What type of Pulp Hero campaign are you planning to run?

[ArmlessTigerMan]

Tell us about that Pulp Hero campaign you are running, or plan to run (or play in) when the Pulp Hero book is released!

[JmOz]

Mix Horrors from beyond with pulp style mystery men, and a jungle lord or two would be fun for me...

[Sketchpad]

The best way to explain my campaign is to take the space outta Star Wars and mix with Tales of the Gold Monkey, Indiana Jones, the feel of Tailspin and an environment akin to Crimson Skies :D

[AmadanNaBriona]

I'm quite fond of the Pulp Sci-fi Lost Worlds style game myself, ala REH's Barsoom series.
Radium cannons! Tharks! Beautiful red skinned women who don't wear anything but jewlery and a harness to show off their various medallions!

wait... what was I talking about?
I got distracted.
HI!

[BlackSword]

Its not obvious, but also not listed (and if the players in Epic City are reading, they can stop now ;).




Superhero time travel, except that the time traveling menace has erased heroes from the world. So they are going back in time as normals, for a few adventures, and then regain their power and back to Silver-Age land. Just using it as an excuse to mix genres. ;)

[Michael Hopcroft]

I'm thinking of running a heavily-aerial campaign in the style of the Miyazaki classics Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso, possibly set in a Miyazaki Pseudo-Europe so I can find more complex adversaries than Communists and Nazis.

I want to run a campaign that combines pulpish sensibilities with modern concepts on the nature of good, of evil, of what heroism means and of how reasonable people can be drvien to do extreme and terrible things.

[st barbara]

Of course it depends a bit on what sort of characters the players create but I would like to run a campaign that was a combination of Globe spanning Action and Weird Menace with the players acting as a team to investigate weird happenings and to thwart the schemes of criminal masterminds !

[MisterBaldy]

If I do run anything for the Pulp Hero Genre...it'll probably by the Crime/Mystery flavor. Not in the vein of characters like The Shadow, but more like the Mike Hammer or Sam Spade sort of "gritty" detective story.

As an alternate sort of idea...looking at the Sky Captain, Crimson Skies...or even The Rocketeer sort of daring air-based stories.

Heck, TailSpin also holds some merit. Animal characters? :think:

[FenrisUlf]

Woyld probably be a combo of Weird Adventure and Heroic Crime-Busters. Sort of a 'sequel' G-8, say, with some characetrs dealing with fallout from old WW1 villain plots.

That, or just rip off a couple of ideas I once toyed with for GURPS (Set-
worshiping Nazi Occultists VS. Atlantean Survivors VS. Our Heroes). Mainly be an excuse to send them all over the planet, mess with evil conspiracies wielding mind-numbing powers, and save humanity from the forces of darkness. Just your same old, same old, for a pulp hero. ;)

[Flames]

I'm partial to letting players take unusual talents and even spells from the other Hero System books (excluding Champions, since it won't be superheroes, per se), since players love being able to do that.

I haven't run a roleplaying game in about nine years, and haven't run a Hero System game since about 1992, so wish me luck, folks, as I'll be running for a bunch of experienced players who will be expecting some real fireworks.

Total side note... a full-color drawing of Howler just popped up on the left side of my screen. I'll be back in about four minutes (print print print... dammit, out of ink. Never mind).

[BigJackBrass]

I'll be running a sort of Bogart movie with autogyros... lots of autogyros. It's likely to spread from there to introduce gradually more weird elements, including masked vigilantes, but I like to start small and give the players a grounding in reality.

The autogyros are not negotiable, however.

[James Gillen]

I'd center it around a famous scientist, his two teenage sons, and their combat-happy bodyguard.

JG

[Mentor]

Our campaign is called "New Century". It is a globe trotting adventure with a mix of all of the aforementioned elements, but takes place a bit earlier than the typical pulp fare. The year is 1905, and the Victorian Age meets the machine age. Uncharted wilderness vies with the bustling treets of London, New York, Cairo, or Calcutta for danger and profit. Science and magic both complete and complement one another.

