jlv61560

Okay, thank you. Perhaps we should change the topic to "Streams of Consciousness." What say you, moderator?

I'm confused. What the hell are we talking about on here?

Thanks. Somehow I missed realizing that they were pretty much ALL his! ;-)

Links?

Okay, I gotta come back in on this one. I picked up copies of Bill Craig's "Hardluck Hannigan" series, and frankly it was almost completely unreadable. That is some of the worst fiction I've ever read -- even Fu Manchu stuff is easier to suspend disbelief on. It wouldn't have been so incredibly bad if you weren't constantly pushed back out of the story by some completely wrong information (Himmler is now the Nazi Propaganda Minister -- bet Goebbels was PO'd when that happened) or by clumsy scene handling (the heroine of the first story makes some snide remark to Hannigan when they first meet, to which he responds by saying; "Hey, you asked ME to come here," which, given that the scene where he decided to go where she just happened to be was only a few pages before, you immediately remember was absolutely not true. At various points in the story (supposedly set in 1937 or 1938), we find that Germany is already at war with England, then not, then they've invaded Poland, then they haven't, then the war in Spain is completely hosed up (I don't think Craig has any idea who was actually fighting in Spain, or what they were fighting about)...I won't even address the more obscure technical errors (like the Bf-109s are apparently the later models and absolutely have no problem flying into a French colony to shoot up Americans and Englishmen and engage with an RAF unit that apparently has the range to fly from Gibralter (I assume, or worse, maybe they were basing out of either Spanish Morocco or French Morocco, neither of which is likely because...oh, forget it) to what I can only assume is Algeria, and that's totes okay having the RAF doing that within French jurisdiction...Arrrrrgh!)...it all just gets too tiring for even the casual read. Then, in the "climax" of the first volume, everyone just sort of wanders off somewhere without caring one tiny bit what happened to the people they were supposedly in love for life with. Frankly it reads more like a Mad Magazine spoof of that kind of story than it did an actual story. Nonsequitars, historical inaccuracies that a five-yer-old can spot, a complete inability to grasp basic physical and political geography, crappy plotting, weak dialogue, sudden interruptions of the plot line so the hero and heroine can snoggle someplace...yeesh. I got partially into the second one before I gave it up in disgust. My strong recommendations? 1) Give these a miss -- terrible, terrible writing, plotting and flow. You actually feel dumber after having read these (at least the first one and a half) than you did before you started. Eventually, I'll steel myself to read one of his later ones to see if there was any improvement, but sadly, "steeling myself" is what it will take. 2) Somebody call Craig and tell him to take a writing class. And a basic history class (hell, he could just watch World at War and he'd be more informed than he is currently). Maybe teaching him how to use a simple flow chart or read a map would be a good thing, too. Tom Clancy, this guy ain't. In fact, he isn't even running close to Clive Cussler (who is another hack writer, but at least can string his one and only plotline together somewhat). Very disappointing.

