New Pulp HERO Campaign

[Brian Stanfield]

Hey all,

I'm starting a new Pulp HERO campaign in order to teach HERO System to some new players. After some preliminary planning and some brief correspondence with Steve Long, I've settled on Hudson City as the setting, and using the Carthage Club (Hudson City, p. 59) as the McGuffin to get all my players together as new adventurers. I'll eventually work them towards membership in the Empire Club, but that'll be after they've had some success as members of the Carthage Club first. I think it will be set in the 1930s, although there is a chance it may be set earlier if the players prefer it.

 

What I'm looking for are some adventure seeds for the players' first few adventures. I'd like to keep it simple and varied in order to teach the rules (as many skill-based challenges as possible, some conflicts, Presence attacks, etc. Stuff to really show the rules at work as easily as possible).

 

All the characters overlap a little bit to make the role playing interesting. A quick rundown of who I've got so far:

1. A Romani woman who left Portugal when WWI hit Europe, moving with the circus to Brazil, and then eventually to the U.S. where she became a silent film star. Now that the talkies have taken over, her accent won't let her continue in that career, so she is a bit of an embittered diva. A life of adventure seems like an interesting option. (She is a bit jealous of the younger Russian woman below)
2. An American private eye who is a former Federal Revenue Agent who was disgraced for taking kickbacks. After doing some prison time, he became an alcoholic and a private eye who specializes in some of the cases that others won't touch. He has some kind of past with . . . 
3. . . . An American WWI vet who returned home embittered by his experience. He wandered after the war, traveling the world wherever fortune took him and eventually started a new life of industrial espionage and other activities, calling himself a "shadow economy freelancer." He's gotten in some gambling trouble with the crime underworld in Hudson City. He's had some past dealings with . . .
4. . . . The son of an American industrialist who made the family fortune supplying the war effort, including munitions and armaments. He is also a WWI vet who went to war at the behest of his family's honor, and as an ambulance driver he witnessed some of the worst consequences of what his family was selling the rest of the world. He began a new life in the family business, and has global business contacts, but is trying to convince the Executive Board that they ought to change that business to one of rebuilding the colonial areas that the Europeans and Americans have ravaged.
5. There is also a Tsarist Russian woman who was trained as an unwilling young girl to be a specialist in an experimental "Red Sparrow" sort of program under Stalin. She eventually leaves the Soviet Union with Trotsky and makes it to Mexico City, where she eventually escapes the Communists and moves to the United States. She is trained in all the spy stuff that you'd expect, and is a linguist with PTSD and rage issues after her time in the Soviet Union. She and the Romani woman have a bit of a rivalry going on.
6. There may be another woman playing, but I'm not sure yet. I'm open to suggestions for her.

There's going to be a mysterious Mr. X operating in the background. I'm not sure about him yet, but he'll be an international industrialist as well with competing interests in the same areas that overlaps with our heros. He'll be the reason they gather together, and secretly watch them in action as they get together and become a team. (Think SPECTRE from James Bond, but in the 1930s)  

 

If you have any plot seed ideas for my first few adventures, that would be great. Thanks for your help.

[C-Note]

I've been running a Roll20 "Cthulhu HERO" campaign set in 1925 using pre-published adventures that I've converted to HERO.  The players are fairly new to HERO so I'm able to hand-wave things a little in order to keep the game flowing smoothly.

 

I'm currently running them through adventures from "Tales of the Sleepless City", which is a collection of CoC scenarios set in 1920s New York City.

 

As they get more experience using the HERO System, I'm slowly introducing them to more of the rules.  It's working great so far.  For sanity checks, the players must make EGO rolls with various modifiers.  Failure can result in the characters acquiring a Psychological Limitation which could be temporary or permanent, depending upon how badly they failed the EGO roll.  Permanent Psych Lims can still be bought down or bought off with XPs.

 

[Spence]

Who publishes "Tales"?

[C-Note]

33 minutes ago, Spence said:

Who publishes "Tales"?