[The Monster]

"Voyages of the Airship Archangel"
It's actually been running for several years now (at a couple sessions per year). PCs are the crew of a public/private-produced airship (design based on the Akron/Macon; after reading Farmer's bio of Doc Savage, it was obvious that Savage was the shadowy "Mr. A" behind the whole scheme) which travels the world to "advance the cause of civilization and science." (Kind of like original Star Trek, with the captain, etc. getting into various trouble in different places, and the ship itself only occasionally being a key player.) The adventures have been everything from weird scince at the north pole, to an early party of invaders from Mars (War of the Worlds tripods), to a big series dealing with an occult warlord in southwest China (with hopping vampires and other stuff stolen from Feng Shui).
After the China warlord series, I was about ready to shut down the campaign for lack of good ideas. A discussion about this with the players sparked what now seems bloody obvious - Delta Green: cthulhu mythos, starting with the Nazis and into modern times (A la X-Files). It's 1936 in the campaign, and the ship is overflying the Berlin Olympics, and is about to discover a whole series of occult Nazi plots. Indiana Jones will probably put in a cameo along the line...

[CSgeekHero]

I voted for Action/Adventure because it fit best.

Actually, I'll be torn between getting together an Indiana Jones type deal or something along the lines of National Treasure. I think a blend of Pulp flavor with DC's modern trappings might be lots of fun.

[Alistair]

Two Fisted Adventures with Our Heroes whizzing around in 1935 in autogiros, airships, flying boats, sports cars and the Orient Express. (You can never have enough exotic forms of transport)

Cheers

Alistair

[Super Squirrel]

You can already see the thread where I'm slowly designing the campaign. :)

[Troll]

Masked Mystery Women, most of my players are female, mixed with evil cults, and a possible trip to Yuggoth :Pluto: thrown in.

[st barbara]

Two Fisted Adventures with Our Heroes whizzing around in 1935 in autogiros, airships, flying boats, sports cars and the Orient Express. (You can never have enough exotic forms of transport)

Cheers

Alistair Agreed. Don't forget an adventure involving a luxury liner while you are at it !

[st barbara]

Oh and P S . Welcome to the boards "Alistair". Please let us (or at least me) know how your campaign goes !

[Jkeown]

Three Words:

Antarctic Space Nazis.

Need I say more?

[FenrisUlf]

Three Words:

Antarctic Space Nazis.

Need I say more?

Ah, another Ken Hite fan.

Just one point: wouldn't you have to wait until after the Pulp era as such to use them? After all, the first 'real' accounts of the Antarctic Space Nazis didn't start until the late 50's, or so I remember.

PS -- If you want tons of nutty Nazi lore, you can't go wrong getting a copy of GURPS Weird War II. Everything from Nazi flying saucers to occult SS expeditions to the Atlantean Hollow Earth!

[Mister E]

I'm trying to work out a Fantasy/Star/Pulp-esque campaign, with heavy Flash Gordon inspirations. It might sound funny, but I'm having a hard time figuring our how realistic I want the sci-fi elements to be. The scope of the campaign is another major issue: Do I go with a "Moons of Mungo/Ruler of the Universe" kind of theme... or shoot more for the "ERB Barsoom/Planetary Adventure" setting... or both... or what? It's difficult making a choice so that I can start working on the details. It's fun, though. :doi:

[Moidalyza]

My New Campaign is starting in Pre WWII America, Start the heroes off on spy stuff and homefront sabotage before full blown War. The PC's will be a comando type Super group fighing the Nazi's and their super science wonder weapons and their Mysterious Occultists.

Should be a hoot.

[st barbara]

To "Mister E" What about a "brilliant Earth scientists develop space travel and explore the universe" type campaign ala E E "Doc" Smith or John W Campbell ? Try reading Smith's "Skylark" series for inspiration or Campbell's "Arcot, Morey & Wade" trilogy ("The Black Star Passes", "Islands of Space", "Invaders From The Infinite" ).

[st barbara]

To "Moidalyza" (Murderliza ?) What character types have your P C's created for your campaign ?

[PhantomNarrator]

This is an excerpt from the Guide to Terra Omega, a primer I give to player's who join the campaign. My apologies if it's too long.

GENERAL OVERVIEW

“The world is a beautiful place, and worth fighting for.”
--Ernest Hemingway

Welcome to Omega City – A Pulp Hero role-playing campaign using the 5th edition of the Hero System, where madmen, monsters and masked adventurers fight secret battles across the globe and beyond for the destiny of the future! Terra Omega, the world of Omega City, is an alternate 1930’s of retro-futuristic Pulp-Noir drama and adventure, where the stories told in the lurid magazines of the day are inspired by real events, and the inventions of Tesla's miraculous genius are radically transforming everyday life. It is a world of danger, excitement and mystery, a world of larger-than-life heroes and flamboyant villains, of two-fisted action, spine-tingling suspense and wide-eyed wonder.