I'll second the motion on Call of Cthulhu -- they "did it right," and as a result Chaosium has stayed in business, almost exclusively because of that line of products, despite some serious mismanagement and bad guesses along the way. And their products are always outstanding. And on that last comment, I don't think Hero Games is the only guilty party. GURPS tried with Cliffhangers (good "idea book," but GURPS has always been sort of "meh" for me, and they never supported it with much else), and Chaosium recently released a BRP volume entitled Astounding Adventures which has the potential to be the start of something like that, but probably mistimed it pretty badly since we seem to be in the doldrums again with regard to pulp roleplaying and publishing. They certainly haven't followed it up with anything else, and it wasn't a completely self-contained book like CoC was -- you need the BRP rules to really play. Back in the day, Chaosium released the first edition of Call of Cthulhu, which was a complete game right out of the box, not requiring anything else in order to play, and then followed it in short order wtih Shadows of Yog Sothoth, which was clearly designed not only as a fun adventure, but also as a teaching mechanism for Keepers to use as they designed their own campaigns. Sort of the same paradigm orginally followed by D&D in the early days. And, as a result, we all had a clear and generally agreed upon concept of what "eldritch horror" was supposed to look like. We've grown well out of that nowadays, I suppose, but I have to wonder if Chill or some of these other horror games would have done as well if there had never been a Call of Cthulhu to sort of break trail. There was some kind of global adventure campaign that someone came up with, though I can't for the life of me recall what it was called now, but it was centred around a "club" of some kind that supported exploration (and, if very vague memory suffices now, had some kind of secret "war" going on as well), but it never quite struck the right note, I think. Maybe that's the problem. Since no one has yet actually published a self-contained pulp game, playable out fo the box, everyone is left sort of fumbling around for a concept they can hang their hat on. I mean, I look at a lot of these adventures being published and somewhere inside I'm saying "this is pulp," and "this isn't," but if asked to express what I think pulp is, it's a lot harder -- those gray areas tend to really expand to the point where they derail me. When I personally think of "pulp," I generally think of something like Indiana Jones, The Lost Temple of the Incas, or The Mummy, which is a fairly narrow definition of pulp. Things like The Rocketeer, generally seem to push more towards the super hero genre (afterall, Batman doesn't actually have super-powers -- he's just a gadgeteer on steriods with some martial arts training, but he's definitely included in the "super hero" set now). And that is part of the problem; there seems to be a lot of "mission creep" between "pulp" and "super heroes" which kind of "hurts" both game worlds for me (though what I mean by "hurts" is even more vague -- "detracts?" "lessens focus?" "makes the game concept less appealing?" I'm just not sure). On the other hand, maybe I'm just too narrow-minded in my interpretation.

Yep, that would be the one. Sorry about that -- it's 2AM here right now, and it was just about as late when I wrote that comment! ;-)

I have to agree Kharis2000 -- if you hadn't mentioned Thrilling Places, I was going to -- definitely one of the better written sourcebooks for that kind of thing, and much more useful than most of the competitors. Kudos on a brilliant bit of work! (Edited to add: And Mutants and Masterminds was excellent as well. I was in two minds about whether to pop for it or not, given that a lot of times things like that are not very well done, but I'm glad I did.)

Actually, I'll agree somewhat with Nero on this one -- it seems to me that a LOT of games and scenarios sort of work out that way. There are exceptions, of course, but if you really look at things, it seems like a lot of the time it comes down to that in the end.... Though maybe a better term would be "macguffin hunts" vice "dungeon crawls" since a lot of the crawly scenarios never descend underground (and we could argue the term "dungeon" is what makes people read it literally), even though you're still just after the magic beans or jujube or whatever.

