Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

[BoneDaddy]

I've had an idea, and I'm considering giving it a go, maybe over at http://www.LostCoastGaming.com where many fine text based games may be found.

 

What if the Spanish Flue epidemic from 1918 to 1920 had instead been a zombie plague? I know that takes it right out of most pulps, but that's why I labeled it pulp-esque.

 

I was thinking of putting the PC's on the rapidly disintegrating French trenches, and watching to see what happens next.

 

What happens next?

 

Specifically, if instead of 50 to 100 million dead world wide in a two year timespan, what if there were 50 -100 million undead in that timespan? Would the war have continued? Would the Prussians and the French and the English, et al, have wised up and fought the dead instead of the living?

 

My answers are 1) All hell breaks loose. 2) No. 3) Yes.

 

Next, whom are our heroes? Heroic level PCs drawn from Europe's powers? Earth's Mightiest Steam/Mystic/Magical heroes?

 

For these answers, and the other obvious considerations I have missed thus far, I turn to you, gentle readers, for help.

 

Thanks!

[OddHat]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

Actually, I remember one Pulp series staring (I think) The Spider, where America is conquered, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. War of the Worlds also had massive death and destruction, and well pre-dates the period.

 

So, get down with your funky Zombie self.

 

As to heroes, an inventor with an Electric Man, a super-strong French Foreign Legionnaire from Colorado, a woman who turns invisible when she drinks alcohol, and similar types were all (iirc) available and involved in the war at one time or another in that period.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

Sounds cool. I wanna play.

 

If you wanted to keep it a little more pulpy (or even if you don't, but think it might be a good creative exercise), it might also be worth thinking about replacing the Spanish Flu with a selective zombie plague. Maybe for most people who get the disease it's "just" a nasty brand of influenza. But for some (maybe 1 in 100), it results in zombification.

 

This would put a slightly different spin on it. It would still be horrific (500,000 to a million undead is nothing to sneeze at), but it would be just uncommon enough (within the larger death toll of the war and the flu) that people determined to stay in denial might believe it was all just gruesome wartime folklore. Maybe the powers that be hope the PCs can find the cause and put a stop to it before the truth becomes common knowledge, and the aforementioned hell breaks loose.

 

This might give it a more shadowy feel, as the PCs not only have to fight zombies, they also have to do it fairly quietly, and occasionally confront people who don't know or don't believe what's really going on. (I'm not trying to urge you to change the campaign idea... just thinking that looking at it from a different angle might give you some useful ideas. )

[FireTiger]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

The "bloody pulps" label was not unearned.

 

As OddHat mentioned, some of the bodycounts in the pulps were quite high.

 

(As an aside, perhaps that was the "Purple Invasion" series from the Operator 5 novels? The ones with the master villain being Emperor Rudolph.)

 

Zombies, neanderthals, instant-lepers, pretty-much anything and everything was used when the days of the dime novel shifted into the pulps.

 

It sounds like a good plot, with the heroes trying to find the answer before they wind-up like the guy in I Am Legend (the story, rather than the film).

[BoneDaddy]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

Sounds cool. I wanna play.

 

If you wanted to keep it a little more pulpy (or even if you don't, but think it might be a good creative exercise), it might also be worth thinking about replacing the Spanish Flu with a selective zombie plague. Maybe for most people who get the disease it's "just" a nasty brand of influenza. But for some (maybe 1 in 100), it results in zombification.

 

This would put a slightly different spin on it. It would still be horrific (500,000 to a million undead is nothing to sneeze at), but it would be just uncommon enough (within the larger death toll of the war and the flu) that people determined to stay in denial might believe it was all just gruesome wartime folklore. Maybe the powers that be hope the PCs can find the cause and put a stop to it before the truth becomes common knowledge, and the aforementioned hell breaks loose.

 

This might give it a more shadowy feel, as the PCs not only have to fight zombies, they also have to do it fairly quietly, and occasionally confront people who don't know or don't believe what's really going on. (I'm not trying to urge you to change the campaign idea... just thinking that looking at it from a different angle might give you some useful ideas. )

 

Since I've gotten you as far as "I wanna play" let me ask you some further questions. What power level of hero would you be interested in?

150 points - An awfully talented Tommy, a Hot French Spy, a Cavalryman for the Kaiser

200 points - Richthoffen, Rickenbacker, York, Noel Chavasse, Adrian Carton de Wiart (Who got shot in the FACE and kept fighting in Somaliland), etc. Here, I refer more to the legend that these men and women became rather than who they actually were.

250-350 points - Steampunk gadgeteers, sorcerers, psychics, and the "uniquely gifted." The field is pretty open in this regard, although no mutants, aliens, or AIs would be appropriate.

 

The game would have to be crafted according to the level of the heroes, obviously - getting from the trenches at Ypres to sanctuary at Mt.S.Michel would be really hard at 150 points, and really easy at 350.

