Playing Pulp
Dec 27, 2011 14:13:35 GMT -8
Post by Deleted on Dec 27, 2011 14:13:35 GMT -8
So I am an American History major and a Pulp aficionado, interests that are happily complimentary. I am an academic and teacher at heart, currently serving in the Air Force as an instructor and hoping to get out and teach full time at the middle or high school level (yes I might be a masochist). As a result of these facts I find myself often wanting to jump in with some inputs about the whole "pulp" gaming thing.
So first things first, what is Pulp?
Pulp, contrary to popular belief, is not a genre in and of itself. The term Pulp refers to magazines sold from the late 1890 through the end of the 1950s. These magazines were printed on cheap "pulp" paper, thus the moniker. They were the follow-up to the Dime Novels and Penny Dreadful magazines of the 1800s. They were cheap, mass produced magazines aimed at the lower middle class market, offering a hundred or so pages of novellas and short stories, all for about a quarter.
They were also the single biggest publishers of short stories in their time and covered every genre. Westerns, Sci-Fi, Crime, Historical Fiction, Teen Romance, Horror, you name it and you could find a pulp magazine or ten dedicated to your genre of choice. Some even tried pairing up multiple genres, sometimes with bizarre results, such as the entire line of "Spicy" books which paired lurid romance with pretty much every other genre they could find. Even then sex sold.
They were the home of guys like Lovecraft, Burroughs, Howard, and McCulley, spawning respectively Cthulhu, John Carter, Conan, and Zorro. And along with those fellows pretty much any author of short stories during those decades probably published at least a few stories between the lurid covers of a pulp magazine.
Of course the pulps eventually faded, with the few publishers that survived transferring over to other things, Marvel and DC for instance both started life as pulp publishers before entering and essentially creating the modern comic book industry.
So done with the history lesson, what does any of this have to do with playing a pulp game?
Well my point is essentially that playing a pulp game has less to do with the genre of the game then it does the tone. Call of Cthulhu for instance, Chaosium has done an amazing job getting the feel and tone of Lovecraft's work into a workable table top experience. Most people simply call it horror, but it is very much pulp. Savage Worlds does this well too, though they went more for the western (with Deadlands) and action adventure genres they still have that fast paced feel of the source material.
That isn't to say that you can't play pulp in whatever your system of choice is, but I think some games lend themselves better to it. You want a fairly fast paced system, and though crunch isn't a bad thing, you want a system where it doesn't slow things down. D&D for instance is probably not the best system for the pulp experience, it tends to be far to slow paced as a result of the focus on tactics. I really like FATE personally as it tends to be a fast paced system that gives the players and the DM plenty of freedom to throw curveballs and cliffhanger events into the mix.
Regardless of system though it's the story that is key. The pulps were a haven for short stories and Novellas. These were thirty to a hundred page stories that moved fast, pulling you through the story with thrills, chills, dramatic plot twists, and surprise reveals. They were short self-contained tales that often only hinted at the overreaching world or plotline that may have existed.
Your games should follow a similar vibe. Each adventure should play like a one shot, dropping the players into the action or mystery as quickly as possible. Now I'm not saying it needs to be as tightly scripted as you would a game for a con or the like, but you should be running short stand alone type adventures. Each session or two should be a single story. An adventure with all the plot twists, cliffhangers, and a climatic ending of a pulp style story.
But what if you want to run a Pulp themed campaign?
Most pulp stories were self contained adventures, but they also tended to have a continuity between them . The Shadow for instance gained and lost agents as the stories went on. He gained new skills, lost friends, defeated mortal enemies, and found new ones. Sometimes months passed between adventures, other times it was only a few days. But his campaign against evil went on for years.
Though I think pulp games should be played as a series of self contained adventures, think a string of one shots that just happen to link together, each dropping hints at the future without necessarily having a direct path to it. Instead of the constantly moving story that seems to be the norm when playing a game think of it more as a timeline where you might have one adventure happen in early spring, while the next session jumps to say midsummer, the next early winter. On occasion you might even flashback to a smaller adventure that happened during one of those skipped periods of time.
Even if you aren't going for a Pulp theme I find allot of advantages to gaming this way. For one you always have a ready end point should the group or the DM get burned out, for another the episodic nature of it makes it much easier to work new players in or explain away a missing player. How many times have you had to handwave a character because the player didn't show up when the group is supposedly trapped in a dungeon or the like.
