This article is being co-written by Blair Ramage, with whom I co-referee a Pulp Hero campaign. Although it started as a single item, it has grew so substantially that it became necessary to split it into multiple parts. The first part dealt with the relationship of genre to other aspects of a roleplaying game, and furnished a context for the whole series. The second part covered Pulp environmental and game world conventions. Parts Three and Four dealt with the plot and story conventions of the Pulp Genre, and parts Five and Six began an examination of Character conventions within the Pulp Genre. This time around the intent is to wrap up that examination, leaving the final part of the series to tie it all together with some additional GM advice.

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Fed

We start off by revisiting something that’s been brought up before: the citizens of the pulp world can, and do, trust the government. That means that for the most part, a Fed is the Pulp equivalent of a Paladin in D&D: virtuous, honest, mild-mannered, incapable of giving offense and completely unwilling to take offence. A mild exception is made for the Tax-collector, but even they are not so much mistrusted as feared and disliked.

The implication is that every encounter a character has ever had with any branch of officialdom is going to be a positive one except in the most unusual of circumstances. They can make mistakes, they can overlook things they should take into account, but their intentions are always good. Bureacracy is there to facilitate getting things done, and red tape can always be cut through in an emergency.

There are no ‘cracks’ for someone to fall through. There are no real safety nets because none are expected.

A World Without Depression

One of the changes to history that has been made in the Adventurer’s Club campaign is that the Great Depression was not as severe as has been recorded in real-world history. There were a number of reasons for this digression, but the main one was necessity.

It can be argued that part of the sense of optimism that is fundamental to the pulp genre derives from a role as escapist literature, a contrast with the difficulties post- Wall Street Crash. Blair felt that some historical divergence was necessary in order to make that escapist optimism manifest in ‘the real world’ when he created the campaign setting. Since then, we have discussed the consequences and implications on several different occasions.

I’m not going to repeat these discussions, but some of our conclusions bear reporting.

• The “New Deal” was not as substantial an economic revolution as recorded, because it wasn’t necessary.
• The underlying fragility of the American Economic Policies of the time that caused the Great Depression was masked but not repaired.
• While unemployment spiked, it was quickly restored. Economic prosperity is thus closer to 1940-45 levels than those recorded for 1930-35, and so are prices.
• There was no loss of confidence in the business leadership. Corporations are the people’s friends.
• Manufacturing is at a higher level as a result.
• There is enough loose capital floating around to make it practical for backyard inventors and weird scientists to ply their trade.
• Technological research has benefitted from greater access to capital, and is generally at an early 1940s level, though few of the benefits of this progress have yet manifested in benefits for the ordinary citizen.
• These changes enable wealthy dilettantes the wherewithal to build supercars and rappelling guns and whatever other gadgets are required to transform a playboy into a Pulp Hero.

Much of the required infrastructure and justification for the world having a more “Pulp” flavour can be traced back (with a bit of oversimplification) to this one point of divergence.

Of course, there are other consequences. Without the difficulties of the Great Depression to make reparations payments impossible for Germany and so stridently demanded by the allies of World War I, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler needs a little tweaking. His skill at oratory needs to be elevated to a near-superhuman level. He becomes, quite literally, a hypnotic speaker. Whatever shred of justification there may have been for the Nazi revolution in Germany is lost, and the entire ascendancy of the Nazi Party becomes one of deliberate subjugation by a demagogue. In short, the Nazis become even more pulp-villainous than they were historically.

Prior to World War II, the fascist economy was widely admired for its efficiency and productivity, transforming Germany from a crushed nation to a world power in a mere decade. There was a view that this was the next step in economic and political evolution. This view, a result of the contrast with the economic woes of the US and repercussive consequences on the rest of the world, won the Nazis many sympathisers. If that contrast is muted because the depression was less severe than expected, then once again, those sympathisers become more villainous.

It fits.

A Depth Of Character

There is a mistaken impression that some people, both players and GMs, subscribe to – that Pulp characters are simplistic and without depth as a consequence of this simpler world-view. Blair and I would contend that the exact opposite is true; by making choices black and white in their morality, and forcing characters to have perpetually chosen between these extremes in their past, situations are automatically heightened in dramatic impact, and characters are forced to wear their past sins on their sleeves, as it were. While individual elements of characterisation may be simpler, the tapestry they weave can be every part as rich and complex as is found in any other genre.

Before I (Mike) was a co-GM in the campaign, I was a player. My character was named Paulo Lumierre. I started writing a background for the character, but my status changed and the character was retired before it was complete. But, as proof of the statement made in the previous paragraph, here’s a snapshot:

• Son Of A Made Man: Paulo started life as a Sicilian American named Gino Samuele Vassili shortly after his family emigrated to New York. His father became muscle for Donatello Lancioni (a gangster) and was eventually killed in a turf war with the Jade Dragons, a minor Tong.
• Footsteps On The Path Of Betrayal: Gino blamed both Tong and the Lancioni family and spent two years setting himself up as a double agent for the Tong to get the information he needed to have them destroy each other in an orgy of escalating violence. Heo could have gone to the police, but he didn’t want them found guilty of other charges, he wanted blood for his Father.
• Exposure & Flight: Obsession led to Gino making a mistake: the heir to the Tong expected him to continue to spy for them. At the same time, the Lancioni family’s territory was taken over by Don Corlione, who knew that the Tong had a mole in the former family and set about discovering who it was. Gino’s brother was ordered to “take care of the problem” but Guiseppe gave Gino just enough warning to flee.
• Performer: Gino changed his name and became a roustabout and wandering clown for Barker’s Cavalcade Of Star Attractions, a minor circus. He stayed with them just long enough to establish his credentials as a Carnival Hand before moving on and again changing his name to further muddy his trail.
• Europe: He eventually hooked up with Simon’s Travelling Big Top, who were concluding an extended tour of the US and Canada, and returned with them to the Continent. Now using the name “Larry Sanders”, he was an established member of the troupe when they were joined by a new act, The Great Zabroski, a stage magician. “Sanders” became Zabroski’s friend and understudy and mastered the secrets of hypnotism.
• Agent Of Deception: Two years later, “Sanders” discovered that Felix Zabroski was actually a spy for the Romanovs who stole government secrets wherever the circus went. Rather than kill his friend, Zabroski recruited him.

That’s as far as I had gotten in the 3-and-a-half pages that were completed before the project was put on hold, but I had roughly as much again plotted out. Zabroski was going to get wind of the unrest that would unseat the Romanovs and go into business for himself; then get caught and sell out his “friend” to save his own skin. “Sanders” would then flee to France and adopt yet another new identity, “Paulo Lumierre”, only to get caught up in World War I. Distinguishing himself as a spy behind German Lines for the Allies, he would rediscover his morality and after the war, become an adventurer. He would always be looking over his shoulder in case the Tong or Corlione families learned of his survival.

What’s the point? Well, “Paulo” became a bad guy to avenge his father, betraying two crime syndicates in the process. He made his escape only to become a spy in the employ of another villainous family in order to save the life of his friend – who then betrayed him, anyway. He then used a solid War Record to give himself a clean slate, using everything he had learned to become a hero – but a hero with a shady past and a solid streak of ruthlessness. He was someone who would do the wrong thing for the right reasons without blinking an eye.

There’s a lot of very solid characterisation there, and the ongoing story of Paulo’s redemption would have been great to play. Certainly, there is no trace of simplicity in the finished product, even though every element is starkly black and white, morally.

Pretty Girls And Macho Men

Plastic surgery would not be a very profitable career choice in a pulp world. The women go from being pretty girls to voluptuous women, and the men from strapping youths to Macho Heros. Even characters who are thin and emaciated are “whipcord leather”. Unless you’re a villain, you are handsome/beautiful. And so is everyone else you meet – think of 1930s movie stars.

Warped Body, Warped Mind

The reason, of course, is because of this genre convention (which is occasionally honoured with an inversion, but that is always noteworthy). There is a social assumption that any physical abnormality will be reflected in a mental abnormality. This does not mean that the unfortunate character will be slow or stunted or any of a dozen other impolite terms applied to describe intellectual disability or limitation; it means that the character’s thinking will be aberrant in some manner. And, since aberrant thinking is incontrovertibly NOT “right” thinking, it follows that any form of aberrant thinking makes the character in question a villain, or the murderous henchman of a villain.

Blair and I are actually fond of inverting this convention (I hate the word ‘trope’) with respect to the major villains on occasion. We will not scar them, mutilate them, or deform them; instead, we make them as close to perfection as a PC would expect to be (in his or her own way) to offer a subtexted implication that the villain is a twisted reflection of the hero. This plays especially well when it is obvious that by his or her own standards and objectives, they ARE a hero – but those standards and objectives clash with those of The Good Guys and so must ultimately be flawed in some way.

However, as a general rule, all our villains are marked in some way. The Nazi super soldiers all have a mass of surgical scars all over their bodies. The head of the Nazi division responsible for recovering treasures and artefacts of a possibly arcane nature wears a skull-like mask made of steel for a face (after his real skull was crushed in an accident – the mask holds the shattered pieces together), and so on. The occasional crazed expression may be used if the villain is otherwise unrelentingly normal. Once it was a pair of eyebrows that looked like animated overgrown hedges and a nervous twitch. Shades Of Cindy Crawford, even our femme fatales (and we haven’t used enough of them) usually have a mole or birthmark or tattoo somewhere on their bodies (even if it is never visible to the PCs).

At the same time, we are careful in our choice of language to describe the “good guys”. There are no blemishes, there are beauty marks. Wrinkles signify character and experience, not decrepitness or age. Old people never have liver spots. Everyone has perfect teeth, and eyeglasses are practically an affectation.

The same should apply to the PCs, of course. Paulo Lumierre was scarred multiple times by the life that he led before becoming a hero, but when he did so, his deepset eyes went from “sinister wells in the shadows” to “mysterious pools hinting at the fringes of the unknown” as fast as the character could take breath, his expression from “haunted and edgy” to “concerned and constantly aware of his environment”.

Philanthropists And Industrialists

These same dichotomies reduce CEOs to two fundamental types: there are Philanthropists and there are Industrialists. The first are good guys, charitable, usually friendly and helpful. The latter are greedy schemers out to advance themselves beyond what is fair and reasonable – villains. The concept of a corporation or business entity which did not have the welfare of its staff and customers foremost in mind when making policy decisions is unthinkable, and no shareholder would want or trust such a person to operate on their behalf.

These labels are subtexts that can always be used to place a moral appraisal on a businessman’s performance and behaviour. This is not only the language employed within the game by the GMs, it is the language employed by the newspapers and the public. Ebenezer Scrooge would be described as a “wealthy industrialist”.

Some labels can supersede these categorisations, especially those relating to noble origins. A Duke may be a Philanthropist and a maniacal would-be world conqueror. A King can be an industrial magnate and still concerned with his citizen’s wellbeing – that simply means that his slave labour comes from outside his own subject population. National titles, such as President, or Senator, can similarly mask either of these labels, as can military titles. Remember that a heroic figure can do the wrong thing because he believes the end justifies the means just as easily in Pulp as in any other Genre.

This is one genre convention that we found the players could access more easily than we expected. On reflection, we realised that this is because the ideological loading placed on these terms persists from the pulp era into the modern day, even in the real world. We have also had some success infusing the same ideological subtext when applying the terms “Newspaper Publisher” and “Media Magnate” – the first implies a love of and reverence toward truth and honesty and public welfare, the latter is underhanded and sensationalist.

