroes of golden-age comics, and made pulp heroes even more believable for this restraint. The GM should exercise strict control on the weird powers that their players may want for their PCs, putting their foot firmly down on strange powers too overpowering for their own interpretation of the genre.
Less fantastic, but still unique background abilities and skills for pulp heroes of more traditional "whodunit"s and spy-smashing stories should be encouraged. For example, a hero with an encyclopedic memory coming from growing up in a household with a set of these as the only reading material will find this renaissance knowledge handy time and time again; for even more entertainment, Volume S could have been missing, providing strange gaps in this PC's knowledge. A stint in the Great War will provide familiarity with weapons, combat techniques, and even how to handle airplanes and potato peelers for a PC with this type of background. Time spent in the police station, as a rookie cop, news hound or even as a custodian can provide in-depth knowledge of police procedures, the city, underworld contacts, and even how to fix a leaky faucet. Having at an early age running away to join the circus and working there can give useful knowledge of acrobatics, disguise artistry, snake handling and human cannonball. As a last example, merely having sold newspapers or shined shoes as a kid on the street corner near the city hall or local honky-tonk, and remembering the face or shoes of all the politicians, celebrities and crime figures that bought papers can be a very useful background. While not as exotic a background as being raised by apes, or having the power to cloud people's minds, such background skills are remarkably portable through many pulp story genres and should not be neglected or sneered at.
Backgrounds and vocations of the heroes can also help to explain their involvement in pulpish adventures. Stereotypical active professions of the good guys of pulp adventures included hard-boiled detectives, jaded playgirl/boy millionaires, frustrated law officers, crime-fighting stage-magicians, absent-minded professors, veterans of the Great War, gold-digging femme-fatales, mystics from the mysterious East, ghost-busting scientists, trouble shooting circus performers, cynical soldiers-of-fortune, and many more. You can gently twist these stereotypes to get such "bent" heroes as great white hunters in urban jungles, ice-age barbarians defrosted from ancient glaciers now living in the 20th century, reformed gangsters for whom bloodthirsty habits die hard, un-cerebral gadgeteers whose devices work only occasionally as intended, ultra-smart German Shepherds or any other favourite animal star, cigar-chewing middle-aged aviatrixes, and so on. The heroes of the pulps could be literally anyone, as long as they stood behind truth, justice, and fair play.
Disguises, strange names and alter egos for the PC pulp heroes not only give a touch of mystery to the adventure, but also protect them from the unwelcome attention of the press, the police and criminals. Have your players' PCs invent such distinctive names for these alter-egos as "The Nemesis", "The Golden Cometeer", "Captain January", "Merlini" and "Madam Xodiac". If the players do not invent such names for their mystery pulp heroes, they may find over-zealous newspaper reporters doing it for them! Secret hideouts, gadgets, exotic vehicles and more were stylistic conventions that some players may want to include in their PC conceptions. These may also have their own colourful names and labels, such as "The Arachnid's Web", "The Juggernaut", "The Radium Gun", "The Zed-mobile", etc. If the PC heroes are using their real names during their adventures, have attached to them a colourful nickname to create such vibrant monikers as "Ripper Smith", "Flash Maxwell", "Dynamite Bob" and "Wizard Parker". Sometimes a professional title or even the place they were from provided part of the nickname; "Doc Ravage", "Sawbones McCoy", "China Blue" and "Idaho Bones" are some examples of this naming trick. Finally, epithets, little descriptive phrases such as "The Weird Crusader", "The Red-headed Wrecker", "The Man of Uranium" and "The Reckless Flyer" can also be attached to the PC's name to spice it up a little.
If your players choose to use secret identities for their PC pulp heroes, ensure that this common pulp convention works as a two-edged sword. Let the mundane world present interesting hazards and pitfalls for the PC with the secret double life. Have their boss in the "real" world become upset at all the days of late appearances or missed work secretly spent fighting crime. Let the PC hero's current romantic partner or significant other become curious about that locked room in the basement that contains their secret make-up and costume room. Have the editor of the local daily newspaper start a campaign to rid the city of these secretive law-breaking vigilantes. A copy-cat amateur crime-fighter may don the same disguise and try later to un-mask themselves to claim all the past credit and glory which is the rightful due of the real hero. Alternatively, tricky villains may disguise themselves as a mysterious PC hero to work their diabolical deeds, and the unfortunate PC will have to dodge the attentions of the authorities to clear their besmirched good name while at the same time acting to thwart this villain's dastardly plots. Villains can also track down the pulp mystery hero's hideout, and either steal valuable equipment or place booby-traps in it. Villains can also blackmail the hero who hides behind a secret identity to do some favour for the villain, else revealing their identity to the world. Sometimes, it isn`t easy being a hero!
II REDUCED HERO DEATHS
Pulp heroes face incredible danger every day, but very rarely came to any serious harm during their death-defying adventures. Pushed out of flying aeroplanes, being trapped in flooded caverns, dodging a hail of gangster lead, pulp heroes survived it all, with only torn shirts, ripped stockings and mussed hair to hint at the dangers they had faced. In a fair fight, the good guys never lost, being beaten by the bad guys only through overwhelming odds, hypnotism, traps, and other cowardly and treacherous acts. A combination of clever tricks, fast thinking, audacious daring, sheer luck, and plot immunity from pulp authors reluctant to kill a favourite character saved countless heroes from seemingly sure death in the pulps.
It's harder for GMs to have their players' PCs continually stare death in the eye and still have these heroes regularly surviving deadly pulp RPG adventures, but it can be done. Introduce cinematic rules in your RPG system of preference, reducing most wounds to simple unconsciousness, and minor injuries to blackouts, dazing and temporary incapacitation. Instead of lethal injuries, arrange situations for the mortally wounded PC's body to disappear, and later reintroduce the character to the storyline with a some lesser but longer lasting injury and an explanation of some sort for their disappearance. Have your players let their PCs make copious use of the RPG rules on luck and luck talents, allow them to push their strength and will-power to beyond the brink, and let them use extra experience die rolls and "brownie points" to save their PCs from certain death. Note that this pulp adventure ingredient is one of reduced PC deaths, not outright immunity from death. If players have their PCs repeatedly perform reckless and thoughtless actions, let the dice fall as they may, and occasionally let such PCs die. On the other hand, never let a string of bad die rolls alone spell the demise of an otherwise well played pulp PC hero.
Other tricks to reduce the lethal effects of gun combat can be gadgets invented and used by the PC pulp heroes. Allow bulletproof armour for those heroes who frequently face lead-happy enemies. Allow PC gadgeteers to invent strange electrical devices that render gunpowder inert within its area of effect, or produce personal force-fields that will only allow slow-moving weapons such as swinging swords or hurled fists to penetrate. You can also have the pulp version of the magic healing that is common to fantasy games, weird science devices such as "Blood Pills", "Bone Glue" and "Flesh Wrap" that can be invented by gadgeteers to quickly patch up damaged or mangled PC heroes.
Emphasize to your players the pulp convention that both crooks and heroes will more often surrender in the face of overwhelming odds than fight on to the last anaemic drop of blood. To help promote this behaviour, do not punish PCs who honour this classic pulp tradition of surrendering to the enemy; instead, have them taken to the villain's secret HQ, and once there, give them a chance to escape and turn the tables on their former captors. Have your NPC villains make use of knockout gas, heavy saps, and narcotic bullets to bring down our heroes, and not the more ubiquitous and deadly lead variety. Let fisticuffs and brawling be the preferred means of combat by the agents of the villain and the heroes, by allowing handguns to be quickly knocked to the ground at the start of fighting when they are first pulled out by trigger-happy combatants. Providing situations where everyone knows that firing a gun is foolhardy, perhaps aboard a hydrogen-filled dirigible or inside a dynamite factory, is yet another trick to reduce the scale of lethality of your pulp RPG combats.
III COLOURFUL VILLAINS
The evil arch-villain is at the centre of every pulp adventure, and this crucial pulp NPC enemy will directly affect every aspect of the story. With a colourful background, unique name and bizarre disguise or uniform, the villain is often a mysterious figure whose presence projects menace and fear. Build up the pulp villain by having other NPCs refer to this person in terms of terror and awe. Have newspapers, police "wanted posters" or bragging criminal underlings trumpet their diabolical deeds and horrible crimes. The villain can vary from being a Local Gangster stretching his crooked muscle in the Big City, or being a Mad Inventor with some device that she plans to use to blackmail the government, or even an Evil Ethnic Genius with a sinister plot to take over the world. Alternatively, agents, spies, and minions of unfriendly nations or even planets count also as villains, with an automatic tension of "us versus them" being established from the very onset.
For starters, give your pulp villain a villainous name! If their identity is known, pick a harsh and unpleasant sounding name for them, such as Dr. Scarp, or Zach Claw, or "Black" Bram O'Bear. For foreign bad guys, refer to an atlas and pick names of mountains, rivers and forests from a map of their place of origin, and use one of these as part of their name. Look up names in telephone books, movie books, or simply make one up out of random syllables strung together. Use some of the suggestions for epithets and nicknames suggested earlier for the PC pulp heroes for the villians, too. You can also slightly change or steal outright the names and villains from pulp stories and comic books. If the villain is a mystery figure with their identity unknown, give them a menacing name that hints at their awful reputation. Use a thesaurus to check out synonyms for "danger", and also for "crime", "terror" and "mystery". One quick and dirty way to name a villain is by combining a colour with a word suggesting something animal, supernatural or about leadership; i.e. the Black Bat, the Green Goblin, the Scarlet Queen, etc.
Decide your NPC villain's personality and background. Are they a veteran of the Great War unhappy with its outcome, a scientific researcher Gone Bad, a modern gadgeteering pirate, an ethnic criminal mastermind, a misguided idealist, a greedy and sadistic businessman, or even a lunatic who has read too many shudder pulps? What is their source of power? Sinister charisma, immense wealth, weird super-science, black magical arts, alien devices, or a hereditary position? What are their motivations? Is it money, power, revenge, love, lust, a huge ego, or what? Give your NPC villain one or more quirks or traits based on these that will make them memorable; a scary costume, a deep and cultured voice, a squeaking laugh, a silver swiss army knife for a hand, a fondness for chess, a hatred of classical music played badly, etc. If you plan things well, you can use such traits in the pulp plot itself to help figure out what crimes they will commit, what type of treasure they are after, their Achilles Heel, and so forth. This trick of fleshing out a character can also be used with other NPCs, whose personalities can be filled in with the use of such external features. The more important the NPC, the more quirks and outward personality identifiers the GM should give them.
Be sure to have your pulp villain follow other common conventions of the genre. These include having the mystery villain being discovered at the climax of the adventure by the heroes as an unsuspected close acquaintance of the PCs. Murderers in mystery stories were all the time hiring Private Investigators in order to throw the authorities off the trail! Have them kidnap friends of the pulp heroes, threatening harm unless they give up their investigations. More deviously, have the enemy release captured friends, but not after first implanting dangerous post-hypnotic instructions in their minds. Let the villain earn their title by their insidious plans, callous actions, use of fiendish torture, and worse. Another trademark of the pulps you can introduce to your game is having the NPC villain first throwing captured PCs into deathtraps instead of killing them outright, and then taunting them by boasts about their brilliant and insidious plans that the heroes cannot possibly stop. At least, not until the heroes make their escape!
Recurring villains are yet another common pulp convention, with the Bad Guy appearing boomerang-like from prison, deportation or even the grave. Hidden escape routes, secret gadgets and surprise tricks concealed up the villain's sleeve all help to ensure the villain's getaway should the PCs finally capture them. Dead pulp villains are rarely truly dead despite, the fact that no one could possiblely have survived the mine cave-in, dirigible explostion or plane crash the villian was trapped in. By arranging the disappearance of their body and some sort of an explanation, no matter how improbable, the GM can have them return at a later date stronger than ever, and now with an unhealthy grudge against the pulp PC heroes. Failing this ploy, pulp villains can always have identical twins (or even triplets!) to step in to fill their evil shoes after the heroes have arranged for their demise in a previous adventure. It has also been known for other crooks to cash in on the fame of a famous and truly dead villain, adopting their reputations as a cover for their own crimes. Of course, your PC's do not have to discover this deceit until the impostor is unmasked at the end of the adventure.
IV GADGETS AND WEIRD SCIENCE
Gadgets have been an essential plot device throughout all ages of storytelling, from the magical gifts the Greek gods gave Perseus to defeat the Medusa, to the high-tech gizmos given to James Bond by Q Branch. In the pulp stories, these devices play an equally important role, being the tools of mad scientists and gadgeteers to both commit and combat crime. An incredible diversity of gadgets were invented and used by pulp heroes and villains. A far from complete list would include invisibility suits, personal rocket-packs, pocket radar, atomic jalopies, lightning-guns, and much much more. Some inventions made by gadgeteering pulp characters did have some basis in scientific reality, such as gas-guns, wrist-radios, ultrasound goggles, electric skeleton keys, chemical tracking devices, and so on; these were items often far in advance to the technology normally available to the world at large, but still scientifically plausible. Gadgets can also be used to provide or duplicate some of the amazing abilities that many larger than life pulp heroes and villains possess; hypnotism by hypo-guns, night-vision through special goggles, enhanced hearing through electronic stethoscopes, etc. Other devices were simply used for their plot convenience, such as giant robots, thinking machines, death rays, flying-saucers, rocket-ships, time machines, and so on.
Gadgets are very handy tools in planning and plotting pulp RPG adventures. For starters, such gizmos, devices and inventions can be used as a plot McGuffin to kick off adventures as villains steal or attempt to steal such devices. They can be used by PCs to neutralize the efforts of villains trying to kill them in deathtraps and other cliffhanger situations. Besides protecting the hero and their pals, gadgets were awfully handy at providing clues for locating and defeating the villain and their evil minions. Working as they do at the very fragile extremes of technology or via the black-box magic of Weird Science, it is really the GM's whim that decides if the gadget will always work as intended in all situations and conditions. They can be used to subtly guide PC actions, as when a scientific gadget allows the heroes to uncover a valuable clue, or to provide drama when a damaged lifesaving device has to be repaired in a race against time. As the equivalent of "magic items" common in fantasy RPGs, you may want to look at lists of your favourite FRPG's magic devices and take some of the more interesting of these to translate into more appropriate technological terms for your pulp adventure game.
Besides the wonderful availability of gadgets and gizmos, another charm of the pulp era was that the world did not always obey the strict physical laws of science as we know them, but sometimes followed the mysterious rules of "Weird Science". Weird-Science is a catch-all phrase for the technology of the impossible, which was actually possible in the pulps in the hands of mad doctors and crazed inventors. Pulp writers were all the time coming up with scientific and non-scientific "what if?" scenarios, and then exploring the consequences of such things as gravity-nullifying metals, etheric engines, mind-controlling radio-frequencies, elements not found on any periodic table, invasions from other worlds, broadcast power, and so on. Scientific ignorance or the laziness of many pulp writers also resulted in many strange devices with only what appears today as scientific gibberish as an explanation.
Inventions using Weird-Science differ markedly from their counterparts built via normal science, being more powerful yet unpredictable in practice, devices that use it being incomprehensible in mechanism or function to the mind-set of more conventional scientists. Often Weird-Science gizmos could only be created by inventors who were a little crazy to begin with, the stereotypical "mad scientist". Starting from principles very different from the scientific and often tinged with occult and mystical elements, mad doctors could come up with inventions both ludicrous and deadly. These included devices designed to catalyze a new Ice Age, dehydration rays, earthquake triggering machines, metal-rotting gases, sun-sapping stations to blow up the sun, inventions that slow the Earth's rotation, and so on.