Terror Australis was excellent for it's time, but keep in mind it was written for Call of Cthulhu, so it spends a lot of time tying things to the mythos that don't actually need to be. It did do a pretty good job on briefly describing Aboriginal society, though. However, I will agree, it's not the best source book ever done. According to Sixtystone Press (who is working on the Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion with a goal of publishing it in August), they plan to add a lot of information on the Australia section (which was the basis for the original Terror Australis supplement back in the late 80's). That's supposed to include info on police forces, and a very nice section on proto-Nazis in the form of Thule Geselschaft, as well as the experiments performed in Australia in the 1920's to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity. Green and Pleasant Land was the one I was referring to, actually -- though Cubicle 7 has done a whole series of supplements on the British Isles now (check out the Cthulhu Britannica series) and is currently pushing to completion on a Cthulhu Britannica: London boxed set that promises to be the ultimate guide to London, finally replacing the old London Guidebook from decades ago. Most of the monographs are fairly good, though they can be spotty. The one on Hungary, for example, was obviously translated into English, apparently by the same people that translated Japanese stereo instructions back in the day, so is very difficult to use unless you already know (or are willing to spend the time to research) a lot of info on Hungary in the 1920s and 30's -- and even then manages to gloss over things like the Communist state that was formed there briefly in 1919. Others, on the other hand, are simply outstanding. The more recent "official" books on Kenya and Morrocco are the result of well-written monographs published back about a decade or so ago and then formally updated by Chaosium to full "product" status. And, as I said before, the WEG supplement on Japan (Rising Sun) is the best thing I've read on 20's and 30's Japan in some time. Other publishers really aren't doing things like that much. Steve Jackson Games has a couple of useful sourcebooks, though -- in the form of Mysterious Places, and some of the ones on Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt that might inform your pulp game if you're doing the "tough guy professor -- archaeology" theme in your game. Of course, none of these are written for Pulp Hero, but I got a copy of 5th Edition recently, and I don't see it as being terribly difficult to convert most of these to Pulp Hero stats if you wanted/needed to do that. On the other hand, unless I'm actually playing the game system these are written for, I use them more for inspirational ideas anyway, vice actual specifics. Let's face it, you usually have to spend time tailoring official supplements to your campaign and character situations and circumstances anyway. Oh, another thing I recently ran across is something called "Any System" books, for which they have something called Pulp Egypt (along with half a dozen associated adventures set in Egypt), and Heroes of Ruratonga (sort of a play on Tales of the Gold Monkey from what I can see) which also has several adventures associated with it. The deal with these is that they aren't written for any particular system -- just with guidelines on how tough to make things, which makes them very easy to translate into Pulp Hero (or anything else, for that matter). Finally, Kenneth Hite wrote up something called "Tomb Hounds of Egypt" as part of his Pagan Press series called "Ken Writes About Stuff" which purports to give good guidance on how to run an Egypt-centric pulp campaign in the 1930s. I haven't gotten the last two yet, so I can only report hear-say on them at this time, but Pulp Egypt is fantastic, which bodes well for Heroes of Ruratonga; and, of course, I'll read anything Ken writes that I can get hold of. Anyway, there's a lot of really cool and useful background info out there if you have the time, inclination, and money to go after them. I use a lot of these to drive my own research (especially GURPS sourcebooks and things like Suppressed Transmissions) -- for example, a mere mention of something I ran across somewhere put me on the track of the Pirate Brig Whydah (which wrecked off the coast of Massachusetts in a massive storm, going to the bottom with all hands and a supposedly vast treasure) which was subsequently found by divers off Cape Cod in the latter part of the 20th Century. Clearly then, that could become something the players seek in the 20's/30's in order to a) recover treasure; b ) find a clue leading to an even BIGGER treasure; or c) prevent the bad guys from getting something THEY need/want from it. As part of that, of course, they would need to learn how to dive in the era before SCUBA equipment (for which skill, useful information can be found in a Call of Cthulhu supplement called Fearful Passages -- which also, BTW, includes scenarios and information on such diverse forms of transport as a giant biplane passenger plane from the 1920s, elephant riding, and armored cars from World War I), which in turn could lead them to the ruins of the semi-mythical pirate stronghold of Libertatia in the Indian Ocean, and thence to the famous Treasure of the Indies (the richest haul ever made by a pirate vessel), and so on. (Interestingly, the pirate captain who captured the Portuguese treasure ship in question, hid the treasure and left a ciphered note behind that hasn't been solved to this day that supposedly leads the clever treasure hunter to the treasure (the cipher has been broken, but no one can figure out the clues); now THAT would be an interesting adventure -- especially if you give the players copies of the cipher, clues to solving it, old treasure maps, and that sort of thing to work with!) Lots of opportunities there, all from simply glancing through sourcebooks on Arkahm Massachusetts and Miskatonic University (which is where I started my players from)! Now to some extent, I obviously have hijacked this thread, and for that I sincerely apologize; but the point here is that sourcebooks from just about anything can be used to help you with your Pulp Hero campaign...and help you define cities in ways that make them useful as home bases for your players; witness how Arkham plays perfectly into my Whydah scenario idea by sheer accident!

