Pulp!
The votes have been tallied and our latest Patreon poll has a winner. We asked our Quest Givers to decide what new and exciting genres the Heroes would explore this month. As you might have noticed, it was Classic Pulp that carried the day. (Better luck next time, Weird West!)
Shifting genres is all kinds of amusing, and that applies to players, GMs, and comic writers alike. Laurel and I had a blast going through pulpcovers.com while researching this one. But even more than the outrageous art of a bygone era, it’s the shiny new collection of tropes that makes a genre shift fun.
If you’re into fantasy, then you know how useful the conventions are. Reading through fairy tales and Tolkien, watching Harry Potter movies or Dark Crystal episodes, you can’t help but pick up a few tricks. They’re the Handbook’s stock and trade, and include everything from Quest Givers to Dark Lords; Scheming Nobles to Castle Sieges. They’re the building blocks of genre, and manipulating them at the service of character backstory and campaign setting is part of the fun in games like D&D, Dungeon World, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
When you move into something as radically different as pulp, however, you unlock a treasure chest of new devices. When I asked Laurel why she was frowning so hard at her Cintiq last night, she said, “I want to add a Dick Tracy hat too, but I just don’t know how that works when you’ve got a horn….” Some things just feel right in-genre. For pulp, that includes gangsters, trips to China Town, leggy dames entering detective agencies, and hard-boiled action dudes champing cigars and punching goons down at the docks.
Of course, as you might have gathered from Horsepower’s head and Elf Princess’s conspicuously pointy ears, it’s also possible to mix genres. My last pulp game was actually in the Exalted 2e system, and involved a god-blooded black cat named Baby Grand. Dude owned his own own private investigations outfit in Nexus, had a voice like Batman, and yes, wore an adorable tiny fedora.
So how about it, guys? Have you ever taken a dramatic turn from your group’s usual setting? Was it an exciting change of pace, or an unwelcome departure from your preferred set of tropes? Tell us all about your adventures in strange and distant genres down in the comments!
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I think the biggest departure we ever had was when our dm set up a d20 modern campaign 1000 years in the future. There were a lot of great moments, but there were two things often holding things back. First was that the d20 modern rules are kind of a absolute mess, not helped by the fact that this was everyone’s first time with it. I probably didn’t help matters by making my guy an absolute munchkin who was the around as good at being a skill monkey as the other smart character, had almost as much damage as our primary damage dealer, but also had a jetpack and was virtually unkillable, with me being able to count the number of times he was actually hurt in the campaign with just the fingers on my hands. Secondly was the fact that the dm kinda accidentally screwed over the guy who based his character on driving early on by destroying his mentally bonded car after an other player was trying to escape a chase scene by setting off bombs in the warehouse where the car was kept. The dm should have just said it was in a different area of the warehouse since the player had no intention or knowledge that that was where the car was, but mistakes happen, and he often gave the guy other things to drive in the game, as well as a tank in the finale. I will say that the game definitely had a lot of great and memorable moments, but the stuff in between was just not as good as what we typically did. I do kinda just want to say my 2 favorite moments though. One was where a couple of tracking missiles were being launched at our airship, so i managed to hijack one mid air with my jetpack and mag boots, hack it with my computer and engineering skills, and reprogram it to fly back at the shooter. The other was when i was flying on my jetpack away from some pursuing jets who were considerably faster then me, but not as good at maneuvering between buildings, in the end, I beat them by predicting where one would go when around a building, flying full speed just ahead of it, shooting out the cockpit glass, slamming into the now exposed cockpit, knocking out the pilot and taking a good bit of damage in the process, then using it to take out the other jet and fly to the mothership. Those were good times, but the stuff in between just wasn’t as good.
Well, our actual biggest departure was a shadow run campaign, but that campaign didn’t last too long, and I’m not sure if its that good a comparison since the rule system was much more different from what we were used to then d20 modern, there were a lot of scheduling issues, and this was our dms first time, though he was fairly good and we still had a good time, and we really liked the world. Still, I don’t really think this was as useful a comparison as our d20 modern campaign
I never quite got the relationship between d20 Modern / d20 Future. Is the latter just an expansion on the former?
