looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

[Rebar]

I want to build a Adventurer's team that is not comprised entirely of Caucasian nationalities. The characters are all highly proficient and successful, which is why they've been gathered into a team (think of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). This is set in the mid-twenties or thereabouts.

 

I've been poring over the Pulp Hero book and supplements. Found some about exotic nationalities, but not a lot about PC-level roles.

 

Example character roles I'm already toying with are: Aviator, Ship Captain, Grease Monkey, Modern Major General, Professor/Scientist, Great White Hunter and Nordic Ox (Hans).

 

Example nationalities so far seem to be French, Irish, British, American, Icelandic.

 

I'm willing to jumble things up to get the right combo.

 

I want something more colourful but I don't know how non-whites achieved success and expert proficiency in desirable skills in the pulp era. It would be easy to do if I were including sidekicks, but I hate the idea of the token non-white being relegated to what is essentially a second-class role.

 

 

I don't think I want to do the exotic Asian Martial Artist.

It would be cool to have a East Indian. (I don't know, maybe a prince? Or is that too close to Nemo in LXG?)

Maybe an African. I could see the Ship's Captain being African (thinking of the ships' captain from Raiders).

 

 

If you think of something (such as the Indian), please try to give links. I'd need to read up on the history so I can ensure it's properly canonical to the pulp era (It'd be dumb to have an Indian prince if they were rare in the '20s).

 

Any other ideas?

[Burrito Boy]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Although they weren't formed until 1944, the Aztec Eagles come to mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escuadr%C3%B3n_201

 

There's no reason you couldn't have a Mexican fighter pilot around earlier. Maybe he saw action in the first World War. Or you could get weird with his background and draw on the Aztec Ace comic for inspiration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_Ace

[assault]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Beginning of Aviation in India.

Jack Johnson.

Paul Robeson.

Eslanda Goode Robeson.

CLR James.

Learie Constantine.

 

Fictional:

Charlie Chan.

[Barton]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

I have in my pulp game a young female Aussie grease monkey character. A complication she has is being chased by rich son of the sheep ranch next door who wants to marry her for the land that her dad has. Fun character....

Another idea is a USA black airman Hubert Julian, the Black Eagle of Harlem

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/The-Black-Eagle-of-Harlem.html

[Cancer]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Mystics are rarely European, unless they're Gypsies. India, Tibet, east Asia all seem easy.

 

The martial artist sort (think Kato of the Green Hornet) is almost invariably from East Asia, though you indicated you didn't want to use that one.

 

There seems to be a good tradition of smugglers from North Africa or south central Asia, though these are often villians.

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

..So maybe a Smuggler repents of his evil ways and becomes a hero specializing in opposing the worst of the smugglers (gun runners selling to both sides of a conflice, white slavers, etc.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Karamaneh, Fu Manchu's agent and a seductive "Eastern slave girl," falls in love with Dr. Petrie and eventually escapes with him, appearing in subsequent novels on the side of the good guys.

 

"Canadian master harpoonist" Ned Land provides the muscle in Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. If not explicitly identified as a Francophone Metis, he could easily be reinterpreted that way.

 

The "the Avenger" pulp series gave the title character several assistants, including the African-American couple, Josh and Rosabel Newton, who frequently went undercover as servants and played on Black stereotypes. The Wikipedia article may mistakenly suggest that these characters were created prior to the 1973--4 revival, however.

 

the Shadow's gang included fairly stereotypical Asian and Black characters.

 

The Spider was assisted by his Indian manservant, Ram Singh, master of the kukri before it was cool.

 

Kim, of course, is Anglo(Irish)-Indian.

 

And here's a list article from Wikipedia that will probably yield many more examples.

[Bloodstone]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Atlantis had a Black/Native American medic and Puerto Rican mechanic on the crew.

[Lucius]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

I want to build a Adventurer's team that is not comprised entirely of Caucasian nationalities. The characters are all highly proficient and successful' date=' which is why they've been gathered into a team (think of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). This is set in the mid-twenties or thereabouts[/quote']

 

One of my personal heroes, Eugene Bullard, an African American pilot in WWI

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Bullard

 

It would help to know more. Who's putting together this team? Where are they based? etc.