Through careful use of language, we have been able to apply similar value judgements (not always accurately in fact, but always accurate in public perception) to just about everyone the PCs have encountered in the Adventurer’s Club campaign – though I doubt many of them were aware of it! While not in any way railroading the campaign, this subconsciously preps the players to react appropriately to the characters they encounter.

People Dress Appropriately (Unless It’s Funny)

It’s a strange thing, but characters never seem to LOOK out of place, in terms of attire, in any pulp story. If James Bond is not dressed appropriately, the villain will expand the Hero’s wardrobe when inviting him to lunch – usually at the point of a gun. A Magician always wears his coat, cape, and top hat.

When it comes to the PCs, the GMs will ensure that there is always a mechanism to at least let them look appropriate to the setting IF they want to avail themselves of it. What’s more, the character’s usual dress will get them by in most settings. Consider who our current PCs are, for a moment: There’s a Merchant Captain who dresses in Naval costume; a Dashing Pilot with multiple decorations from the war; a Priest; and a Doctor (and they are always well-dressed). It doesn’t matter whether or not they are at a warehouse, a graveyard, or a reception, these are reasonably appropriate clothing.

The only times a PC is dressed inappropriately is when they insist on wearing something other than their normal attire as a disguise, or when it’s just plain funny for them to be out of place. If the PCs ever try to sneak into somewhere by way of a brothel, expect them to emerge wearing veils and tassels – and his collar, in the case of the Priest! Not because it’s reasonable for them to emerge dressed that way, but because it’s downright hilarious. If we’re feeling generous, we might let them be carrying their street clothes!

Individuality Thrives, Conformity Withers

This is one of the more subtle, not-recognised-at-first-glance genre conventions, and yet it is one that anyone who is at all well-read in the genre will recognise the truth of, immediately. Heck, I’ve read hardly any pulp, Blair is the expert in our little team, but even I recognise it!

The more individual and individualistic, the more distinctive a character, the more they will succeed over the long run. As soon as a character leaves his life of distinctiveness behind and “settles down”, his life – and his enthusiasm for life – begins to wane. Cipher characters are a dime-a-dozen and matter about as much, in terms of plot and relationships.

And it’s not just because the most individualised characters going around are the PCs either; the same is true of NPCs. Either they are colourful and noteworthy (in which case they will probably survive and even prosper in the long run) or they are chicken fodder of no great relevance.

Not only should GMs and players actively bear this in mind and use it as a characterisation tool to ensure that the most interesting characters are those tapped for success by events, they should also apply the converse; characters who thrive or prosper should always be a little more colourful in some respect than those of less success in the same task.

You don’t have to take it over the top – that should be saved for those really special characters that come along every now and then – but giving each character that meets this description some unique mannerism or personality element is necessary to conform with this genre convention. Of course, this is a good idea in any genre, but when it comes to pulp it is mandatory.

Doomed By Destiny

Every character in a pulp game has a destiny, and no matter how much they struggle against it, fate always wins. Villains, for example, are fated to fail, usually at the hands of a specific nemesis or group of enemies. Heroes are fated to have the lives and fates of others thrust into their hands. Some characters are doomed to lives of misery, no matter how promising events may seem in the short term. Some characters can fall into a cesspool and strike oil, others will always struggle.

Obviously, this also applies to PCs. Players can make their lives (and their characters) more interesting by determining what they think their characters’ destinies are going to be – but the final determination should be left to the GMs and to the outcomes in actual play, and the GMs are under no obligation to match the PCs ambitions in this regard. In fact, it can be argued that the tension between expectation and reality elevates the interest within the character.

When it comes to NPCs, GMs should take a more active role. They should never control events while the PCs are present and involved (though they may shape them) – that way leads to plot railroads – but as soon as the NPCs are whisked off stage, events should conspire to restore the appropriate “status quo”.

Hoist By Their Own Petards

Another genre convention that GMs should respect as often as possible is the mechanism of defeat for the villains – as the title of this section says, they are generally undone by their own natures. This is, in itself, an expression of the “Doomed by destiny” convention.

The easiest way to achieve this without railroading the players is twofold:

1. Build multiple potential failure modes and plans to overcome them into the Villain’s plans in the first place, then ignore every failure mode except the second one that the PCs pursue (or possibly the third); and
2. Don’t only take the genre convention literally – consider metaphor and allegory and symbolic representations as well.

This manner of directed Sandboxing ensures that the GM (and players) are not overwhelmed by options, as the Villain himself has closed off most of them in advance, just be being a competent opponent, while ensuring that the adventure will be challenging. What’s more, by making the “weak point” the second or third option pursued by the PCs, the GM ensures that the PCs can attempt one thing, make progress, encounter setbacks, and still ultimately succeed – all while staying true to the genre convention.

Of course, there are still weak points in such planning – what if the PCs can’t find the flaw in the plan? What if they think of something the GM hasn’t? In the case of the first, the GM should let events progress while dropping the occasional hint or clue as to the flaw, preferably as a result of the attempts to utilise the ‘first’ flaw. This gives the PCs a sense of achievement even while it delays the ultimate success. And in the case of the second, let the Villain do everything that the GM thought of, blocking all avenues of failure of his plan – except the one that he didn’t think of, and the PCs did. This is one of those occasions referred to earlier in which everything works out the way the PCs expect it to – eventually.

Consumption Is Usually Safe

In 1982, Joe Jackson released Night And Day, which included a track with the chorus “Everything Gives You Cancer”. In modern times it seems there is something wrong with everything – not enough of this, too much of that, this side effect, that problem. If you listened to all these pronouncements of doom, you’ld never eat or drink anything again, and would wear a respirator connected to an oxygen bottle at all times.

The Pulp world and its characters reflect a different attitude. While a few things are poisonous, most things can be consumed without ill effect. You can be a hard-drinking chain-smoking private eye while never worrying about Cancer or Liver failure. And, so far as poisons are concerned, the attitude is “whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” – read the story of Rasputin, for example!

Only when it becomes important to the plot will a character encounter any ill effects from any form of conspicuous consumption.

Even unlikely radiations are generally safe – even though Marie Curie died of radium poisoning caused by the radioactivity of the element she made her life’s work, this was still considered a case of accumulated poisons and not an effect of the radiation itself. Characters can handle refined uranium with their bare hands and suffer nothing worse than a few blisters.

Internal Consistency

Consistency in pulp tends to be a one-adventure-at-a-time thing, as discussed in part one of this series (and elsewhere). Anti-gravity can be impossible in one adventure and central to the next. Throughout a character’s history, that character’s personality remains the common thread that ties the adventures together, while the definitions of some skills will change as necessary to encompass whatever the game reality is within the current adventure.

That can be tricky for players to manage, and even trickier to integrate within a character’s timeline; GMs should expect to have to help them, and to encourage the players to get creative. Once again, the general solution is to take the first interpretation to feature and consider it to be the default, and all other interpretations to be limited exceptions.

I have to apologize for the vagueness of that advice; it’s hard to be specific about this without making this article even more unreasonably large than it now is. I can only refer the reader to earlier parts of this series where the problem and solution was discussed at greater length.

Even more likely is the problem of intersecting backgrounds in conflict. Character A proposes that Voodoo works one way, with one set of limitations, in his character background, while character B has a quite different set of rules in place for his own encounter with Voodoo in his background. Or perhaps they have both encountered someone with the same title but a different name and personality, at more-or-less the same time. The players expect the GM to sort this problem out, and without requiring substantial revision of either of the characters if at all possible!

In cases like this, we will generally choose the option that has the most story potential, or is the most interesting/inviting, and make that our default (unless we don’t like either of them). Then we simply have to graft in a circumstance that explains why it worked differently, or appeared to work differently, in one character’s case (or both cases, if we’ve chosen option C, Neither Of The Above).

We may not tell the players of the solution, or even that there is a conflict – we can build an adventure around their discovery of the truth, and it gives the characters something to talk about!

Or, if we’re feeling lazy, we’ll simply let the players argue it out until they come up with a solution – or leave it as a mystery. Not everything needs to be explained!

The finishing line is now in sight! Next time around there’s some general advice, some discussion of genre reinforcement and integrating exceptions, and a look at why it all matters. Join me next week as we wrap up this examination of genre!

Win a set of these

Who says undead can’t have personality? While rank and file skeletons and zombies will get mowed down faster than you can roleplay, you can turn any single undead into a remarkable NPC. To do that, you just need to add a few details beyond the stat block. Today’s generator will help you do this.

Skull dice giveaway

I also have the last pack of Q-Workshop dice on my desk to give away: red and black skull dice. Details are at the end of this post.

Undead generator

Start with d10 Motives. It is good to know what your special foe wants to accomplish in the campaign.

Next, d20 Mannerisms gives you some fun roleplaying details. Build out your rumours and news with this information too.

d12 Backstories works in combination with your motive. Use the pair to create unique personalities.

d8 Interesting Lairs offers ideas on interesting places your creature might make his home base. Cemetery is not on the list. I figured that was a gimme.

2d6 Undead Themes. How is the campaign affected by your antagonist? Give it a theme to guide your designs and encounters.

2d4 Unexpected Defenses. Surprise your players!

Undead generator tables

	d10 Motives
1	Revenge on a fallen paladin who forced his fiance to marry the diabolical knight.
2	Gather 1000 powerful souls as part of a scheme to become immortal.
3	Become the leader amongst a secret society of undead that aims to overthrow King or empire.
4	Visit orphanages in the land, kill the masters, rescue the children, and start an orphanage “farm” of his own.
5	Thinks he is still alive but with special powers and is starting the let greed and lust control him impulses.
6	Find his murderer and make him undead too so he can inflict eternal pain and torment on the killer.
7	Cursed to free a kingdom under the withering rule of a lich by one who thinks you must fight fire with fire.
8	Seeking immortality but discovering a tortured existence instead, this poor creature only finds misery company. He now targets anything with peace or beauty and destroys it.
9	Turned into undead against her will, she now seeks a way to return to her former life. But growing more desperate and succumbing to her unnatural state, she has started turning to cruel methods to further her quest.
10	The event that turned him into undead was so traumatic he has blocked it from his memory. Now he seeks out those afflicted by the curse of undeath and wishes to assemble a support group and network. However, he is unaware this is by design, and a greater power who planted this suggestion in him at the time of his conversion plans to seize control of this network when the time is right.

	d20 Undead Mannerisms
1	Never stops his school-girl giggling, which gets higher pitched the more evil he performs.
2	There is a poem people in the land learn to ward off evil spirits. He never stops repeating it in a hushed voice, and he seems to time his actions to key phrases in the poem that twists the meaning of the poet in the worst possible way.
3	His hands are those of a random creature. When a hand gets severed, which he often does to himself, another random appendage appears. Yesterday, it was a giant lobster claw, which he cut off and sold to a nearby restaurant. A hoof appeared in its place, and now he’s getting a gold shoe fashioned for it.
4	Takes every chance, even if it involves breaking in, to stand over a bed and watch someone sleep.
5	Scratches hands, arms, and legs through skin to the bone unless someone makes him aware of what he is doing.
6	Has scars that magically form into patterns that seem like important information or clues, but are usually meaningless.
7	Enjoys eating people’s pets, even though he need consume no flesh to survive.
8	His face grows black blood-filled zits and boils that ooze and pop, offering materials usable as deadly poison.
9	He smells of fond memories, giving him a small bonus to any manipulative social situations.
10	Espouses the tenets of a lawful god, trying to convert everyone he can, pleased with the taint he imbues in unwitting converts.
11	Speaks in a selfless and compassionate way, making those unaware of his nature think he is a wonderful friend and loyal companion.
12	His eyes give him such an uncomfortable gaze it becomes difficult for those he stares at to lie, maintain a poker face, or not fidget.
13	Adorns himself in holy symbols, runes and icons. Tattoos, jewelry, clothes and possessions all tie to good deities.
14	Is beautiful or handsome. Perfect skin, brilliant smile, and engaging eyes makes everything think the undead is some kind of higher creature.
15	Still has masterful control of facial muscles and body functions, allowing him to continue with his hobby and craft of disguise. He enjoys impersonating others.
16	A strange sound accompanies him wherever he goes. The sound does not seem to emanate from him, and it sometimes changes. Some report hearing crickets, others a low stringed instrument, and still others animals crying out in pain.
17	Can take off his skin. He does so frequently, in front of others, either to clean it or put it on again so “it fits better.”
18	Covered in a horrible creature of the GM’s choice: moving green slime, writhing maggots, birthing botflies, starving leeches. The undead likes to get close to people and reach out to touch them in friendly gestures.
19	Cracks knuckles, which actually breaks them. The knuckles heal in a couple of minutes. Also enjoys breaking his fingers in interesting ways and watching them reknit.
20	Becomes confused when viewing any reflective surface. After a few moments of disorientation, the undead descends into a blind, destructive fury that lasts for a minute.