Love that “reprogram the missiles” bit. The hackerman stuff is definitely something you don’t get in a fantasy setting. Well… most fantasy settings.
http://cryptorpg.com/cryptomancy/
I think so, not exactly sure though. We only ever did the 1 campaign with it.
I think the best “other genre” I’ve played in was “all of them.” The setting was a city built in to the gap between dimensions, and people and things just sort of fell through sometimes. End result: a world where you might see (or be) a cyborg trying to explain anime to an elf while the steampunk band breaks into a blistering concertina solo.
Rifts?
Sounds more like “Nexus: The Infinite City” than Rifts.
Well, pulp villains were never known for subtlety…
I’m sure Mr. Stabby enjoys being a revolver.
Mr. Shooty?
Or maybe the gun just shoots blades? =P
At the end of the Storm King’s Thunder campaign, the DM decided it was time to go weird, and took us into spelljammer. It ended up being mostly the same “Standard fantasy” but we’d visit different planets for it to happen on.
That’s too bad. The weird flavor is the point when you’re fighting giant space nautiloids.
Looks like Fighter is a natural as a pulp villain! I bet he’d make for a fine cover model for Martials Magazine as well. Assuming he’s fine with working with animals.
https://content.artofmanliness.com/uploads/2010/05/ad13.jpg
Well he does have experience: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mother-nature
In our current game we are playing as a construct of technocrats but instead of the usual pogrom, big brother and Hypertech we decided to go for a more lite a comical campaign. Basically our current game is Friends but with some elements of Agents of Shield and The Big Bang Theory. Far and away of the usual World of Darkness yet we have manage to change the mood but still conserve the bleak world we love so much. This campaign is great fun, very different to what we usually play but still very much the same. Still be usually don’t change the mood, style or tropes. I for one, for example, play fantasy because is easy to do a campaign and run the game. Sci-fi is another genre i really like to play whenever i can, what i like are the possibilities and freedom. While i like both of them i try not to combine them. Combine genres is too much risky to even bother try and in my group we have reach that conclusion, finally 🙂
Wait… Why is combing sci-fi with fantasy risky? Was there a space-time paradox or something?
Not combining sci-fi with fantasy is what is risky but combining any two genres. When my friends play Shadowrun i don’t even bother to appear. I can’t stand the game and they are better without me, that way the can enjoy more that awful thing. That particular game is a good example of why combining two genres can be a bad thing. It’s not fantasy for the setting and it’s not cyberpunk for all the fantasy elements. When you combine two things you can get many diferent results. Combining blue and yellow gives you green, but combining white and black can give you different shades of gray. And even when you put them together without mixing the colors people can still dislike it and see it like gray. Shadowrun is not the only example, Rifts and Torg are two other games that combine genres, and in a similar fashion, that still are on the bad results list. Exalted on the other hand can be a good example of doing things right, the first age was choke with Magitek and Shards of the Exalted Dream, specially Gunstar Autochthonia is the better example of that book. Pathfinder in the region of Numeria can be an interesting shift of the usual fantasy setting. Numeria is Golarion’s Roswell. Numenera can be an example, in that game tech and magic are pretty much the same. Actually they might be the same after eight whole worlds. So while there are games that do the mixing thing right others make things in the wrong way. For all of this is that i say that combining genres can be risky 🙁
Not combining sci-fi with fantasy is what is risky but combining any two genres. When my friends play Shadowrun i don’t even bother to appear. I can’t stand the game and they are better without me, that way the can enjoy more that awful thing. That particular game is a good example of why combining two genres can be a bad thing. It’s not fantasy for the setting and it’s not cyberpunk for all the fantasy elements. When you combine two things you can get many different results. Combining blue and yellow gives you green, but combining white and black can give you different shades of gray. And even when you put them together without mixing the colors people can still dislike it and see it like gray. Shadowrun is not the only example, Rifts and Torg are two other games that combine genres, and in a similar fashion, that still are on the bad results list. Exalted on the other hand can be a good example of doing things right, the first age was choke with Magitek and Shards of the Exalted Dream, specially Gunstar Autochthonia is the better example of that book. Pathfinder in the region of Numeria can be an interesting shift of the usual fantasy setting. Numeria is Golarion’s Roswell. Numenera can be an example, in that game tech and magic are pretty much the same. Actually they might be the same after eight whole worlds. So while there are games that do the mixing thing right others make things in the wrong way. For all of this is that i say that combining genres can be risky
I think what your zeroing in on is the “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” problem. When that spaceship crashed into fantasy land way back in “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks,” some folks thought it was an amazing mashup. Others felt like the chocolate really did ruin their beloved fantasy peanut butter.