Just FYI, if you aren't already aware of it, allow me to recommend something called "American Book Exchange," or ABE as a source for books. For example, I looked up Hardluck Hannigan on Amazon and could only find a couple of the books in actual print format (personally, I hate e-book/MOBI/Kindle -- much prefer to hold a book in my hands -- though I'll buy them if I simply can't find the book anywhere else). But on ABE, I found multiple copies for differing prices depending on what you want, plus multiple offerings of the first six novels in an Omnibus format (two novels per Omnibus), which is a cheaper way to buy them. And the books on Amazon were roughly twice the price of what I found on ABE. I'm sure if you go to the ABE web site and take a look, you can find just about anything you want on there in various formats and prices. Little known fact: ABE is actually the most commonly used ordering system for out-of-print, or even IN-print, by many locally owned bookstores (I don't know if the big chains use it or not) -- it's how they can tell you "Oh, I can get you that!" because they can just order it from some other bookstore, or direct from the manufacturer via ABE. Of course they have other sites they can use that people like us can't, but ABE has been my source for little-known books for well over a decade now. Check it out -- you won't be sorry!

Hmm, guess I'm just failing to communicate. My players don't "build the world" other than by playing in it, but they can and should tell me what they enjoyed the most about the last session, as well as what they didn't enjoy about it -- which provides some steerage as to what kinds of things they find fun and want to do more of. Some like investigation more than others. Others like the opportunity to use their fists or guns more. Some like car chases and zeppelins, others like puzzles to solve (incuding the physical kinds where you have to put the correct doohickey in slot A, or everybody winds up getting dropped into a pit, as long as the clues as to which doohickey is correct are there for them to figure out). In fact, the only constant that I've discovered is that they ALL seem to like a lot of handouts (player aids), like newspapers, mysterious letters, journal pages, autopsy reports, even the occasional stone tablet or statuette, which is a personal holdover from my Call of Cthuhlu games. They love getting those and trying to figure out how they fit in. Of course, since I give them a whole newspaper sheet sometimes, they tend to overthink the "background" articles more, thinking they somehow relate to the main story, but I get my revenge on them later when it turns out the second background article in that newspaper I gave them three months ago in a completely unrelated adventure has some foreshadowing for the adventure they're on now! <insert insane evil laughter here> Part of the lack of involvement in world building, I guess, is because there really ISN'T much world building in my games (whether pulp or Call of Cthulhu) -- they're set in 1920s and '30s Earth, and the only things that switch out are that some artifacts actually do what they say they do in the legends, evil cults are real as are the gods they worship (this one more in CoC than in pulp), evil masterminds and femme fatales exist, as do their nefarious plots, and that the characters themselves may develop a bit of a "reputation" in certain circles for getting things of a specialized nature done. Oh. And there may (or may not) be a "Hollow Earth." ;-) Along the way (by way of those background articles in the newspapers, or maybe a selection of old radio shows -- Live365 is great for this) I try to encourage them to explore the real history a bit; the Call of Cthulhu Player Handbooks are great for this since it includes timelines, biographies of famous people, and discussions of events. They don't have to, but the ones who do seem to really enjoy reading (or, in some cases, watching old newsreels of) the history-related things, and it seems to improve their enjoyment of the game. Plus when they talk about things like that it usually gives me a plot hook I can get in there sooner or later which ups the "immediacy" of the game.