	d12 Undead Backstories
1	A jealous rival took him fishing and then drowned him in the shallow pond.
2	Was forced to drink a glass of blood by a bully who confronted and beat him one day at random.
3	Challenged a vampire who killed his family. He won, but not without being bitten first.
4	Was on a date and wandering through the house of horrors when she was attacked. She never saw her attacker, and her transformation took just a few hours. She turned on her date, who failed to protector, and he became her first undead minion.
5	Saw something shiny in a sewer opening. When reaching in to grab it, a hideous creature lunged out and clawed him. He lost his arm that day, but gained a new look on unlife.
6	Step-father beat him to near death, took all his money, and dumped his bleeding body in the bad part of town. The open wounds attracted a certain creature who drank his fill, killing the boy but giving him a chance for revenge moments later….
7	Studied for years by an undead lord, protected and subtly groomed, the wizard always suspected he had a guardian angel. When the time was right, the lord sabotaged an experiment that grievously wounded the magic practitioner.
8	They embalmed and entombed him, performing with perfection all the steps for venerating their beloved ruler…but one. A follower, wishing for longer rule, sabotaged one step, which resulted in the leader coming back as an undead.
9	His lord sent him and several other soldiers on a suicide mission to save the land. Turns out the mission was a diversion so the lord could attack a foe by surprise and pillage. The soldier died, mere inches away from his goal, and in the afterlife upon learning of the ruse, he forced his way back to the land in the form of an undead.
10	A mad priest dug his body up and imbued it with unlife. After years of service, the priest was finally slain by heroes. Freed, he managed to escape and journey to this part of the world.
11	Little did he know the book he found captures the souls of readers. Imprisoned for centuries, he was disgorged by the book as the tome can hold only a certain number of souls and then it frees older ones in favour of new readers. Upon release, however, the book turned him into undead, having drank his life while trapped.
12	A famous pit fight ironically died in his sleep. Unwilling to let his cash cow go so easily, the manager arranged for the fighter to be raised as undead (cheaper than full resurrection, plus other advantages). The fighter won many more matches until his nature was discovered. His manager was put to death but he escaped before clerics could perform their painful ceremonies on him. That was yesterday.

	d8 Interesting Lairs
1	Defiled church. The locals are unaware of the taint and still come to worship.
2	Black library. Profane, rebellious, and corrupting titles brush up against works of knowledge that enhance residents’ strategies and tactics.
3	Local make-out place / lover’s lane. The raw emotions attract certain undead, who fight each other for control of this area.
4	Crowded orphanage. The day to day activities mask the presence of an unspeakable evil.
5	Popular bordello. The constant flow of strangers allow undead to anonymously pass…and feed.
6	Busy hospital. Run by nuns who lock the doors of their rooms at night.
7	Asylum. Formerly a place to protect the insane from the public and themselves, a new threat tears at their sanity.
8	Travelling carnival. The strange and wondrous roll across the land and entertain crowds.

	2d6 Undead Themes
2	Terror
3	Dread
4	Obsession
5	Despair
6	Shock
7	Disease
8	Poison
9	Fear
10	Phobia
11	Insanity
12	Depression

	2d4 Unexpected Defenses
1	Immune to Good attacks
2	Heals when physically struck
3	Blinks as a move action
4	Heals when Turned
5	Turns to stone until danger passes
6	Doppelganger (switches identities so foe looks like the undead)
6	Living shield (grapples foes so foes take all damage)
6	Magic rebounds off him

Win a set of Skull Dice

Comment below with d4 more entries for any of the tables above: Motives, Mannerisms, Backstories, Interesting Lairs, Undead Themes, or Unexpected Defenses.

Enter multiple times – each helps fellow GMs roleplay their undead better.

I will mail the winner a set of cool Red & Black Skull dice from Q-Workshop.

I’ll draw a random entry Friday, just a few days away, so enter now:

One more article for the Blog Carnival! Next time, I’ll get back to the series on Pulp Genre Conventions, if everything goes according to plan…

A Variant Combat System for D&D 3.x

Is healing too easy in D&D? Sometimes it seems like Clerics are little more than magical drip bottles, especially in more tactically oriented campaigns and adventures, like the typical dungeon. Only when adventures move beyond this restriction and begin to explore themes of theology and the nature of divinity do Clerics contribute more to the party than being a source of healing and a second-rate fighter.

Worse still, other characters can come to take this instant total recovery for granted, giving them a sense of invulnerability, which expresses itself as a disrespect for the capabilities of the creatures encountered.

Nor can the GM counter by using the principle of “what’s fair for the PCs is fair for the NPCs”; doing so means that the combat will last long beyong the point at which it is interesting, becoming tiresome and exhausting, and taking entirely too much game time. Slowing the game to a crawl is not an acceptable solution!

The Value of Healing

There is also an arguement to be made for an answer of “No” to the initial question. The characters are supposed to be exceptional, after all, and the chutzpah that comes from having sufficient healing available enables them to act that way. This is the same line of arguement that led me to introduce a ‘quick healing’ technology in my superhero campaign.

A second line of argument runs that reducing the game to an exercise in bookkeeping drains the fun from it faster than anything else around, continually dragging the players out of immersion in the roleplay and back into the metagame.

Finally, there is a third arguement that if clerics are less effective at healing, the value of the character type is weakened, reducing the variety in party composition, and that the risk involved in taking anything other than a high-hit point character class becomes disproportionately high. Having a reasonably high level of healing available makes variety more accessable as a choice.

The Delicate Balance

With as many reasons for having ample healing available as there are reasons for limiting the benefits of healing, it’s clear that there is a delicate balance to be maintained between too much healing and not enough.

Which still leaves the initial question itself to be unresolved. My answer is that it depends on the nature of the campaign.

Dungeon Campaigns

In dungeon-oriented campaigns, there will be more combat per day, and the number of healing spells available to a cleric will quickly be consumed; since this is the type of campaign that the designers of the game clearly had in mind when they wrote the rules, it was for this style of campaign that the availability of healing is balanced.

I would include in this category combat-heavy campaigns that take place above ground, as well.

Storytelling Campaigns

The answer is not so positive when it comes to campaigns that are more about roleplaying and less about frequent combat for its own sake. In these situations, where many game days in a row can be completely combat-free, I find that healing is too readily available, and that players can generally assume that they will enter each battle fully healed. The inevitable side-effect is that combat is not as thrilling as it could be – for anyone.

What’s Needed

What’s needed is an optional system that the GM can invoke. It must be compatable with the game as it operates normally, so that if a campaign enters a phase in which the ‘normal’ game balance is appropriate, the system can be ignored. The arguements, both pro- and anti- healing restrictions, can be viewed as design restrictions.

Standard vs Dramatic Combat

TORG had such a system, one of many worthwhile innovations that were either invented in that game’s rules or intruded apon my awareness for the first time when I read the system. They divided combat into two types: Standard combat, and Dramatic Combat.

If we designate the rules as written as “standard” combat, and the variations on healing effectiveness as “dramatic” combat, then requirement #1 – compatability – is assured.

When to use Dramatic combat

The goal of dramatic combat is to make both sides aware of every blow, to make the combat feel more knife-edge life-and-death dramatic. It follows that it should only be used at certain times:

1. when the prospects for more combat in the near future are lower than they would be in a dungeon setting;
2. when the outcome of the battle is unusually significant;
3. when the GM has some specific reason for desiring the participants to feel every blow more keenly than usual;
4. when the GM wants a more dramatic or epic flavour to the battle.

We’ll talk about this question again, once the mechanics are ironed out.

The Drama Of Dramatic Combat

By retaining the existing rules as “Standard combat” for compatability, certain choices are barred. We can’t reduce the effectiveness of healing spells, for example, or reduce the number of hit points a character has. We can’t increase the amount of damage inflicted, either. In fact, NONE of the standard paramaters can be altered at all; what we need is something “on top” of the existing rules.

Some sort of damage or combat effect that can’t be healed with the administration of a healing spell.

Wounds

Every blow that lands on a target inflicts a certain amount of damage on the target. We don’t want to mess with that, it’s fundamental to the operation of standard combat; so it follows that we are talking about an additional kind of damage, which I shall call Wounds (unoriginal but it gets the point across).

Wound Capacity

Next, we need a quick way to measure wounds, one that differentiates between combatant combat capabilities. The obvious device is the size of a character’s hit dice, plus their CON modifier. If the character’s hit dice is a d6 and they have a class modifier of +2, then every 6+2=8 points of damage would inflict one wound. The character has a wound capacity of 8.

If an attack does less than 8 points of damage (in this case), the character doesn’t get wounded by it – it’s just a scratch (to them). If an attack does 25 points of damage, the character suffers 3 wounds (because 25/8=3-and-a-bit).

Compare this with a Mage (d4 hit dice) and a CON modifier of -1. That’s a Wound Capacity of 4-1=3. So the 8-point attack would do 2 wounds, and the 24-point attack would do 8 wounds. Such characters might well end up with a negative BAB. What’s a mage doing in melee, anyway?

The Effect Of Wounds

Third, we need some sort of effect for these wounds to have on the game. How about:

• -1 to the character’s AC, or
• -1 to the character’s BAB, or
• -1 to either of the above, player’s choice?

The characters with a lot of wound capacity – those with a large-sized hit dice and high CON modifier – are also the character types with lots of BAB and AC to lose, and so are the most likely to feel this effect on combat. With BAB going down, they will slow with each nick and slash – but so will the enemies that they are attacking.

These effects apply ONLY in Dramatic conflicts.

The best choice, in this case, is the first one, because I have another trick up my sleeve for BAB.

Fatigue

Why not use a similar mechanism to track the effects of repeatedly inflicting damage? In effect, each blow of sufficient magnitude would inflict a “wound” on the character inflcting the damage.

Fatigue Capacity

Fatigue should not accumulate as quickly as Wounds, so let’s set Fatigue Capacity to 150% of Wound Capacity (round up). Our Fighter example had a Wound Capacity of 8, so he would have an exhaustion capacity of 12.

However, exhaustion should not be determined on the basis of counting only extraordinary blows; instead, it should be a reflection of the total accumulated damage handed out. If the fighter lands three blows in a round, doing 6, 12, and 15 points of damage respectively, they have inflicted a total of 33 points of damage and have suffered two points of exhaustion and are working on a third.

Effects Of Fatigue

It should now be obvious that Wounds have been applied to AC so that Fatigue can affect BAB. Every 5 points of exhaustion costs the character one attack a round, until they are reduced to a single blow.