 

Remember that just because the fiction of the period, or the media of the period, or even the history books, don't mention non-European or Euro-American people, doesn't mean they weren't there. For example, take that American icon of the Old West, the cowboy. About 1 in 7 were African American, mostly former slaves who went west after the Civil War. You wouldn't know this from old Western movies or novels or tv shows, but you'll know it if you look at the records of the Census for 1880 1890 and 1900. Lots of 'em were also Mexican, and I've read a great many were English immigrants, and amazingly enough, lots of Cowboys were really Indians.

 

Example character roles I'm already toying with are: Aviator, Ship Captain, Grease Monkey, Modern Major General, Professor/Scientist, Great White Hunter and Nordic Ox (Hans).

 

Skippers: Nations with coasts tend to have navies and maritime fleets. I don't know what you consider "exotic" but a ship captained by an Arabic, Turkish or East Asian person could easily turn up in any port in the world.

 

Mechanics: Being a lower prestige job compared to others you list, it was probably not that hard for disadvantaged minorities to learn and practice.

 

Military Officers: A general in whose army? Ottoman Turkey was a major world power until WWI, and a "modern major general" who had served in the Sultan's army is a possibility. On the other hand, the US didn't have an African American general until 1940. France had the French Foreign Legion and probably had officers from all their colonial possessions.

 

Professor/Scientist: Maybe more likely than you think, but again - where in the world are we? In the US, accomplished scientists like George Washington Carver were rare but existed. In Japan, you can probably find plenty of Japanese scientists and it would be a European professer who would be exitic and rare!

 

Sort of by definition a "Great White Hunter" is White (also Great, and a Hunter) but if you mean someone with the skills to track and shoot big game, there were probably plenty of Africans, Indians, and Native Americans who knew their own lands and the beasts native to them at least as well as people who HADN'T grown up there.

 

Again a "Nordic Ox" is sort of by definition Nordic, but a big bruiser could come from almost anywhere. Even Japan, stereotypically not a land of giants, is home to sumo wrestlers.

 

I don't think I want to do the exotic Asian Martial Artist.

It would be cool to have a East Indian.

 

Try an Indian Martial Artist

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_martial_art

 

(I don't know, maybe a prince? Or is that too close to Nemo in LXG?)

Maybe an African. I could see the Ship's Captain being African (thinking of the ships' captain from Raiders).

 

 

If you think of something (such as the Indian), please try to give links. I'd need to read up on the history so I can ensure it's properly canonical to the pulp era (It'd be dumb to have an Indian prince if they were rare in the '20s).

 

Any other ideas?

 

Not unless you can be more specific about what you're looking for.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Palindromedary Hero

[Rebar]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Thanks guys, lot's of ideas in here!

 

 

I had better come clean before this gets too far. This is really more of a story than a game. I've fantasized about running this game for years, but I realize the thing that will mess it up is a GM and PCs. So I'm dabbling with the idea of bypassing the whole roleplaying aspect and just writing the story.

 

 

There's no reason you couldn't have a Mexican fighter pilot around earlier.

I have in my pulp game a young female Aussie grease monkey character. A complication she has is being chased by rich son of the sheep ranch next door who wants to marry her for the land that her dad has. Fun character....

Another idea is a USA black airman Hubert Julian, the Black Eagle of Harlem

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/The-Black-Eagle-of-Harlem.html

 

I suppose. Though Australian and Mexican are still technically European race. Don't seem to be doing proper justice to diversity (I'm Canadian, so it's a pathological imperative...).

 

 

 

One of my personal heroes, Eugene Bullard, an African American pilot in WWI

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Bullard

 

It would help to know more. Who's putting together this team? Where are they based? etc.

I'm deliberately trying to be open so as to get the broadest set of choices. The character is more important.

 

Skippers: Nations with coasts tend to have navies and maritime fleets. I don't know what you consider "exotic" but a ship captained by an Arabic, Turkish or East Asian person could easily turn up in any port in the world.

This could work. I like this.

 

Mechanics: Being a lower prestige job compared to others you list, it was probably not that hard for disadvantaged minorities to learn and practice.

Yeah, that could work.

 

Military Officers: A general in whose army? Ottoman Turkey was a major world power until WWI' date=' and a "modern major general" who had served in the Sultan's army is a possibility. On the other hand, the US didn't have an African American general until 1940. France had the French Foreign Legion and probably had officers from all their colonial possessions.[/quote']

I like this a lot.

