Odd Thought: Pulp meets Pulp Fantasy

[AdamLeisemann]

Here's a thought I've been mulling over:

In the 1930s, the "Pulp Era," there was the origins of Sword & Sorcery fantasy, with heroes like Conan, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn (among others)

Also during that time, and in the decade before, you've had lots of adventure stories and crime stories as well.

So it occurs to me that by combining Howard's contemporary era with the fantasy of his tales, there seems to be a couple of possibilities...

1: Globe-Trotting "heroes" traversing the world and dealing with Derk Sorcery. An example might be a group of Archeologists fending off ancient demopnic evils and trying to prevent the horrors of the past from entering the modern world, sometimes having to get blood-soaked in the process.

2: Thompsons and Sorcery. What if the Alcohol trade during the Prohibition era was an attempt to fund research into the forbidden? Imagine Elliot Ness and the Untouchables having to deal with Demons as well as Capone...

Just a thought of mine. Have you any thoughts on the concept of Pulp Contemporary Fantasy?

[Captain Obvious]

http://www.baen.com/library/0671876627/0671876627.htm

[Matt the Bruins]

Oooh! Cast a Deadly Spell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_a_Deadly_Spell)! I approve. :thumbup:

[bubba smith]

Here's a thought I've been mulling over:

In the 1930s, the "Pulp Era," there was the origins of Sword & Sorcery fantasy, with heroes like Conan, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn (among others)

Also during that time, and in the decade before, you've had lots of adventure stories and crime stories as well.

So it occurs to me that by combining Howard's contemporary era with the fantasy of his tales, there seems to be a couple of possibilities...

1: Globe-Trotting "heroes" traversing the world and dealing with Derk Sorcery. An example might be a group of Archeologists fending off ancient demopnic evils and trying to prevent the horrors of the past from entering the modern world, sometimes having to get blood-soaked in the process.

2: Thompsons and Sorcery. What if the Alcohol trade during the Prohibition era was an attempt to fund research into the forbidden? Imagine Elliot Ness and the Untouchables having to deal with Demons as well as Capone...

Just a thought of mine. Have you any thoughts on the concept of Pulp Contemporary Fantasy?
sounds good to me

[Susano]

This sort of sounds like a less-dark CoC game. Or... Pulp-era Shadowrun.

[AdamLeisemann]

This sort of sounds like a less-dark CoC game. Or... Pulp-era Shadowrun.

I was thinking more like Pulp Era Conan. Taking the horror and supernatural elements of Robert E. Howard's stories and putting them into the Pulp Era itself (or, alternately, creating a full-fledged fantasy world that is currently in what we'd see as the Pulp Era, with conventions from Hoeward's and Leiber's writing.)

[Markdoc]

I've done the reverse. RE Howard wrote some nifty pulp stories collected in Son of the White Wolf and Swords of Sharazhar. They've been reissued, but used to be quite hard to find - a fact I exploited by shamelessly ripping them off for my FH game, aware that my players had likely never even heard of them :D

The two-fisted, ripping adventure style of those stories translates very well to the kind of FH game I like to run, and translating "fierce Afghani warriors with rifles and khindjals" to "fierce mountain tribal warriors with bows and khindjals" was easy enough :D

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Del Rey will be releasing a collection of REH horror stores in the fall. I hope some additional collections to follow.