One problem about Weird-Science occurs when players finally defeat the villain and lay claim to all their scientific equipment, notes, and other assorted goodies. Unless destroyed in the final climatic battle, how do you prevent the PCs from using the incredibly deadly Weird-Science Crime-Ray captured from the villain themselves in their future battles? There are some things that man and PCs were not meant to know (or own), if only to prevent the GM from initiating a Weird Science arms race between the PCs and later villains. The GM may later reveal that the weird science device was simply a hoax, with the example Crime Ray being nothing more than a trigger for previously implanted hypnotic suggestions, or a signal to detonate pre-planted explosives. Alternatively, you could postulate that it was some weird mental ability or talent of the mad scientist was the true power behind the device, and not the actual device itself. This gadget may have been a psychological crutch for this strange talent, or simply served as an amplifier for this weird ability. Both explanations would answer why such devices become only useless junk in the hands of the PCs once they defeat this pseudo-science using villain.
V BIZARRE CRIMES AND MYSTERY
Mystery, crime and violations of justice were common everyday occurrences in the pulps. Many a story centred around a strange mystery to be solved, a dangerous spy ring to be smashed, a loathsome murderer to be revealed, and a mad villain to be brought to justice. Heroes solving a kidnapping, thwarting a ghoul or stopping a blackmailer could be professionals just doing their jobs; police officers, private eyes, consulting detectives and even vampire hunters. Amateur detectives investigating a haunted house or finding a missing treasure ranged in identity from teenage sleuths to little old ladies. A burning curiosity and a love of riddles, puzzles, and strange mysteries were characteristics of nearly every hero in the pulps.
Crime in the pulps were never boring or mundane. The vault of the First National Bank is not opened with just dynamite, but through the magic of Weird Science. It is not just anyone being blackmailed, but a beautiful redheaded siren with a dark and dangerous secret. It is not just a crook trying to take over town with their henchmen, it's an Ancient Criminal Mastermind with a scheme to destroy the world. A dead body is not found with just any knife in their back; a rare ceremonial Aztec sacrificial knife is the murder weapon. Deadly poisons, archaic weapons, rare beasts and other exotica were common means of delivering death in the pulps, and can be in the adventures you run based on them.
Crimes made by ordinary means but under identically strange circumstances were a common feature of the pulps. For example, a string of murders of men named Smith, the robbery from museums throughout the country of their Egyptian mummies, the same playing card left at the scene of the crime, or even a taunting clue for the PCs to follow up on. Such a series of crimes are often made by the villain to obscure their real motives and plans; blowing up trains to conceal the kidnapping of important atomic research scientists, stealing rare fish from aquariums whose internal organs are needed to create deadly toxins with strange effects. The theft of suits of armour from a long dead European monarch to recreate a long-lost treasure map from clues inscribed on the inside the metal breastplates. Seemingly unconnected crimes are often but the means the villain uses to get to the real item they are after, and can offer important hints for the heroes to follow. Clues could also be deliberately planted by more devious villains to lead PCs into ambushes, deathtraps or worse.
Criminal wrongdoings may even appear to be made using impossible magical skills and supernatural ability. The walking dead, disappearances from locked rooms, mythical creatures of the night and other eerie elements were often encountered by pulp heros, but were later revealed to occur through either trickery and deception, or by some weird new gadget of the villain's devising. Again, for designing such gadgets for villains to use, it may be helpful to look over the spell and magic item lists of your favourite fantasy RPG for ideas on abilities for what these devices can do. For a twist to the genre, you can even rule as GM that magic does work in your version of the pulp era, and even allow for other fantasy trappings such as lost magical races, mythological beings, magical spells and occult devices to exist in such a variant pulp world background.
The type of treasure a pulp villain can be after can also be more interesting than just stolen bank loot, though it's the rare crook will turn down cold, hard cash. Antique Chinese jewelry, a cache of pearls, Blackbeard's treasure map, famous artifacts of religion and mythology, or even the rare metals necessary to create Weird Science devices, are all more fun to steal than just paper money. Treasure itself is anything that the villain is after, even if its value to others is questionable. This can range from obscure items for a villain who collects such things as autographs, blue glass, Confederate army swords, medieval suits of armour, pre-Colombian art, vintage violins, and so on. A villain can even steal interesting people to talk to, kidnapping famous persons for their conversational value!
Clues in pulp mysteries and crimes should be fairly obvious for your players to follow up on since there is nothing more frustrating than having a mystery that would confound a Sherlock Holmes being dumped on the average players' plate. It is neither satisfying to have a die-roll to provide a solution to a puzzling mystery, nor appropriate to have the PCs fail because their players missed an obvious clue. Since all pulp adventures have a mystery of some sort to be solved, the GM has a narrow line to tread in presenting what can be a challenging and not impossible problem for their players to solve. Providing multiple clues that lead to the same step in the mystery is important, for even if the PCs miss one important clue, there will be backup clues they can stumble over and use. Having a handy NPC who suggests not the clue itself but something related to it will help direct the PCs back on the right track. Clues can also be inadvertently dropped by the more dim of the villain's henchmen, or even by a bragging villain themselves within the adventure. You can certainly use red-herrings in your pulp RPG mysteries, but be careful not to use them very often; events in pulp adventures are often tangled enough without having the PCs being led continually astray.
There may be occasions when you are absolutely, positively stuck for an idea for making a pulp mystery for your players. One handy trick a GM can use to create mysteries on the fly is to simply throw out random clues like crazy, and then listen carefully as your players try to make some sense of all these different clues and suspects. When your players first come up with solution that seems to fit all the random clues you have provided, and also implicates a certain NPC as the villain, give that NPC suspect an alibi. Later in the adventure you can pass on information to the PCs that invalidates this alibi. Not only will your players feel smug that they have solved the mystery and defeated the villain, but they'll have written much of the plot and have done much of the work of creating the mystery for you as well!
VI EXOTIC SETTINGS & LOCATIONS
It is important to provide interesting places, settings and scenery where your pulp heroes can strut their stuff. Give each important scenes for PCs to explore or villains to attack or hide out in, a slight twist to make them interesting and unique. Roaring steel-mills, condemned theatres, midnight graveyards, frenzied race-tracks, eerie psychiatric hospitals, inky-black mine tunnels, chaotic circus grounds, observatories, cluttered warehouses, posh hotels, desolate oil-fields, movie-studio back-lots, ivy-covered college buildings, public aquariums and more can all provide interesting settings and situations to knot an adventure scene around. Don't hold back in furnishing these buildings with pulp-action rich architecture; chandeliers to swing on, balconies to throw thugs over, ramps and ladders to climb on, elevator shafts to fall down or climb up, secret tunnels and hidden doors to discover and be trapped in, conveyor belts and factory machinery to be turned into death traps, etc. Simply let your imagination run wild, and if it runs a little short, try looking at floor plans and pictures of interior decor in magazines or in books on famous buildings. You can even cannibalize non-pulp RPG supplements for maps of buildings and other interesting structures.
Vehicles can also provide mobile adventure locations for pulp heroes on the move. The Orient Express, a sleek millionaire's yacht, huge helium-filled dirigibles, rusting tramp freighters, trim speedboats, alien rocket-ships, baroque aerial aircraft carriers, and elegant ocean liners can all be the scene for claustrophobic pulp action. Rather than just being a means to get from here to there, the means of transport can be the main setting for an eerie murder mystery where victims are trapped with an unknown murderer. Or the mobile location can be a way to gather an interesting and diverse band of characters who can be caught together when an terrible electrical storm transports the PC's to a Lost World, or shipwrecks them on the coast of a mythical republic. The vehicle itself may be an item the villain wants to carry out some wicked plan with. It may even be the secret headquarters of the NPC villain. A great deal can happen on such a movable feast of a setting, with the advantage of using such a limited location being that it constrains the number of choices available to the PCs, making the action and adventure easier to control by the GM.
It was common for pulp heroes to travel to the four mysterious corners of the earth in pursuit of action and adventure. Travelling for long distances was like travelling back in time, with the sights and smells that the PCs encountering having been relatively unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. Introduce the PCs to the spice-drenched bazaars of Persia, the lonely moors of Scotland and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Let them experience the zephyr breezes of the South China seas and the sun-bleached ruins of ancient Greece as they hunt down the villain's secret hideout. Have them encounter dangers on the fog-choked streets of London, the arid steppes of Outer Mongolia, and other thrilling destinations. If all this seems like old hat, have your PCs journey to fictional countries such as the old European nations of Noirlandia, Ruritania and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. For a more South American flavour, have them visit the make-believe republics of Hildago and Nasilia for even more obscure but exciting excursions abroad. Immerse your players in exotic cultures, foreign languages, and anachronistic sights; stew this with thrilling adventure and watch the fun that results.
You can also provide a touch of the exotic close to home. Your PC heroes can visit the local Chinatown, and be exposed to the transplanted mysteries of the Far East. Other ethnic enclaves or ghettos can give a taste of Old Europe and other distant locales. Or they can visit the wharfs of the nearby waterfront to confront danger and excitement shipped in from any one of the seven seas. World Fairs allow the sights of sounds of many nations to be mixed into a multicultural tossed salad of adventure. Hollywood back lots work much the same way to gather many different historical environments of adventure; haunted castles, old West towns, jungle sets, Victorian streets, and so on. Private libraries and museums can offer exhibits of Egyptian relics, African totems, dinosaur skeletons, or other similarly atmospherically intense artifacts and backdrops. Environments of the strange and foreign can be found literally in the PCs own backyard, which in turn will also attract similarly foreign visitors and their bizarre problems.
You can even place adventures in fictitious nearby cities, counties and states that exists on no map or atlas of the real world. A GM's version of New Orleans can be a renamed River City, or the fictitious US state of Wichinois with its capital of Zenith can be set vaguely somewhere in the American Midwest. Such alternative settings offer the GM the opportunity to be creative and play fast and loose with political figures, street-plans, road maps and other historical details. With this method you do not have to worry that inadvertent historical or geographical inaccuracies that can result from using a real setting will cause problems in the game for your players.
VII LOST WORLDS
Lost worlds are a very special setting for PCs to visit for pulp adventure, they being isolated and fantastic chunks of geography unknown to the world at large. Lost Worlds were places, creatures and people trapped in time, existing today as living museum pieces while the rest of history marches on. Hidden jungle cities. Immense caverns buried deep under the earth. The craters of smouldering volcanoes. Valleys surrounded by impassable mountain ranges. Islands in uncharted parts of the ocean. For all these and more, what made all these mysterious areas special was their difficult access, foreign inhabitants and strange wildlife. The natives were often living descendants of ancient cultures--Egyptian, Viking, Babylonian, Incan, Aztec, Roman, etc.--unaware of the outside world. In the opposite extreme, its inhabitants could be fictionalized long lost races and cultures--Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu--whose rulers are determined to remain secluded from the 20th Century. Even more strange can be locals who are intelligent dinosaurs, giant Ant-men, or even space-shipwrecked aliens. Lost Worlds can be outright terrariums of bizarre biology with dinosaur valleys, ice-age plateaus, islands of giant or dwarfish creatures, and so on being common and time-honoured locations.
The basic premise of a Lost World adventure is having the PCs accidentally discovering a small Lost World, being trapped there, exploring its thrills and dangers and unpleasant native inhabitants, and then escaping, never to find it again. The latter can be accomplished by losing the maps on how to get their, having a cave-in or avalance cut off the access, or even having some terrible cataclysm--a volcano erupting or Weird Science gone wild--destroying the Lost World completely. Such a "one-off" Lost World can be a playground for fantastic historical or super-science adventure. Cowboys being challenged by medieval knights or mole-people. Detectives shooting out with Spanish pirates. Whip-wielding archaeologists trading blows with mammoth-riding cavemen. Aviators dogfighting with pterodactyls or flying-saucers. All these and more are but some of the wild adventures that the PCs can encounter in the Lost World setting.
If wanted, a Lost World can be a campaign setting that is much more extensive and durable than the one-shot version mentioned above. Instead of having the Lost World lost again or destroyed at the end of the adventure, the GM may decide for the PCs to take up temporary or permanent residence and positions of power in this self contained setting. It was quite common for pulp heroes of this more style of adventure to stumble on a Lost World setting whose native inhabitants are in the middle of a civil war or have the PC heroes presence push a previously tense situation over the edge to war. Heroes in pulp Lost World romances were often forced to choose sides in such conflicts. The PC heroes may decide the aid the "good guys" with merely their grit and brawn; "going native" as it were. Alternatively, they may decide to use their superior equipment and knowledge to arm the locals against the (until then) superior forces and abilities of the enemy. Rewards for helping the winning side of the conflict ranged from gifts of valuable treasure, a means to escape the Lost World if the PCs had been trapped there, or even the hand in marriage of the eldest child of the current ruler of the Lost World.
Newly created gadgets and futuristic vehicles can be used to get to even stranger landscapes of wonder. A Lost World can be found deep inside a hollow earth, accessible only by a mechanical drilling mole of an inventor PC's devising. Time machines can convey PCs to a far-off past or future. Rocket ships or teleporters can whisk players off to brave new worlds both inside and out of our solar system, galaxy or universe. Shrink-rays can even let heroes explore the normal world scaled down to the size of toys, insects, or even sub-sub-sub-atomic particles. Along with being the means of conveying the PCs there, vehicles can be used for stranding the PCs in the Lost World, either temporarily or permanently. The pulp GM can go wild at designing alien cultures, monstrous ecologies and fantastic landscapes for their heroes to romp through. If the GM is stuck, they can raid material from their favourite fantasy or SF RPG--maps, modules, bestiary lists, fantasy races, etc--to help in the creative process of building their pulp fantastic Lost World.
VIII CLIFFHANGERS
Cliffhanger endings were a classic technique used by the pulps and by radio and movie serials to maintain tension and drama. Stories that end suddenly with the hero and their friends caught in a dire predicament with only a "stay tuned for the next episode to see what happens next" message ensured that the impatiently waiting reader, listener or viewer would be soon be back to see how the heroes avoid their fates in the next adventure chapter. Heroes in the pulps have been left at the end of a chapter trapped in falling elevators, bound and gagged inside of burning warehouses, caught without parachutes in stalled and falling aeroplanes, locked inside flooding dungeons and, to fulfil the old cliche, even found clinging precariously to the edge of a cliff with the villain about to step on their clinging figers and push them over to certain doom! Despite all odds, pulp adventurers always survived these deadly perils in the next chapter of the adventure.
Salt and pepper your adventures liberally with situations that temporarily leave the PCs in a very tight jam, with the PCs wondering how on earth they';l survive. This is especially easy to do when a group of your pulp PCs have separated. When this happens, you can cut away from the first group left at a cliffhanger ending, and then continue gaming with this second PC group until they in turn have a cliffhanger opportunity. Then cut back to the first group, switching back and forth as often as you can. If your players PCs do not split up into different groups, you can announce a short stretch and snack break at a cliffhanger situation, and then return again later to it later to complete the scene to your players satisfaction. Make each cliffhanger a special and unique opportunity to create harrowing adventure for your players and PCs.