 

Yeah, I'd been thinking about the FFL. But a Turkish officer would be cool.

 

(Though frankly, I abolutely loooooooooooooove the traditional attire of the Indians.)

 

Sort of by definition a "Great White Hunter" is White (also Great, and a Hunter) but if you mean someone with the skills to track and shoot big game, there were probably plenty of Africans, Indians, and Native Americans who knew their own lands and the beasts native to them at least as well as people who HADN'T grown up there.

True. This is broadening my ideas.

 

Again a "Nordic Ox" is sort of by definition Nordic' date=' but a big bruiser could come from almost anywhere. Even Japan, stereotypically not a land of giants, is home to sumo wrestlers. [/quote']

True, though I do want to avoid the stereotype of the Big "Dumb" Bruiser. It's a slippery slope.

[kahuna's bro]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

..So maybe a Smuggler repents of his evil ways and becomes a hero specializing in opposing the worst of the smugglers (gun runners selling to both sides of a conflice' date=' white slavers, etc.[/quote']a cross between indiana jone and han solo?good idea

[Lucius]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

A lot of pulp heroes were probably European to appeal to their prospective audiences, but could have been otherwise. One might say they were Western not by necessity but only by Occident.

 

Tarzan was British but was inspired by Mowgli, who was native to India. Tarzan could far more easily be African, and just as easily of Indian or Arabic or Turkish nobility or royalty especially if you shipwreck his parents on Africa's east rather than west coast.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Lama

 

The Green Lama was a pulp character who was a man of the West who became a Tibetan monk and maintained an alias as Tibetan as well as his original identity and the costumed Green Lama identity. He could just as easily actually BE Tibetan. The same might be said of The Shadow. These studnets of the Mysterious East may not have been often confused, but one could argue they had been deliberately dis-Oriented.

 

Charlie Chan has already been mentioned; he was based on a real Chinese detective in Hawaii by the way. Another fascinating Asian hero in American literature of the period is Mr. Moto.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Moto

 

From the Wikpedia:

 

While he is a devoted servant of the Emperor, he is often at odds with the Japanese military. He believes in the manifest destiny of the Japanese to expand into China, but unlike the military, wants to achieve this slowly and carefully. Millicent Bell in her biography of John P. Marquand notes how this may have impacted the audience:

"There is political significance, too, in the calculated appeal to American readers of the ever resourceful Mr. Moto, the representative of Eastern subtlety combined with Western efficiency, who emerges as a gentleman of wit and charm. Up to 1939 it must have seemed possible to some that Japan would be moderate and reasonable in its expansion in the Far East – that the Mr. Motos would defeat the Japanese military fanatics. Pearl Harbor, of course, put an end to American neutralism as well as to hopes of Japanese moderation – but not before Marquand's Moto series had become one of the most popular fictions ever to be run in an American magazine"

 

 

True, though I do want to avoid the stereotype of the Big "Dumb" Bruiser. It's a slippery slope.

 

 

This character is a superhero but might give you inspiration:

 

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/70614-Artist-of-Strength

 

 

In Trin Dar right now I'm playing a Rogma (half-Ogre) specializing in healing skills and spells who has no weapon skills and prefers not to fight.

 

 

But the hulking muscular pacifist or the intellectual giant, while subversions of the "dumb bruiser" stereotype, are probably common enough to almost be cliches in their own right.

 

 

Consider making the largest and strongest person a woman.

 

She's from a hundred years before your period, but you might be interested in "Black Maria Lee" a large powerful woman who kept a boarding house for sailors and who reportedly came running at any sound of disturbance in her neighborhood to quell brawls, subdue the riotously drunken, and generally assist the constables in keeping the peace.

 

http://www.aug.edu/~libwrw/Articles/blackmaria.pdf

 

From another source

"Maria Lee, an imposing black woman, became a national heroine in 1798 when she delivered swivel guns to outfit the little cutters Alexander Hamilton had ordered built to protect American merchant ships on the high seas. Maria was just as reliable when she opened her boardinghouse for sailors in the early 1800s; her place was the cleanest and her guests the best-mannered on the Boston waterfront because even hardened criminals feared her awesome strength. The giant woman aided the police so often that the saying "send for the Black Maria" became common whenever there was trouble with an offender. Fiery Maria sometimes helped escort prisoners to jail, and when the first British police horse vans or paddy wagons were introduced in 1838 they may have been christened Black Marias in her honor."

