So my buddies are trying to get a game going.
One of my buddies suggested a 40's superhero game in the spirit of the original Superman cartoons...all square jaws and art deco and mad science.
Me, I’m a scholar of the pulps, and of the Wold Newton writings of Philip Jose Farmer, which posit that (1) all of the great characters of detective / pulp / adventure literature, from Holmes to Tarzan to Doc Savage to James Bond, are real, living people; (2) that their adventures have been popularized in fictionalized biographies, often misleading but containing clues about the truth; (3) many of these heroes — and villains — are related, descendants of a handful of Brits exposed to the radiation of a meteorite that struck near Wold Newton, England in 1795, gifting the descendants of these lucky few with the capacity for extraordinary strength, intelligence, and ambition.
One of the ideas on the table is a combination of the two. It’s 1938 in a world much like our own, at least on the surface — but where there’s been quite a bit going on behind the scenes for well over a century. The PCs, however, are something new — they’re the first superheroes, the harbingers of the Golden Age.
So take this composite pulp world — where everything from Fu Manchu to Wellsian Martians to lost subterranean worlds exists — and introduce superheroes [who are probably themselves the products, one way or another, of these secret wars]. Play them as a natural extension of the pulp heroes before them — they’re adventurers and detectives and explorers as well as crimefighters, and much of the “superhero code” — like the no-killing rule — has yet to be written.
Anyway...just something we're pondering...
One of my buddies suggested a 40's superhero game in the spirit of the original Superman cartoons...all square jaws and art deco and mad science.
Me, I’m a scholar of the pulps, and of the Wold Newton writings of Philip Jose Farmer, which posit that (1) all of the great characters of detective / pulp / adventure literature, from Holmes to Tarzan to Doc Savage to James Bond, are real, living people; (2) that their adventures have been popularized in fictionalized biographies, often misleading but containing clues about the truth; (3) many of these heroes — and villains — are related, descendants of a handful of Brits exposed to the radiation of a meteorite that struck near Wold Newton, England in 1795, gifting the descendants of these lucky few with the capacity for extraordinary strength, intelligence, and ambition.
One of the ideas on the table is a combination of the two. It’s 1938 in a world much like our own, at least on the surface — but where there’s been quite a bit going on behind the scenes for well over a century. The PCs, however, are something new — they’re the first superheroes, the harbingers of the Golden Age.
So take this composite pulp world — where everything from Fu Manchu to Wellsian Martians to lost subterranean worlds exists — and introduce superheroes [who are probably themselves the products, one way or another, of these secret wars]. Play them as a natural extension of the pulp heroes before them — they’re adventurers and detectives and explorers as well as crimefighters, and much of the “superhero code” — like the no-killing rule — has yet to be written.
Anyway...just something we're pondering...