 

Whaddya think?

[OddHat]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

Since I've gotten you as far as "I wanna play" let me ask you some further questions. What power level of hero would you be interested in?

150 points - An awfully talented Tommy, a Hot French Spy, a Cavalryman for the Kaiser

200 points - Richthoffen, Rickenbacker, York, Noel Chavasse, Adrian Carton de Wiart (Who got shot in the FACE and kept fighting in Somaliland), etc. Here, I refer more to the legend that these men and women became rather than who they actually were.

250-350 points - Steampunk gadgeteers, sorcerers, psychics, and the "uniquely gifted." The field is pretty open in this regard, although no mutants, aliens, or AIs would be appropriate.

 

The game would have to be crafted according to the level of the heroes, obviously - getting from the trenches at Ypres to sanctuary at Mt.S.Michel would be really hard at 150 points, and really easy at 350.

 

Whaddya think?

200 or so would actually be my preferred starting level for a game where goons with guns are still a threat, though 250+ can work well if rDEF is kept to 10 or under with most or all of that being luck based or Does Not Prevent Penetration (so that you as GM could still make being shot or stabbed scary). rDef 12 or so is OK with hit locations and Impairing/Severing in place as optional rules. My 250 point pulp game went well imo, but the PCs did get fairly indifferent to attacks by conventional goons because I let the rDef and CV get a bit high.

 

With low rDef and CV, even 350 points can work, and is probably the minimum to do a really complete Tarzan or Doc Savage homage assuming they need to pay for perks (bases, vehicles, contacts, etc).

 

Some real personalities of the period would probably take 250+ points to fully stat out, depending on benchmarks and build style.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

I'm a heretic. I admit it. I far prefer the Neanderthal invaders from the Spider to zombies. They're fast and brutal, and apt to perform the most horrid outrages. They have all the savage's wiles, and only a scientific, red-blooded American (Briton) can best them in hand-to-hand combat.

Sure, a bullet or two (so long as it is .45 calibre or so) will stop them. But this ain't zombie apocalypse. The heroes have access to dynamite, 75s, dreadnoughts and Bristol Fighters, not cricket bats. The Neanderthals will need their cunning.

And it plays to the spirit and anxieties of the age. The whole matchup is just like Harvard, skippered by Hamilton Fish IV, playing the Carlisle Indians, led by that beastly professional, Jim Thorpe. Go Crimson Tide!

And yes, I'm aware how that game came out.

[Querysphinx]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

Howe about this.

 

The influenza hits, but thanks to some early experimental bio-chemical engineering, it goes crazy and begins mutating like mad. Some people who get it, get over it. Some people are crippled, some people die and some people are changed in unexpected ways all over the planet.

 

There's a village in the Ardens where all the citizens reverted to bestial savagery, retaining their cunning, but losing their compassion and gaining great strength and speed.

 

Down in Serbia you get people who have lost their ability to produce certain hormones necessary to survival. Their minds are nearly vegetative, but they're immune to pain and and are possessed of an incredible drive to survive, which they do by eating the hypothalmus of non-infected humans. "Brains Brains."

 

You could use these viral mutations to have outbreaks of weirdness all over the planet. On the one hand the virus is everybody's problem, but since the weirdnesses don't seem to be related, the various governments do not band together against it. The war goes on, with each side hampered by it's own outbreaks and every mad scientist on the planet trying to figure out a way to control the virus.

 

I can see this as a low-powered supers campaign, each of the supers being either an exceptional Doc-Savage type normal or someone who has been weirded in a useful way.

 

200-250 pts.

 

My 2 bits

[csyphrett]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

It kind of reminds me of Lord Baltimore. The war ended because the plague was so bad soldiers just refused to fight and went home. Personally I think other monsters would appear with the spread of Zombies.

 

I can see playing a Frankenstein or Topper in this setting, looking for a cure.

CES

[jtelson]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

Is it wrong that anythime I hear Zombies, my first thought is how to get Herbert West involved?

 

In this case either as a hero researching madly against the tide or perhaps he's the big bad having caused the epedemic to mutate or a combination of the two; Caused it and now trying desperately to end it.

[FireTiger]

Re: Brainstorming a 1920's Pulp-esque campaign.

 

You could use these viral mutations to have outbreaks of weirdness all over the planet. On the one hand the virus is everybody's problem, but since the weirdnesses don't seem to be related, the various governments do not band together against it. The war goes on, with each side hampered by it's own outbreaks and every mad scientist on the planet trying to figure out a way to control the virus.

 

Scattered across various Hero System books are examples of different kinds of zombie critters (the Walking Cadaver and Zombie from Horror Hero; Zuvembie and his zombies from Enemies: The International File; and the Zombie from the Hero System Bestiary for 4th ed. come to mind) that can be used to represent several variations of the zombie.