 

Miskatonic River Press.  It's been out of print for years.  Amazon has a copy for $249.  There are PDFs floating around the interwebs.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Sleepless-Scott-David-Aniolowski/dp/098218185X

[Brian Stanfield]

9 hours ago, C-Note said:

Amazon has a copy for $249.

 

Luckily it's at a place called "Half-Price Books," otherwise that price would have been sky high . . .

[Brian Stanfield]

Ok, still looking for some ideas for beginning adventures for my new group. I'd like to do several little mini-scenes that bring them together in pairs or something like that, and then they'll all end out meeting at the Carthage Club in Hudson City. I'd like some activities to teach them the rules: like a skill vs. skill challenge, a Presence attack, maybe a brief scuffle, in order to teach the basic game elements. But I'd like them to feed into a real adventure, and I'm struggling to settle on something. 

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

[Spence]

16 hours ago, C-Note said:

 

Miskatonic River Press.  It's been out of print for years.  Amazon has a copy for $249.  There are PDFs floating around the interwebs.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Sleepless-Scott-David-Aniolowski/dp/098218185X

 

Ah...   That is a bummer.  I Checked to see if i was still on sale anywhere and it is not.  It used to be on DriveThruRPG until a couple years ago. 

 

Some research shows Stygian Fox now has it and is planning a CoC 7th Edition version.  For CoC, Stygian Fox does some great work. 

[archer]

I'm more of a fan of the 1920's as a beginning setting than the 1930's. China and Japan get into a very messy war with Japanese atrocities very early in the decade which either puts your people into a war or closes off both China and Japan as settings for adventures.

 

=====

 

As for an adventure idea:

 

Search for the long-lost hero or explorer.

 

He could potentially be a friend of the team's industrialist sponsor. Or perhaps a rival who had a secret. Plan for both the hero/explorer being found alive and the hero/explorer being found dead.

 

Listen to the player's speculation as the adventure goes along and if they come up with some good ideas, swipe them.

 

They get the set up from someone to get started on the quest. They come up with ideas for research whether archives or people. They split up or stay together. Public archives are probably safer than secret archives from shadowy or criminal sources. Asking questions to the wrong people can get you hassled or killed.

 

Once they get pointed in what they think is the right direction, they arrange travel to their destination. If it's near, no problem. If it's far away, they might have trouble with passports, lost tickets, the language barrier, unscrupulous guides, their luggage being stolen or at a minimum searched, the government of the country they're visiting assuming they're spies. They'll have time to kill whether traveling by steamer, train, or aeroplane so there might be gambling, dances, meeting people who they'll run into again later, spies who are intentionally following them, spies who are doing something else but who discover the PCs are doing something interesting, stowaways, crewmen who are looking to jump ship, crewmen who report suspicious behavior to the captain.

 

At the destination, discovering the whereabouts of the hero/explorer could be simple or difficult. Most people can drop out of sight simply by not writing home so the guy could be the most well-known person in the city and be "hiding" in plain sight. If you need more adventure out of the adventure, the PCs might have to recruit a caravan/Sherpas/bearers/posse and go across the deserts, mountains, and/or jungles looking for the last place the person was known to be going. Those hirelings can be as generic and loyal or as detailed and motivated to do their own thing as you please.

 

If the guy was an explorer, the PCs might find what the explorer had been looking for but no trace of the explorer himself.

 

If you wanted to go for a historical figure, Ambrose Bierce the American soldier/journalist/science fiction writer/spiritualist and believer in the weird and unexplained disappeared in 1913 at age 71 when following Pancho Villa's army in northern Mexico. His last communication was  a letter which ended "As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination," then he disappeared from history. He could have gone with the rebel army somewhere or have gone haring across the desert in search of treasure or legends. Or he could have been sucked up into some alternate dimension like a character in one of his books (and he might or might not have aged there).

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce

[Brian Stanfield]

16 hours ago, archer said:

I'm more of a fan of the 1920's as a beginning setting than the 1930's. China and Japan get into a very messy war with Japanese atrocities very early in the decade which either puts your people into a war or closes off both China and Japan as settings for adventures.

