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What are your favourite Pulp cities?


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When your characters aren't globe-trotting, what cities are "home"? Where do you set your crime-fighting adventures?

 

Real world ones like New York?

Ficticious ones? (Hudson City?)

Other?

 

Feel free to rave on at length about cities in your pulp games. Golden Age Champions games, too, if you feel like it.

 

One I've been looking at recently is "Lakefront City" from the old TSR Gangbusters game. Hudson City is another possibility. Pinching bits from both seems even more likely...

 

Ghostbusters II was on TV here again recently. That reminded me of Beach's Pneumatic Subway, which must surely have some Pulp potential.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

CHICAGO

Rich pulp-era history, big city, big lake, organized crime, corrupt goverment, corrupt cops, Capone, Untouchables, St. Valentine's day massacre, big newspapers, had big early radio stations, universities, many rich people....

 

This makes a great city for Pulp!!!

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

San Francisco -- excellent blending of Old West, New Era and with a Chinatown!

 

New Orleans (I've been printing off a copy of the Federal Writers' Project Guide to New Orleans [a pdf from Internet Archive] -- Good Stuff)

 

Show me the link!!

[/Jerry McGuire]

 

I concur. My Pulp Game is currently based in SF. I have to admit, it's more of a historical Dark Champions game than what most consider Pulp, but it's edging in that direction.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

Well "home" for "The Adventurers' Club" is New York but so far they have been to an undiscovered Pacific Island somewhere near Java,Haiti and New Orleans,London, and Rome. Plus two "home" adventures one that took place in (and underneath) New York's Chinatown and another that sent them around various parts of the city and ended in the Docks area for the final showdown. They haven't been to The Far East yet, bit I think that we have an upcoming scenario which will fix that deficiency.:eg:

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

LONDON

Muesums, rich people, Scotland Yard, UK goverment offices, very busy seaport, very busy airport.

 

Oh yeah! As a Brit, I agree whole heartedly. But as I live just outside Bangkok I have a lot of settings in Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong. It gives me the whole Opium Warlords / Thuggee Cult / Fu Manchu connection and allows hidden or forgotten south sea islands as well as elephants. You can't have a really good two fisted fight unless it's on the back of a berzerk elephant rampaging through a fog enshrouded, portside ghetto shanty town filled with sooth sayers, beggers and gun runners...

 

Makes me homesick to think about it.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

Cairo -- exotic tombs and pyramids' date=' secret societies, ancient history, and tons of historical material available.[/quote']

 

 

Love Cairo. Pick up "the Cairo guidebook" for Call of Cthulhu. Tons of information and story seeds on 1920s Cairo. They players love having an authentic seeming area with the city fleshed out. " I'm feeling like being pampered. Lets stay at Sheppards. " for example.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

Santa Carla, CA is my city of choice. It's the name of the town in the film The Lost Boys, the Murder Capital of the World.

 

I've used this city repeatedly in various modern-day campaigns. I like to think of it as Buffy's "Sunnydale" only much bigger. A true big city rather than a (relatively) small town. I like using Santa Carla because it's fictional and thus rules-lawyering munchkins can't catch me out on details of geography or law the way they can with real life cities.

 

Besides, it's just such a cool place.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

Santa Carla' date=' CA[/b'] is my city of choice. It's the name of the town in the film The Lost Boys, the Murder Capital of the World.

 

Good call! Repped!

 

I'm very seriously considering using a fictional city, since the game I have settled on sits right on the border of Pulp and Golden Age Champions. Essentially, the PCs will be Champions characters, and everyone else will be Pulp.

 

Ideally I would have each PC in a different fictional city, but that might be a bit of a strain!

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

Gotta be NYC. With huge areas devoted to Chinatown, Little Italy, etc., hundreds of art deco-filled nightclubs and museums, and the most active ports/airfields for international travel in the country, my group has always found Manhattan to be a great base of operations. And if you've ever been there, you know the buzz it gives off. Feels like a pulp adventure could start up at any time. Plus, it's the home of Doc Savage. If it's good enough for Doc, it's certainly good enough for us.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

Where can I find information for Hudson City in the Pulp era?

 

Basically, you use the Dark Champions book, and back date it. There are some brief notes in the book itself. Otherwise, you shrink it a bit (eliminating suburbs that have grown up since the 30s), remove anachronisms, and, well, use it as is. Of course if you also want to use it "in the present" you will need to change the name of the mayor and so on.

 

Removing the anachronisms takes a bit of work, but isn't too hard.

 

I've looking at Vibora Bay with the same idea in mind. The interesting thing about it is how small it was during the Pulp era.

 

I'm currently planning a late-30's Golden Age Champions game, and one of the things I am considering is having each PC based in a separate fictional city. Unfortunately it means having to actually collect or create up to four or five fictional cities...

 

There is, of course, no difference between a "Pulp city" and a "Golden Age city", except that the latter is usually a few years later.

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Re: What are your favourite Pulp cities?

 

I'm not running a game (and Hoohoo knows when if ever I'd run one) but I'd deeply appreciate knowing about Pulp Age Seattle (I've got info on Victorian/Edwardian/1910's Seattle). Also Pulp Age Santa Barbara CA and environs---the ritzy-rich Los-Angelinos (and the "noovo rish" entertainment moguls & stars) tended to make their homes "north" up the coast, and there are (or were in the 1980s) homes around Santa Barbara that were built by "talent" in the Pulp Era; if someone wants to run a "gliterrati"-oriented campaign, Santa Blah-blah is *the* place for pulpster.

 

Sorry I know almost nothing. I guess this is more a "help me" than a "this is what I do".

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