These are just my opinions on the topic of course, and I'd love to hear other people's views or ideas on things. Also hopefully this will get some people thinking and may have acted as a slightly informative and entertaining read.
So first things first, what is Pulp?
Pulp, contrary to popular belief, is not a genre in and of itself. The term Pulp refers to magazines sold from the late 1890 through the end of the 1950s. These magazines were printed on cheap "pulp" paper, thus the moniker. They were the follow-up to the Dime Novels and Penny Dreadful magazines of the 1800s. They were cheap, mass produced magazines aimed at the lower middle class market, offering a hundred or so pages of novellas and short stories, all for about a quarter.
They were also the single biggest publishers of short stories in their time and covered every genre. Westerns, Sci-Fi, Crime, Historical Fiction, Teen Romance, Horror, you name it and you could find a pulp magazine or ten dedicated to your genre of choice. Some even tried pairing up multiple genres, sometimes with bizarre results, such as the entire line of "Spicy" books which paired lurid romance with pretty much every other genre they could find. Even then sex sold.
They were the home of guys like Lovecraft, Burroughs, Howard, and McCulley, spawning respectively Cthulhu, John Carter, Conan, and Zorro. And along with those fellows pretty much any author of short stories during those decades probably published at least a few stories between the lurid covers of a pulp magazine.
Of course the pulps eventually faded, with the few publishers that survived transferring over to other things, Marvel and DC for instance both started life as pulp publishers before entering and essentially creating the modern comic book industry.
So done with the history lesson, what does any of this have to do with playing a pulp game?
Well my point is essentially that playing a pulp game has less to do with the genre of the game then it does the tone. Call of Cthulhu for instance, Chaosium has done an amazing job getting the feel and tone of Lovecraft's work into a workable table top experience. Most people simply call it horror, but it is very much pulp. Savage Worlds does this well too, though they went more for the western (with Deadlands) and action adventure genres they still have that fast paced feel of the source material.
That isn't to say that you can't play pulp in whatever your system of choice is, but I think some games lend themselves better to it. You want a fairly fast paced system, and though crunch isn't a bad thing, you want a system where it doesn't slow things down. D&D for instance is probably not the best system for the pulp experience, it tends to be far to slow paced as a result of the focus on tactics. I really like FATE personally as it tends to be a fast paced system that gives the players and the DM plenty of freedom to throw curveballs and cliffhanger events into the mix.
Regardless of system though it's the story that is key. The pulps were a haven for short stories and Novellas. These were thirty to a hundred page stories that moved fast, pulling you through the story with thrills, chills, dramatic plot twists, and surprise reveals. They were short self-contained tales that often only hinted at the overreaching world or plotline that may have existed.
Your games should follow a similar vibe. Each adventure should play like a one shot, dropping the players into the action or mystery as quickly as possible. Now I'm not saying it needs to be as tightly scripted as you would a game for a con or the like, but you should be running short stand alone type adventures. Each session or two should be a single story. An adventure with all the plot twists, cliffhangers, and a climatic ending of a pulp style story.
But what if you want to run a Pulp themed campaign?
Most pulp stories were self contained adventures, but they also tended to have a continuity between them . The Shadow for instance gained and lost agents as the stories went on. He gained new skills, lost friends, defeated mortal enemies, and found new ones. Sometimes months passed between adventures, other times it was only a few days. But his campaign against evil went on for years.
Though I think pulp games should be played as a series of self contained adventures, think a string of one shots that just happen to link together, each dropping hints at the future without necessarily having a direct path to it. Instead of the constantly moving story that seems to be the norm when playing a game think of it more as a timeline where you might have one adventure happen in early spring, while the next session jumps to say midsummer, the next early winter. On occasion you might even flashback to a smaller adventure that happened during one of those skipped periods of time.
Even if you aren't going for a Pulp theme I find allot of advantages to gaming this way. For one you always have a ready end point should the group or the DM get burned out, for another the episodic nature of it makes it much easier to work new players in or explain away a missing player. How many times have you had to handwave a character because the player didn't show up when the group is supposedly trapped in a dungeon or the like.
These are just my opinions on the topic of course, and I'd love to hear other people's views or ideas on things. Also hopefully this will get some people thinking and may have acted as a slightly informative and entertaining read.