This effect applies ONLY in Dramatic Conflicts.

Undead

Undead need to be treated as a special case. Since they don’t get a CON bonus, they are disadvantaged by this system. To compensate, Undead have their Wound Capacity doubled, and do not suffer from exhaustion. This actually reinforces the flavour of Undead – even when hacked to ribbons, they keep coming.

Regeneration

A creature that regenerates can remove 1 wound each round for every point of regeneration. This again acts to emphasise the fact that they remain whole more readily than normal creatures.

Healing

A Cure Wounds spell can heal 1 wound for every Wound Capacity of healing, up to a maximum of 25% the wounds currently suffered (round up). This reduces the Healing amount by Wound Capacity. Once a character’s HP are fully restored, the character’s Wounds cannot be healed by spell or by potions of healing. These spells have no effect on Fatigue.

So if a character with a wound capacity of 10, who has suffered 8 wounds, receives 60 points of healing during or after a battle, he can either take all 60 as HP recovery, or up to 20 points of it to recover 2 wounds – the maximum permitted. If the character still has damage to recover, he may receive a second dose of healing, and another 2 wounds (25% of 6, rounded up, is 2) may be recovered.

Not only does this reduce the effectiveness of healing, it CAPS it. The character is unlikely to fully recover all wounds, and recovers no Fatigue.

Resting In Combat

A character can take the option of resting during battle as a Standard Action. This removes one point of Fatigue, but the character risks taking Wounds during that round.

Resting Out Of Combat

At least eight hours of continuous rest permits a character to recover half his accumulated Fatigue (round up) and 1 Wound. This can only take place once per day – it doesn’t matter if the character does nothing but lie in bed all day, he only gets this much recovery. If the character has no Fatigue to recover, he may recover a second Wound.

The effects Of Negative AC

If a character experiences so many wounds that their AC is reduced below zero, that simply means that attackers (effectively) receive a bonus to hit their opponants.

The effects of Negative BAB

If a character experiences so much fatigue that his BAB is reduced to 0 or less, this simply means that it becomes harder to successfully attack the enemy. In effect, the enemy is receiving an AC bonus because their attacker is Fatigued.

Consequences

This mechanism would dramatically alter combat in many ways. Creatures with different ratios of damage inflicted, number of attacks, and Hit Points would necessarily adopt different tactical styles; in some cases, battling several targets at once, in others focussing on a single target until it is down and then moving on to the next. Melee with a large number of opponants becomes more dangerous because a character will accumulate Wounds and Fatigue, then confront fresh opposition in a weakened state. Numbers alone can eventually bring down the strongest combatant.

Healing becomes less effective, and two Dramatic conflicts in close succession become far more difficult; the character is unlikely to be fully recovered from the first when he enteres the second.

The psychological impact of becoming more vulnerable as a critical combat continues, and becoming less able to inflict damage apon the enemy, should be equally great. For the first time, there is a cost to inflicting massive damage on the enemy, and a player will FEEL his character’s wounds accumulating in the course of battle.

Spellcasters are unlikely to suffer Wounds (unless they are silly enough to enter melee) or they are attacked at Range. However, their most potent spells are likely to severely deplete their Fatigue; while this may make Touch Attacks more difficult, it will have no effect on Area Effect spells such as Fireball. That means that tactical spell use acquires a new and different parameter, one that will alter slightly with different types of opposition.

At the same time, properly utilised, this system permits the details of enemy’s nature to impact on their style and behaviour on the battlefield, giving colour to what is otherwise simply “more of the same”. Even without special planning in the way of Tactics, this will have an effect on the flow of combat. The uniqueness of each combatant becomes more emphatic and larger than life – exactly what you would hope to achieve with a “Dramatic Combat” system variant.

When Should You Use Dramatic Combat (revisited)?

That’s up to each GM. An arguement can be made for using it all the time, no question. As a general rule of thumb, if the EL is two below the average level of the party, I would always use Standard Combat, if the EL is two above the average level of the party, I would always use Dramatic Combat.

Wandering Monsters would almost always use Standard Combat, except when the EL indicates Standard Combat as defined above. Encounters that are designed to advance the plot or nudge characters in a different direction would almost always use Dramatic Combat, regardless of their EL.

There are a couple of downsides. There are more numbers to track in battle, and that’s a big one – though the bookkeeping is relatively straightforward. Combat might take a little longer as a result – and that’s another big one. The role of Clerics would shift somewhat away from being walking Healing Potions, and for characters who have been optimised to deliver the maximum Healing punch possible, that can be another.

For me, the key question to be asked in each encounter is: What would you rather have: a better combat or a faster combat?

Mike is now on Twitter! You can find him as @gamewriterMike. Why not stop by and say Hi? And, of course, you can always leave a comment if you have something to add to, or say about, this article!

What forces govern your city?

A strong military is real, solid power. A city with a skilled, well-equipped and well-led army can protect itself, fend off its neighbours, go on a conquering binge, and keep its own citizens under control, though not necessarily all at once or in that order.

A politician with a private army can often get away with what he wants until someone with a bigger or better army comes along.

Strengths

People can be coerced into doing many things when they’re at the bad end of a sword, making the military a powerful and influential card to have in any government’s hand. In addition, unlike city walls, the military is a mobile defense or weapon. This allows a government to influence its neighbors and, possibly, more distant powers.

The military is also good tool for taking what a government wants, whether it’s land from neighbouring cities or states, civil liberties from its citizens, or money and resources from anyone.

The military has its own internal, controllable, social and economic rules, which often makes it easier to wield than other power bases, such as affiliation or popularity.

A military is easy to develop as well, either through conscription, feudal obligation, recruitment or slavery. As a tool, it can be honed and shaped to the government or politician’s needs, making it quite flexible.

For example, a government might require a small navy, a larger land force, and a special unit of spell casters, based on its analysis of internal needs and external threats.

War itself is a potential power base. Wars tend to unify civic factions, freeing up government resources or providing government with breathing room to do its own plotting.

Wars provide good cover, as well. While the populace casts its gaze outside the city walls, the government can be quietly performing various actions and maneuvers that might meet with great outcry during peaceful times.

A war victory can launch many political careers as well, as soldiers and generals leverage increased fame from valorous deeds or great leadership, fortune from pillage, and popularity from victory and reputation.

Weaknesses

There are few limits to an army, other than movement rates and supply logistics. While this makes the military a potent threat to a city’s enemies, it also makes it a deadly threat to a city’s own citizens.

Many cultures go to great lengths to protect themselves from their own military. A rogue general or ambitious politician might turn a civilization’s weapon against his kin. Consequently, some governments might decree that troops cannot enter the city proper or must remain a certain distance in miles from the city walls.

Others might have clear legal guidelines about who can order the military to do what. Different branches of a government might be given different executive powers where the army is concerned to establish a safe system of checks and balances.

Armies are expensive. They need food, water, supplies, equipment, training and fuel. Troops need wages, unless the motivation to serve and fight isn’t economic.

Leadership is a critical weak link as well. Superiority of numbers sometimes works against the enemy, but at the cost of great waste and long-term viability. Good leadership will not only make better use of fewer resources, but also maintain discipline and the ability to maintain an army in general.

This factors into loyalty, which is always a cause for concern. Unless discipline is tight and loyalty of the leadership assured, there’s no guarantee an army will do what a government or politician decrees.

A good military can attract unwanted attention. Other parties, such as neighbors, enemies and any higher powers the government serves, might fret about their safety with a rival military in their back yard. This might start unwanted conflicts or unify the opposition against the city. Therefore, as a power base, having a military can cause a great deal of trouble.

Wars can’t last forever, making them unstable power bases. They also tax the resources of all those involved. The government must also constantly assess whether the costs of a potential loss outweigh the benefits gained from war activity or from a potential victory.

Flavor

The military provides great flavor opportunities:

• Divisions and units. Different sections of the military have different functions, require unique equipment, and have different character and NPC class make-ups. Consider how different you can design parts of your city and the military folk who work or live there based on their function: navy, air force, land force, tunnelers, siege experts, war casters, magic defense, medical, administration, training and so on.
• Uniforms. Every professional military unit has a uniform, and this clothing lets you distinctly color and decorate NPCs, villains and locations.
• Military activity. Troops rarely get to rest. They’re always doing something. Put standard military activities into the background and foreground of your campaign: training, exercising, sleeping, eating, deploying, returning, patrolling, swabbing the decks, building equipment, cleaning equipment, assisting civilians, building public works, maintain public areas.
• Military life. Civilians don’t salute. Right there is a unique roleplaying opportunity you can wield. Inject the military into your city. Have NPCs salute, bark orders, obey commands, stand at attention, goof off, function as a well-oiled team, curse and so on.

War is the backbone of many campaigns. War oozes flavor like blood and provides lots of possibilities for molding a great city design or campaign.

For starters, there’s the conflict itself. The PCs can encounter units fighting and join in or carefully sneak around. Then there’s conscription, press gangs, a nervous citizenship, siege, clandestine military operations, broken families and torn lovers.

There’s also the possibility of civil war. Imagine a city design where brother has fought brother for months or years. What is the condition of the city’s infrastructure? Who’s left standing? How does one survive?

Figure out the personality of your city’s military (or militaries). Will it be aggressive and domineering? Will it be quietly confident? Will it abuse its power, and if so, how?

Comment plot hooks for a chance to win NBOS software

It is time for another software giveaway, courtesy of NBOS.

Comment below your ideas for encounter seeds and hooks based on military civil power base. What kinds of encounters could PCs have in a city where military is the power base?

Multiple entries are welcome and give you a better chance of winning. I’ll draw the lucky winner Friday, so enter now before it’s too late.

The winner gets an NBOS software title of their choice, delivered electronically.

I’ve put the “Reinventing Pulp” series on hold for a week in order to do a short article for this month’s Blog Carnival, which is all about life and death in RPGs. The series will return next week.

One of the problems with a campaign that spans multiple game systems is that there are parts of the rules systems that form part of the campaign background, whether you realise it at the time or not. Specifically, when a campaign evolves from AD&D or 2nd Ed to 3.x or Pathfinder, two pieces of this incurred background in particular can leap up and bite you.

The first is restricted class levels for non-human races. To be honest, I never understood this aspect of the rules. If it was necessary to balance the benefits given to non-human races, there were so many better ways – the most obvious being an xp penalty that slowed their development such that a human reached 20th level at the same time as the non-human race reached their stated “racial maximum”.

There’s been a lot of discussion about this particular legacy rule lately, with a proposal that it be brought back. There are two blog posts that are especially worthwhile: Demi-Human Level Limits – What Were Those About? and this reply Ancient History – Demi-Human Level Limits responses. When you finish reading this article, they are worth checking out.

The other game limitation is more interesting. Under the old rules, elves cannot be ressurrected. When the game system changes, suddenly they can. When this change occurred, it was a matter of considerable discussion amongst the players and GMs around me. It quickly emerged that there were two consensus opinions regarding the best way to handle the transition.

The more things change

One camp held the position that everything else had changed, why not this? Simply ignore the limitations of the past and pretend that they had never been part of the game.

The more they stay the same

Another maintained the position that this limitation had formed part of the psychology and decision-making of both the players and their characters, and hence was part of the formative fabric of a campaign. This group insisted that the limitations be artificially ‘frozen’ in place for the duration of that campaign and those PCs.

A third path

The debate was quite heated, and I thought both arguements had sufficient merit that neither was compelling. So when, a number of years later, I found myself with a game that was about to make the transition from 2nd Ed to 3rd Ed, I carved out a third path.

