stu2000

Re: Victorian Hero (Sorta) Those are good reasons.

Re: Linking Logo Seconded.

Re: Linking Logo I'll sleep better tonight knowing we have parity.

Re: Who is the best Archaic/Anachronism/whatever in comics? My favorite comic book anachronism is the seemingly immortal Enemy Ace.

Looks to me like--over on the right side of the screen--Pulp Hero is the only logo without some animation. Hardly seems fair. What if the Hero descends from the top of the frame, and the Pulp ploomps out like a parachute? I think it'd be a gas!

Re: What Other Pulp Hero Books Would You Like To See? OK. I get it. Admittedly, a lot of what I want to see isn't as immediately practical as he HPLHS stuff. What I'd love to find is a big coffee table book of train memorabilia. But it's not as easy to scare that stuff up as I thought. Some marginalia on over-the-road trucking from the 30s and 40s would be nice. But really, it's more for my benefit, to get the mindset. I don't typically belumber my players with more that just a couple cute handouts here and there. Iguess what I want is more like the gamer equivolent of Depression glass.

Re: What Other Pulp Hero Books Would You Like To See?

Re: What Other Pulp Hero Books Would You Like To See? I'd like to see a book--or perhaps a folder--of replica train tickets, hotel menus, business cards, advertisements, packaging, matchbooks, sheet music, betting slips, driver's licenses, bills of sale, manifests--all that kind of detrius and marginalia. You can find just a little on the web. You can find some in collections. But it would be nice to have enough excellent reproductions in one place at one time to get a feel for what everyday life looked like.

Re: What Other Pulp Hero Books Would You Like To See? Hudson City's on the coast. I'm sure it would have a well-developed Chinatown. Yeah, I'd go for a HC'35 book, also.

Re: The Empire Club: recruiting drive! Huh, Like Nero Wolfe. That'd be cool. Maybe the trauma of battling the outre contributed to their early ends.

Re: The Empire Club: recruiting drive! I like several of the celebrities mentioned. Has anyone mentioned Lon Chaney (Sr)? I think The Man of A Thousand Faces would've been a good candidate for "secret adventures." He and Douglas Fairbanks could've teamed up as a 20s Hollywood version of James West and Artemis Gordon. Battling insidious threats to the movie business . . . and the world!

Re: What Other Pulp Hero Books Would You Like To See? Oh, you know I'd love that one. I'd also throw another vote on for a couple very serious location books--detailing someplace like San Francisco, or like the Maravella Islands--a nice South Pacific, or South China Sea island chain. Some gun runners, a mysterious island shrouded in fog, with a skull-shaped moutain, Nazi volcano bases--the works.

Re: Pulp Hero, after looking it over I just want to throw another "nicely done" out. The book is terrific. You can tell it's a labor of love. Love the timeline, love the maps, love the crunchy detail about costs of travel and whatnot. Short of including a 1935 Sears catalog, you did a very nice job. You really outdid yourself and it's appreciated.

Re: Firearms granularity The firearms damage used to look odd to me, too, in chart form. I would like there to be a wider range of dice for the full range of bullets. But in play, with stun mods and so forth, it's very satisfying. The granularity is less evident in play than it is reading the book. If you can get your guy to trust you for two or three gunfights, I bet he'll be fine with it.

Re: Hero System Guru in 20 days or less. If you're resolved to play a lot, set up adventures or story arcs that focus on different chunks of the rules. Start with a fighty chunk. Then do something with some limited powers. Then vehicles and martial arts. Then magic and psionics. Then cosmic powers. Like that. I started with my present group by letting them know specifically that I was going to be doing this. They started as a family of southern cockfighters, no powers at all, but belligerent and prone to violence. We folded in vehicle details, since they love their truck. We're presently folding in some limited magic, as one of their competitors is dabbling in gamecock-boosting voodoo. We've gently folded in powers as they've come across super-soldiers and mutant boars and soon a cousin of theirs, degenerated into a bayou bog monster. It's all a little goofy, but the background and story are fun and chaotic enough that the rules are prioritized a little less, giving me the freedom to make a few mistakes as I'm learning, and the gradual incorporation of new elements lets me look at the new chunks for a couple weeks and do a little testing before I bring them to the table and embarass myself.

Re: Pulp Film Recommendations Did anyone mention J-Men Forever? The Firesign Theater lovingly butchered a half dozen or so serials and repasted them, doing a pretty hilarious voice-over. It runs precisely the way any game runs when I have multiple heros with unusual abilities. If you can find a copy, it's pretty hilarious.

Re: S John Ross! I'm also happy he's in there. The GM chapter is going to be hard; I'm curious to see it. Pulp seems to be the genre everyone loves, but nobody plays, because the inherent inconsistencies interfere with suspension of disbelief in play in ways they don't when you're just observing. Some consistent advice on coping with failed roles, the trap-door/cliffhanger nature of plotting--these would be handy things for which to have a systematic approach. I'm looking forward to the book.

Re: Pulp Film Recommendations There's Sorceror, by William Freidkin. There're no magic users in it. It's about these first-world criminals, hiding out in a third-world oil camp, who may win a slim opportunity at new lives if they can drive some sweaty dynamite across Venezuela in antique, homemade trucks. Taking the trucks across the rope bridge is intense modern pulp. Someone mentioned B Banzai as a Doc Savage update. Did anyone mention Big Trouble as a Fu Manchu update? The Fu Manchu pictures are pulpy fun. I'm not crazy about Anaconda, but it evokes some good wierd menace jungle pulp.

Re: Pulp Hero Cometh Maybe this is a duplicate, but Adventure House (301) 754-1589, http://www.adventurehouse.com, has a great pulp catalog, including The Compleat Adventures of Jules De Grandin, a 3 vol HB set. $250. (ouch--maybe I'll browse e-bay) Not the first occult detective, but the fiestiest, and the most French. Sacre blue!

Re: What we like about HERO My favorite game is Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes. There were several adventures produced with stats for both MSPE and Espionage!. So I checked out Espionage! and thought it was pretty cool, but wondered why they had all those numbers. Eventually, I started running into gamers that wanted to know exactly what happened in every round of HtH combat, and were clearly a little insecure about leaving all those details up to me. So with the devil-may-care gamers, I like MSPE. With the detail-oriented folks, I like Hero. I like initiativeless combat. I like stun/kill damage. I like the detailed character sheet, with plenty of stats. I like the clearly-defined special effects. I like the scalability. Good stuff.