Try to arrange to end a session of game play on a cliffhanger note to create a much longer period of suspense and dramatic tension until the next time the gameing group meets. You can provide for such a theatrical ending for your own pulp RPG adventures by picking a time window for completion of that sessions game. Whenever a dramatic action scene occurs within that pre-chosen time window, make it the cliffhanger scene, and suspend game play at that point until the gaming group meets again. Alternatively, you can try to plan ahead of time for a cliffhanger or deathtrap to end your game-session on; this requires some GMing experiance in predicting just how much the players can accomplish in a given time period before springing the cliffhanger. Whatever method you decide to use, your players may complain about being left in suspense, but they'll soon be back with a vengeance
While the beginning and end points of a cliffhanger scene are fixed, what happens in the time between is entirely up in the air. For example, a game session may end with the GM saying "...the car with your hero tied to the steering wheel is hurtling towards the cliff edge! Seconds later, the car goes over the edge and bursts into flames when it hits the rock below! Stay tuned until next time to see what happens!" The next time the gaming group meet, the GM can recap the situation of the car hurtling over the cliff edge and then say that if the PCs want to make their escape, it has to be in the few seconds before the car actually hits the ground (after all, the GM never actually said the PCs were in the car that exploded in the last cliffhanger scene!). How the PCs survive this situation is up to the players decisions and action. They may try to break through the steering wheel and jump out of the car at the last possible second, or attempt to slip their bonds and do the same, or somehow regain control of the car in a way that forces the villain'scar that had been following them to go over the cliff instead, etc. Remember, there should always be an out for the players to have their PC's to discover, and one that does not rely on lucky die rolls alone.
Cliffhanger escapes should always be made at what looks like the last possible minute, and this by the actions of the PCs, and not some outside agency. While movie serials often cheated by having some form of deus ex machina rescue the trapped heroes--a freak power failure, the police charging in, the friends of the hero coming to the rescue--don't overuse this cheap trick in your game. It's more satisfying for the PCs to escape due to their own efforts, abilities and ingenuity, rather than relying on the fat hand of the GM to do their work for them. Sometimes making the situation apparently worse for the PCs by piling even danger will suggest a solution to the players. If bad luck doggedly follows the PCs let the bad event happen, but by no means have a string of poor die rolls cause the death of a PC. Going back to the pulp genre convention of reduced hero mortality, have some long lasting but non-lethal injury occur instead, or simply have the PC involved disappear for some time, and then have them appear again at an opportune moment when their friends could use them most.
IX DEATHTRAPS
Deathtraps were a special kind of cliffhanger used in the genre, devices either built or used extemporaneously by the arch-villain to do away with the hero and their friends. Deathtraps are not designed to kill the PCs as much as they exist to give them a puzzle to solve, and to slow them down while the villain does their bit of nasty work. It was a rare villain who simply tossed a hero in a deathtrap and ran away; the deathtrap gave the villain a chance to gloat and brag about their fiendish plans and answer all the unanswered questions raised by the hero! Deathtraps include such classics as locked rooms filling with poison gas, heroes tied to tables with huge pendulum knives slowly descending, being slowly lowered by rope into huge vats of boiling and noxious liquids, electrical devices with two persons ensnared for whom the escape of one means certain shocking death to the other, and so on. Death traps need not even be mechanical contraptions of this Rube Goldberg variety. Villains framing PCs with murder and other criminal activities can be remarkably effective, with the most gentle penalty for failure being a long and uncomfortable vacation in Sing Sing or Alcatraz; for a worst case scenario, the electric chair awaits the unlucky.
These lethal traps can be difficult for the GM to construct so that their players face a nasty challenge, but still have a decent chance to avoid their deaths. The quick wits of the players working could probably turn some portion of the trap against itself, or lead to some way to deactivate the device. You can try to plan the deathtrap around the PCs' equipment and capability, ensuring that they are equipped for escaping danger. Special abilities or devices unknown to the villain--lock-picking skills, a wire saw hidden in a hollow tooth, a vial of acid--may be used to elicit an escape. Or you can simply make for a fiendish situation, and trust to the creativity of your players. You may be astonished at some ideas your players can come up with for escapes. If you are stuck on building a good deathtrap, try using alternating the two techniques that follow below, but be careful not to tell your players you are using such tricks!
A) One method is to secretly rule that the PCs must make two different kinds of escape attempts that will automatically fail before their third
It may be obvious to say so, but the heroes of the pulps were heroes! No quibbling or ambiguity about good and evil, morality was monochromatic, with the hero in the white and the villain in the black. Heroes of pulp magazines were cast in a mold of nobility and bravery, the final product perhaps a little tarnished and rough around the edges, but still with a core that was solid, rare and pure. Adventurers in the pulp magazines were larger than life, being the strongest, the most athletic, the smartest, and naturally the most heroic.
Ensure that your players recognize this pulp convention of the hero being role-models of bravery, honesty and integrity. This will allow you to avoid such problems as out of genre characterizations and actions from cropping up later in your game. Your players' PC acts of self-sacrifice, gallantry and daring should be encouraged with appropriate rewards specific to the pulp game world. Give them praise on the front page of city newspapers, ticker-tape parades held in their honor, have the mayor bestowing to them the key to the city, and even have children begin adoring PC hero fan-clubs complete with secret passwords and secret-decoder rings! Let them earn the friendship of powerful patrons inside the game world that can provide them with super-scientific gadgets, help them cut through pesky government red-tape, or smooth things over with the law when things go horribly wrong. Hand out such games mechanic rewards as increased skill and experience levels, luck points, and other "player cookies" as your rule system allows for. Players who persist in having their PCs perform less than noble actions may find to their surprise NPC pulp heroes showing them up and getting all the goodies mentioned above. Even worse, NPC pulp villains may try to recruit them as allies for their own nefarious plots!
Pulp heroes often had unusual powers and abilities granted to them as a result of a strange experience or an eccentric background. A stint in the Far East gave weird powers of the mind and body to the more mystically oriented. Having been orphaned and raised by animals in the jungles, deserts and polar regions of the world conferred to certain heroes amazing abilities in strength, agility and athletic prowess. Or a strange gadget or device invented by the hero may be the source of their unique powers and weird talents. These powers were much milder in comparison to the extravagances typical of the "long-underwear" superheroes of golden-age comics, and made pulp heroes even more believable for this restraint. The GM should exercise strict control on the weird powers that their players may want for their PCs, putting their foot firmly down on strange powers too overpowering for their own interpretation of the genre.
Less fantastic, but still unique background abilities and skills for pulp heroes of more traditional "whodunit"s and spy-smashing stories should be encouraged. For example, a hero with an encyclopedic memory coming from growing up in a household with a set of these as the only reading material will find this renaissance knowledge handy time and time again; for even more entertainment, Volume S could have been missing, providing strange gaps in this PC's knowledge. A stint in the Great War will provide familiarity with weapons, combat techniques, and even how to handle airplanes and potato peelers for a PC with this type of background. Time spent in the police station, as a rookie cop, news hound or even as a custodian can provide in-depth knowledge of police procedures, the city, underworld contacts, and even how to fix a leaky faucet. Having at an early age running away to join the circus and working there can give useful knowledge of acrobatics, disguise artistry, snake handling and human cannonball. As a last example, merely having sold newspapers or shined shoes as a kid on the street corner near the city hall or local honky-tonk, and remembering the face or shoes of all the politicians, celebrities and crime figures that bought papers can be a very useful background. While not as exotic a background as being raised by apes, or having the power to cloud people's minds, such background skills are remarkably portable through many pulp story genres and should not be neglected or sneered at.
Backgrounds and vocations of the heroes can also help to explain their involvement in pulpish adventures. Stereotypical active professions of the good guys of pulp adventures included hard-boiled detectives, jaded playgirl/boy millionaires, frustrated law officers, crime-fighting stage-magicians, absent-minded professors, veterans of the Great War, gold-digging femme-fatales, mystics from the mysterious East, ghost-busting scientists, trouble shooting circus performers, cynical soldiers-of-fortune, and many more. You can gently twist these stereotypes to get such "bent" heroes as great white hunters in urban jungles, ice-age barbarians defrosted from ancient glaciers now living in the 20th century, reformed gangsters for whom bloodthirsty habits die hard, un-cerebral gadgeteers whose devices work only occasionally as intended, ultra-smart German Shepherds or any other favourite animal star, cigar-chewing middle-aged aviatrixes, and so on. The heroes of the pulps could be literally anyone, as long as they stood behind truth, justice, and fair play.
Disguises, strange names and alter egos for the PC pulp heroes not only give a touch of mystery to the adventure, but also protect them from the unwelcome attention of the press, the police and criminals. Have your players' PCs invent such distinctive names for these alter-egos as "The Nemesis", "The Golden Cometeer", "Captain January", "Merlini" and "Madam Xodiac". If the players do not invent such names for their mystery pulp heroes, they may find over-zealous newspaper reporters doing it for them! Secret hideouts, gadgets, exotic vehicles and more were stylistic conventions that some players may want to include in their PC conceptions. These may also have their own colourful names and labels, such as "The Arachnid's Web", "The Juggernaut", "The Radium Gun", "The Zed-mobile", etc. If the PC heroes are using their real names during their adventures, have attached to them a colourful nickname to create such vibrant monikers as "Ripper Smith", "Flash Maxwell", "Dynamite Bob" and "Wizard Parker". Sometimes a professional title or even the place they were from provided part of the nickname; "Doc Ravage", "Sawbones McCoy", "China Blue" and "Idaho Bones" are some examples of this naming trick. Finally, epithets, little descriptive phrases such as "The Weird Crusader", "The Red-headed Wrecker", "The Man of Uranium" and "The Reckless Flyer" can also be attached to the PC's name to spice it up a little.
If your players choose to use secret identities for their PC pulp heroes, ensure that this common pulp convention works as a two-edged sword. Let the mundane world present interesting hazards and pitfalls for the PC with the secret double life. Have their boss in the "real" world become upset at all the days of late appearances or missed work secretly spent fighting crime. Let the PC hero's current romantic partner or significant other become curious about that locked room in the basement that contains their secret make-up and costume room. Have the editor of the local daily newspaper start a campaign to rid the city of these secretive law-breaking vigilantes. A copy-cat amateur crime-fighter may don the same disguise and try later to un-mask themselves to claim all the past credit and glory which is the rightful due of the real hero. Alternatively, tricky villains may disguise themselves as a mysterious PC hero to work their diabolical deeds, and the unfortunate PC will have to dodge the attentions of the authorities to clear their besmirched good name while at the same time acting to thwart this villain's dastardly plots. Villains can also track down the pulp mystery hero's hideout, and either steal valuable equipment or place booby-traps in it. Villains can also blackmail the hero who hides behind a secret identity to do some favour for the villain, else revealing their identity to the world. Sometimes, it isn`t easy being a hero!
II REDUCED HERO DEATHS
Pulp heroes face incredible danger every day, but very rarely came to any serious harm during their death-defying adventures. Pushed out of flying aeroplanes, being trapped in flooded caverns, dodging a hail of gangster lead, pulp heroes survived it all, with only torn shirts, ripped stockings and mussed hair to hint at the dangers they had faced. In a fair fight, the good guys never lost, being beaten by the bad guys only through overwhelming odds, hypnotism, traps, and other cowardly and treacherous acts. A combination of clever tricks, fast thinking, audacious daring, sheer luck, and plot immunity from pulp authors reluctant to kill a favourite character saved countless heroes from seemingly sure death in the pulps.
It's harder for GMs to have their players' PCs continually stare death in the eye and still have these heroes regularly surviving deadly pulp RPG adventures, but it can be done. Introduce cinematic rules in your RPG system of preference, reducing most wounds to simple unconsciousness, and minor injuries to blackouts, dazing and temporary incapacitation. Instead of lethal injuries, arrange situations for the mortally wounded PC's body to disappear, and later reintroduce the character to the storyline with a some lesser but longer lasting injury and an explanation of some sort for their disappearance. Have your players let their PCs make copious use of the RPG rules on luck and luck talents, allow them to push their strength and will-power to beyond the brink, and let them use extra experience die rolls and "brownie points" to save their PCs from certain death. Note that this pulp adventure ingredient is one of reduced PC deaths, not outright immunity from death. If players have their PCs repeatedly perform reckless and thoughtless actions, let the dice fall as they may, and occasionally let such PCs die. On the other hand, never let a string of bad die rolls alone spell the demise of an otherwise well played pulp PC hero.
Other tricks to reduce the lethal effects of gun combat can be gadgets invented and used by the PC pulp heroes. Allow bulletproof armour for those heroes who frequently face lead-happy enemies. Allow PC gadgeteers to invent strange electrical devices that render gunpowder inert within its area of effect, or produce personal force-fields that will only allow slow-moving weapons such as swinging swords or hurled fists to penetrate. You can also have the pulp version of the magic healing that is common to fantasy games, weird science devices such as "Blood Pills", "Bone Glue" and "Flesh Wrap" that can be invented by gadgeteers to quickly patch up damaged or mangled PC heroes.
Emphasize to your players the pulp convention that both crooks and heroes will more often surrender in the face of overwhelming odds than fight on to the last anaemic drop of blood. To help promote this behaviour, do not punish PCs who honour this classic pulp tradition of surrendering to the enemy; instead, have them taken to the villain's secret HQ, and once there, give them a chance to escape and turn the tables on their former captors. Have your NPC villains make use of knockout gas, heavy saps, and narcotic bullets to bring down our heroes, and not the more ubiquitous and deadly lead variety. Let fisticuffs and brawling be the preferred means of combat by the agents of the villain and the heroes, by allowing handguns to be quickly knocked to the ground at the start of fighting when they are first pulled out by trigger-happy combatants. Providing situations where everyone knows that firing a gun is foolhardy, perhaps aboard a hydrogen-filled dirigible or inside a dynamite factory, is yet another trick to reduce the scale of lethality of your pulp RPG combats.
III COLOURFUL VILLAINS
The evil arch-villain is at the centre of every pulp adventure, and this crucial pulp NPC enemy will directly affect every aspect of the story. With a colourful background, unique name and bizarre disguise or uniform, the villain is often a mysterious figure whose presence projects menace and fear. Build up the pulp villain by having other NPCs refer to this person in terms of terror and awe. Have newspapers, police "wanted posters" or bragging criminal underlings trumpet their diabolical deeds and horrible crimes. The villain can vary from being a Local Gangster stretching his crooked muscle in the Big City, or being a Mad Inventor with some device that she plans to use to blackmail the government, or even an Evil Ethnic Genius with a sinister plot to take over the world. Alternatively, agents, spies, and minions of unfriendly nations or even planets count also as villains, with an automatic tension of "us versus them" being established from the very onset.
For starters, give your pulp villain a villainous name! If their identity is known, pick a harsh and unpleasant sounding name for them, such as Dr. Scarp, or Zach Claw, or "Black" Bram O'Bear. For foreign bad guys, refer to an atlas and pick names of mountains, rivers and forests from a map of their place of origin, and use one of these as part of their name. Look up names in telephone books, movie books, or simply make one up out of random syllables strung together. Use some of the suggestions for epithets and nicknames suggested earlier for the PC pulp heroes for the villians, too. You can also slightly change or steal outright the names and villains from pulp stories and comic books. If the villain is a mystery figure with their identity unknown, give them a menacing name that hints at their awful reputation. Use a thesaurus to check out synonyms for "danger", and also for "crime", "terror" and "mystery". One quick and dirty way to name a villain is by combining a colour with a word suggesting something animal, supernatural or about leadership; i.e. the Black Bat, the Green Goblin, the Scarlet Queen, etc.
