The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
One of the key challenges in scenario design is finding ways to help the characters by into the story.
This is my take on adapting the advice of Wolfgang Baur in “Writing your first adventure” (https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ab/20060728a) to Pulp Adventure design.
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself more and more in need of assistance when it comes to keeping track of all the important points that the players need to learn during a game. A list of key revelations that need to occur during the game is therefore an invaluable tool.
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
After constructing an outline, listing the NPCs, and defining the villain, the next thing I do in preparing a scenario is map out the locations in the plot outline and the connections between them. This will eventually result in four things; a location map linking the locations with clues, a clue list/chart, and two game maps (one for the players and one for the GM).
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
Villains are an essential element of the pulp universe and require careful planning to be an effective part of a game. I have friends who will happily roll up a random monster to serve as the antagonist of the piece, but this is never as satisfying to me as a villain who “belongs”.
A three dimensional villain is one who is memorable, motivated, active, and relatable. Below are some tips and a template I find useful for designing villains.
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
The following is a home-brew character generation system for creating pulp characters for your role-playing game. Feel free to use, ignore, or modify these rules to suit yourself (just remember the copyright line above). While the majority of this is home-brewed, the questionnaire included below was inspired by the questions provided in the fantastic Castle Falkenstein rules by R Talsorian Games.
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
These are some rules I’ve been using in my home-brew pulp game. They certainly don’t originate with me. They are a combination of ideas lifted from http://kellri.truculent.org/WEIRD%20SCIENCE.pdf and https://sites.google.com/site/moochava/genius, mashed together and adapted to fit pulp play.
Weird science achieves the impossible. While it is possible to MacGuyver a hot air balloon from scraps found in the rubble of an earthquake devastated city using standard science skills, a machine that can look into the aether and allow communication with ghosts requires something more – Weird Science.
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
Once the general plot of a game has been defined I create a list of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) who might be important in the game and define their relationships and the scenario’s main areas of conflict.
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
Today’s blog entry is about a simple scenario outlining tool I like to use. It’s based on alternating action and exposition within a 3 act structure defined by the conventions of the pulp adventure genre (with a little recently discovered (at least by me) feature of cinematic screenplay writing called the “goal reversal”).
The text of this blog is copyright 2012. Have fun with the content but don’t pass it off as your own or try to sell it, Okay.
Roleplaying in the world of 1930’s pulp adventure is the subject of this blog and this entry in particular introduces the topic, explaining a few terms and presenting you with an “Invitation to adventure”.
Pulp-centric 