Showing posts with label Pulp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pulp. Show all posts

Friday 16 April 2021

Pulp Hero - Buller the Wonderdog

 A couple of years ago I played a Hollow Earth game set in the 1920's. 

It was a fabulous adventure which leaned heavily on the pulp serial aesthetic of Indiana Jones, Doc Savage Man of Bronze, King of the Rocketmen, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to name just a few.

My character was the intrepid adventuring archaeologist Yorkshire Smith who was never more than a few feet from his faithful Bulldog Buller.  A few weeks before the game began I ordered a set of Bob Murch's 28mm Pulp Figures PHP2 Rugged Personalities which contains 4 iconic pulp adventurers (an Indy, a Doc Savage, a pith helmet wearing British explorer, an American pilot and a bulldog.

Yorkie Smith vs The Doom Turtle
Yorkie Smith vs The Doom Turtle

Whilst I quickly painted my character I just couldn't find the enrgy or inspiration to paint the dog.  I've never been any good at painting short haired animals like horses or dogs which often have their own pieballed patterns breaking up the solid colours of their body.  These are complex and hard to pull off without making the mini look like it's been painted in some sort of innovative camoflague pattern.

This week I managed to crack it with Buller and finally got round to finishing him.

Buller the Wonderdog
Buller the Wonderdog

Now if only I could find where I've stored Yorkie I could reunite him with man's best friend.  

"Buller, go find Yorkie!!"

Tuesday 27 September 2016

Back on the Horse

Well tonight sees me writing my first blog entry since July 2016 and a lot of water has passed under the life bridge.  A new job in the private sector was kicking my arse for a while but I now seem to have it all under control (foolish words?).

A return to DMing

In recent weeks I have also returned to DMing after a long hiatus.

When the opportunity arose (a nice way of saying that a game collapsed and I stepped into the breach) I have to say I was filled with doubt.  Could I still do it?, would I be able to juggle the balls of work/life balance to give time to prep? would I be able to physically last for a 3 hour session after a hectic day at work?

Buckaroo!
Technically not a horse, but this is how I felt about DMing after an 1,800 day detox
  Well I did manage to survive and I can't believe how much I enjoyed it.  Sure it was not my finest hour and I was a little rusty, but I made it through to the other side and I think my players really enjoyed it.

Most likely the two go hand in hand, without the catalyst of an ongoing campaign I did not have the creative juices flowing through my mind in order to create content and to share those ideas with you the RPG community.

Old Skool Shits and Giggles

The scenario I ran was an epilogue to the NSFW module Liberation of the Demon Slayer by +Venger Satanis, and Bryan Winter's decidedly Old Skool scenario Baron Mikrut's Tomb from Pulp Dungeons #5: Uninvited Guests published by Corsair Publishing back in 1997.  The latter posed a few problems when it came to monster stats because it was one of those systemless scenario which used to get published back in the day by Independent Publishers who didn't want to sign up to OGL or pay system royalties.

Pulp Dungeons #5: Uninvited Guests (1997 Corsair Publishing)
by Gary Gygax (it must be old skool)
They always require a bit more DM effort than "Official Modules" but they often have a much bigger payback in terms of not suffering from the usual tropes or baggage which come with trying to fit into an established milleu.   

I'll do a proper synopsis on My Campaign Blog but suffice to say the PCs handled the nuclear winter, mutated wildlife, a demon invasion and a dungeon crawl with aplomb.  Thanks to all those who took part it was a lot of fun.  

So my mind is made up and I will now start to...

Plan My Next Game

The question is where do I set my next game.  The library is fully stocked with plenty of dungeon magazines and some old skool scenarios and I have 3 months to put something together to astound and amaze.  Will I be proactive? Will I labour furiously to craft a campaign so cunning that it will be the talk of my game group for years?

Probably not, but I'm going to do it anyway.    

Monday 3 March 2014

Retroblasting Explain the Evolution of Adventure Heroes

I'm a big fan of the Adventure Hero / Pulp genre of 80s films like Indiana Jones, Goonies and even Romancing the Stone and I've always know that their origins lay in the Saturday matinee serials of the 20s and 30s.