I'll bump this one again: I was born in Honolulu, back when it was still a territory (though just barely), but we left there in 1963, so I don't really remember much about the place. Instead I'll talk about El Paso, Texas (where I was mostly raised) in the 1920's. El Paso, for those who don't know, is located where the borders of Texas, New Mexico and old Mexico all pretty much meet. The city wraps around the end of Franklin Mountain between the mountain and the river and across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico. A much smaller place then than it was even when I was growing up, it was mostly centered around the old downtown area, where electrical trolley lines remained in use into the 1950s. The central park area was a dusty plaza where you could still meet old western ranchers, cowboys and retired gunslingers in the 1920s. Prohibition didn't have much effect on El Paso, since Juarez was literally right across the river and even then, before all the New Mexico farmers dropped the water levels to nearly nothing, it was easy enough to ford the river if you wanted to avoid the bridge and just ride over to a cantina. Law and order was still a bit iffy, and mobsters never got much of a foothold in El Paso since smuggling booze wasn't really worthwhile across the border there given the logistics of getting it anywhere else, and no one actually needed anything smuggled there since they could just go over and get it themselves. Which is not to say there wasn't crime -- but perhaps surprisingly, it tended to read more like a Louis L'Amour novel than a Dashiell Hammett novel. El Paso's big claim to fame (other than being founded in 1581, making it the second oldest city in North America) was the railroad stop which was just about halfway between Houston and LA. There wasn't a ton of major manufacturing there at the time, though the ASARCO plant was opening around that time to smelt the ores being mined up in New Mexico (and down in old Mexico, for that matter), and most of the local economy was still based on either ranching or farming (mostly orchards and nut farms down in the Rio Grande valley -- which still does all of that today). The population was probably about half Latino and half Caucasion, with very few Black people living there at the time (slavery was never a productive economic system in the west, even under the Confederacy, and so there just weren't a lot of slaves/former slaves in the area -- especially since, when they left the old slave states, they tended to move north to the more industrialized states where the jobs were). The local terrain and weather are straight out of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, so if you've seen any of those movies, you know just what the El Paso area looked like back in the day (and still, to a large extent, does). During heavy rains, the streets flooded and if you were caught in a gully during a rainstorm (even one not particularly close to you) there was a distinct chance of being drowned or killed by large logs or rocks being washed into you by the runoff (still true today, by the way -- stay out of gullies if you see a rainstorm hitting a nearby mountain or mesa top out there). There were very few high-rise buildings (which I'll define as a building higher than four stories) in El Paso in the 1920s, with some more of them being built towards the end of the Roaring Twenties. Some streets were paved, most were not, and even the downtown area tended to be dusty most of the time. Automobiles were in use in the area, though still considered somewhat of a novelty by most people given the quality of the local roads outside of town until the mid-30's or so. Cars tended to be older and more robust models like the "T" (easy to fix, and easy to tow home with a horse if necessary) for a while longer than they were elsewhere in the US. It wasn't until the late 40's and '50s that El Paso became more "LA-like" in terms of cars and roads and high school kids, yada, yada, yada. Probably a good half of the construction at the beginning of the era was adobe with most of the remainder being load-bearing walls with timber supports. As I noted, it wasn't until the late 20's-early 30's that downtown started to get more multiple story buildings higher than three or four stories built. In other ways, the town was fairly mainstream, though, with electricity, running water, telephones and radios arriving and entering use along the same lines as they did in other cities of the day. Woolworth and Kresge and Sears all had stores downtown, as did many other major chains of the era. There was a small college (the Texas College of Mines) built up on the slopes of Mount Franklin (the major mountain that comes right down to the river on the western side of town and serves as the end of the Rocky Mountains before the Sierra Madres pick up a mile or so south of the river -- thus the name of the town; "El Paso del Norte," "The Pass of the North"). TCM would eventually become The University of Texas at El Paso, but for now was mostly a school for mining engineers and geologists. One of the school's major claims to fame (to this day) is the architecture of the builidngs is based on the architecture of Nepal, and all the buildings (four buildings, in the 1920s) have a faint Nepalese look to them. Indian tribes in the local area included the Ysleta Indian tribe (a small Pueblo Indian group) and the Apaches who lived north of the city in New Mexico in the mountains where it was cooler and wetter (and south of the city in the mountains of Mexico in "rancherios"). For the most part, they were merely poor now, though some of the older men remembered their days of youth forty years earlier when "lifting some hair" was considered quite the thing to do in some social circles, and their run-ins with the cavalry (both US and Mexican) were the stuff of legends. The Lincoln County War was fought only a few dozen miles north of El Paso, and Billy the Kid was actually put on trial in Las Cruces (before escaping), a small New Mexican town about 45 miles north of El Paso along the Rio Grande. El Paso would make a good place for passing through for scenery and descriptive purposes, and could easily serve as a setting for a scenario or two -- especially if you were using the "modern western" pulp style for a while. Criminal activity would probably revolve more around the classic cattle rustlin'/horse thievin' sort of things with the occasional bank robbery thrown in. There was a small military post (Fort Bliss, still extant -- and quite large -- today) which was an old cavalry post and kind of a sleepy place, at least until about 1938 or so. It was still there mostly to keep an eye on things in old Mexico (the Villa raid up into New Mexico was only four years prior to 1920, and Fort Bliss was used by General Pershing to stage his campaign against Pancho Villa from) so while there is a possibility of some international intrigue, given that Mexico wasn't much of a threat to the United States, it might not amount to much (though a few Nazis in the 30's could always enliven things). Weird Science probably wouldn't work too well either, unless an evil mastermind needed an old abandoned mine to work from and the characters show up in El Paso to hunt him out of the mountains around there. Archaeology, on the other hand, has enormous potential -- especially given the legends of lost gold and lost mines that abound in the area, and the old mission sites (which could potentially contain clues, of course) that exist in the city and it's vicinity both north and south of the border. Horror campaigns could do a lot worse than take a look at an old Call of Cthulhu scenario entitled "The Secret of Castro Negro" for inspiration for the American Southwest. Set in the area around Silver City up in the Gila Forest and Animas Mountains area, it would be easy enough to move closer to El Paso if that was desirable for some reason, though frankly its location works really well where it is. Air adventures would work well in terms of actual mechanics -- the weather is nearly always clear, and in the winter can be quite cold, with very little humidity and lots of relatively flat ground to land planes on. Mind you, if you're not careful, you'll break an axle or lose a wheel on all the rocks and what not, but you can at least walk away from the wreck if you have any luck and skill at all. It would be hard to conceal a secret air base, though again, those old abandoned mines (some of them surprisingly large considering the technology when they were built) could be reconfigured for aircraft use and would at least keep the ground support activities out of the open. The runways would still tend to be pretty visible from the air though -- there's nothing much you can use to conceal them out there, and they'd get marked up pretty fast when you leveled them and removed the rocks, creosote bushes, and cactus from the runway, to say nothing of the wheel marks when the planes touch down. Hopefully someone finds this useful.