The concept was that the PCs are the architects of change within a campaign; at the very least, they have a front-row seat and a certain level of influance over events, at the other extreme, they are the instigators and agents of change. So why not make them the principle operators in this change?

And so I crafted a side-quest for the PCs, to be held in abayence until the first time a PC Elf was killed. The concept was that they would have to create the mythological infrastructure that provided a return path from the elvish afterlife back to the mortal realm, and that this would also (as a side effect) open the door to a new type of Elvish Undead, revealing a few aspects of the relationship between Life, Death, and Undeath within the campaign.

I even ensured that eventually they would have to undertake this side-quest by making its successful completion a prerequisite for the PCs achieving their ultimate goal of becoming Gods. Unfortunately, the campaign shut down before it reached that point, after seven years of part-time gaming; mostly because I no longer had enough free time to run a seventh campaign. Something had to give, and this was the least painful option.

So why write about this now?

It’s only recently occurred to me that there was an implication of this that I hadn’t recognised, and never thought to explore: the fact that for each species which was subject to ressurection, someone within the game world had already done this. Or, alternately, that some species were so weakly-bound to the realm of Death that they were inherantly able to be ressurected.

(Rhetorically) Does anyone else see any story potential in either of these alternatives?

The Point

This post isn’t just about the Life, Death, and Ressurrection of characters; it’s actually intended to be about the Life, Death, and Ressurrection of a particular generation of game systems.

To a lot of people, a generational change in their rules system is something to be endured. To others, it’s something to be ignored or avoided altogether. There is an alternative: to look for the opportunities in the change.

A spot of self-defence

Long-time readers of this website – and anyone who glances at the categories list over to the right – may be tempted to point their fingers at me and level accusations of hypocracy, because all my campaigns are still operating with D&D 3.x rules. This is a choice that has been made quite deliberately, and for several reasons, the most important of which I explained in the comments to a previous post “The Quality Of Rules”, part of the (still incomplete) Rules Mastery series, where I wrote:

All too often, when people are assessing House Rules, or even changes to the Official Rules, they operate exclusively on the GNS axis, or they talk about the “flavor” having changed without being able to summarise exactly how and why. That’s because they are using the GNS [Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist] axis and there’s no place on it for genre considerations, so they are reduced to saying “it’s different and I love it because it’s better for the game I want to run” or “it’s different and I hate it because the changes get in the way of the game I want to run” – frequently simplified to the basic reaction with no analysis whatsoever. Those assessing the changes then dive directly into game mechanics and specific changes because there is no tool in their understanding for generalising.

Each edition of a game system occupies a slightly different position on the GNS-and-Genre landscape to the one before it, defining it’s own “comfort zone” in terms of the genres that it can comfortable simulate without rules modification. Some of them will overlap – some won’t, and don’t. I think that’s the source of a lot of the angst felt over the “edition wars” of D&D. From everything I’ve seen and heard, 4e does a better job of focussing on the low-fantasy end of the fantasy spectrum, and it’s better-defined in it’s focus on that niche. It’s geared to shorter campaigns so that characters never get to the point of being capable of the sweeping and epic attributes of a high-fantasy campaign. My tastes run to high-fantasy, and even 3.x with Epic-level characters doesn’t lean far enough in that direction for me; but those rules are closer to simulating the chosen genre of the games that I am running, that can and will take many years to play out, than 4e. So for my games, 3.x is better than 4e.

The emphasis here is on “for my games”. My decision was an enlightened and deliberate one. Does that mean that I’ll never buy a 4e product? Only if I can adapt it to my 3.x campaign, to be honest; and by the time those campaigns are complete (5 years or more from now), I would not be surprised if 5th edition is out. And from all the indications lately – see this article from NewbieDM’s blog, which I find completely plausible – there is evidence to support that expectation. By 2014, 4e will be six years old, not counting the time spent in development prior to release. Even if there weren’t valid game-mechanics/fan-oriented reasons for a new edition by that time, there will increasingly shrill noises coming from the direction of those making marketing and business decisions calling for a new edition.

My choice isn’t for everyone. But that doesn’t mean that everyone should reject it without considering the possibilities.

I’ve never yet run a campaign with a deliberate permanent change from one rules system to another built into the plans from day one. But – using the precepts I’ve described in this article – the potential is there. It would simply be a matter of identifying the plot potentials and opportunities that the transition would provide. Generational change in your game system doesn’t have to be a life or death decision for your campaign.

Mike is now on Twitter! You can find him as @gamewriterMike. Why not stop by and say Hi? And, of course, you can always leave a comment if you have something to add to, or say about, this article!

What forces govern your city?

A power base is an asset you can use to achieve goals. It serves as a foundation or tool. You can wield it like a weapon, use it like a tool or draw upon it like a resource.

Governments are typically boring game elements. However, design a power base for each government or government agency, and you turn them into NPCs of a sort. The power base offers you storytelling options because it guides what actions agencies take when confronted with challenges or opportunities.

This series offers you several example power bases you can give governments so they become integral and interesting to your campaigns. This week we discuss the various facets of social leverage, marriage and wealth and how an agency or official can use them for gain.

Social Leverage

Government and politics operate at a social level to some degree. After all, it’s about governing and organizing people, regardless of whether the motivation is selfish or selfless.

Social leverage is purely about using some form of negative influence to get what one wants. Often, these methods are used in pursuit of a valuable or just goal. However, many might say the end doesn’t justify the means. Regardless, social leverage is a much-used and effective power base.

There are several types of social leverage one can add to their political repertoire:

• Blackmail. The government threatens to reveal a dark secret if some condition is not met or some action is not taken. Darker secrets mean greater leverage.
• Scandal. Most governments fear the “S” word. Scandals result in loss of popularity, authority or power.Even absolute governments, such as monarchies and dictatorships, seek to avoid scandal because it makes their power games more complicated and difficult. In addition, governments do not exist in a vacuum. Relationships with trading partners, forces of justice, treaty holders and other third parties are often impacted by scandal as well.
• Reputation. This powerful form of social leverage works because it influences the thoughts, decisions, choices and actions of many at once.For example, if a government can foster a reputation of generosity, it can get away with ungenerous acts from time to time without negative repercussions. If a government can establish an international reputation of being strong defensively and militarily, this can dissipate many war and raiding plans before they hatch.
• Politicking. This activity is all about the art of the deal. To get what one wants, whether its food for the poor or gold for the treasury, a government must get others to take action for its cause. These third parties have their own needs and agendas that must be appeased before they’ll act.Often, the needs and agendas conflict with others’. Therefore, the government must make compromises and capitulations, and wield whatever leverage it can – and is willing – to use to get the problem solved. The ability to get the deal done is a powerful form of social leverage, as the best at it can make practically any arrangement happen.Another form of politicking is making a deal out of nothing to suit one’s purposes. In this arrangement, the government is skilled at getting two or more parties contributing to a scheme and then it fails to follow through on some or all of its end of the bargain. This makes such deals very profitable for the government!One might think a government or official can’t keep up such social leverage for long, but true masters of politicking know how to make new, false deals with wounded parties to keep stringing them along for years, decades and even longer.
• Fear. Threats, reputation, blackmail, strong military and other things can create fear in a government’s jurisdiction and beyond.The fear it successfully cultivates can be wielded to ensure consent and that certain actions are taken, specific choices are made, objections and counteractions are limited, and much more. Fear is a powerful motivator amongst individuals and groups.

Strengths

In most arrangements and agreements, one party will fail to act if the challenge or adversity is great enough, and as governments know, many parties have low adversity thresholds!

Social leverage helps raise the level at which a party will default on its promises. It might not be a nice way to ensure compliancy, but it’s effective.

The Miner’s Guild might not like the new, higher production quotas, but it fears the government will hand the guild’s control over to another agency, so it hustles to comply. The wealthy merchants living in their large mansions on the hill might not like the tax increases, but if they bark, their selfish and traitorous deals will be exposed to the public. Next year, the mine production rates and taxation levels go up again – but still everyone complies. Such is the power of social leverage.

Weaknesses

Social leverage is fragile. Fear fades and secrets can eventually be nullified. Other parties can out-leverage the victim with even darker secrets or a greater fear factor.

In addition, the government must constantly appear strong and impregnable to the parties it’s leveraging. Any sign of weakness will spawn counteractions and resistance. The maintenance of strength can often be tiring and expensive, possibly even defeating in the long run.

Flavor

Social leverage is the grist of many plots and adventures. As mentioned, the party wielding the leverage must appear strong. In your campaign, this can take many forms.

Let’s take a few clues from real world dictatorships: large military; extensive use of propaganda; unified messaging in the form of uniforms, symbols, and logos; frequent use of force; control of public communication; severely limiting personal freedoms; state control of industry; and the use of secret police.

Pick one or more of these techniques and figure out how they manifest in your government. For example, perhaps your city government employs a highly effective force of doppleganger police and it uses disguised spellcasters to randomly monitor the thoughts of the populace.

Except in the most absolute governments and departments, a degree of consensus is required to initiate action. Perhaps plebiscite regularly take place, or a senate exists, or weighted voting amongst merchants based on wealth gets things done. Regardless, whenever a vote or show of support is involved, a party or faction has two options:

1. Win by getting more of their supporters to show up and vote than the opposition does
2. Win by ensuring fewer of the opposition’s supporters vote or participate

This definition opens up many possibilities for campaign flavor as each faction uses social leverage in public and private ways to achieve a win.

Marriage

Marriage into a powerful, wealthy, noble or political clan is a fast path to power. It’s often an acceptable method for furthering a political career, though societies will usually have unwritten rules about what arrangements are acceptable and what races, classes, backgrounds and ancestries can be mixed.

For example, your city’s upper crust might frown upon a landless law official wedding a noble’s daughter and then running for office.

Strengths

Depending on the length and nature of the courtship, the conditions of a dowry (maternal or paternal side, if there is any), and how inheritance works, marriage can quickly establish a power base.

For example, a city’s leader might wed his son to the daughter of a neighboring city’s leader to ensure peace, and eventually, more power for the leader’s son’s son, assuming the grandson would be allowed to inherit both cities.

Marriage can have numerous benefits for individuals and governments:

• Status
• Capital
• Military
• Alliances and relationships
• Business(es)
• Land
• Authority
• Reputation

Not bad for the signing of a single contract. Marriage is a long-term power base as well. Unless divorce or separation is allowed or common in your city, assets and benefits are joined until death or as long as they last, whichever comes first.

Weaknesses

Joining with another clan can be a double-edged sword. They will have reasons of their own for agreeing to the wedding and these reasons might not suit the suitor. The other family might have secrets or drawbacks waiting to be discovered after it’s too late.

In addition, except in rare circumstances, the new clan member will not be able to control all of their new relatives. A reckless but favored son might loose a large part of the family fortune at a card game or on a sour business deal. The father-in-law might drag everyone into a war or feud. There is no guarantee the new power base will last unless careful steps are taken.

Flavor

Weddings are wonderful ways to add session flavor. They can serve as high profile backdrop events. They can directly involve the PCs.

Buzz, rumors, preparations, and the special day can all provide fodder for NPC parley and setting descriptions. A marriage between powerful clans can cause a shift in the balance of power, and everyone, from nobles to peasants, can feel its impact.

Wealth

As a medium of exchange, nothing beats money as a source of power. With cold, hard gold coinage, a government can buy friends and influence, arm and train soldiers, fill the private coffers of its officials, build defenses, and much more.

Other forms of wealth have different levels of liquidity, but are no less valuable to a government with bills to pay, dreams to fund and people to impress.

Examples of wealth might include land ownership and control, mineral and ore mines, and the crown jewels.