On Terra Omega, the earthquake that struck San Francisco in 1906 was actually caused by an arch-criminal; the resulting "Big One" was so severe it severed the peninsula from the mainland, forming a new island at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay. This terrible example of science gone awry inspired an ambitious and newly-rich young genius named Orson Cole, with help from Nikola Tesla and a group of silent partners known as the Paragon Club, to build a new city from the ashes of the old. It was to be a city unlike any ever seen before; a community based on science, reason and progress that would serve as a model for the new century – Omega City, the Ultimate Metropolis!

Mile-high towers of silver, copper and gold hue soar majestically over public greens and broad avenues garlanded with neon and crisscrossed by cable cars, skyways and escalators. The skies are filled with gyrocopters, aeroplanes, and dirigibles of every description and color. In this city, pneumatic tubes connect almost every building, city ordinances are planned according to scientific principles, and the night sky glows with the power of the Tesla Tower broadcaster. Everywhere there are signs of innovation, convenience and modernity . . .

But behind it’s chromed, futuristic façade, Omega City struggles with the same intractable problems that plague other large urban areas – chronic poverty, endemic corruption, racial bigotry, entrenched crime and class warfare. What’s more, Technopia has proven elusive – Omega City’s complicated infrastructure is prone to idiosyncratic malfunctions, and the constant repairs and upgrades seem to only multiply the number of glitches. Living in the "Metropolis of Tomorrow" is certainly exciting, but it’s not always what it’s cracked up to be.

Like most of the world after the Great War, Omega City was caught up in the frantic decadence of the Roaring Twenties, experiencing a long boom of growth. During good times no one noticed that organized crime and social injustice were spinning out of control as the heroes of the "Electric Age" died off or retired following the Palmer Acts of 1919. Without them, widespread corruption and hidden menaces went unchecked and now threaten to tear Omega City apart. For many ordinary people, especially for the waves of economic refugees that flood into the city every day, a life of crime is the only way to avoid the breadlines. The once glittering towers of downtown now cast long shadows over slums dubbed "Hoovertowns" that have sprung up around them like weeds, and civic leaders seem unable or unwilling to fight the evil that has taken root there.

This campaign starts in January of 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl grips the Midwest, soup kitchen lines are getting longer, Prohibition is about to end and the New Deal is set to begin. Around the world authoritarianism is on the rise, while in America a spirit of desperation and revolution is in the air. From its hill mansions and luxury towers, to its benighted shantytowns and slums, Omega City simmers in a dangerous cesspool of violence and vice. More than ever, the people cry out for heroes.

[walker]

Most of our adventures try for the Doc Savage tone (most of those adventures either come from the old Cliffhangers game, or I write them myself). However, I have a ton of adventures from the various Indiana Jones games (both West End and TSR), so that makes up a big chunk of what we do. Can't wait for Pulp Hero to get underway so we can get some new adventures to download. Too bad HERO won't be making them available in hardcopy format. That's how I prefer 'em.

[Markdoc]

I'm going for an earlier period (Late Victorian) to restrict access to technology somewhat (I don't want characters flitting hither and yon in flying machines to start with or loading up on automatic weapons), but it'll be pulpish none the less.

I plan to start with the standard "two fisted adventures" style - it'll segue into "two fisted lands of mystery adventures" develop into "weird two fisted lands of mystery adventures" as the campaign develops and - if all goes to plan - climax in "weird internatinal conspiracy two fisted lands of mystery adventures" :D

Oh - and the game is "Colonel Carruther's Colonial Company"

cheers, Mark

[Moidalyza]

To "Moidalyza" (Murderliza ?) What character types have your P C's created for your campaign ?

So far we have:
American Eagle: Martial artist
Red, White, and Blue Jay: Side kick with Native american shamanistic gimicks

Avatrix: Rocketeer type

Jane Bond: Widowed British Spy, Mother of Guess who? :>

Golem: Jewish Brick using the legendary Golem imagery

And an Unamed Young Mystical master Apprentice, who is sent out to thwart Mystical threats, Befor he takes his Vow of non interferance.

One or 2 more players may be getting involved

I still have a year of Prep time as My Hackmaster Campaign runs its course.

[Theron]

A campaign is a bit of a reach for me at the moment (not to mention, with Jess Nevins in my gaming group, a bit daunting to consider). What I am planning is a one-shot for a gamers' gathering inspired by Buckaroo Banzai and a host of New Wave music videos.

Mainly because I want to have a super weapon called the "Anything Box".

[pinecone]

I'm thinking Crime/mystery blended with weird menaces...now Thats a good grape juice!