Well, okay, but if you know your players are confused and/or turned off by that, why would you do it to them? It's supposed to be a communal effort -- and if everyone isn't enjoying it, that's a good way to become a community of one. If they DO enjoy it, then you are giving them what they like and no guidance is necessary. I guess what I'm saying is that the guidance you're seeking is sitting right across the table from you -- what do your players say? (I'm honestly not trying to be flip here -- I wish we were talking face-to-face since you would hear my actual tone of voice and all.)

The ones you picked were great choices and easily should get you (and your players) into the mood, however I'll throw in a second vote for Secret of the Incas -- if you want to see the movie that Lucas and Spielberg pretty much ripped off to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, this is it. Complete to the leather jacket and the fedora, and beam of light in the hidden treasure/map room. Plus, it's got Charlton Heston in it, and his work was usually worth a glance. I'll also second The Librarian movies -- they're campy, and get progressively worse as you go through the three of them in terms of acting and plotting -- but they've got some interesting ideas in them and most of the pulp tropes make an appearance sooner or later. If they moved a little faster, and such things were still made in the modern day, they would have potentially made good cliffhanging serials to show before the main picture show. ;-) High Road to China and King Soloman's Mines, in my opinion, are pretty much on a par with The Librarian series as far as acting goes, but lots of ideas and scenery there! Even something like Wild Wild West (the movie -- which is really more steampunk than anything else) has the evil mastermind/wierd science thing going which is pretty classic as pulp.