Decide your NPC villain's personality and background. Are they a veteran of the Great War unhappy with its outcome, a scientific researcher Gone Bad, a modern gadgeteering pirate, an ethnic criminal mastermind, a misguided idealist, a greedy and sadistic businessman, or even a lunatic who has read too many shudder pulps? What is their source of power? Sinister charisma, immense wealth, weird super-science, black magical arts, alien devices, or a hereditary position? What are their motivations? Is it money, power, revenge, love, lust, a huge ego, or what? Give your NPC villain one or more quirks or traits based on these that will make them memorable; a scary costume, a deep and cultured voice, a squeaking laugh, a silver swiss army knife for a hand, a fondness for chess, a hatred of classical music played badly, etc. If you plan things well, you can use such traits in the pulp plot itself to help figure out what crimes they will commit, what type of treasure they are after, their Achilles Heel, and so forth. This trick of fleshing out a character can also be used with other NPCs, whose personalities can be filled in with the use of such external features. The more important the NPC, the more quirks and outward personality identifiers the GM should give them.
Be sure to have your pulp villain follow other common conventions of the genre. These include having the mystery villain being discovered at the climax of the adventure by the heroes as an unsuspected close acquaintance of the PCs. Murderers in mystery stories were all the time hiring Private Investigators in order to throw the authorities off the trail! Have them kidnap friends of the pulp heroes, threatening harm unless they give up their investigations. More deviously, have the enemy release captured friends, but not after first implanting dangerous post-hypnotic instructions in their minds. Let the villain earn their title by their insidious plans, callous actions, use of fiendish torture, and worse. Another trademark of the pulps you can introduce to your game is having the NPC villain first throwing captured PCs into deathtraps instead of killing them outright, and then taunting them by boasts about their brilliant and insidious plans that the heroes cannot possibly stop. At least, not until the heroes make their escape!
Recurring villains are yet another common pulp convention, with the Bad Guy appearing boomerang-like from prison, deportation or even the grave. Hidden escape routes, secret gadgets and surprise tricks concealed up the villain's sleeve all help to ensure the villain's getaway should the PCs finally capture them. Dead pulp villains are rarely truly dead despite, the fact that no one could possiblely have survived the mine cave-in, dirigible explostion or plane crash the villian was trapped in. By arranging the disappearance of their body and some sort of an explanation, no matter how improbable, the GM can have them return at a later date stronger than ever, and now with an unhealthy grudge against the pulp PC heroes. Failing this ploy, pulp villains can always have identical twins (or even triplets!) to step in to fill their evil shoes after the heroes have arranged for their demise in a previous adventure. It has also been known for other crooks to cash in on the fame of a famous and truly dead villain, adopting their reputations as a cover for their own crimes. Of course, your PC's do not have to discover this deceit until the impostor is unmasked at the end of the adventure.
IV GADGETS AND WEIRD SCIENCE
Gadgets have been an essential plot device throughout all ages of storytelling, from the magical gifts the Greek gods gave Perseus to defeat the Medusa, to the high-tech gizmos given to James Bond by Q Branch. In the pulp stories, these devices play an equally important role, being the tools of mad scientists and gadgeteers to both commit and combat crime. An incredible diversity of gadgets were invented and used by pulp heroes and villains. A far from complete list would include invisibility suits, personal rocket-packs, pocket radar, atomic jalopies, lightning-guns, and much much more. Some inventions made by gadgeteering pulp characters did have some basis in scientific reality, such as gas-guns, wrist-radios, ultrasound goggles, electric skeleton keys, chemical tracking devices, and so on; these were items often far in advance to the technology normally available to the world at large, but still scientifically plausible. Gadgets can also be used to provide or duplicate some of the amazing abilities that many larger than life pulp heroes and villains possess; hypnotism by hypo-guns, night-vision through special goggles, enhanced hearing through electronic stethoscopes, etc. Other devices were simply used for their plot convenience, such as giant robots, thinking machines, death rays, flying-saucers, rocket-ships, time machines, and so on.
Gadgets are very handy tools in planning and plotting pulp RPG adventures. For starters, such gizmos, devices and inventions can be used as a plot McGuffin to kick off adventures as villains steal or attempt to steal such devices. They can be used by PCs to neutralize the efforts of villains trying to kill them in deathtraps and other cliffhanger situations. Besides protecting the hero and their pals, gadgets were awfully handy at providing clues for locating and defeating the villain and their evil minions. Working as they do at the very fragile extremes of technology or via the black-box magic of Weird Science, it is really the GM's whim that decides if the gadget will always work as intended in all situations and conditions. They can be used to subtly guide PC actions, as when a scientific gadget allows the heroes to uncover a valuable clue, or to provide drama when a damaged lifesaving device has to be repaired in a race against time. As the equivalent of "magic items" common in fantasy RPGs, you may want to look at lists of your favourite FRPG's magic devices and take some of the more interesting of these to translate into more appropriate technological terms for your pulp adventure game.
Besides the wonderful availability of gadgets and gizmos, another charm of the pulp era was that the world did not always obey the strict physical laws of science as we know them, but sometimes followed the mysterious rules of "Weird Science". Weird-Science is a catch-all phrase for the technology of the impossible, which was actually possible in the pulps in the hands of mad doctors and crazed inventors. Pulp writers were all the time coming up with scientific and non-scientific "what if?" scenarios, and then exploring the consequences of such things as gravity-nullifying metals, etheric engines, mind-controlling radio-frequencies, elements not found on any periodic table, invasions from other worlds, broadcast power, and so on. Scientific ignorance or the laziness of many pulp writers also resulted in many strange devices with only what appears today as scientific gibberish as an explanation.
Inventions using Weird-Science differ markedly from their counterparts built via normal science, being more powerful yet unpredictable in practice, devices that use it being incomprehensible in mechanism or function to the mind-set of more conventional scientists. Often Weird-Science gizmos could only be created by inventors who were a little crazy to begin with, the stereotypical "mad scientist". Starting from principles very different from the scientific and often tinged with occult and mystical elements, mad doctors could come up with inventions both ludicrous and deadly. These included devices designed to catalyze a new Ice Age, dehydration rays, earthquake triggering machines, metal-rotting gases, sun-sapping stations to blow up the sun, inventions that slow the Earth's rotation, and so on.
One problem about Weird-Science occurs when players finally defeat the villain and lay claim to all their scientific equipment, notes, and other assorted goodies. Unless destroyed in the final climatic battle, how do you prevent the PCs from using the incredibly deadly Weird-Science Crime-Ray captured from the villain themselves in their future battles? There are some things that man and PCs were not meant to know (or own), if only to prevent the GM from initiating a Weird Science arms race between the PCs and later villains. The GM may later reveal that the weird science device was simply a hoax, with the example Crime Ray being nothing more than a trigger for previously implanted hypnotic suggestions, or a signal to detonate pre-planted explosives. Alternatively, you could postulate that it was some weird mental ability or talent of the mad scientist was the true power behind the device, and not the actual device itself. This gadget may have been a psychological crutch for this strange talent, or simply served as an amplifier for this weird ability. Both explanations would answer why such devices become only useless junk in the hands of the PCs once they defeat this pseudo-science using villain.
V BIZARRE CRIMES AND MYSTERY
Mystery, crime and violations of justice were common everyday occurrences in the pulps. Many a story centred around a strange mystery to be solved, a dangerous spy ring to be smashed, a loathsome murderer to be revealed, and a mad villain to be brought to justice. Heroes solving a kidnapping, thwarting a ghoul or stopping a blackmailer could be professionals just doing their jobs; police officers, private eyes, consulting detectives and even vampire hunters. Amateur detectives investigating a haunted house or finding a missing treasure ranged in identity from teenage sleuths to little old ladies. A burning curiosity and a love of riddles, puzzles, and strange mysteries were characteristics of nearly every hero in the pulps.
Crime in the pulps were never boring or mundane. The vault of the First National Bank is not opened with just dynamite, but through the magic of Weird Science. It is not just anyone being blackmailed, but a beautiful redheaded siren with a dark and dangerous secret. It is not just a crook trying to take over town with their henchmen, it's an Ancient Criminal Mastermind with a scheme to destroy the world. A dead body is not found with just any knife in their back; a rare ceremonial Aztec sacrificial knife is the murder weapon. Deadly poisons, archaic weapons, rare beasts and other exotica were common means of delivering death in the pulps, and can be in the adventures you run based on them.
Crimes made by ordinary means but under identically strange circumstances were a common feature of the pulps. For example, a string of murders of men named Smith, the robbery from museums throughout the country of their Egyptian mummies, the same playing card left at the scene of the crime, or even a taunting clue for the PCs to follow up on. Such a series of crimes are often made by the villain to obscure their real motives and plans; blowing up trains to conceal the kidnapping of important atomic research scientists, stealing rare fish from aquariums whose internal organs are needed to create deadly toxins with strange effects. The theft of suits of armour from a long dead European monarch to recreate a long-lost treasure map from clues inscribed on the inside the metal breastplates. Seemingly unconnected crimes are often but the means the villain uses to get to the real item they are after, and can offer important hints for the heroes to follow. Clues could also be deliberately planted by more devious villains to lead PCs into ambushes, deathtraps or worse.
Criminal wrongdoings may even appear to be made using impossible magical skills and supernatural ability. The walking dead, disappearances from locked rooms, mythical creatures of the night and other eerie elements were often encountered by pulp heros, but were later revealed to occur through either trickery and deception, or by some weird new gadget of the villain's devising. Again, for designing such gadgets for villains to use, it may be helpful to look over the spell and magic item lists of your favourite fantasy RPG for ideas on abilities for what these devices can do. For a twist to the genre, you can even rule as GM that magic does work in your version of the pulp era, and even allow for other fantasy trappings such as lost magical races, mythological beings, magical spells and occult devices to exist in such a variant pulp world background.
The type of treasure a pulp villain can be after can also be more interesting than just stolen bank loot, though it's the rare crook will turn down cold, hard cash. Antique Chinese jewelry, a cache of pearls, Blackbeard's treasure map, famous artifacts of religion and mythology, or even the rare metals necessary to create Weird Science devices, are all more fun to steal than just paper money. Treasure itself is anything that the villain is after, even if its value to others is questionable. This can range from obscure items for a villain who collects such things as autographs, blue glass, Confederate army swords, medieval suits of armour, pre-Colombian art, vintage violins, and so on. A villain can even steal interesting people to talk to, kidnapping famous persons for their conversational value!
Clues in pulp mysteries and crimes should be fairly obvious for your players to follow up on since there is nothing more frustrating than having a mystery that would confound a Sherlock Holmes being dumped on the average players' plate. It is neither satisfying to have a die-roll to provide a solution to a puzzling mystery, nor appropriate to have the PCs fail because their players missed an obvious clue. Since all pulp adventures have a mystery of some sort to be solved, the GM has a narrow line to tread in presenting what can be a challenging and not impossible problem for their players to solve. Providing multiple clues that lead to the same step in the mystery is important, for even if the PCs miss one important clue, there will be backup clues they can stumble over and use. Having a handy NPC who suggests not the clue itself but something related to it will help direct the PCs back on the right track. Clues can also be inadvertently dropped by the more dim of the villain's henchmen, or even by a bragging villain themselves within the adventure. You can certainly use red-herrings in your pulp RPG mysteries, but be careful not to use them very often; events in pulp adventures are often tangled enough without having the PCs being led continually astray.
There may be occasions when you are absolutely, positively stuck for an idea for making a pulp mystery for your players. One handy trick a GM can use to create mysteries on the fly is to simply throw out random clues like crazy, and then listen carefully as your players try to make some sense of all these different clues and suspects. When your players first come up with solution that seems to fit all the random clues you have provided, and also implicates a certain NPC as the villain, give that NPC suspect an alibi. Later in the adventure you can pass on information to the PCs that invalidates this alibi. Not only will your players feel smug that they have solved the mystery and defeated the villain, but they'll have written much of the plot and have done much of the work of creating the mystery for you as well!
VI EXOTIC SETTINGS & LOCATIONS
It is important to provide interesting places, settings and scenery where your pulp heroes can strut their stuff. Give each important scenes for PCs to explore or villains to attack or hide out in, a slight twist to make them interesting and unique. Roaring steel-mills, condemned theatres, midnight graveyards, frenzied race-tracks, eerie psychiatric hospitals, inky-black mine tunnels, chaotic circus grounds, observatories, cluttered warehouses, posh hotels, desolate oil-fields, movie-studio back-lots, ivy-covered college buildings, public aquariums and more can all provide interesting settings and situations to knot an adventure scene around. Don't hold back in furnishing these buildings with pulp-action rich architecture; chandeliers to swing on, balconies to throw thugs over, ramps and ladders to climb on, elevator shafts to fall down or climb up, secret tunnels and hidden doors to discover and be trapped in, conveyor belts and factory machinery to be turned into death traps, etc. Simply let your imagination run wild, and if it runs a little short, try looking at floor plans and pictures of interior decor in magazines or in books on famous buildings. You can even cannibalize non-pulp RPG supplements for maps of buildings and other interesting structures.
Vehicles can also provide mobile adventure locations for pulp heroes on the move. The Orient Express, a sleek millionaire's yacht, huge helium-filled dirigibles, rusting tramp freighters, trim speedboats, alien rocket-ships, baroque aerial aircraft carriers, and elegant ocean liners can all be the scene for claustrophobic pulp action. Rather than just being a means to get from here to there, the means of transport can be the main setting for an eerie murder mystery where victims are trapped with an unknown murderer. Or the mobile location can be a way to gather an interesting and diverse band of characters who can be caught together when an terrible electrical storm transports the PC's to a Lost World, or shipwrecks them on the coast of a mythical republic. The vehicle itself may be an item the villain wants to carry out some wicked plan with. It may even be the secret headquarters of the NPC villain. A great deal can happen on such a movable feast of a setting, with the advantage of using such a limited location being that it constrains the number of choices available to the PCs, making the action and adventure easier to control by the GM.
It was common for pulp heroes to travel to the four mysterious corners of the earth in pursuit of action and adventure. Travelling for long distances was like travelling back in time, with the sights and smells that the PCs encountering having been relatively unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. Introduce the PCs to the spice-drenched bazaars of Persia, the lonely moors of Scotland and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Let them experience the zephyr breezes of the South China seas and the sun-bleached ruins of ancient Greece as they hunt down the villain's secret hideout. Have them encounter dangers on the fog-choked streets of London, the arid steppes of Outer Mongolia, and other thrilling destinations. If all this seems like old hat, have your PCs journey to fictional countries such as the old European nations of Noirlandia, Ruritania and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. For a more South American flavour, have them visit the make-believe republics of Hildago and Nasilia for even more obscure but exciting excursions abroad. Immerse your players in exotic cultures, foreign languages, and anachronistic sights; stew this with thrilling adventure and watch the fun that results.