 

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary suggests that if you want diversity, make the Turkish officer a commander of shatarnals

[John Desmarais]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

One of the guys in the Pulp game I'm currently in is playing a character based on Queequeg from Moby Dick. Time period is a little off, but it's working.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

If your campaign allows for any version of the supernatural, you could have a character following the spiritual traditions of Native American or African shamans/witchdoctors, or houngans (Voudu priests). While white North American society would generally ignore them, they could be very prominent in their communities.

[assault]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

France had the French Foreign Legion and probably had officers from all their colonial possessions.

 

Unfortunately, no. Very few of the colonial empires of the time allowed their colonial troops to be commanded by officers of their own nationalities.

 

You might have had an officer from, say, Algeria, commanding Algerian troops, but he would have been a pied-noir.

[Clonus]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

If you don't want sidekicks, then perhaps villains

 

I would like to draw your attention to Dragon Lady from the period comic strip "Terry and the Pirates", the half-caste pirate queen who, in the years leading up to American participation in World War II became a hero of sorts as a leader of Chinese resistance against the Japanese invaders.

 

Then there's Twenty Faces, Edogawa Rampo's Lupin-like master of disguise who got an heroic makeover in a fairly recent cartoon.

[kahuna's bro]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

qhat is apled-nore?

[Lucius]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

Unfortunately, no. Very few of the colonial empires of the time allowed their colonial troops to be commanded by officers of their own nationalities.

 

You might have had an officer from, say, Algeria, commanding Algerian troops, but he would have been a pied-noir.

 

Hm. A quick check of Wikipedia says only 10% of the Legion's officers are from their own ranks, and I'm not motivated enough to go digging deeper.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromdary still likes the idea of a Turkish commander of shatarnals.

[Lucius]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

qhat is apled-nore?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfoot

 

Which links to an example of a Great Not-So-White Hunter

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Potts

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary thinks something different was meant

[freakboy6117]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

you can have some fun with the tropes and problems if race if you have two players who can work together just of the top of my head you can have some interesting partnerships English aristocratic detective and his Gurkha or Sikh man servant or thats how it appears on the face and how society treats the servant but they are actually sworn to each other as brothers in arms as sole survivors of a massacre somewhere in India.

 

or the southern gent river boat gambler and marksman and his hulking mute black servant of course what no one realizes is the servant is the brains of the outfit and the gambler is his muscle. after all everyone underestimates the servants

[Lord Liaden]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

You could also have non-Caucasian citizens hailing from various "Lost Worlds." The pulps were full of cities hidden in darkest Africa, Asia, or South America; in tropical oases in the Arctic Circle or Antarctica, or in the heart of the Sahara or Arabian deserts; beneath the surface of the Earth; even on the Moon. They could be inhabited by survivors of archaic real-world cultures, antediluvian civilizations, or descendants of stranded aliens, wielding super-science or mystic powers; or primitive savages, even apelike subhumans, sometimes serving immortal masters (or mistresses).

[Tom Carman]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

I've had old Disney movie "Island at the Top of the World" for years and still haven't gotten around to watching it. That one has airships and lost Viking colony in an Arctic volcano.

[death tribble]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

And it's got killer whales......

[Rebar]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

You could also have non-Caucasian citizens hailing from various "Lost Worlds." The pulps were full of cities hidden in darkest Africa' date=' Asia, or South America; in tropical oases in the Arctic Circle or Antarctica, or in the heart of the Sahara or Arabian deserts; beneath the surface of the Earth; even on the Moon. They could be inhabited by survivors of archaic real-world cultures, antediluvian civilizations, or descendants of stranded aliens, wielding super-science or mystic powers; or primitive savages, even apelike subhumans, sometimes serving immortal masters (or mistresses).[/quote']

 

Actually, this is where they're going to end up...

[Rebar]

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles

 

I looked up Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and it looks like the entire regime was overthrown in 1925, exiling all royalty.

 

It's an obvious tie-in - an exiled Ottoman prince.

 

But it's got me realizing that it's REAL hard to write up a character who's supposed to be a stereotype when you know noting about the history - let alone the stereotypes - of a nation. I foresee some tremendously clumsy and naive characterization.