But for those of you who love the genre and want to know more, here's an interesting video taken at Pensacon 2014 where the Retroblasting team (Melinda Moch and Michael French) explain the history and influences behind them.


I'm going to look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in a different light now. 

Monday 27 May 2013

Fiasco: The Sins of Anarchy's Sons

On Friday night I ran a FIASCO using the Sins of Anarchy's Sons playset created by Chris Groff and Rob Wakefield which is loosely based on the hit FX TV Show, Sons of Anarchy.  If you've not seen the show it's follows the exploits of an outlaw motorcycle club (the Sons of Anarchy MC) trying to keep their powderkeg of criminal activity from blowing up in their faces.

I've run FIASCO a couple of times before with varying degrees of success and decided to change things up for this session.
FIASCO by Bully Pulpit Games

This time I decided to be the "Director"


FIASCO is cinematic in concept and I've found that players can often struggle with closing a scene because they try to resolve all of the loose ends right there and then.  I've put this down to in part to their lack of experience with FIASCO but mostly because they all want to get in on the action and develop their own stories.  The role of the director is to look at the whole picture and shout "CUT!" when he spots a great cliff hanger, one liner or that the players are drifting from one scene into something else. 

As director I also get to play any NPCs which get created and through them drive the story in interesting ways, primarily to stop the players from having meatshields, but also to create conflict.

My players are very familiar with other RPGs which contain concepts of self preservation, character progression and achieving goals collaboratively.  FIASCO is about going to hell in a handbasket in the most messed up way possible and this is difficult for players to reconcile.  It really only works, If they manage to put away any silly notions that they're going to come out of this alive and start to selfishly concentrate on achieving their own NEEDS.

How it went

Here's the setup for friday's game (with TILTS)

Friday Night's Sins of Anarchy's Sons Setup (Click image to enlarge)
Mel Carver's high school friend Misty turns up at the Junkyard (which doubles as the MC's Clubhouse) claiming to be on the run from a Federal Taskforce Agent (Mario Marquez) who used her as an informant against the Colombian Cartel.  She wants the MC to kill the fed and destroy his list of informants and is willing to pay the club a lot of money in return.

Flashback to a couple of months ago when Spanner, Dice, Blanco and Bull are dismantling a stolen car that Bull and Blanco acquired.  Inside the door pockets of the Red Ford Taurus are 8 kilos of coke.  A heated debate ensues as to where they got the car from and how they're gonna turn the uncut coke into a huge amount of cash.

Flash forward to Blanco and Bull burying a teenage meth chef in the desert after having just shut down his laboratory.  His wallet has fallen on the ground and they discover he's Ernesto Marquez.

Bull and Blanco have set up a meet with Agent Marquez to buy the list of informants from him.  Marquez is receptive to this as he is trying to rebuild his life after his wife kicked him out, blaming him for the disappearance of their son Ernesto.  During the exchange muffled cries can be heard coming from the trunk of the agent's SUV.  For some unexplained reason a very pissed off Mel is being held captive in the trunk.  She manages to get free and stabs Marquez in the groin with a tyre iron, Bull and Blanco finish him off by shooting him in the head and they take his car and body to the Junkyard.

At the Junkyard the MC agree to meet with the colombians and give them Marquez's head as a gesture of good faith.  The rest of him gets put in a bath tub full of battery acid... (nice).  They also decide that Misty is too nice to hand over to the Cartel (particularly as she was very grateful to Arnie) who will end up killing her for being a narc and so Dice doctors the list of informants and removes her name.

Flashback to Puff and teenage Meth chef Ernesto in bed at Puff's house.  Bull calls asking Puff to come to the clubhouse to discuss how they're going to cut 8 kilos of coke and distribute it.  With hindsight this scene doesn't quite work in the timeline (as Ernesto should be dead) but nobody noticed at the time.