I'm just beginning to cross over into Pulp from Call of Cthulhu, but I have to tell all you pulpsters out there that there are superb gudebooks for London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cairo, and of course, the entirety of "Lovecraft Country" (the made-up towns of Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich and the entire Miskatonic River Valley) available for the 1920s, as well as guidebooks for Kenya, Morrocco, England in general, Hungary, Ireland, the Congo, the British Raj (though that one's more focused on the 1890's, as is the one on the Sudan), Iceland, Tibet, Australia, and Mesoamerica out there for your enjoyment in the Call of Cthulhu line. I'm sure I've skipped a few in the list too. And if you throw in things like Trail of Cthulhu sourcebooks, you'll find even more. Additionally the globe-trotting campaigns (expecially Masks of Nyarlathotep) get you to places like Shanghai, and the complete route of the Simplon Orient Express from London to Istanbul in considerable detail. There's even a full-up campaign set in Antartica (Beyond the Mountains of Madness) which, while hardly usable as written for purely pulp adventures (unless unspeakable alien beings are part of that for you, of course) does an excellent job of describing how you outfit expeditions to such places and giving you lots of info on the continent (to include giant albino penguins, for those of you looking for them). All of these are written for either BRP or Gumshoe as a game system of course, but I've found very little difficulty converting such things to D6, for example, for that more cinematic feel. And if you like a somewhat grittier system, thanks to things like Astounding Adventures (for BRP) and the hopefully soon forthcoming Pulp Cthulhu, you can always use BRP to game out pulp adventures -- it's still one of the better RPG systems I've found. In short, there are a whole world of resources out there that you can easily use for pulp settings, and if you go back into the long out-of-print stuff, you can add Norway, parts of France, and even a little bit of info about Chicago to the list of stuff available. Mind you, most of this is set for what they call the "classic" era, or the 1920's (because that's when most of H.P. Lovecraft's stuff was set), but it's not so hard to update to the 30's if you don't want to start your players in the earlier era -- throw in a few more cars, some better roads, a few more telephones and more airplane connections, and you're pretty much set. Oh, and don't forget to lower the prices a bit since things got cheaper during the Depression.... If you're looking for info on the far east, West End Games, as part of their old World of Indiana Jones game did publish a source book on Japan in the '30's, which was pretty well done. I'd love to see someone do up a source book on China and Southeast Asia for the period too -- and rumor has it that someone might for Call of Cthulhu, which would be very useful to Pulp gamers too. So, to answer the original question (and keeping in mind that I'm an American and never got to go to London -- much to my personal regret, though I did manage Paris and Berlin) -- probably either Arkham or NYC as the primary home base -- though SF or LA could be interesting too. I'd prefer a coastal city for the greater opportunities for travel that it gives (you don't have to cross half the continent first in order to reach a major seaport). But that's just me.

As to how much "supernatural" stuff belongs in Indiana Jones style pulp roleplaying, as opposed to Call of Cthulhu, well, I guess the obvious answer is it's up to the Game Master really. From what I've read and seen, every Indy Jones event has something supernatural going on, whereas as a "Keeper" in Call of Cthulhu, I generally try to restrict that stuff as much as I can since it seems like it would tend to make the player characters even LESS likely to survive, with scenarios not having anything magical or supernatural about them roughly half the time (though that's somewhat misleading since generally I run scenarios in groups as either full-fledged campaigns or as mini-campaigns involving two or three scenarios, and the culmination of the scenario group ALWAYS has something "Man Was Not Meant To Know" in there somewhere, even if only by implication). So to me (though I'm only just beginning to run Indy style Pulp adventures thanks to a new player wanting something a bit more "cinematic" than the classic CoC type stuff tends to be), it seems that the supernatural actually crops up in the Indyverse MORE than it does in my Call of Cthulhu campaign. And that's kind of odd, really, now that I think about it....

Or, perhaps, a pseudo-Indiana Jones adventure where the players are confronted by Chinese warlords, a Japanese force intent on grabbing the nine, and a Fu Manchu style mastermind who seeks to play all three of them against each other for his own benefit. Throw in some quick action in Shang-hai, up along the Yellow River by junk and thence to the Great Wall and into outer Mongolia (Mongolian Death Worms, anyone?) with a climactic battle between good and evil at the villain's lair (probably an ancient Chinese temple, or maybe even the tomb of the last Emperor of the Zhou Dynasty) and you'd have quite the makings of a Far Eastern tour de force!