You can also provide a touch of the exotic close to home. Your PC heroes can visit the local Chinatown, and be exposed to the transplanted mysteries of the Far East. Other ethnic enclaves or ghettos can give a taste of Old Europe and other distant locales. Or they can visit the wharfs of the nearby waterfront to confront danger and excitement shipped in from any one of the seven seas. World Fairs allow the sights of sounds of many nations to be mixed into a multicultural tossed salad of adventure. Hollywood back lots work much the same way to gather many different historical environments of adventure; haunted castles, old West towns, jungle sets, Victorian streets, and so on. Private libraries and museums can offer exhibits of Egyptian relics, African totems, dinosaur skeletons, or other similarly atmospherically intense artifacts and backdrops. Environments of the strange and foreign can be found literally in the PCs own backyard, which in turn will also attract similarly foreign visitors and their bizarre problems.
You can even place adventures in fictitious nearby cities, counties and states that exists on no map or atlas of the real world. A GM's version of New Orleans can be a renamed River City, or the fictitious US state of Wichinois with its capital of Zenith can be set vaguely somewhere in the American Midwest. Such alternative settings offer the GM the opportunity to be creative and play fast and loose with political figures, street-plans, road maps and other historical details. With this method you do not have to worry that inadvertent historical or geographical inaccuracies that can result from using a real setting will cause problems in the game for your players.
VII LOST WORLDS
Lost worlds are a very special setting for PCs to visit for pulp adventure, they being isolated and fantastic chunks of geography unknown to the world at large. Lost Worlds were places, creatures and people trapped in time, existing today as living museum pieces while the rest of history marches on. Hidden jungle cities. Immense caverns buried deep under the earth. The craters of smouldering volcanoes. Valleys surrounded by impassable mountain ranges. Islands in uncharted parts of the ocean. For all these and more, what made all these mysterious areas special was their difficult access, foreign inhabitants and strange wildlife. The natives were often living descendants of ancient cultures--Egyptian, Viking, Babylonian, Incan, Aztec, Roman, etc.--unaware of the outside world. In the opposite extreme, its inhabitants could be fictionalized long lost races and cultures--Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu--whose rulers are determined to remain secluded from the 20th Century. Even more strange can be locals who are intelligent dinosaurs, giant Ant-men, or even space-shipwrecked aliens. Lost Worlds can be outright terrariums of bizarre biology with dinosaur valleys, ice-age plateaus, islands of giant or dwarfish creatures, and so on being common and time-honoured locations.
The basic premise of a Lost World adventure is having the PCs accidentally discovering a small Lost World, being trapped there, exploring its thrills and dangers and unpleasant native inhabitants, and then escaping, never to find it again. The latter can be accomplished by losing the maps on how to get their, having a cave-in or avalance cut off the access, or even having some terrible cataclysm--a volcano erupting or Weird Science gone wild--destroying the Lost World completely. Such a "one-off" Lost World can be a playground for fantastic historical or super-science adventure. Cowboys being challenged by medieval knights or mole-people. Detectives shooting out with Spanish pirates. Whip-wielding archaeologists trading blows with mammoth-riding cavemen. Aviators dogfighting with pterodactyls or flying-saucers. All these and more are but some of the wild adventures that the PCs can encounter in the Lost World setting.
If wanted, a Lost World can be a campaign setting that is much more extensive and durable than the one-shot version mentioned above. Instead of having the Lost World lost again or destroyed at the end of the adventure, the GM may decide for the PCs to take up temporary or permanent residence and positions of power in this self contained setting. It was quite common for pulp heroes of this more style of adventure to stumble on a Lost World setting whose native inhabitants are in the middle of a civil war or have the PC heroes presence push a previously tense situation over the edge to war. Heroes in pulp Lost World romances were often forced to choose sides in such conflicts. The PC heroes may decide the aid the "good guys" with merely their grit and brawn; "going native" as it were. Alternatively, they may decide to use their superior equipment and knowledge to arm the locals against the (until then) superior forces and abilities of the enemy. Rewards for helping the winning side of the conflict ranged from gifts of valuable treasure, a means to escape the Lost World if the PCs had been trapped there, or even the hand in marriage of the eldest child of the current ruler of the Lost World.
Newly created gadgets and futuristic vehicles can be used to get to even stranger landscapes of wonder. A Lost World can be found deep inside a hollow earth, accessible only by a mechanical drilling mole of an inventor PC's devising. Time machines can convey PCs to a far-off past or future. Rocket ships or teleporters can whisk players off to brave new worlds both inside and out of our solar system, galaxy or universe. Shrink-rays can even let heroes explore the normal world scaled down to the size of toys, insects, or even sub-sub-sub-atomic particles. Along with being the means of conveying the PCs there, vehicles can be used for stranding the PCs in the Lost World, either temporarily or permanently. The pulp GM can go wild at designing alien cultures, monstrous ecologies and fantastic landscapes for their heroes to romp through. If the GM is stuck, they can raid material from their favourite fantasy or SF RPG--maps, modules, bestiary lists, fantasy races, etc--to help in the creative process of building their pulp fantastic Lost World.
VIII CLIFFHANGERS
Cliffhanger endings were a classic technique used by the pulps and by radio and movie serials to maintain tension and drama. Stories that end suddenly with the hero and their friends caught in a dire predicament with only a "stay tuned for the next episode to see what happens next" message ensured that the impatiently waiting reader, listener or viewer would be soon be back to see how the heroes avoid their fates in the next adventure chapter. Heroes in the pulps have been left at the end of a chapter trapped in falling elevators, bound and gagged inside of burning warehouses, caught without parachutes in stalled and falling aeroplanes, locked inside flooding dungeons and, to fulfil the old cliche, even found clinging precariously to the edge of a cliff with the villain about to step on their clinging figers and push them over to certain doom! Despite all odds, pulp adventurers always survived these deadly perils in the next chapter of the adventure.
Salt and pepper your adventures liberally with situations that temporarily leave the PCs in a very tight jam, with the PCs wondering how on earth they';l survive. This is especially easy to do when a group of your pulp PCs have separated. When this happens, you can cut away from the first group left at a cliffhanger ending, and then continue gaming with this second PC group until they in turn have a cliffhanger opportunity. Then cut back to the first group, switching back and forth as often as you can. If your players PCs do not split up into different groups, you can announce a short stretch and snack break at a cliffhanger situation, and then return again later to it later to complete the scene to your players satisfaction. Make each cliffhanger a special and unique opportunity to create harrowing adventure for your players and PCs.
Try to arrange to end a session of game play on a cliffhanger note to create a much longer period of suspense and dramatic tension until the next time the gameing group meets. You can provide for such a theatrical ending for your own pulp RPG adventures by picking a time window for completion of that sessions game. Whenever a dramatic action scene occurs within that pre-chosen time window, make it the cliffhanger scene, and suspend game play at that point until the gaming group meets again. Alternatively, you can try to plan ahead of time for a cliffhanger or deathtrap to end your game-session on; this requires some GMing experiance in predicting just how much the players can accomplish in a given time period before springing the cliffhanger. Whatever method you decide to use, your players may complain about being left in suspense, but they'll soon be back with a vengeance
While the beginning and end points of a cliffhanger scene are fixed, what happens in the time between is entirely up in the air. For example, a game session may end with the GM saying "...the car with your hero tied to the steering wheel is hurtling towards the cliff edge! Seconds later, the car goes over the edge and bursts into flames when it hits the rock below! Stay tuned until next time to see what happens!" The next time the gaming group meet, the GM can recap the situation of the car hurtling over the cliff edge and then say that if the PCs want to make their escape, it has to be in the few seconds before the car actually hits the ground (after all, the GM never actually said the PCs were in the car that exploded in the last cliffhanger scene!). How the PCs survive this situation is up to the players decisions and action. They may try to break through the steering wheel and jump out of the car at the last possible second, or attempt to slip their bonds and do the same, or somehow regain control of the car in a way that forces the villain'scar that had been following them to go over the cliff instead, etc. Remember, there should always be an out for the players to have their PC's to discover, and one that does not rely on lucky die rolls alone.
Cliffhanger escapes should always be made at what looks like the last possible minute, and this by the actions of the PCs, and not some outside agency. While movie serials often cheated by having some form of deus ex machina rescue the trapped heroes--a freak power failure, the police charging in, the friends of the hero coming to the rescue--don't overuse this cheap trick in your game. It's more satisfying for the PCs to escape due to their own efforts, abilities and ingenuity, rather than relying on the fat hand of the GM to do their work for them. Sometimes making the situation apparently worse for the PCs by piling even danger will suggest a solution to the players. If bad luck doggedly follows the PCs let the bad event happen, but by no means have a string of poor die rolls cause the death of a PC. Going back to the pulp genre convention of reduced hero mortality, have some long lasting but non-lethal injury occur instead, or simply have the PC involved disappear for some time, and then have them appear again at an opportune moment when their friends could use them most.
IX DEATHTRAPS
Deathtraps were a special kind of cliffhanger used in the genre, devices either built or used extemporaneously by the arch-villain to do away with the hero and their friends. Deathtraps are not designed to kill the PCs as much as they exist to give them a puzzle to solve, and to slow them down while the villain does their bit of nasty work. It was a rare villain who simply tossed a hero in a deathtrap and ran away; the deathtrap gave the villain a chance to gloat and brag about their fiendish plans and answer all the unanswered questions raised by the hero! Deathtraps include such classics as locked rooms filling with poison gas, heroes tied to tables with huge pendulum knives slowly descending, being slowly lowered by rope into huge vats of boiling and noxious liquids, electrical devices with two persons ensnared for whom the escape of one means certain shocking death to the other, and so on. Death traps need not even be mechanical contraptions of this Rube Goldberg variety. Villains framing PCs with murder and other criminal activities can be remarkably effective, with the most gentle penalty for failure being a long and uncomfortable vacation in Sing Sing or Alcatraz; for a worst case scenario, the electric chair awaits the unlucky.
These lethal traps can be difficult for the GM to construct so that their players face a nasty challenge, but still have a decent chance to avoid their deaths. The quick wits of the players working could probably turn some portion of the trap against itself, or lead to some way to deactivate the device. You can try to plan the deathtrap around the PCs' equipment and capability, ensuring that they are equipped for escaping danger. Special abilities or devices unknown to the villain--lock-picking skills, a wire saw hidden in a hollow tooth, a vial of acid--may be used to elicit an escape. Or you can simply make for a fiendish situation, and trust to the creativity of your players. You may be astonished at some ideas your players can come up with for escapes. If you are stuck on building a good deathtrap, try using alternating the two techniques that follow below, but be careful not to tell your players you are using such tricks!
A) One method is to secretly rule that the PCs must make two different kinds of escape attempts that will automatically fail before their third
try automatically succeeds in providing their escape and getaway from the trap. This technique allows the players ingenuity
to play a role, and providing such timing that the escape is made by the hero at the very last possible second. For example, a PC hero locked in a cage with a maddened gorilla on a barge that is slowly sinking can try to escape
this trap by 1) bending the bars, or 2) stunning the gorilla and then picking the lock, or 3) pouring trap-eating acid on the floor and making the escape through the resulting hole. Whatever order the hero tries, it will be
the third and final attempt that succeeds, and it will occur at such a time that it just saves the hero from death or worse.
B) A second method is to rule that the very first way the players choose for their PCs to make their escape is in fact the correct one, but something must change before this initial idea will work. For the example of the PC trapped inside the sinking barge, yes pulling the bars apart will work, but only the gorilla is strong enough to do this and must be tricked to do this task for the PC. Perhaps the acid trick is the right idea, but the barge has to tilt on its side for the acid to work on the side walls of the cage. Or picking the lock is the right idea, but you must first deal with the enraged gorilla that is rushing to attack this trapped PC.
X THE "FEEL" OF THE 1930s-1940s PULP ERA
To help capture the zesty colour and rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the pulps, familiarize yourself and your players to the pulp genre and understand its peculiar stylistic conventions and unique atmosphere. Read reprints of the pulps, and lend these to your players, or try reading comic books inspired by the pulps. Many of these are listed in the recommended references and resources guide that follows this article. Watching old adventure movie serials is another painless way of getting the know the period and the trademark pulp etiquette used. Showing such a mystery-adventure episode to your players before a pulp RPG session can do wonders in setting the right mood for the gaming that will later follow. Books on and about movie serials can be a goldmine of plot ideas and character names for you and your players to steal. Recordings of famous radio-plays, such as those of "The Shadow", "The Green Hornet", "I Love A Mystery" etc., are also worth listening to, and can also be played or lent to your players to help them provide the right atmosphere and mood of the era in your pulp adventure role-playing game.
Fast pacing is an important element to convey to give the proper atmosphere inherent in a pulp-inspired adventure. While relentless action is nearly impossible to maintain, you can still punctuate your pulp RPG adventures with scenes simply drenched with furious action and drama. To reflect this, do not give the PCs much time to think or plan during such episodes of overwhelming excitement. Have masked men burst into the room through trap-doors in the floor, let the cable of the elevator they are standing in break loose and start to fall, or have a hail of bullets fly their way as they stand around wondering what to do. It's okay to allow players some time to plan elaborate responses to thwart the villain, but realize that in the pulps, when push came to shove, it was common for the heroes to think more with their fists and guns than with their brains. Also remember that action doesn't just mean combat; it can also mean a reckless chase scene, escaping from a deadly deathtrap, rescuing someone from the jaws of catastrophe, or being suspended near death at the end of a cliffhanger scene. It's okay to skip ahead through boring scenes of travel or plotting in your adventure to get to a more interesting scene, but be sure to show that such PC preparation and planning pay the price of passing time. Above all, keep things moving!
Convey the feel and "pulp" atmosphere for the period of the 1930s and 1940s for your game. Give a "postcard and snapshot" glimpse of the time, providing details and historical trivia to your players throughout the gaming session. Major issues of the day can be mentioned via actual newspaper stories and alongside of clue laden stories and headlines you make up yourself. For the latter, you can create your own headlines or news-stories by either using a good computer desk-top publishing program, or by doctoring a photocopy of a real newspaper's frontpage headline obtained from a public library's microfiche collection. Along with this method to drop news of the day and clues to help move along a pulp plot, you can relate stories in newsreels or radio broadcasts to your players; make up your own "Flash" announcements that interrupt some appropriate period music you have previously recorded and have playing softly in the background.
More subtle ways can be used to impart a verisimilitude of the pulp period. Try mentioning the every day entertainment of the era for starters. This can be what live music bands are playing in a nightclub (Benny Goodman's or Guy Lombardo's Orchestras), the latest fad (be it Mah-jongg, jalopy racing, or flag-pole sitting), what baseball team is leading the World Series, details in dress and fashion, what Hollywood celebrities are spotted at the local ritzy honky-tonk restaurant (Myrna Loy, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire) and the latest movie playing at the Orpheum theatre (Frankenstein, The Prisoner of Zenda, or The Wizard of Oz, etc.). Show and use the technology of the 1930s and 1940s--large radio-transceivers, six-shooters, complicated telegraph sets, propeller-driven aeroplanes, octopus-like telephone switchboards, vacuum-tube scientific devices, etc.--and juxtapose these with more higher technology elements that really existed (rocket-planes, gyrocoptors, radar, submarines, television, atomic power) along with weird science devices that never did exist but ought to have. Other period details you can drop in are the makes of the vintage automobiles people are driving (you can also call them flivvers or jalopies), having NPCs drop 1930s slang words, mentioning the price of lunch at an automat, having elevator operators in large buildings interact with the PCs, spotting a horse-drawn milk-wagon, travelling by cruise-ship or zeppelin to Europe, etc. Mention the PCs seeing apple sellers on street-corners, hoboes riding the rails, dusty cars full of migrant workers, long lines at soup kitchens etc., all images of the Depression to make these decade feel real and solid to your players.
