Snippits From My Pulp Hero Game

[Kharis2000]

I ran over the Memorial Day weekend which lead to the following moments that stick out in my mind:

 

The party's toughest character, a former Olympic boxer and big game hunter is bailed out of jail by his wife (amazingly, he was not guilty of the crime of beating the four men to death and stuffing them into a closet he was accused of). Once they get home the following conversation ensues:

 

Wife: "Oh! I almost forgot! One of your friends came to see you today - a polite German man, very tall - he waited a little bit, and had some tea, but had to leave. He wanted me to tell you that he'd try and catch back up with you later."

 

Player: "Did he leave a name?"

 

Wife: "I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget... Oh, here we are. Krieger, Maximilian Krieger."

 

Player: "We're moving."

 

******

 

Another player, who has decide that his character thinks the prototype for Minnie Harper of the Frankenstein Mob is the girl he'd like to date is at a nice Italian restaurant - in a small booth in the corner - having dinner when a local mobster comes in and is gunned down by a NYU college athlete, leading to this gem:

 

Player: "Guns? Shooting? I check to make certain that no one's coming this way!"

 

GM: "No, everything seems to be happening near the front door. The mobster's bodyguards are currently reloading after they apparantly shot some young man in a Letterman's sweater about twenty-five times."

 

Player: "Good - I was worried there for a second!"

 

GM: "There is a sort of muffled sound from across the table, though."

 

Player: "I look that way to make sure Minnie didn't get hit by a stray round."

 

GM: "You don't see any blood, but you can clearly see that one of her eyes is physically larger than the other - and a differant color - and curls of wood are coming up off the table top under her nails. She's making a low growling sound."

 

Player: "That's not good."

 

*****

 

Later in the game, while the same character is escorting a Chinese feng shui practitioner and geomancer to look at another player's room, the geomancer stumbles and drops to one knee while passing the character's room:

 

Geomancer: Points to door. "I cannot fix that!"

 

Player: (knowing that the room is his and that he recieved a dream from the demon his family is responsible for keeping bound up in a temple in French Indochina the night before that had physical side effects on the environment around him as he slept) "No, no, Lady Penelope's room is this way. That's just... another problem."

 

****

 

Finally, the closing moment of the session fell out this way:

 

Basic explaination: One of the players has a tong in China that is going to incredible lengths to kill him for some offense that he doesn't recall giving them. Their latest attempt is to send two of the guardian Foo Lions allied to the tong after him to kill him - the hook being that he hasn't actually *done* what they think he has (not yet anyway). This session, the character had a series of dreams where the character thought he was fox hunting back in England and had lost his dogs. He could hear them, and (all on his own - sometimes players are so accommodating!) started calling to get them to come back. After two or three dreams where they get closer and closer each time, the scenario ended when he was dreaming and finally got them to show up. As he turned to greet them (the dogs having run up out of the woods behind him) it started to rain and he woke up...

 

...to the drip-drip-drip of saliva as a pair of 3 meter long foo lions - one male, one female - stood over his bed, saliva dripping on his forhead from their open mouths.

 

GM: "Christopher remembers seeing the statues everywhere when he was in China, but he'd always thought they were made larger than life, that the Chow-Chow dogs were what they really represented, and that the statues were inflated larger than life for artistic and mythological purposes. It never occurred to you that the Foo Lions were real, and actually looked like that... or that all those statues were, after all, life-sized."