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Conan, Grim Tales, or Iron Heroes
- Thread starter Ry
- Start date
GlassJaw said:
So this snippet of review from Mortality.net:
"New from Badaxe Games, Grim Tales is a "rules resource and campaign toolkit" for designing high adventure, low magic games in any genre - though it's particularly geared toward "pulp"-style games. With it, you can create worlds based on your favorite books, movies, comic books, computer games... anything. It's a d20 system product, so you can use it with any of the core rulebooks, but it's recommended that you use it with the Modern d20 core rules."
And this copy from the folks that put out Grim Tales:
"Based upon the d20 Modern Grim Tales is the high adventure, low magic campaign tool-kit for fantastic roleplaying in your favorite pulp genres, from the dawn of Atlantis to the apocalyptic future of a dying planet. "
Doesn't mean anything? What you can do differs from the intended design. 'Pulp' doesn't mean 'super heroic' or 'low lethality' - even the Hero Pulps were fraught with serious danger for the heroes, and given the fluid nature of the pulps' writing and production schedules, readers stood a very good chance of seeing well-known characters seriously wounded or killed off quite often.
Sorry, but the facts bear out; your argument does not.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
GlassJaw said:
It actually makes a lot of sense if you know what "pulp" is (and if you read the design goals of Grim Tales). What's absurd is claiming that pulp isn't and/or can't be gritty. I digress, though - I know what pulp is. When you take some college level lit classes (assuming you pay attention) you'll discover for yourself that pulp encompasses a body of fiction that spans everything from Conan (fantasy) to The Last Castle (sci-fi) and isn't limited in scope to tough guy adventure set in the 1930s/40s.
Kolchak
First Post
Jim Hague said:
Pulp heroes face incredible danger every day, but very rarely came to any serious harm during their death-defying adventures. Pushed out of flying aeroplanes, being trapped in flooded caverns, dodging a hail of gangster lead, pulp heroes survived it all, with only torn shirts, ripped stockings and mussed hair to hint at the dangers they had faced. In a fair fight, the good guys never lost, being beaten by the bad guys only through overwhelming odds, hypnotism, traps, and other cowardly and treacherous acts. A combination of clever tricks, fast thinking, audacious daring, sheer luck, and plot immunity from pulp authors reluctant to kill a favourite character saved countless heroes from seemingly sure death in the pulps.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
Jim Hague said:
That was a lot more productive than what I said. Thanks. My intent wasn't to attack Glass Jaw, but to point out that his definition of 'pulp' is by no means the literary definition of the same word and is, in fact, a well-meaning but incorrect connotation used almost exclusively by the RPG community. My fuse simply grows short with people who try to argue a certain stance without bothering to learn what they're talking about first.
That said, I don't hold Glass Jaw wholly responsible for using the term "pulp" as he does - if anybody else were to simply take what they read on internet forums as gospel without doing a little research, they'd reach the same conclusions (i.e., that pulp is all low-letahlity, two-fisted, adventure). This is why I don't generally advocate RPGs as teaching tools, as most of what they teach is just flat out wrong.
On an intersting side note, if one does a few Google searches on the words "Pulp Genre", they'll find that about 80% of the hits are somehow tied to RPG sites. If, however, you do a Google search on the word "pulp" by itself, you pull up almost no RPG sites. This illustrates the split that I'm talking about quite nicely (and on another level, illuminates my biggest gripe about the RPG hobby).
Kolchak
First Post
I might debate that Lovecraft is pulp but Pulp can be cover a lot of ground. His stories were published in Wierd Stories so I guess you have a point.
But what exactly does Grim Tales has that generates a Pulp experience? Looking over the rules it just appears to be a stripped down d20 Modern without advanced and prestige classes with several options thrown in.
But what exactly does Grim Tales has that generates a Pulp experience? Looking over the rules it just appears to be a stripped down d20 Modern without advanced and prestige classes with several options thrown in.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
Kolchak said:
That is true only of certain pulp fiction, not all of it. Note that H.P Lovecraft's protagonists almost all went mad, died, or were left to an even worse fate (Randolph Carter, most notably). Again, the definition of 'pulp' that you're drawing on is the largely distorted definition commonly found solely within the hobby - a definition that excludes a large portion (arguably a majority) of the body of fiction classified as pulp by the literary community.
Also note that the definition you're using completely invalidates the stated design goals and ad copy of Bad Axe's own design team (as cited verbatim by another poster). With that in mind, I think it is probably more likely that they were using the literary definition, as opposed to the distorted definition utilized by many within our hobby. Pulp isn't all high-flying, masked crusaders, or larger than life heroes - again, Lovecraft is probably the best example of gritty pulp fiction, but main characters are regularly dispatched in the pulp fiction of Jack Vance, Frank Herbert, and Robert Bloch as well.
Last edited:
EditorBFG
Explorer
I would have Grim Tales PCs but generate most of the villains with the villain classes from Mastering Iron Heroes. I would make the Iron Heroes feats available to Grim Tales characters, using the section on adapting to other d20 games in the back (changing the Mastery levels to simple requirements), and (very carefully) adapt the Iron Heroes class abilities as Talent Trees for the Grim Tales base classes. Also, I would use the armor rules from Iron Heroes. Otherwise, Grim Tales stuff like mass combat, insanity rules, magic, and vehicle combat (for camel- or horse-back chases) covers everything you need-- just use Iron Heroes to make melee combat more interesting (which is kind of what it's for).