To add further depth and breathe life to the era, have your PCs run across famous and important personages of the day. Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Howard Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Winston Churchill, Houdini, and Eleanor Roosevelt are all people they can meet, perhaps even help or be helped by. Fictional personages can also be added for fun; an aging Sherlock Holmes, an even more poisonous and shrunken Fu Manchu, a still vine-swinging Tarzan, etc. Other pulp heroes such as Doc Savage, the Green Hornet, and the Shadow can also cross your PC heroes' path. For the latter you can even drop stories in the press on their competitors' pulp exploits, or even adding a "box-score" column on the front page of the daily newspaper listing the number criminals put away by their friendly rivals each week. All these details help instill a feel of authenticity to this brightly innocent and charming age that existed in the pages of the pulps.
IDEAS FOR PULP ADVENTURES
You'll need to mix many of the pulp ingredients previously mentioned above to create the structure for your own pulp adventure scenario. It doesn't hurt to follow a formula approach, which is what most pulp writers did. Create your villain, flesh out what they want and how they intend to get it. Make the crime that each separate villain you create different, and make each way the crime is performed unique too. Develop a number of interesting scenes and situations for the heroes to romp through in their pursuit of the solution to the mystery, and be generous about how you spread clues and ideas to get players moving from scene to scene. The goals of the villain and the crimes they commit always set the stage for the interesting settings that provide the background for your pulp adventure.
Start your adventure with the heroes in a mess of trouble. Give them cliffhangers to escape from, several deathtraps to rescue themselves and friends from, and keep the excitement and action at a furious pace. Let them stumble over trouble as they go about their business of crime-fighting, crime-busting, helping friends out, etc. Foreshadow the arch-villain by having this NPC built up by their terrible deeds and horrible crimes. Introduce this wicked NPC to your PC heroes at an early opportunity via news reports, eyewitness accounts, taunting letters, and even successful kidnapping of your players' PCs. Invent prisons and ingenious deathtraps for your heroes to escape from, and turn the tables on their former captors. Be sure to allow your pulp PC hero’s ample occasions for them to defeat the villain honestly at the adventure climax. Don't worry about having your players kill off a wonderful arch-villain; pulp villains are made of durable stuff, and you can even bring back a favourite Mr. Nasty from the grave if you want to!
To help in the creative process of constructing a pulp adventure, try looking at authentic background material on the era of the 1930s and 1940s. Many public or university libraries have back-issues of local newspapers available on microfilm that you can scan for ideas--local or national news stories, ads for movies and theatre shows, classified ads, obituaries, etc.-- around which can be knitted an adventure of your own devising. Used bookstores can have old issues of Life, Look, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, school atlases, encyclopaedias, time-lines of history, etc., all of which can be a source for ideas for pulp adventures. Current or vintage travel books and maps are also good for pulp adventure ideas in foreign lands. Try reading about political events, items from war newsreels, strange Fortean news stories, scientific "what-ifs" of then and now, accounts of famous crimes and disasters, for more even more ideas for stories. While there are many good history books covering this period, you can give yourself a break and check out the history section in your local children's library. Books aimed at younger readers are clearly written, never assume any prior or specialized knowledge, and they are often wonderfully and generously illustrated.
Reading reprints of the original pulps, watching movie serials and listening to radio shows from this period is the best and most direct way to capture ideas and the flavour needed for pulpish cliffhangers. Try looking at some of the recommended pulp-related materials listed a the end of this article. Many cliffhanger serials filmed during the 1930s and 1940s are readily available on home video. To maximize your enjoyment of watching these vintage shows, be sure not to see each video entirely in one sitting--watch only one 20 minute episode at a time, and only watch the next episode after you have waited with bated breath to discover how the hero and heroine have extricated themselves from a deadly cliffhanger. There are also many black & white movies filmed during this period from which you can pick up ideas for plots, mysteries, traps, atmosphere, villains, settings and mood. Keep a pad and pencil handy while watching, and be sure to jot down ideas as they flood into your creativity.
IDEAS FOR PULP CAMPAIGNS
A campaign based on the pulp genre can be of several types. One-shot adventures can be fun, and can be used to explore a variety of story genres and characterizations. Such one-off adventures are useful for players or GMs with schedules too busy for long term campaigns. Also common is the pulp serial campaign, where the same group of heroes are followed through a succession of different adventures. This approach has such positive features as growing PC reputations, a chance for players to explore thoroughly their GM's version of the pulp era, familiarity of PC characterizations among players and GM, recurring villains appearing to work their dark revenge on the PCs, and so forth. There are many interesting settings and situations that can unite a band of PC heroes; a charismatic NPC pulp hero who needs help in fighting crime, the announcer and crew of a newsreel reporting company, the stunt gang of a movie studio's back-lot, a pulp magazine publishing company roster of writers, a "scandal-sheet" newspaper, a university's nutty-faculty club, and so forth.
Whatever the campaign style, it helps to have either the players or the GM provide a reason for why the heros are involved in the pulp adventure, either alone or working together as a team. A mechanism must be provided to explain and get all the different PC heroes working together for at least their very first adventure together. The GM can provide an adventure campaign framework, such as a detective agency that all PCs work for, or a World Explorer's club that they all belong to. The force of circumstances can also be used to sweep together PCs of highly variable backgrounds together for adventure. This could be a disaster that occurs with all PCs on hand, having all the PC's being accused of murder together and working as a team to clear their good names, the PCs being zeppelin-napped together, having the PCs all working for the same incredible pulp-hero boss (but whom unfortunately suffers from lapses of amnesia, and thus cannot always be relied on), and so on. Below are a few adventure campaign premises you can use as examples or tweak for your own purposes:
1) Weird Masks Publishing Co.
Weird Masks Publishing Co., or more simply, Weird Masks, is a publisher of those monthly lurid and lusty adventure periodicals commonly called "pulps". Weird Masks flagship publication is an anthology weird-detective magazine itself called "Weird Masks", but they also publish a variety of other genre fiction magazines. Detective-mystery, gangster, spy, sports, jungle, zeppelin and single-hero pulps fill out their selection, with many pulp titles being started and dropped each month. As part of the company's corporate policy, each and every magazine it owns has either the word "Weird" or "Mask" somewhere in its title. Its offices are housed in a prominent New York City landmark, the "Hurricane Building", and its presses are in this skyscraper's basement. Daily operations are headed by Illingsworth Xagat, its shrewd, balding and cigar-chomping Chief Editor.
Weird Masks has an unusual editorial policy of only using fictionalized accounts of true stories to fill the pages of its many adventure magazines. Even more unusual is that Weird Masks doesn't just try to chase after completed adventures; they actively initiate the adventure process. How this works is by Xagat and his underlings finding an interesting story (i.e. a vampire curse in Peru, a "Stink Man" raiding hobo jungles near the Florida Everglades, strange shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, etc.) through the company's network of staff story scouts, and freelance agents answering to ads in the back pages of Weird Masks many magazines. Once a hot story has been found and has been selected for follow-up by the editorial staff, Weird Masks gathers together a team of its adventurer agents to look into the matter. These adventurers, selected through their "Department of Adventurers" central character casting file, are shadowed or accompanied by writers and their aides to write up the subsequent adventure that will naturally ensue, which will then be published by Weird in an appropriately (ie. luridly) titled pulp. Particularly successful stories will lead to Weird and Xagat reuniting this particular team of adventurers under some appropriately colourful team name. This is how such pulp series as "Rip Valentine & His Blackhearts", "The Dragon-Flyer", "Shakespeare's Ghost", "The Radio Rovers", "The Arachnid" and "The Masquerader" got their start with Weird Masks.
In many ways, "Weird Masks" is run very much like the major motion picture studios of the same time. Given this parallel, Weird Masks has a special matching service, the "Department of Adventurers" that tries to put together the best possible team of individuals to meet their perpetual demands for stories of eerie mysteries and strange adventures to fill the pages of its many magazines with. In this department's files are the resumes hundreds of stuntmen, cowboys, acrobats, boxers, sailors, scientists, circus folk, aviator's, ex-soldiers, big-game hunters, gunsels, dancers, aspiring actors and actresses, and other types too diverse to easily classify, who are all available for hire on short notice. This very large roster of adventuring types has been compiled from a listing of all those who have answered classified advertisements that Weird Masks places on an irregular basis in the New York Times, and other large international newspapers. It's assumed that the PCs have been recruited by "Weird Masks" in this same fashion. Those signed to a contract with Weird Masks are sent to coaches for fisticuff training, fencing, horseback riding and more--the normal grooming for potential heroes of this brand of pulp adventures. They will also have access to expensive vehicles, equipment and devices from the company's "Adventure Props Department". Sometimes the curious loot from villains vanquished by Weird Mask contract heroes makes its way into the Prop's warehouse, whose use makes for surprising results and interesting adventures.
Colourful adventurers are especially sought for by Weird Masks, especially those with fanciful nicknames and strange backgrounds. Those that lack such a lurid nickname from either friends, or the whim of the press will have one grafted on by one of Weird Masks in-house writers (ie. the GM). Hence a lion tamer becoming, "Zara, the Black Whip", or a daring race-car driver becoming "Swifty" Fraser. Occasionally a nickname is inappropriate to the personality of the adventurer, such as a nervous and timid paleontologist being stuck with "Tornado" Smith as a moniker, but as Xagat would say (after first removing from his mouth a particularly vile smelling cigar), "A larger than life name sells copy, and the fancy name might just inspire you to greatness. Besides, pal, you ain't got no choice. Read the fine print of your contract!"
One of the stipulations of the job contract that Weird Masks insists on is that the team of newly assembled adventurers must be willing to be accompanied by a few hack writers, a secretary and an illustrator/photographer, who will all record the various events and happenings that the adventurers encounter. Weird Masks is willing to spend a great deal of money in training on behalf of promising individuals; they are also determined to get their money's worth. For a healthy salary and various bonuses for extra-daring heroics and especially memorable lines that the writers can use, the players sign away all story rights of their adventures. Not only does the accompanying magazine staff provide a transcript of the adventures the PCs undergo, but they can suggest ways for players to get into the proper pulp spirit, or even drop hints on things to do, "I think Illingsworth would pay a hefty bonus if you tried to jump from that biplane, onto that escaping car. Not that *I* recommend you do this, mind you...". Depending on the GM, the team of pulp writers can take a very low key approach to their job (ie. planting hidden recording bugs and robot camera equipment on the PCs), else become active participants in the adventure (with their own roles carefully edited out of the final pulp transcript).
If the GM wishes to use the Weird Heroes campaign premise, players can each generate several different PCs of varying backgrounds, histories and abilities. From this roster of PCs, the GM, in the guise of the Chief Editor, can select the most appropriate mix to play out a pulp game with themes as divergent as Lost Worlds, Jungle-Love, Weird-Spy, Spicy-Zeppelin, Western-Horror, etc. Alternatively, for even more fun, the GM can chose the most inappropriate collection of PCs, who'll soon will have to come to terms with the wild diversity of their backgrounds, talents and abilities in order to complete the task before them. For some added variety, PCs could be one of the writers or flunkies assigned to cover the story. They could also be the story scout who uncovers the mystery the other PCs become involved with. As an additional twist, one of the adventurer agents or story writers could be an imposter. This ringer could be a famous pulp hero working incognito to lend a hand to the greenhorns. Alternatively, this person could be the villain or an agent of the villain working to sabotage the best efforts of the magazine's team of heroes. PCs themselves can be ringers of this sort, or may have been hired for the task through false credentials. Such PCs may find to their dismay they have bitten off far more than they can chew once the true nature of their abilities and skills are found wanting in the face of a real pulp danger.
A final, and particularly nasty variation on this premise is the secret fact that the secret owner of Weird Masks is really a nefarious pulp villain! The true owner is a megalomaniac with designs to rule the world, whose insidious purpose in creating and running Weird Masks is to first locate and then neutralize potential adventure-hero threats to their diabolical plans. Middle-of-the-road heroes are left to handle mundane mysteries, while more competent adventuring teams can be safely used as unwitting pawns to thwart rival pulp villains or led on time-wasting wild goose chases to occupy their time. If the PCs start to wonder just how and where Xagat is getting all these juicy stories from, they can be safely diverted into deathtraps, framed for awful crimes, or worse!
2) The Radio Heroes.
Early in 193_, the following advertisement appeared in many East coast newspapers:
B) A second method is to rule that the very first way the players choose for their PCs to make their escape is in fact the correct one, but something must change before this initial idea will work. For the example of the PC trapped inside the sinking barge, yes pulling the bars apart will work, but only the gorilla is strong enough to do this and must be tricked to do this task for the PC. Perhaps the acid trick is the right idea, but the barge has to tilt on its side for the acid to work on the side walls of the cage. Or picking the lock is the right idea, but you must first deal with the enraged gorilla that is rushing to attack this trapped PC.
X THE "FEEL" OF THE 1930s-1940s PULP ERA
To help capture the zesty colour and rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the pulps, familiarize yourself and your players to the pulp genre and understand its peculiar stylistic conventions and unique atmosphere. Read reprints of the pulps, and lend these to your players, or try reading comic books inspired by the pulps. Many of these are listed in the recommended references and resources guide that follows this article. Watching old adventure movie serials is another painless way of getting the know the period and the trademark pulp etiquette used. Showing such a mystery-adventure episode to your players before a pulp RPG session can do wonders in setting the right mood for the gaming that will later follow. Books on and about movie serials can be a goldmine of plot ideas and character names for you and your players to steal. Recordings of famous radio-plays, such as those of "The Shadow", "The Green Hornet", "I Love A Mystery" etc., are also worth listening to, and can also be played or lent to your players to help them provide the right atmosphere and mood of the era in your pulp adventure role-playing game.
Fast pacing is an important element to convey to give the proper atmosphere inherent in a pulp-inspired adventure. While relentless action is nearly impossible to maintain, you can still punctuate your pulp RPG adventures with scenes simply drenched with furious action and drama. To reflect this, do not give the PCs much time to think or plan during such episodes of overwhelming excitement. Have masked men burst into the room through trap-doors in the floor, let the cable of the elevator they are standing in break loose and start to fall, or have a hail of bullets fly their way as they stand around wondering what to do. It's okay to allow players some time to plan elaborate responses to thwart the villain, but realize that in the pulps, when push came to shove, it was common for the heroes to think more with their fists and guns than with their brains. Also remember that action doesn't just mean combat; it can also mean a reckless chase scene, escaping from a deadly deathtrap, rescuing someone from the jaws of catastrophe, or being suspended near death at the end of a cliffhanger scene. It's okay to skip ahead through boring scenes of travel or plotting in your adventure to get to a more interesting scene, but be sure to show that such PC preparation and planning pay the price of passing time. Above all, keep things moving!
Convey the feel and "pulp" atmosphere for the period of the 1930s and 1940s for your game. Give a "postcard and snapshot" glimpse of the time, providing details and historical trivia to your players throughout the gaming session. Major issues of the day can be mentioned via actual newspaper stories and alongside of clue laden stories and headlines you make up yourself. For the latter, you can create your own headlines or news-stories by either using a good computer desk-top publishing program, or by doctoring a photocopy of a real newspaper's frontpage headline obtained from a public library's microfiche collection. Along with this method to drop news of the day and clues to help move along a pulp plot, you can relate stories in newsreels or radio broadcasts to your players; make up your own "Flash" announcements that interrupt some appropriate period music you have previously recorded and have playing softly in the background.