The MC members meet with the Colombian Cartel's representative General Garcia who is grateful to the MC for disposing of Agent Marquez.  He then asks them to help locate the people who stole his 8 kilos of coke for which he will pay them $250K.  As he departs in his Humvee he tells them that he will contact them in two weeks, if they haven't found the thieves he will kill them all.

Back at the clubhouse Puff, who still carries a torch for Bull, has just observed him getting freaky with Misty and so shoots her in the head from outside his window.  Bull throws the Misty onto the floor, grabs his gun and leaps through the window.  The back of the clubhouse is littered with junk and he ends up cutting his foot on something and giving up the chase.  Dice goes to look around outside and finds Puff's monagrammed derringer outside Bull's window.

Arnie calls a chapel meeting to decide what to do about the mexicans and Bull and Blanco decide that two of them have to be given up to the Cartel and it isn't going to be them.  Bull punches Arnie who then pulls his gun.  Dice tries to ring his FBI contact and relay the whole confrontation to him but in the fracas his phone is knocked from his hand and spins out onto the chapel tabel.  Everyone's eyes are transfixed by the phone as a voice crackles "Hello... This is Agent Johnson".  Arnie shoots Dice through the head.

Meanwhile Mel has taken Agent Marquez's SUV out of the junkyard to dispose of it when she is followed by a rival gang of mexican bikers intent on killing the taskforce agent for some reason.  She runs one of them off the road but the others open fire on the SUV causing her to veer into oncoming traffic and getting hit by a semi-trailer.  The SUV spins off the road and down an embankment.  Barely alive she is beginning to think about how to get herself out of the crumpled vehicle when the bikers turn up to finish the job.

Unfortunately we ran out of time to complete all the scenes, but as there were only white dice left in the pool everyone just took one.

Almost everyone survived the Aftermath but in typical FIASCO fashion most were "dead on the inside"  The final scene was Puff trying to hitch a ride down a lonesome desert highway with her life in tatters.

What I'll do differently next time


Character Generation - We usually manage to get about 3 hours of actual gaming done on a Friday night, character generation (in my experience) normally takes a group of 5 players (or 6 in this games case) about 50-60 minutes of dice rolling consulting charts and mulling options.  This leaves about 60 minutes for each act which means it's quite a push to get round the table four times and allocate all of a players dice.

I put this delay partly down to my players coming to the table burdened with other RPG experience, and partly the "picking" aspect of the games character gen, so next time I'm just going to give them the option of either rolling two dice (finding the result and then choosing which relationship card to write it on) or choosing one of the available pregenenerated setups.  I hope that this way we can reduce the prep time and get down to the enjoying the mayhem.

Roles with Conflict Built In - Even using all the presets, the players managed to engineer characters who all had some connection with the MC and were not in roles of direct conflict, for example no-one was playing a cop or other town luminary charged with shutting the club down.  This may have been a direct result of the playset's design and to be fair we didn't really need it to create a good enough game, but I felt it didn't reflect the feel of the show where the MC are beset on all sides by authority figures trying to crush them.  Hopefully future games (with different playsets) will result in PCs with roles which already have the conflict built in to them.

Did They Enjoy it? 


Only two of the players had any experience with FIASCO, and about half were familiar with the TV Show.  Despite this, everyone said that they'd had a good time, it was refreshing to play something totally different and would definitely play again.  It was by far the best FIASCO I've run so far and I can reccomend the playset to those gamers (and fans of the show) wanting to recreate their own little version of Charming.


Tuesday 17 May 2011

MOVIEWATCH: The Adventures of Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn

Probably the most eagerly awaited movie of the year (well in my house anyway!!), only 7 more months to wait...

Thursday 6 January 2011

Mars Attacks! Bubblegum Cards on Flickr

Call me crazy but I do love a bit of pulp Sci-Fi every now and then, here's a Flickr set of the complete Mars Attacks! bubblegum cards.
36a

Mars Attacks Bubblegum Cards

Most of you will know that these cards were the original inspiration for Tim Burton's 1996 movie of the same name, But

I've never seen the whole collection before or seen the card backs either so set the slideshow to play, sit back and enjoy a bit of nostalgia.