Strengths

• City governments face numerous expenses, such as:
• Paying its staff
• Building or repairing the city’s infrastructure (i.e. walls, roads, bridges, public buildings, market places)
• Maintaining standing armies
• Supporting its bureaucracy with supplies and services
• Hosting public events or important guests,

Wealth can also be used as a negotiating chip to broker deals and solve civic disputes. Politicians can use wealth to fund their careers, whether it’s to support electoral campaigns, maintain a certain standard of living and public image, or for disbursements to important supporters and influential third parties. Some government officials might feel the need to hire a personal guard, have a large staff, host expensive parties, and engage in other expensive habits – all of which require deep pockets.

A key strength of wealth is that, when properly managed, it begets more wealth. Though it might seem crazy, wealth attracts more wealth, leaving many to bemoan that you need to be rich in order to get rich.

For example, if your city has a bank or lender that pays interest on citizens’ deposits, then wealthy citizens can earn money just by letting their gold sit in the bank’s vault for awhile. In addition, those with capital are often sought to fund business deals. These capitalists often charge high interest or require a large chunk of the endeavor’s revenues as payment, and they often don’t have to lift a finger in the enterprise they’re funding.

Wealth is also nearly universally respected. Alien races, intelligent monsters, inter-planar entities, foreign governments, external guilds, and other forces can respect wealth, thus allowing these parties and your city’s government to do business or come to terms on various issues.

Weaknesses

As a power base, wealth has a few key potential weaknesses.

• Protection. Wealth requires expense to protect it. City treasuries must be guarded. Vaults need traps and trap maintenance. Land needs fences and, possibly, troops and lawyers to deal with hungry neighbors. Mines, crops and industry need social and economic stability.
• Liquidity. A government needs cash flow. It cannot spend its land, else it will soon have no land to govern. Staff need to be paid in a currency they can exchange for food and daily needs.A silver mine by itself only represents the potential of wealth – ore must actually be dug out and processed before that mine is valuable. Orchards must bear fruit for those trees, and they land they occupy, to produce tangible wealth. Different forms of wealth have different levels of convertibility into currency, and a government needs certain amounts of currency on hand at any given time to take care of its expenses.
• Exhaustible. Most forms of wealth are finite. Some forms can be nurtured and managed to become renewable. Cash reserves used as investment, croplands, and skilled workforces are good examples. Other forms, such as mines, will ultimately run out, regardless of management.
• Devaluation. Some forms of wealth might have a historically stable value, but many others are risky in terms of fluctuating value rates based on factors that cannot be controlled.The weather, for instance, can determine the value of croplands in any given season. Even a solid historical record does not hold any guarantees. For example, in a high fantasy setting, an accessible infinite plane might be discovered and land values drop until the government can gain control of the gates, mages, magic items and any other access points.
• Theft. As mentioned, wealth incurs expense for its own protection. If that protection fails, then the wealth is gone.

Flavor

The types and natures of the wealth a government has can influence numerous other societal factors.

If a government relies upon slave labor, for example, then city life would be impacted differently than if a city’s power were based on a skilled, unionized work force.

Another example would be how a mine-based wealth source would be quite different from an exotic crop-based source.

Take a step back and think about how the sources of the government’s wealth affect daily life, administration, commerce, art and other elements of society.

In most cities, citizens expect the government to share its wealth. The people might demand parks, competent police, protection from invaders, clean streets and more. The wealthier a citizenship perceives its government to be, the more expenditure it expects to be lavished upon it.

It would be an interesting campaign if the perception of the government’s wealth did not match the reality. Imagine a government design where the coffers were overflowing but the people were poor. Then imagine the opposite extreme, where the city was spending out of control on gold gilded street lamps and brightly uniformed elite guards when, in fact, the government was bankrupt.

A real thompson submaschine gun in a violin case

This article is being co-written by Blair Ramage, with whom I co-referee a Pulp Hero campaign. Although it started as a single item, it has grew so substantially that it became necessary to split it into multiple parts. The first part dealt with the relationship of genre to other aspects of a roleplaying game, and furnished a context for the whole series. The second part covered Pulp environmental and game world conventions. Parts Three and Four dealt with the plot and story conventions of the Pulp Genre, and the previous part began looking at Character conventions within the Pulp Genre. That examination was supposed to take two parts, but time ran short, and so it has now been split into three; this is the middle of those parts.

The Jungle Breeds Noble Savages

There is an unusual dichotomy in pulp fiction, and hence in pulp game characters, in the juxtaposition of an optimism toward the future and a romanticization of the primitive experience, expressed most clearly in Tarzan and similar stories. At first glance, these are so radically at odds that the pairing seems unlikely. But a deeper analysis of this genre convention leads to a few more important facets of Pulp characterisation, and reconciles the amomaly.

The deeper truth within pulp characterisation is the belief that regardless of exterior trappings and circumstances, men (and women) have an innate purity of self at their core, a distillation of their personality that remains a central truth of that character. Noble or Ignoble, Hero or Villain, Angel or Devil – this innermost core is fundamental to the character.

This is the wellspring of both the sense of optimism that pervades and permeates the pulp genre and the concept of the “noble savage”. Given the precept that good is fundamentally stronger than evil because it permits characters to join together into a whole stronger than the sum of its constituants, while the latter is inherantly selfish and suspicious of others, it is inevitable that the pure of heart will always win (all else being equal).

It is, in part, the job of the GM to unbalance situations sufficiently that all things are NOT equal, giving the villains advantages in timing and preperation sufficient to ensure that the situation SEEMS TO BE in doubt, while preserving enough of that fundamental (and hidden) bias to permit the PCs to win – in the end. In other words, to challenge the PCs and make them work for their success, while preserving a back door to success that does not give the impression of a Duex-ex-machina.

Leopards Hardly Ever Change Their Spots

It follows that villains tend to remain villains and heroes tend to remain heroes. In particular, the villains learn only the most superficial possible lessons from their mistakes and defeats; and, rather than refine a plan that almost worked to remove the flaw, they will abandon it entirely.

On extremely rare occasions, a villain whose heart was pure may reform, but this is very much an exception to the general rule, and such characters remain under suspicion for years and even decades, no matter what good deeds they may commit in the meantime – because even if a leapard actually does change his spots, most people don’t believe it. That’s a measure of how much a truism this genre convention is.

At the same time, a special level of condemnation is reserved for any heroes who prove to have feet of clay. There are no shades of gray, it is not considered possible for a character to be “mostly” heroic; you are either a hero, or you are a villain, there’s nothing in-between.

Irredeemably Evil?

A number of GMs fail to realise that this absolutism actually makes it easier to explore fringe issues within their campaigns. One nation’s hero is another nation’s villain, and those loyal to the first nation will remain “pure” to the ideology they champion. At the same time, because they are “heroes”, they are able to transcend that ideology from time to time and find common ground with those they would normally oppose.

If black and white lines or spots are sufficiently densely packed, they will seem to be a shade of grey.

Villains (Usually) Boast

I’ve only ever heard one or two explanations for this genre convention, which I’ll describe in a moment. First, I want to emphasise that this genre convention is even more universal in pulp RPG games, even more ubiquitous than in other media. The only real exception is when the PCs have already got the whole story of what the villain is up to, so he can spend his time threatening them instead of making sure they are up-to-date.

Yet, my co-GM and I have found that on many occasions the players are unwilling to let the villain monologue at them simple because he has to render them (aparrantly) helpless first. I make this observation to re-emphasize a note made within the article on pulp plot conventions: Players, let your PCs be captured!

Boasting From Respect

And so, to the first explanation. It has been suggested that villains boast of their plans to the Hero or heroes simply because there is no-one else who they feel can appreciate the brilliance, the nuance, of their plans. They boast out of a need to stroke their egos.

I’m sorry, it doesn’t hold water. While there may be a few cases where the arch-villain has insufficient self-confidence and arrogance that he needs to reassure himself, for the most part, they are utterly convinced that no-one, especially the heroes, is at their level.

Boasting to Humiliate

What, then, of the other oft-mooted possibility: that the villains boast to humiliate the heroes, rubbing salt into the wounds of failure? On the face of it, this seems entirely more plausible, so much so that I would accept it on the part of any villain of lesser intelligence. The more intelligent amongst them, however, would be aware that nothing is won until the finish line is crossed. “Smart characters are still smart”, and this would constitute an unneccessary risk to their plans.

And yet, the smarter the villains, the more likely they are to boast. So this is, at best, only a partial answer to the question.

A third answer: Morale

In thinking about this, I devised a third answer to the question, one which is consistent with almost all the characterisations involved: the villain boasts to demonstrate his superiority and confidence, not to the heroes, but to his minions.

“Criminals are a superstitious, Cowardly lot” according to the mythology of Batman. It follows that the mere involvement of the heroes would be enough to cause some of the minions to hesitate or waver in their loyalty (usually with good reason). Demonstrating that the hero is completely within the power of the villain is a means to reassure those who have weakened in their resolve. That is sufficient motive for the villain to run the risk of the heroes subsequently disrupting the plans, even in the face of the experience of the heroes doing exactly that – because if he does not, his plan might well be forfeit anyway, due to the phenomenon of rats deserting a sinking ship.

The only circumstances under which this explanation is insufficient occur when the ties that bind the villain and henchmen together are religious, or quasi-religious, in nature. With his henchmen’s loyalty and obediance assured by other means, this villain has no need to reassure them; but these types generally take every opportunity to reinforce their divine destiny in the minds of their followers, and frequently suffer from self-restraint issues (having come to believe their own PR). These offer ample justification for them to boast anyway.

Impact on characterisation

One of the most important decisions a GM has to make, in referance to a villain’s characterisation, is whether or not they will Monologue, and if so, why? This decision can either reflect personality decisions already made, or can be the key to unlocking other aspects of the villains’ characterisation. Either way, it’s critically important to get it right, because this is one of the villain’s primary interaction modes with the PCs. Who can forget Goldfinger’s rebuttal, “No, Mister Bond, I expect you to DIE.”

Melodramatic Schemes

To describe the plots of villains in a pulp game as grandiose is to understate the description. They can be subtle, brilliant, blatant, or even foolish, but they are never small and petty.

Creating and implementing such schemes requires a particular personality element on the part of the villains, a form of exhibitionism, a compulsion toward the melodramatic. Each pulp villain needs background elements that justify this compulsion. Obsession, a reaction to teasing and humiliation in childhood, megalomania, or any of several other psychological and historical factors can account for this, but each villain needs something.

This much is obvious; what is not so obvious is the impact of such schemes on pulp Heroes, who seem to do everything they can to feed this self-aggrandised image. There have been some suggestions that the heroes suffer from an equivalent psychology, sometimes described as the Hero Complex; a need to see their names in the paper, to be publicly lauded. But this isn’t the only possible explanation.

Enough Rope

Surely, the principle of feeding a villain enough rope is sufficient in and of itself to justify the behaviour of the heroes in a pulp game? By playing to the villains’ melodramatic impulses, the heroes incite revelations (see “Villains (Usually) Boast”, above), and feed a sense of confidence to the villain to the point at which it becomes overconfidence.

In other words, there is no need for a character to suffer from a Hero Complex.

This is a good thing, because those who do are not being heroic through any innate purity of spirit, as demanded by the principle stated in “The Jungle Breeds Noble Savages”; their need to be Heroic is a flaw in their characters, and can eventually lead to the performance of villainous actions purely to provide an opportunity to display their heroism. This was the premise at the heart of Backdraft, and it’s an entirely valid premise for use in a Pulp Game as well.

A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

I’ve taken pains to emphasise this point because it demonstrates, once again, that even in a morally black-and-white world, a morally black-and-white character can posess a personality every bit as sophisticated and complex as a character in a less absolutist environment.