A lot of folks seem to love the crap out of Shadowrun. One of my buddies calls it his favorite system / setting. But as you demonstrate, that’s by no means a universal opinion. The risk is alienating some of your audience, even as others enthusiastically come on board.
Well my friends are not exactly fans of Shadowrun, but they kinda like it. I don’t like it and don’t even bother to play it. I have play it on the past, good or bad if i don’t play it i will never we sure. But what i can’t stand in the lore of the game, for me it’s an important part of any game. Still all of this is my opinion, i prefer Cyperpunk 2020 to Shadowrun but other people may like more the latter. People have different tastes, continuing with your example, some like chocolate, others peanut butter and some both of them but maybe they dislike the combination. That is what i consider risky of combining genres, you need to achieve a fine, very fine balance and even still you will have people angry and don’t liking what you have done. In any case one can always play the games one likes and ignore the others 🙂
Sorry for the double post above. I have problems with that internet thingy and that makes funny things with my comments sometimes 🙂
I sadly haven’t played enough games to have a standard to deviate from. But if we’re talking Pulp, I am your man. Seems like every character I build, but never get to play, is some kind of detective or dilettante. Be it cyberpunk dystopias or Waterdeep, there’s usually a dame or a gumshoe who’d come off as a mega-hipster or a trans-planar weirdo.
I think you’ve got the right avatar for that particular affliction.
I always liked Ravenloft as an excuse to mix flavors. It’s gothic-meets-swords-and-socery in the first place, but then you’ve got dudes coming in from every imaginable setting. That’s a good time in horror town.
Supplemental to the subject raised by the Handbook, Glen Cook wrote a fantasy “noir” series which feature metals in their titles (i.e. Cold Copper Tears, etc) and incorporates as much of this genre’s tropes as he could – hard-bitten detective, saucy dames, convoluted power grabs, etc. If anyone is thinking of a game along these lines, check them out as resource or reference materials.
As always, I need to read more. I also need more time for reading. 🙁
I’m guilty of creating our biggest departure from status quo, which was a Space Opera style campaign loosely inspired by an old PHP based internet game called TDZK that used the Big Eyes Small Mouth d20 Ruleset. It’s a point based anime system that’s kinda similar to Mutants and Masterminds. I put a huge amount of work into it, building races in the point buy system, putting out a list of weapons for players to choose, and writing an actual packet of lore that was ten pages thick. The game lasted a grand total of two sessions.
For you see, this was long before our group was introduced to the concept of Session Zero, and PVP was much more common and accepted in that group than it is with my current one. So one player showed up with a Federation War Hero, the second a fairly standard gear head, the third a space pirate, the fourth a big scary warrior race guy, and the fifth a wanted terrorist who tried to drop the Moon on the Earth. x.x’ And I learned the lesson of do not write that much for one setting without putting down very clear rails. Players cannot be trusted in a Sandbox, they will find a way to weaponize the sand against each other.
As King of the Hill taught us, weaponized sand can be very dangerous indeed. 😛
I think we’ve all been there with ill-advised system hacks. I tried to tack the D&D skill system onto the Mordheim skirmish game when I was a new GM, using the latter “for the combats.” That went about as well as you’d expect.
We played a game of Honey Heist for my birthday, with our only sane player volunteering to DM. The problem was that we didn’t all know what genre we had shifted too. The DM had decided that Honey Heist was a Mission Impossible genre, while I thought that it was an absurd, craziest-plan-wins genre. So while the DM thought a good plan would be to don disguises and sneak through an underwater tunnel (which I did try, by the way; I just failed the rolls to succeed), I thought that a good plan would be to use a ramp to send a moving vehicle through a second story window, and use a grappling hook and water skies to ride behind the careening car.
The two genres did not mix very well, and the game quickly became everyone running around fleeing guards with assault rifles while generally causing as much mayhem as possible.
It was a brief, but fun game.