More subtle ways can be used to impart a verisimilitude of the pulp period. Try mentioning the every day entertainment of the era for starters. This can be what live music bands are playing in a nightclub (Benny Goodman's or Guy Lombardo's Orchestras), the latest fad (be it Mah-jongg, jalopy racing, or flag-pole sitting), what baseball team is leading the World Series, details in dress and fashion, what Hollywood celebrities are spotted at the local ritzy honky-tonk restaurant (Myrna Loy, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire) and the latest movie playing at the Orpheum theatre (Frankenstein, The Prisoner of Zenda, or The Wizard of Oz, etc.). Show and use the technology of the 1930s and 1940s--large radio-transceivers, six-shooters, complicated telegraph sets, propeller-driven aeroplanes, octopus-like telephone switchboards, vacuum-tube scientific devices, etc.--and juxtapose these with more higher technology elements that really existed (rocket-planes, gyrocoptors, radar, submarines, television, atomic power) along with weird science devices that never did exist but ought to have. Other period details you can drop in are the makes of the vintage automobiles people are driving (you can also call them flivvers or jalopies), having NPCs drop 1930s slang words, mentioning the price of lunch at an automat, having elevator operators in large buildings interact with the PCs, spotting a horse-drawn milk-wagon, travelling by cruise-ship or zeppelin to Europe, etc. Mention the PCs seeing apple sellers on street-corners, hoboes riding the rails, dusty cars full of migrant workers, long lines at soup kitchens etc., all images of the Depression to make these decade feel real and solid to your players.
To add further depth and breathe life to the era, have your PCs run across famous and important personages of the day. Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Howard Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Winston Churchill, Houdini, and Eleanor Roosevelt are all people they can meet, perhaps even help or be helped by. Fictional personages can also be added for fun; an aging Sherlock Holmes, an even more poisonous and shrunken Fu Manchu, a still vine-swinging Tarzan, etc. Other pulp heroes such as Doc Savage, the Green Hornet, and the Shadow can also cross your PC heroes' path. For the latter you can even drop stories in the press on their competitors' pulp exploits, or even adding a "box-score" column on the front page of the daily newspaper listing the number criminals put away by their friendly rivals each week. All these details help instill a feel of authenticity to this brightly innocent and charming age that existed in the pages of the pulps.
IDEAS FOR PULP ADVENTURES
You'll need to mix many of the pulp ingredients previously mentioned above to create the structure for your own pulp adventure scenario. It doesn't hurt to follow a formula approach, which is what most pulp writers did. Create your villain, flesh out what they want and how they intend to get it. Make the crime that each separate villain you create different, and make each way the crime is performed unique too. Develop a number of interesting scenes and situations for the heroes to romp through in their pursuit of the solution to the mystery, and be generous about how you spread clues and ideas to get players moving from scene to scene. The goals of the villain and the crimes they commit always set the stage for the interesting settings that provide the background for your pulp adventure.
Start your adventure with the heroes in a mess of trouble. Give them cliffhangers to escape from, several deathtraps to rescue themselves and friends from, and keep the excitement and action at a furious pace. Let them stumble over trouble as they go about their business of crime-fighting, crime-busting, helping friends out, etc. Foreshadow the arch-villain by having this NPC built up by their terrible deeds and horrible crimes. Introduce this wicked NPC to your PC heroes at an early opportunity via news reports, eyewitness accounts, taunting letters, and even successful kidnapping of your players' PCs. Invent prisons and ingenious deathtraps for your heroes to escape from, and turn the tables on their former captors. Be sure to allow your pulp PC hero’s ample occasions for them to defeat the villain honestly at the adventure climax. Don't worry about having your players kill off a wonderful arch-villain; pulp villains are made of durable stuff, and you can even bring back a favourite Mr. Nasty from the grave if you want to!
To help in the creative process of constructing a pulp adventure, try looking at authentic background material on the era of the 1930s and 1940s. Many public or university libraries have back-issues of local newspapers available on microfilm that you can scan for ideas--local or national news stories, ads for movies and theatre shows, classified ads, obituaries, etc.-- around which can be knitted an adventure of your own devising. Used bookstores can have old issues of Life, Look, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, school atlases, encyclopaedias, time-lines of history, etc., all of which can be a source for ideas for pulp adventures. Current or vintage travel books and maps are also good for pulp adventure ideas in foreign lands. Try reading about political events, items from war newsreels, strange Fortean news stories, scientific "what-ifs" of then and now, accounts of famous crimes and disasters, for more even more ideas for stories. While there are many good history books covering this period, you can give yourself a break and check out the history section in your local children's library. Books aimed at younger readers are clearly written, never assume any prior or specialized knowledge, and they are often wonderfully and generously illustrated.
Reading reprints of the original pulps, watching movie serials and listening to radio shows from this period is the best and most direct way to capture ideas and the flavour needed for pulpish cliffhangers. Try looking at some of the recommended pulp-related materials listed a the end of this article. Many cliffhanger serials filmed during the 1930s and 1940s are readily available on home video. To maximize your enjoyment of watching these vintage shows, be sure not to see each video entirely in one sitting--watch only one 20 minute episode at a time, and only watch the next episode after you have waited with bated breath to discover how the hero and heroine have extricated themselves from a deadly cliffhanger. There are also many black & white movies filmed during this period from which you can pick up ideas for plots, mysteries, traps, atmosphere, villains, settings and mood. Keep a pad and pencil handy while watching, and be sure to jot down ideas as they flood into your creativity.
IDEAS FOR PULP CAMPAIGNS
A campaign based on the pulp genre can be of several types. One-shot adventures can be fun, and can be used to explore a variety of story genres and characterizations. Such one-off adventures are useful for players or GMs with schedules too busy for long term campaigns. Also common is the pulp serial campaign, where the same group of heroes are followed through a succession of different adventures. This approach has such positive features as growing PC reputations, a chance for players to explore thoroughly their GM's version of the pulp era, familiarity of PC characterizations among players and GM, recurring villains appearing to work their dark revenge on the PCs, and so forth. There are many interesting settings and situations that can unite a band of PC heroes; a charismatic NPC pulp hero who needs help in fighting crime, the announcer and crew of a newsreel reporting company, the stunt gang of a movie studio's back-lot, a pulp magazine publishing company roster of writers, a "scandal-sheet" newspaper, a university's nutty-faculty club, and so forth.
Whatever the campaign style, it helps to have either the players or the GM provide a reason for why the heros are involved in the pulp adventure, either alone or working together as a team. A mechanism must be provided to explain and get all the different PC heroes working together for at least their very first adventure together. The GM can provide an adventure campaign framework, such as a detective agency that all PCs work for, or a World Explorer's club that they all belong to. The force of circumstances can also be used to sweep together PCs of highly variable backgrounds together for adventure. This could be a disaster that occurs with all PCs on hand, having all the PC's being accused of murder together and working as a team to clear their good names, the PCs being zeppelin-napped together, having the PCs all working for the same incredible pulp-hero boss (but whom unfortunately suffers from lapses of amnesia, and thus cannot always be relied on), and so on. Below are a few adventure campaign premises you can use as examples or tweak for your own purposes:
1) Weird Masks Publishing Co.
Weird Masks Publishing Co., or more simply, Weird Masks, is a publisher of those monthly lurid and lusty adventure periodicals commonly called "pulps". Weird Masks flagship publication is an anthology weird-detective magazine itself called "Weird Masks", but they also publish a variety of other genre fiction magazines. Detective-mystery, gangster, spy, sports, jungle, zeppelin and single-hero pulps fill out their selection, with many pulp titles being started and dropped each month. As part of the company's corporate policy, each and every magazine it owns has either the word "Weird" or "Mask" somewhere in its title. Its offices are housed in a prominent New York City landmark, the "Hurricane Building", and its presses are in this skyscraper's basement. Daily operations are headed by Illingsworth Xagat, its shrewd, balding and cigar-chomping Chief Editor.
Weird Masks has an unusual editorial policy of only using fictionalized accounts of true stories to fill the pages of its many adventure magazines. Even more unusual is that Weird Masks doesn't just try to chase after completed adventures; they actively initiate the adventure process. How this works is by Xagat and his underlings finding an interesting story (i.e. a vampire curse in Peru, a "Stink Man" raiding hobo jungles near the Florida Everglades, strange shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, etc.) through the company's network of staff story scouts, and freelance agents answering to ads in the back pages of Weird Masks many magazines. Once a hot story has been found and has been selected for follow-up by the editorial staff, Weird Masks gathers together a team of its adventurer agents to look into the matter. These adventurers, selected through their "Department of Adventurers" central character casting file, are shadowed or accompanied by writers and their aides to write up the subsequent adventure that will naturally ensue, which will then be published by Weird in an appropriately (ie. luridly) titled pulp. Particularly successful stories will lead to Weird and Xagat reuniting this particular team of adventurers under some appropriately colourful team name. This is how such pulp series as "Rip Valentine & His Blackhearts", "The Dragon-Flyer", "Shakespeare's Ghost", "The Radio Rovers", "The Arachnid" and "The Masquerader" got their start with Weird Masks.
In many ways, "Weird Masks" is run very much like the major motion picture studios of the same time. Given this parallel, Weird Masks has a special matching service, the "Department of Adventurers" that tries to put together the best possible team of individuals to meet their perpetual demands for stories of eerie mysteries and strange adventures to fill the pages of its many magazines with. In this department's files are the resumes hundreds of stuntmen, cowboys, acrobats, boxers, sailors, scientists, circus folk, aviator's, ex-soldiers, big-game hunters, gunsels, dancers, aspiring actors and actresses, and other types too diverse to easily classify, who are all available for hire on short notice. This very large roster of adventuring types has been compiled from a listing of all those who have answered classified advertisements that Weird Masks places on an irregular basis in the New York Times, and other large international newspapers. It's assumed that the PCs have been recruited by "Weird Masks" in this same fashion. Those signed to a contract with Weird Masks are sent to coaches for fisticuff training, fencing, horseback riding and more--the normal grooming for potential heroes of this brand of pulp adventures. They will also have access to expensive vehicles, equipment and devices from the company's "Adventure Props Department". Sometimes the curious loot from villains vanquished by Weird Mask contract heroes makes its way into the Prop's warehouse, whose use makes for surprising results and interesting adventures.
Colourful adventurers are especially sought for by Weird Masks, especially those with fanciful nicknames and strange backgrounds. Those that lack such a lurid nickname from either friends, or the whim of the press will have one grafted on by one of Weird Masks in-house writers (ie. the GM). Hence a lion tamer becoming, "Zara, the Black Whip", or a daring race-car driver becoming "Swifty" Fraser. Occasionally a nickname is inappropriate to the personality of the adventurer, such as a nervous and timid paleontologist being stuck with "Tornado" Smith as a moniker, but as Xagat would say (after first removing from his mouth a particularly vile smelling cigar), "A larger than life name sells copy, and the fancy name might just inspire you to greatness. Besides, pal, you ain't got no choice. Read the fine print of your contract!"
One of the stipulations of the job contract that Weird Masks insists on is that the team of newly assembled adventurers must be willing to be accompanied by a few hack writers, a secretary and an illustrator/photographer, who will all record the various events and happenings that the adventurers encounter. Weird Masks is willing to spend a great deal of money in training on behalf of promising individuals; they are also determined to get their money's worth. For a healthy salary and various bonuses for extra-daring heroics and especially memorable lines that the writers can use, the players sign away all story rights of their adventures. Not only does the accompanying magazine staff provide a transcript of the adventures the PCs undergo, but they can suggest ways for players to get into the proper pulp spirit, or even drop hints on things to do, "I think Illingsworth would pay a hefty bonus if you tried to jump from that biplane, onto that escaping car. Not that *I* recommend you do this, mind you...". Depending on the GM, the team of pulp writers can take a very low key approach to their job (ie. planting hidden recording bugs and robot camera equipment on the PCs), else become active participants in the adventure (with their own roles carefully edited out of the final pulp transcript).
If the GM wishes to use the Weird Heroes campaign premise, players can each generate several different PCs of varying backgrounds, histories and abilities. From this roster of PCs, the GM, in the guise of the Chief Editor, can select the most appropriate mix to play out a pulp game with themes as divergent as Lost Worlds, Jungle-Love, Weird-Spy, Spicy-Zeppelin, Western-Horror, etc. Alternatively, for even more fun, the GM can chose the most inappropriate collection of PCs, who'll soon will have to come to terms with the wild diversity of their backgrounds, talents and abilities in order to complete the task before them. For some added variety, PCs could be one of the writers or flunkies assigned to cover the story. They could also be the story scout who uncovers the mystery the other PCs become involved with. As an additional twist, one of the adventurer agents or story writers could be an imposter. This ringer could be a famous pulp hero working incognito to lend a hand to the greenhorns. Alternatively, this person could be the villain or an agent of the villain working to sabotage the best efforts of the magazine's team of heroes. PCs themselves can be ringers of this sort, or may have been hired for the task through false credentials. Such PCs may find to their dismay they have bitten off far more than they can chew once the true nature of their abilities and skills are found wanting in the face of a real pulp danger.
A final, and particularly nasty variation on this premise is the secret fact that the secret owner of Weird Masks is really a nefarious pulp villain! The true owner is a megalomaniac with designs to rule the world, whose insidious purpose in creating and running Weird Masks is to first locate and then neutralize potential adventure-hero threats to their diabolical plans. Middle-of-the-road heroes are left to handle mundane mysteries, while more competent adventuring teams can be safely used as unwitting pawns to thwart rival pulp villains or led on time-wasting wild goose chases to occupy their time. If the PCs start to wonder just how and where Xagat is getting all these juicy stories from, they can be safely diverted into deathtraps, framed for awful crimes, or worse!
2) The Radio Heroes.
Early in 193_, the following advertisement appeared in many East coast newspapers:
JACK GALAHAD IS ON SILVER AIR NORTH
That intrepid knight of the Wild Blue Yonder,
Jack Galahad, can be heard with his daring
Chums every Friday Evening at 9:30 PM on all
Silver Air East affiliate stations. Tune in as
Jack and his "Knights of the Round World" clash
with Capt. November, The Strange Angel and Lady Tarot
every week in eerie and uncanny adventure.
Don't miss out on the EXCITEMENT!
The player characters are involved with the live broadcast of "Jack Galahad, and his Knights of the World", an adventure radio-play that airs once a week on Friday nights. Captain Galahad, a modern day paladin of the skies, travels the world in the custom zep-plane, "Camelot", helping out people who find themselves in trouble. He's aided by two other fellow adventurers; Sonia "Lasagna" Smith, his crackerjack co-pilot, navigator and nurse; and "Ape" Carney, his wizard radio-operator, grease monkey and cook extraordinaire.
Using their wits, quick fists and the technological marvels of his aircraft, "Camelot", Jack Galahad and his pals encounter thrills, danger and excitement aplenty in each week's hour long episode. Dodging their heels are a number of villainous sorts; the sinister Captain November, a secret agent for a unnamed foreign power that considers Jack and his pals a threat to their expansionist territorial plans; Lady Tarot, a slinky red-haired vamp who seems to be torn between romantic entanglements with Jack and the chance to steal and sell his amazing technological secrets to the highest bidder; and the Strange Angel, a weird masked flyer known only by the name of his eerie black-canvassed custom biplane, who wields seemingly supernatural powers to spread chaos and destruction for reasons unknown.