Many GMs and the occasional author of Pulp modules and supplements fail to appreciate the possibilities that occur within the genre when it is fully exploited. By portraying the characters as simplistic and cartoonish archvillains, they impose a juvenile aspect to the genre that is neither warranted or necessary. This approach, in turn, hinders the complexity and sophistication of the plots within the campaign, and reduces the genre’s ability to engage a modern audiance.

A rejection of the oversimplistic while applying the moral absolutism of pulp, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of producing immersion within the campaign on the part of most players, though a few “just won’t get it”.

As with all RPGs, depth of characterisation and intriguing plot lines within a plausible game world are 95% of the recipe for a successful campaign.

Masters Of Disguise

It doesn’t matter whether or not characters have disguise skill, if they dress and behave appropriately, they will never be discovered. This is a consequence of events moving at the speed of plot, and one of the few that PCs can take advantage of.

The key here is “dress and behave appropriately”. That doesn’t mean that you can dress as a mechanic and wander the executive corridors with impugnity. It doesn’t even mean that you can do so wearing an appropriate business suit and go around sticking your nose in every door that you pass, or peering intently at every passing face.

Mug a flunky for their clothes, and look as if you both belong there and know where you are going, and success will be yours.

Which raises the question, what is the value of having skill in Disguise or Acting in a pulp game? The answer comes when players do NOT behave as outlined, or when they attempt to alter their appearance to match a specific individual, as opposed to a generic member of a group. There will be times when chutzpah alone will not suffice, and that’s when this expertise enters the picture.

If players and GMs think of these skills as being the ability to craft “super disguises” of the type made famous by Martin Landau in Mission Impossible (the original TV series). Those skills don’t mean that such a character is immune to discovery, especially if they behave in a fashion that will call attention to themselves; it just makes it less likely that they will be discovered by a casual search, or even a close search if they haven’t behaved stupidly.

Respect Your Enemy

Most villains and heroes in pulp have an unspoken respect for their enemies, whether they will admit it or not, or – more specifically – for their abilities. This respect is at odds with the usual explanation offered for villainous monologues, as explained earlier.

The more intelligent the villain, the more they will attempt to hero-proof their plans. The more intelligent the heroes, the more they will focus on the problem at hand – the villain’s current plan – without getting distracted or overambitious. The first is fairly obvious, the second less so; but the exercise of some simple logic on the part of the player should make it obvious:

If the GMs expect or intend for the villains to meet their doom at the climax of the adventure, they will provide an opportunity for the PCs to achieve this, regardless of what the PCs ambitions. More frequently, the GMs will have the villain make some doomed and desperate attempt to salvage their plans in the face of PC success. It follows that the PCs should focus on the plot and not the plotter in this circumstance.

If the GMs do not expect or intend for the villains to expire in a blaze of failure, they will focus the luck that they grant the PCs, and every nuance of good fortune, towards making up the slack, ensuring that the plan will fail despite the PCs cavalier attitude; then balance the books by giving the villain all the advantages when they attempt escape. In other words, the PCs won’t succeed at taking out the villain unless the GMs permit it, anyway. If they want the villain to get away, he will, and focussing on that objective is therefore a waste of time.

Either way, then, the best choice is for the PCs to focus on the immediate issue, and let tomorrow take care of itself.

Optimism Trumps Cynicism (One More Time)

This is the third time that we’ve brought this up in the course of this series; it’s that important, and that difficult for people to grasp. Sure, people can get the notion, intellectually, but feeling it and responding in the right way automatically, is much more difficult.

So, how does this genre convention affect characters?

Well, first of all, it has a massive impact on the personal history of the character. There are no glass-galf-empty moments, there is no misfitting public policy, there’s no angst. People are either villains or they do the right thing as best they can. Mistakes are just that; characters don’t obsess over them, even if those mistakes destroy a character’s old life; that just means that they have the opportunity to build a new and better one. A character can be hard-drinking and cigar-smoking without ill effects – even without a hangover.

Secondly, it has a major effect on the character’s ambitions, which is to say his current status. Anything a character wants can be theirs, if they just work hard enough to achieve it. Failure to achieve something inevitably means that they didn’t work hard enough to deserve it. Remember, no negativity. So favouritism and nepotism and sexism and, in fact, any other kind of “ism” don’t exist.

Ultimately, it is WHAT the character wants to achieve that distinguishes Hero from Villain. Some ambitions carry with them a willingness to achieve by means of violence and evil, to do whatever is necessary regardless of the impact on others. Others temper their ambitions to accommodate the wishes and needs of others.

Both are incurable optimists. Heroes are optimistic that evil will never defeat good, so long as it is opposed by men (and women) of courage and virtue. Villains are optimistic that this time, things will be different and everything will come out the way they want it to.

Any sort of negativity or cynicism is a mental illness – to be treated with such “cures” as shock therapy. Both players and GMs have to bear that in mind.

Colourful Characters

There’s just enough room left in this post to discuss this point, which should be fairly self-evident. All characters in a pulp setting should have a measure of flamboyance about them, one way or another.

Villains tend to be bathed in the reflection of their grandiose schemes, so they are easily accommodated in this respect.

Heroes can be a little trickier. Some are inherantly flamboyant, but most have a need to insert colour into their pasts and circumstances. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to consider a GM’s-eye-view of the PCs in the Adventurer’s Club campaign:

• Father Justin O’Malley: A catholic priest who fights a private war against the supernatural in the name of God and his virtues. (That sounds pretty colourful to me, all deriving from the nature of his personal adversaries).
• Tommy Adkins: A dashing, barnstorming, decorated WWI aviator from Australia who is always willing to chance his luck and throw caution to the wind. (Plenty of colour there, too, stemming from the personality of the character and (in this case), the player).
• Captain “Blackjack” Ferguson: An Australian seafairer with an iron will and quiet sense of Justice; gruff and implacable on the surface but a closet softie underneath, who brave any pirate den in defence of his crew, ship, or friends. (Again, plenty of colour, but more deriving from the circumstances surrounding him than his personality).
• Dr Matthew Hawke: A GP who suffered from a listlessness until he found a home in the Jungles of the Pacific, ministering to the natives. (Oh dear, there’s not a lot of colour there. This was the player’s first pulp character and his first exposure to the genre.)

Matthew Hawke: A case study in characterisation

Since it will also be instructive, let’s take a moment to contemplate how we could impart a little more colour to the character of Dr Hawke. Note that most of this is speculative and not signed off on by the player.

To start with, here’s what we’ve already done, approved by the player:

• We have established that he is not the obsessed-with-healing type.
• We have established that the character was more at home in the tribal wilderness, and has a deep respect for “primitive” medicines.
• We’ve written into his background an incident involving the sale of out-of-date medicines to primitive cultures – a modern social referance that fitted the character.
• We’ve seen strong indications of an overblown sense of responsibility that for some reason the character supresses or keeps hidden.
• We’ve also seen hints that the character has a hot temper that he actively supresses most of the time.

There are many possible points of expansion here, but the first item on the list isn’t one of them. It is really only an exclusionary statement, telling us what the character is not; there isn’t a lot of scope for expansion there.

The second item on the above list is more fertile ground. Clearly, the character did not get his medical licence in the jungle, so something must have driven him there. What that could be is a decision for the player to make, but it is also the first potential location for an injection of colour. Perhaps he had a patient or an emergency situation in which he found his western medicine to be useless, but his patient was saved through native medicine of some sort. Or perhaps he got involved in some sort of crime ring and fled to the jungle, where he began to redeem himself. Maybe he was the innocent dupe of a criminal and fled before he could be jailed, putting a dark shadow over his past – which would explain why he’s been reluctant to speak of it.

Or perhaps he was on a holiday cruise and somehow got washed or thrown overboard, and that is how he came to find himself in simpler circumstances. That’s certainly got a bit of colour to it.

In any event, it seems clear to ME that the Doctor has come to embody a variation of the Noble Savage, which is something that the player could develop as part of his in-play personality. He could extend this profile by becoming a little more hesitant in his use of technology, or a little more elementary… no, that’s the wrong term. A little more primitive in his sense of society and propriety, that’s a better way to phrase it. Or simply a little more obviously uncomfortable in more advanced society, and a little more desirous of simple, straightforward solutions.

The third point brings to the fore his current personal goals – he is trying to hunt down whoever was responsible for the dumping of the out-of-date medicines on the tribe that was under his care. So far, there hasn’t been much of an opportunity for this to factor into the campaign, but there was one occasion recently in inner China where we were able to bring it to the fore, and we have one or two variations planned for the near future. The problem is that this is relatively limited; we can use it a couple of times, but it will quickly grow monotonous. So we need to have this expand into a broader motivation.

There are two possibilities: the first is for the character to generalise this objective into a hatred of greed, using a character convention of the pulp realm which we’ll discuss next time; and the second is for us as GMs to tie the distribution of bad medicines into organised crime, permitting the character to generalise his antipathy in that direction. The player can choose either, and we can happily work with it.

This item on the list also offers the potential to add colour to the character by tying it into his background even more extensively than has been done to date, specifically to the character’s motive for abandoning his western practice and heading into the jungles in the first place. I speculated that Dr Hawke may have been involved in some way with a criminal act – what if he was involved in the despatch of the oout-of-date medicines to the Jungle but didn’t realise it until it was too late – and then dropped everything to undo what he had inadvertantly done? That’s another fairly colourful suggestion.

The fourth item speaks of a hidden or suppresed sense of responsibility that goes beyond normal levels. Certainly, that would fit with many of the speculations offered here, but most especially with that last one. The expiation of personal guilt, even if it is not warranted, definitely gives the character a depth that is currently lacking.

Finally, we have the temper. Once again, there are many possibilities – the character may have gone too far in dealing with a situation, for example. Exposing those responsible for the speculative medicine-rebirthing ring and uttering threats against them, or personally seeing them behind bars are both possibilities. Or maybe the character was just a hothead, with no other connection between that and the events leading up to his time in the jungle, but was taught self-control by the simple life of the natives; this would give an additional focus to the ‘noble savage’ concept.

And I have to admit that I love the dichotomy of a professional healer, a respected doctor, as an embodiment of the Noble Savage. But the player might not agree, and it’s ultimately his character.

There’s still one more slice of character conventions in pulp to look at! But next time around, this series will be taking a brief break to enable me post something for this month’s Blog Carnival on Life and Death. I have three article ideas for that post and no idea which one I’ll choose to write… or maybe I’ll do all three, who knows?

Filling The Empty Chair by Johnn with Mike

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This month’s RPG blog carnival theme covers life and death in RPGs.

When thinking about what I’d write for the carnival my attention wandered to my Riddleport campaign. There, I spotted how death was a theme in at least two plots. Then another plot. And then another. Soon, I was seeing death everywhere.

It makes me wonder – could death be a surprising yet unknown theme in your campaign too? Realizing this could give you a stronger sense of what your campaign is about and offer you new inspiration for your plots and designs. If you realize a theme has been lurking in your campaign, you can now take steps to ripen that theme and bring it closer to the surface to enhance its flavour.

Here are three examples of how death plays a big part in my campaign right now.

Raising The Dead in Riddleport – Many Sinister Plots

First, a request. If you are a player in my campaign, please stop reading now. The spoilers below are big ones for the campaign. They reveal some deep plots of the villains you hate. Knowing the information below will ruin parts of the campaign for you because of the core secrets I am about to reveal.

The Body Monks

A group of monks in the city offers a 5gp reward for bodies. Under the auspices of study and “learning how people work so as to better heal them in the future,” this group sends carts around the streets to collect those who have passed on. They also collect the bodies laid before their front gate in the middle of the night, a practice the monks encourage.

