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Hudson City as Pulp city?


Lysando

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Hello all,

I looking for a "setting" for my upcoming Pulp campaign. I put "setting" into quotes because the majority of the adventures will be elsewhere ("globe-trotting adventure" and all). However, the characters have to have a place to call home, and a place for the villain to unleash his unobtanium death ray on to get revenge on the characters. I'm thinking Hudson City, because I don't want to use a historical city.

 

The Hudson City book that already exists is supposed to be for Dark Champions, am I correct in assuming that the book is based in the "present-day"?

 

ntb

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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

Yes, it is based in modern day.

 

However, I have often thought it would be fun to run a street-level Dark Champions game set in the Hudson City of the 1920s and 30s. There is historical background given for the city and I don't think much work would have to be done to convert the setting into the Pulp era. It would certainly be easier than trying to put together something from scratch.

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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

I'd love to see a book (or even PDF) covering some of the changes to tie it in with Pulp HERO.
That's a cool idea. I'd eagerly pay for a Hero Plus supplement that gave an overview for using Hudson City in a pulp-era campaign. It'd just need to have a rundown of what is different in Hudson City 1930 as opposed to modern-day Hudson City. In 1930 what occupies locations now occupied by modern buildings? What gangs were operating in the city, what rackets were they involved in, etc.
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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

I made a few fairly simple changes to the "Justice, Not Law" version of Hudson City to use it as a setting in my Doc Hawkstar campaign fo Justice, Inc back about 10 to 12 years ago. Here's the campaign paradigm with the changes. Adapting to HC:TUA should be fairly painless.

 

p.s. It would help the look of the thing if you have the ParkAvenue BT and Betty Noir fonts. ;)

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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

I've always traditionally based my Pulp Hero game in NYC due to the ease of finding historical material that covers it, but have branched out and started tying adventures to Hudson City (and boy do I get jokes about the city's name from my players). The conversion back to the 1930's was pretty much painless, since I'd already mined out all the relevant information on HC in that era back when I was writing Mastermind and Madmen and Thrilling Places and everyone's been fine with it.

 

The biggest issue for me was in making certain that adventures in HC have a different 'feel' than ones in NYC, and by playing up the Raven's penchant for mystical foes, the Chinatown connection, and installing a police detective who handles the 'mask crimes' that's completely different than the one that the PCs deal with in NYC, it's worked out pretty well.

 

Honestly, there isn't really any reason why you can't use Hudson City straight out of the box if you want to, and just change the high tech industries around to something more pulp-appropriate, but if you want to scale the city back to the 1930's, there's enough information in the Hudson City book to do that easily enough. You will need to read the individual borough entries though, as some of it is in there, and not in the summary at the start of the book.

 

And in a shameless product plug moment, I'll point out that Thrilling Places has a selectin of Pulp-era Hudson City locations already designed for you.

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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

If the Pulp line had sold better I'd've definitely created a Hudson City 1935 book' date=' which would've been a fun write. Alas, 'twas not to be.[/quote']

 

 

So basically you're saying that there will be no further support for Pulp Hero.

 

Do I understand you correctly?

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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

So basically you're saying that there will be no further support for Pulp Hero.

 

Do I understand you correctly?

 

Yes, we've said that on several occasions. PH itself sells quite well. The supplements sell very poorly. So, we're not going to do anymore, unless they were somehow amazingly easy and cheap to do. We'll stick with producing the occasional Hero Plus Adventure in PDF for Pulp Hero, since those are at least profitable.

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Re: Hudson City as Pulp city?

 

We'll stick with producing the occasional Hero Plus Adventure in PDF for Pulp Hero' date=' since those are at least profitable.[/quote']

 

Could a series of small-scale PDF articles covering the subject work? A page or four about a particular location, institution or feature from the past (and how it links to the present Hudson City) with a few potential plot hooks, for example?

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