Pulp Adventure Ideas (7 Deadly Wonders and 1491)

[proditor]

Just finished reading both books and they are two very different books indeed. One is by the newly emerging master of action books, Matthew Reilly. The guy writes action movies that happen to be in book form. Intruiging and ridiculous, they are still a ton of fun. The other is a very serious attempt to combine all of the latest data gathered by archeologists in North, Central and South America to get a true idea of what the Americas looked like before the Europeans arrived. I can't recommend this one highly enough. Anyway, on to the basic ideas in these suckers:

 

*Starred Review* Some readers might look at Reilly's new novel as a calculated attempt to cash in on the success of The Da Vinci Code and its ilk. Someone with a less-cynical spirit will see it as a wildly fast-paced, hugely entertaining caper novel. The story is perfect for the big screen, assuming certain logistical and plausibility problems can be solved: a small international team of commandos, plus a scientist and a 10-year-old girl, dash around the world in a retrofitted Boeing 747. Their objective: to navigate through ancient traps set by an Egyptian architect and find the far-flung, long-lost Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and, with them, the seven pieces of the golden capstone of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Their competitors: large, heavily armed contingents from the U.S. And Europe. At stake: the fate of the world. Many thriller writers are accused of producing first-draft screenplays that pretend to be novels. Reilly, on the other hand, writes movies in book form: his storytelling is almost purely visual, made up of scenes that leap off the page and project themselves on the screen in the reader's mind. Combine that with likably larger-than-life characters and an engaging, no-frills prose style, and you have a novel that grabs readers by the hand and pulls them along until they're out of breath. It is impossible (even for hard-core cynics) not to love this big, boisterous, action-filled adventure. David Pitt

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

 

Amazon.com

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley

 

Both books should provide a GM with tons of ideas for ongoing adventures in the Indiana Jones style and they both flow fairly well. While one is ridiculous and the other is an earnest attempt at historical discovery, I think they both have something to offer a good pulp GM.

[Rathicus]

Re: Pulp Adventure Ideas (7 Deadly Wonders and 1491)

 

I'll be sure to check those out.

[Cominius]

Re: Pulp Adventure Ideas (7 Deadly Wonders and 1491)

 

I just recently finished reading 1491 myself, and I second Proditor's suggestion it is an enjoyable read and a very good source of inspiration for a GM. I have to admit my first thoughts were to use the information in a fantasy game, but I can see how it would be equally useful for a pulp game.

 

I’ll have to check out the other book, it sounds quite interesting.