Well, to return to the original question, and speaking as a considerable fan of Call of Cthulhu (the game) and anything written by HPL, I think for me the difference is best described by the word "atmosphere." Clearly Indiana Jones is a globe-trotting adventurer, in the classic mold of people like Doc Savage (if not so "super-powery"), while the average protagonist of a Cthulhu Mythos story is more like Marcus Brody. Except that Marcus Brody doesn't know anyone even remotely like Indy, and instead has to deal with the situation on his own. And except that the situation doesn't involve murdering Nazis stealing an ancient artifact as the primary opponents, but monsters so beyond the average mortal's ability to deal with them that the most frequent recourse for the protagonist is either death (often by suicide) or a rapid descent into madness. Even when purely mortal cultists are the primary enemy (as in in the eponymous Call of Cthulhu itself, they are actually not considered the worst part of the story; but merely lesser manifestations of the incredible evil and corruption of the primary foe (that being whichever Great Old One the protagonist is being forced to confront). Nor is any of what's going on really "magic" -- even though it may be described that way by mere humans; but instead is a manifestation of Clarke's Law though more focused on mathematics and physics than merely on technology. Or, to rephrase Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced mathematical, geometrical or physical sciences skill is indistinguishable from magic." Given that HPL was an atheist, his "magical systems" (at least according to his letters) were intended to merely be mysterious manifestations of outre math and scientific understandings -- indeed in Dreams in the Witchhouse, he clearly makes that connection as Walter Gilman both slowly goes mad and increasingly interacts with Keziah and Brown Jenkin as his understanding of "non-Euclidean" geometry grows. So while it would clearly be possible to interpret Indiana Jones adventures in terms of the Cthulhu Mythos, they would cease being the free-wheeling pulp adventures they are, and would instead become dark stories of cosmic horror in which Indy and his friends would be consumed by horrific deaths at the hands of frequently nearly indescribably monsters and beings and the survivors would steadily descend into abject madness more as a defense mechanism than anything else. Which brings us back to the "atmosphere" argument I launched in the beginning. In Cthulhu Mythos stories and games, the world is a terrible place, concealing inconceivable evil and terror which can only be "defeated" by nearly impossible efforts, usually costing the protagonist either his life or sanity, and which really only constitutes a minor setback for the entities being opposed. In Indiana Jones, a single (talented, but basically normal) human opposes and overcomes more common "evils," albeit with many "cliffhanging" opportunities along the way, and with the help of some loyal, but probably not terribly impressive friends. Indy suffers no real negative consequences of his confrontations with his enemy; he's not driven insane, nor is he killed (though he may take a beating along the way), nor is he left with deeper questions as to the meaning of it all. ("What's that?" "The Ark of the Covenant." "The Ark of the Covenant? Are you sure?" "Pretty sure." -- and thus a major event in Indy's life is dismissed in one flip exchange. Whereas in a more Mythos-oriented tale, merely seeing the image might be enough of a shock to send him fleeing from the tunnel he's in towards the more sane light of day.) In game terms, it's why Call of Cthulhu has a "Sanity" mechanism (which will eventually and unavoidably remove any character that physically survives the game through guaranteed madness), and D6, Pulp Hero, and so on doesn't really (though you could certainly add one if you liked). I note in passing that in Chaosium's house organ for Basic Roleplaying, Uncounted Worlds, they have replacement rules for "Stress" instead of "Sanity" which removes the inevitable descent into madness from the game and replaces it with a more "shock" -like mechanism suitable for more pulpy roleplaying -- and which, unless over-damaged through lack of time to relax and heal, can be completely recovered from with no lasting ill effects. Whether "Stress" is any more a description of reality than "Sanity" is, I'll leave to the sufferers from PTSD to determine. Anyway, that's my $0.40 worth (that much, because I probably went on about 20 times as long as anyone wanted me to). ;-)