The radio show is broadcast live, once a week, from the main studio of the Silver Air North Radio Network, located on the 77th floor of the Argent Tower in Chicago. It's major sponsor is Galahad Aviation, a major manufacturer of innovative aircraft equipment, and the radio show is a promotional advertising effort that has met with great success.
Player characters can be involved in the Radio Heroes campaign premise in a variety of ways. They can be actors and actresses lending their voices for the show. For more rugged characters (such as big game hunters or federal agents) they could be guest emcee's for the show, giving a little talk before the radio-show begins on their own "real" efforts to fight crime. Other PC's can be working as radiotricians, sound effects persons, story-writers working on the show, administrative staff (studio gophers, security guards, producers and lawyers). They may even be members of a guest studio audience observing the show.
Unfortunately for the PCs, while they know that their show is not real, others in their listening audience are not so well informed. Folks running from trouble will converge on the studio headquarters of the radio show, intruding and begging for help from the very surprised PCs. Ill-informed villains thinking that "Jack Galahad" and his band of helpers might pose a threat to their own nefarious plans and plots, will make preemptive strikes against the show, and as a result, drag the heroes into bizarre plots that they would otherwise remain happily ignorant of. Police, G-Men and "real" pulp heroes (who will attract in turn their own arch nemeses) will think that where there is smoke, there is fire, and will continually bother and badger the PCs and the show. Things could get very interesting, especially if the PCs decide to really enact the fictional characters they portray, if only in self defence from all the harassments listed above.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Given its immense popularity of in such media as film, television, comics and novels, the pulp genre has been surprisingly underutilised by the RPG industry. With the immense popularity of the modern superhero genre in RPGs, it is astonishing that their pulp counterparts from the period before and during the Second World War have been virtually ignored. Comic books and the superheroes who live in them are the direct literary descendants of the pulps, with comic heroes as Batman, Spiderman and Superman having the Shadow, the Spider and Doc Savage as their pulp counterparts. Cliffhanger endings, strange disguises, epic adventures, secret identities, hidden hideouts, deathtraps, weird-science and oddball villains, all which to some degree are present in the comic-book and RPG superhero genres, were classic stylistic conventions first forged in the fiery furnace of the pulps. Granted that the unrealistic cinematic approach, absence of flashy superpowers, pre-Atomic technology level, and narrow period of the era between the Depression and the Second World War is off-putting for some, there is still a great deal of fascinating material that can be explored in this style of gaming.
Happy Pulpateering!
REFERENCES AND RESOURCES
Primary Pulp Sources and Reprints:
Maxwell Grant (pseudonym for Walter B. Gibson who wrote the majority of the stories, as well as Theodore Tinsley and Bruce Elliott). The Shadow series.
Robert Hogan. G-8 & his Battle Aces series.
Brant House (pseudonym for Paul Chadwick, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Arthur Leo Zagat and R.T.M. Scott). Secret Agent X series.
Kenneth Robeson (pseudonym for Lester Dent). Doc Savage series. Note that the unnumbered stories currently in print are new novels ghost written by Destroyer author Will Murray.
Kenneth Robeson (The first 20 novels by Paul Ernst under this pseudonym; subsequent novels ghosted by Ron Goulart in the 1970's). The Avenger series.
Grant Stockbridge (pseudonym for Norvell Page, though R. T. M. Scott wrote the first two novels). The Spider series. Reprinted in double book format by Carrol and Graf, with the latest (and likely final) volume being #8 at this point of writing.
Books on or about the Pulps, Movie and Radio Serials
Alan G. Barbour. "Days of Thrills and Adventure". An illustrated survey of movie serials, divided by genre, stars, stunt-men, etc.
Alistair Durie. "Weird Tales". A survey of the authors, stories and artists of the premier pulp magazine of the strange and the bizarre.
Frank Eisgruber Jr. "Gangland's Doom". A slim and hard to find book that discusses the Shadow and his various identities; brief synopses of his various exploits, his helpers, B&W cover reproductions, etc.
Philip Jose Farmer. "Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life". A loving look at Clark Savage Jr., his various lairs, his famous helpers, his tom-boyish cousin, notable villains, gadgets, and even a speculative family tree relating Doc Savage to most every other fictional and real-life hero. Also check out his carefully researched and creative biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs most famous Lord of the trees, "Tarzan Alive!"
Tony Goodstone. "The Pulps". A bright and cheerful illustrated survey of the pulps, with a short story or two from each of the main genres covered.
Ron Goulart. "Cheap Thrills". One of the few survey books about the pulps, covering such genres as SF, Western, Detective, etc., this book includes interviews with some of the original pulpsters.
Ron Goulart. "The Dime Detectives". An examination of the mystery-detective pulp stories, with chapters on the Shadow, the Spider, Doc Savage, Race Williams, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and other fictional gumshoe notables.
Walter B. Gibson. "The Shadow Scrapbook". Actually written by the man who penned the vast majority of the Shadow stories, this is a beautiful look at this dark avenger through essays, a short story, a complete comic strip, a radio-script, listing of all the stories and radio-episodes, colour plates on the original pulp covers, information about the various Shadow movie-serials, and more! Well worth tracking down.
Jim Harmon. "The Great Radio Heroes". A nostalgic, though at times gushing, book about many radio serials of the 1930s to 1950s. It covers such radio shows as "Little Orphan Annie", "Superman", "The Lone Ranger", "I Love A Mystery", "The Shadow", and many others. Highly recommended.
Robert Kenneth Jones. "The Shudder Pulps". A look at one of the more bizarre genres of the pulps, the horror-terror-weird-menace tale of newlyweds and couples beset by lusty cripples, sadistic witches and bloodthirsty fiends; lots of quotes and synopses from representative stories.
Jay Maeder. "Dick Tracy; the Official Biography". A look at the comic-strip version of this famous police detective, and the many oddball crooks he fought.
Bill Prozini. "Gun In Cheek". A humorous trek through some of the worst detective-mystery stories of all time. Not surprisingly, lots of pulp material to be found here, and tons of great quotes from less than great stories.
Robert Sampson. "Spider". A deep and thoughtful look at the novels involving the most messianic and violently right-wing of the pulp heros, the Spider. The book includes a listing off titles, and a brief synopsis of many of the stories, and is the definitive work on this character.
Robert Sampson. "Yesterday's Faces". A five-volume series that looks at the broad literary themes and characters of the early pulp stories, such as Tarzan, the Red Raven, Nick Carter, etc.; it has less coverage of later hero pulp characters and magazines.
Lee Server. "Danger is My Business". A beautiful survey book of the pulp magazines. Wonderfully illustrated with colour reproductions of many pulp covers. One of the few books on the pulps actually still in print. Strangely enough, I found my copy in the art section of my local bookstore; don't miss picking this up!
James Steranko. "The Steranko History of Comics" (two vol.). Besides having an entire chapter devoted to "The Bloody Pulps", there are tons of material and ideas from golden-age comic-books that are entirely suitable for pulp situations.
Robert Weinberg (with John McKinstry). "The Hero Pulp Index". Thumbnail sketches of every hero of the hero pulp magazines, and a listing of every magazine appearance they had. The list of pulp novel titles is extremely useful for triggering ideas for pulp adventures of one's own. Hard to find, but well worth looking for.
Robert Weinberg (ed.). "The Man Who Was Doc Savage". Chock full of essays about the gadgets, adventures and villains encountered by Doc, and articles about the author of the Doc Savage stories, Lester Dent. This book also includes Dent's pulp formula that he used to write all his Doc Savage stories.
Ken Weiss & Ed Goodgold. "To Be Continued..." is a gold mine for RPG ideas; this book lists nearly every adventure movie serial ever made, and provides photos, a brief plot synopsis, a few of the more daring cliffhangers encountered, and a cast of characters for each.
Comic Book Series and Graphic Novels:
Airboy
Agent 13
Doc Savage
Flash Gordon
Batman
The Green Hornet
Justice Inc.
The Night Prowler
The Phantom
The Phantom Stranger
The Shadow Strikes
Radioactive Man
The Rocketeer
Sandman Mystery Theatre
The Shadow
The Spider
The Spirit
Terry and the Pirates
Tintin
The Twilight Avenger
Valkyrie
Movie Serials Available on Home Video
The Adventures of Captain Marvel
Batman
Batman & Robin
Captain America
Cliffhangers: Adventures from the Thrill Factory.
The Crimson Ghost
Daredevils of the Red Circle
Dick Tracy (various)
Fighting Devil Dogs
Flash Gordon
Hurricane Express
King of the Rocket Men
Manhunt on Mystery Island
The Purple Monster Strikes
Spy Smasher
The Tiger Woman
Undersea Kingdom
Movies, Television & Cartoon Shows
Movies
The Big Sleep
Big Trouble in Little China
The "Bulldog Drummond" series
Buckaroo Banzai
Cast a Deadly Spell
Cat People
The "Charlie Chan" series
Chinatown
/The Two Jakes
Dark Man
Dick Tracy
Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze
Dr. X
Double Indemnity
Dracula
The "Falcon" series
Gilda
High Road to China
His Girl Friday
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Island at the Top of the World
Jake Speed
King Kong
King Solomon's Mines
The Lady Vanishes
Laura
Lost Horizons
The Maltese Falcon
The Mark of Zorro
The Mask of Fu Manchu
The "Mr. Moto" series
The Mummy
Murder, My Sweet
On the Town
The Old Dark House
The Prisoner of Zenda
Raiders of the Lost Ark
/Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
/Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail
The Rocketeer
Scarface
The Shadow
The "Sherlock Holmes" series
The Sting
The "Thin Man" series
The Thirty-Nine Steps
The Untouchables
The Wizard of Oz
Television Series
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
Batman
Bring 'Em Back Alive
The Flash
The Green Hornet
MacGyver
The Prisoner
Tales of the Gold Monkey
The Untouchables
Young Indiana Jones
Cartoon Series
Batman:The Animated Series
Darkwing Duck
Duck Tales
Jonny Quest
Scooby Doo (early seasons)
Tail Spin
Tintin
Role Playing Systems and Supplements
Buck Rogers: High Adventure Cliffhangers RPG (TSR Games).
Call of Cthulhu RPG, 5th Ed. (Chaosium); "Blood Brothers", "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth", "Curse of the Cthonians", "Horror on the Orient Express" are some of the more pulp-useful of the horror-adventure supplements available.
Daredevils RPG (Fantasy Games Unlimited); supplements include "Black Claws", "Menace Beneath the Sea", "Supernatural Adventures" and "Lost Worlds".
Dream Park RPG (R. Talsorium); useful supplements include "Fiendish Agents of Falconberg" and "Race for El Dorado".
Gangbusters, 3rd Ed. (TSR Games)
Gumshoe (Sleuth Publications Ltd.).
Gurps: Cliffhangers (Steve Jackson Games).
Gurps: Lensman (Steve Jackson Games).
Indiana Jones RPG (TSR Games); "Raider's of the Lost Ark", "Temple of Doom", and "Fourth Nail", "Crystal Death", "Golden Goddess" and "Nepal Nightmare" adventure supplements.
James Bond RPG (Victory Games, Inc.); while aimed at a modern setting background, pulp useful supplements for pulp adventures include its "Thrilling Locations", "Villains" and "Q Manual Supplement" sourcebooks.
Justice Inc. RPG (Hero Games); titles include the adventure "Trail of the Gold Spike", and the excellent "Lands of Mystery" Lost Worlds supplement.
Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes (Sleuth Publications Ltd.); supplements include "Stormhaven", "Mugshots 1: Case of the China Clipper".
Top Secret S.I. (TSR Games); "Agent 13 Sourcebook".
Torg (West End Games); excellent pulp supplements include "The Nile Empire", "The Land Below", and "Terra".
Blood Shadows/Indiana Jones (West End Games). Two different RPGs using the same game engine, the first based on the pulp-magic movie "Cast a Deadly Spell" and the second on the eponymous film series. Scheduled for Summer or Christmas release, 1994.
Additional Inspirational Reading
Edgar Rice Burroughs. Nearly everthing, but especially his Tarzan, Barsoom and Pellucidar series.
Lin Carter. "The Nemesis of Evil" and later books in the Prince Zarkon series.
Raymond Chandler. "The Big Sleep", "Farewell My Lovely" and the rest of his hard-boiled detective fiction.
Leslie Charteris. "The Saint" series.
Flint Dille and David Marconi. "The Invisible Empire" and later books in the Agent 13: The Midnight Avenger series.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger stories.
Philip Jose Farmer. "Escape From Loki" is an authorized novel recounting Doc Savage's first meeting with his famous five pals during an escape made together from a P.O.W. camp in World War I. His "Lord of the Trees", "The Mad Goblin" and "A Feast Unknown" grouping of novels is an affectionate and "realistic" homage to the Doc Savage and Tarzan stories. Try also the novella's "Greatheart Silver", "The Adventure of the Peerless Peer", and the short story "After King Kong Fell".
F. W. Dixon. The original Hardy Boys series outlined by Edward Stratemeyer, but ghost-written by Leslie MacFarlane beginning in the late 1920's under the Dixon pseudonym.
Ron Goulart (ed.) "The Hardboiled Dicks." An anthology of great detective yarns of the pulps, written by Lester Dent, Erle Stanley Garnder, and others.
Carolyn Keene. The original Nancy Drew series, outlined and written by Edward Stratemeyer under the Keene pseudonym.
Dashiell Hammet. "The Maltese Falcon", "Red Harvest" and "The Thin Man", and the rest of his books and short stories.
Robert E. Howard. Conan sword and sorcery stories, "The Skull-face Omnibus", "The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan", and "Solomon Kane" series.
R. Rider Haggard. "King Solomon's Mines", "She", and other African adventure novels.
H.P. Lovecraft. The Cthulhu cycle of stories (i.e. "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness", etc.) and other stories of the strange and bizarre.
Rob MacGregor. The new Indiana Jones series of novels, that includes "Indiana Jones & the Peril of Delphi", and "Indiana Jones & the Interior World".
A. Merritt. "The Moon Pool", "Dwellers in the Mirage", "Seven Footsteps to Satan", and other fantasy novels.
C.L. Moore. "Northwest Smith" collection of SF short stories, and various fantasy.
Bryon Preiss, ed. "Weird Heroes" anthology series.
Sax Rohmer. Fu Manchu novels; great for ideas on deathtraps and "Yellow Peril" adventure.
Seabury Quinn. Jules de Grandin scientific occult detective series.
'Sapper'. "Bulldog Drummond" series of a British gentleman adventurer.
E.E. "Doc" Smith. Lensmen and Skylark series; galaxy-spanning gosh-wow space opera.
Weinberg, Dziemianowicz & Greenberg (eds.) "Rivals of Weird Tales". An anthology of weird-fantasy fiction reprinted from pulps other than the granddaddy of them all, "Weird Tales".
Gahan Wilson. "Eddy Deco's Last Caper". A fun spoof that mixes the pulp SF and detective genres, with a big dollop of Art Deco for flavour.
H.G. Wells. "The Time Machine", and other scientific romances.
Excerpts from this article were previously published in The Familiar.
Brian Misiaszek is a long-term pulp fan; he is currently earning an MD in Family Medicine in London, Ontario. You can send email
to Brian at bmisiasz@julian.uwo.ca.