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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hemlock Stones" data-source="post: 2126747" data-attributes="member: 19278">Pulp Noir And What It NeedsGREETINGS!It seems to me that Pulp Noir as an environment concept should be much more popular than it is. Sin City might really light a fire in some of the people out there when they see the dynamics of it on the big screen. What I have observed in the darker games I have played, Vampire the Masquerade in particular, you have to have people willing to play dark characters. On top of that, the DM has to create an intense environment for them to play in. Doing that can be difficult. What I did was to create a city in a pocket world linked to the city of Detroit. I was inspired in part by the David Bowie song Diamond Dogs. One of the groups in conflict within the city called Malice was the Diamond Dogs, a werewolf biker gang. I had a demonic Jimmy Hoffa running the city. The people that played the game enjoyed it because of how different and raw it was opposed to the more typical occult World of Darkness setting.Hollywood has always painted Noir as direct and more of a condensed intense reality opposed to the rest of the world. Not everybody can easily adapt to playing a "black and white" character. Gaming systems like D&D have nine alignments with most of them not really being suitable for the "black and white" realities of a Noir type role playing game. Think about the Shadow as a character. Most people have no idea how evil Lamont Cranston was before he had spiritual enlightenment. People playing a character like that have to really work to bring those necessary qualities out in a character like that. Think of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Much of what Ford did with the character had to do with a singlemindness towards certain values. Doing that outside of the Pulp environs and within Noir tends to isolate the character. From what I saw in Sin City was the main character gets framed. He then reaches out and brings in people to help him out that more or less owe him favors. Granted he helped all of them out in the past with tough situations. But none of them would have gone out of there way to help out if it weren't for the fact that they owed him.One of the things that has a great appeal for a Pulp Noir world is that you bring in supernatural elements that are subtle yet the real impetus for what's going on. A good example of this is how in your typical B&W Serial B-movies was that a criminal gang is doing all the dirty work for a mysterious head boss. Later its discovered the boss is a Martian or a Nazi. It might be a cliche' to do that, but it's Pulp wholesomeness at it's finest. Suppose all the minor crimes the "dark heroes" are running across are being done by your typical criminal gang. The deeper they try to find the mysterious "Boss" the more confused it gets. It's linked to the "Church". The "archbishop" is the culprit. It's all been a war of Good vs. Evil that the "dark heroes" get tangled in the middle of.That's my two cents on it all.Alan  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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