I decided on the 1930s for a couple of reasons: first, it’s fun to have Nazis around for easy foils, and who doesn’t want to punch a Nazi?; second, one of my characters is an aviatrix, and good international and commercial plane travel didn’t really start until the late ‘20s and early ‘30s; plus, did I mention Nazis?

 

The rest is right along the lines I was thinking. The one missing element is this: I want them to meet at the Carthage Club in order to establish it as a new home base, so I want the adventure to come to them at the beginning, give them a reason to become a team, and then venture forth. In addition, I think (maybe?) that I want them to perform little tasks at the very beginning, with a few opening scenes where they learn the basics about rolling for Skills, To Hit, and PRE attacks, just to get those items out of the way early. So I’m now trying to come up with a few short opening scenes where my industrialist, spy, detective, aviatrix, industrial saboteur, and linguist all have “learning tasks” to do. I’m trying to come up with a handful of ideas to integrate with their meeting at the Carthage Club for the first time. Something other than the classic barroom brawl, which is a habitual cliche I’m fighting against with everything I can muster. On the other hand, I was thinking of having them meet at the club at a celebration on the night that Prohibition ended in December 1935. 

[archer]

35 minutes ago, Brian Stanfield said:

I decided on the 1930s for a couple of reasons: first, it’s fun to have Nazis around for easy foils, and who doesn’t want to punch a Nazi?; second, one of my characters is an aviatrix, and good international and commercial plane travel didn’t really start until the late ‘20s and early ‘30s; plus, did I mention Nazis?

 

The rest is right along the lines I was thinking. The one missing element is this: I want them to meet at the Carthage Club in order to establish it as a new home base, so I want the adventure to come to them at the beginning, give them a reason to become a team, and then venture forth. In addition, I think (maybe?) that I want them to perform little tasks at the very beginning, with a few opening scenes where they learn the basics about rolling for Skills, To Hit, and PRE attacks, just to get those items out of the way early. So I’m now trying to come up with a few short opening scenes where my industrialist, spy, detective, aviatrix, industrial saboteur, and linguist all have “learning tasks” to do. I’m trying to come up with a handful of ideas to integrate with their meeting at the Carthage Club for the first time. Something other than the classic barroom brawl, which is a habitual cliche I’m fighting against with everything I can muster. On the other hand, I was thinking of having them meet at the club at a celebration on the night that Prohibition ended in December 1935. 

 

 

Maybe someone hijacked the booze which was supposed to go to the celebration. The PCs are the first people to show up for the party and they're drafted to go find the missing beer.

[Brian Stanfield]

5 hours ago, archer said:

 

 

Maybe someone hijacked the booze which was supposed to go to the celebration. The PCs are the first people to show up for the party and they're drafted to go find the missing beer.

 

Oh my god, that’s brilliant! I was thinking of some artifact being smuggled into the club and then stolen during the party or something, but this is simple and easy! And a fun way to get into things before it gets more serious. 

[ldorn]

"A Romani woman who left Portugal when WWI hit Europe, moving with the circus to Brazil, and then eventually to the U.S. where she became a silent film star. Now that the talkies have taken over, her accent won't let her continue in that career, so she is a bit of an embittered diva. A life of adventure seems like an interesting option. (She is a bit jealous of the younger Russian woman below)"

You might want to look up the Hollywood Star package deal from Adventures Club #13 in the bonus issue section.

[Brian Stanfield]

Unfortunately, I don’t have that issue. You’ll have to tell me what it says. 

[DentArthurDent]

The stolen booze is still on the truck, locked in a garage on __th street.

 

The garage is attached to an abandoned house, where six squatters are living.

They’re being paid to watch for strangers and wait for orders from the nervous German businessman living next door.

 

The businessman’s basement is being used by the sisters Lady Viespa and Madame Verde to make an electro-bomb. The booze is the final ingredient; to be poured into tall glass tubes topped with radio-receiver vacuum tubes connected to a large, pyramidal antenna of mahogany and brass. They are welding the pieces of the antenna together, having to wear hoods and masks to protect against the zinc vapors.

 

The electrobomb will be driven to ______ Park and detonated by a radio transmitter across town. The resulting explosion will be the perfect diversion as the sisters rob the ______ and make their escape in a nearby dirigible.