The order truly does study physiology and has built a massive library of research: charts, monographs and books concerning the body parts of all races. Most information relates to observations such as measurements, colours and consistencies and is not useful to most.

A few monks do analysis. They look for commonalities and outliers. It is all manual work though, and they have to create charts, books and monographs about the observations, and then collate more information about the observations of the observations.

Meantime, the order must feed it members, pay the promised finder fees and pay taxes to the Overarch. The first way it generates monies is by selling bodies through back channels to necromancers and dark priests outside the city. Lots of those in the world of Golarion, and Riddleport is a busy port city, so business is good.

In addition, they have a great little side business of extortion. They cast Speak With Dead on any bodies that fit certain criteria. Subtle inquiries by agents throughout the city also help them decide which dead to interrogate and what questions to ask. Information gleaned gets brought back to those who would pay for that information to disappear.

The monks are smart and do not overdo this. They also have agents conduct the transactions to protect the information source. Usually some clue or false evidence is shown to deflect suspicion away from the monks as to how the agents figured the crimes out.

Lastly, good specimens are sold off-plane to the highest bidder. There are many uses for a fresh body to those who know how to control or season the dead.

Rictus’s Undead Army

The PCs’ patron is a vampire crime lord who owns the city’s only gladiatorial arena.

He has a lich, wights, ghasts and ghouls serving him as lieutenants, street bosses and minions. He keep discipline and control like an evil commander: fear and greed. He coerces those he can into obedience. The rest, he bribes. It would not be good form to have all these creatures running amok.

Fortunately, the arena is the pinnacle of the city’s popular pit fighting league. All fighters dream of an arena match, and the purse that goes along with it. While Rictus makes great money at the gates and from fighter fees, he makes a killing by gambling. He can fix almost any fast without problem, so the House always comes out ahead after each day of arena battles.

Add to this protection money, smuggling and vice, and Rictus can afford to keep his minions in check.

However, his plans go beyond ruling a city district and incredible wealth. In secret, below the arena, he builds an army of undead creatures. Using corpses from vanquished arena foes, he slowly fills a massive cavern complex with new troops each week. His lich necromancer general oversees this aspect of the vampire lord’s operations, and one day soon the army will be large enough to capture the city with.

Astrinus’s Gentleman’s Club

Living beside the characters is a stately man known as Astrinus. He recently bought the building and introduced himself the the PCs as quiet person of philosophy. He hosts an exclusive club for gentleman to drink fine liquor and discuss the nature of life. The gods are just powerful beings with magic the city’s paltry mages have failed to understand. As such, it is up each person to carve their own life according to their own will. Destiny is but a tool used by cunning priests to manipulate the masses.

Or so Astrinus believes, and he invites smart and thoughtful folk to his club to discuss and prove him wrong.

Meantime, he offers a free Raise Dead or Resurrection to folk if they agree to sign a contract. In my version of Golarion, souls are currency, and high level souls are worth more than low level. Those who sign the contract basically sign their souls over to Astrinus’s secret lord, who shall not be named for fear that doing so would summon him and he’d stop me from posting this blog.

The cost of the spell is outweighed by the fact that, on average, signees go on to gain an average of three to six more levels before dying again. That’s a marked increase in the value of the soul that finally reaches his lord. A long term strategy that has paid off for the three hundred years Astrinus has been running his branch of the organization this way.

Some PCs have signed the contract.

Aroden’s Heart

Here is the central plot of my campaign. While the PCs are directly involved, this plot is meant to be a background catalyst for the crazy stuff going on right now in Riddleport.

I’m sure my players think I have just taken my favourite monsters of all time and thrown them into Riddleport for the characters to fight. However, I have actually created a sinister plot that lets me take my favourite monsters of all time and throw them into Riddleport for the characters to fight. A win/win, no?

100 years ago, according to Golarian canon, Aroden died. In my version of the history, Aroden was attacked in a war on a plane of Hell. Accompanied by Ragathiel and other key minions, Aroden lead an army of justice through various battles that finally put his army in hell against an evil alliance of Asmodeus, Lloth and others.

Aroden was ambushed by Astrinus. They found hand-to-hand, and Astrinus won. Before he could deal the killing blow, help for Aroden arrived. That brought Astrinus’s allies immediately forward. A short standoff ensued while Aroden slowly bled out.

It was apparent, on that small mound covered in blood in the center of a waging war, that a greater prize than just winning the conflict was to be had. With Aroden’s death there was an empty seat to be filled at the Divine Table, a seat any of the lords and generals present to could fill and become a god.

The negotiation fast became a conspiracy. They agreed to put Aroden in stasis and hide him away. They tasked the angel Ragathiel to do this, which he immediately did before Aroden’s last life left him. The status would last 100 years, which would give all sides time to plan and plot and be ready when it came time for the Greater Deities to select Aroden’s replacement.

Then they would bring Aroden out of stasis and kill him on the Cypher Gate. That would summon the Greater Deities to pick Aroden’s successor.

Each party to this heinous crime secretly plotted to become the ideal candidate for the gods to choose for Ascendance. They plotted to gain person power and to hamper if not outright kill opposing rivals. They had 100 years to plot, and now the time has come.

This year in the campaign is the 100th year of Aroden’s stasis. All the sides aware of this now gather in Riddleport, prepared to be the Chosen One for Ascendence. Minions fight each other in the streets or through indirect means. And the PCs are caught in the middle.

I Heart Death

As I thought about my campaign through the lens of this month’s RPG blog carnival, I realized how central death was to this campaign. Knowing this now, I will be fleshing out my death related plots and antagonists better so they feature more prominently to champion this theme to the PCs better. That should tighten the campaign design up a bit.

I will keep the date of Aroden’s status a secret for as long as possible. I do not intend for the PCs to “solve” this campaign or become gods. I prefer the Aroden’s Heart plot involving a Race For Ascendancy to just be a cool backdrop for adventure in Golarion’s meanest pirate city. As a sandbox campaign, I’m not about structuring a story around fixed outcomes. That also might mean the campaign does become a Race For Ascendancy if the PCs latch onto that thread with their teeth and refuse to let go.

How does life and death figure in your RPG?

Write a blog post and post the link below. March’s RPG blog carnival has officially begun!

The Story So Far…

This article is being co-written by Blair Ramage, with whom I co-referee a Pulp Hero campaign. Although it started as a single item, it has grew so substantially that it became necessary to split it into multiple parts. The first part dealt with the relationship of genre to other aspects of a roleplaying game, and furnished a context for the whole series. The second part covered Pulp environmental and game world conventions. Parts Three and Four dealt with the plot and story conventions of the Pulp Genre. Which brings us now to Character conventions within the Pulp Genre.

It should be understood that what we’re talking about are the major characters of the storyline: PCs and important NPCs. Everyone else follows the guidelines layed out in World Conventions.

On a number of occasions, people have suggested that characterisation doesn’t matter in a pulp game. This is not a position that I agree with in any way; if it were true, then the lead characters of a pulp story would be interchangeable: The Shadow would be the same as Indiana Jones, Doc Savage interchangeable with Dirk Pitt. If you stretch the definitions just a little, you could consider Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) from The Firm to be a Pulp character – but he’s nothing like Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) from The Mummy!

So, having demolished that arguement, let’s proceed to examine the characterisation conventions in pulp, from the perspective of PCs and significant NPCs in an RPG…

Gender Issues

While this topic was examined in detail under the heading of World conventions, we wanted to shed a little more light onto a dark corner. Regardless of the general attitude towards the female gender in the wider world, different rules can apply to featured characters. If the GM has modernised the attitude towards women, he has chosen a position that makes it less likely to provoke antagonism from pro-feminists, but the price paid is that he has also robbed the featured female characters of the campaign of a source of vitality and depth, stemming from their position on the subject.

In a campaign that faithfully preserves the chauvenism of the genre, while distinguishing between that position and the GMs personal beliefs, female characters have a background against which they can contrast. There are – essentially – four options for them to choose from, and they can all add considerable depth of personality and characterisation to such characters:

The Amelia Earhart Option

This option is presented first on our list because it is the one most commonly employed by female characters within a modern Pulp game. There have always been exceptions to the mould forced on women by a restrictive society, women who refused to play by the rules of the time and managed to do just about anything a man could do. Rather than a point of contention, except with the most misogynistic of individuals, this character’s gender became part of their legend, a wellspring of personal fame. In effect, this character type states ‘Your petty restrictions don’t apply to me’ and ignores or evades the public attitude of the genre.

This is the type of character who becomes furious at liberationists, utterly opposed to most laws aimed at equality, horrified to think that there is any suggestion that they are not every inch the equal of a man – Mavericks who carve their own path in spite of social restrictions. And, to be honest, this is the approach that every female PC (all one of them) and most of the leading female NPCs have taken.

The Iron-Fist-In-A-Velvet-Glove option

A second option is for a more subtle approach, in which the character is (at least in part) defined by the struggle to retain their femininity while acting as ‘one of the boys’. This is essentially an Amelia Earhart that tries to fit in with society in general, the epitome of the ‘everyman of female gender thrust into extraordinary times’. Perhaps the best example of this character are the leading ladies of the early Avengers TV series, Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) (Series 2-5).

The Feminist Option

The third option open to female characters is to put the issue at the very centre of the personality, making the character a crusader for women’s rights. These characters must struggle to overcome or overthrow the restrictions of an ignorant society. This can actually be the hardest option for the GM, because it requires them to recreate faithfully the social attitudes and mores of the time – and society has changed to an unimaginable degree over the last 70 or 80 years. Unless the GM can succeed in this difficult task, however, he will be undercutting the dramatic potential of the chosen role of the female character; without the harshness of the attitudes of the time, the character will have nothing to fight against.

The Mata Hari Option

A character’s final option in a traditional environment is for them to employ their femininity as a weapon. This character type plays the ‘typical woman’ only when it suits her purposes; she can be seductive, sultry, ice-cold or passionate, violent or demure.

Other Options

There are a few other options, and a whole slew of variations and combinations available. The Dragon Lady, the African or Voodoo Priestess, even social Butterflies that are the 1930s equivalent of Cordelia from the early seasons of Buffy are valid characterisations. Look at any comic heroines of the era, such as the original Black Canary, the Phantom Lady, and the like, for more inspiration.

A character’s position on the feminist question relative to that of the world is one of the defining characteristics of a female character’s personality in a pulp game. It’s not the ONLY defining characteristic, but it’s definitely one of the big ones.

Racial Stereotypes And Clichés

If you’re smart enough to be reading these articles, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that two of the “other options” given above are examples of racial stereotypes or Clichés. Characters of non-caucasian backgrounds have essentially the same options available to them concerning whatever racial standards are in place within the campaign: they can ignore them, embrace them, fight them, or manipulate others using them.

The same is true of any caucasian stereotypes, such as characters from the Deep South, or Scotsmen, or Germans. One way or another, the relationship between the character and the stereotype is fundamental to the characterisation.

In the World Conventions, I proposed the 90/10 rule – 90% of individuals should embody the cliché, 10% should be at significant variance to it. PCs should be given the choice of where they fall within this division, and players should treat it as an opportunity to develop a characterisation.

Society Is Perfect

To modern sensibilities, these inequalities of gender and race are symptomatic of a society with many problems. Blind faith and trust in authority is now considered laughable. Unchecked avarice on the part of any corporation is considered the norm. Unemployment is a social issue rather than an expression of personal sloth. Health care is proportional to income. The poor are to be pitied and given the occasional handout, not educated and assisted. Morality is defined by dogma. There is no concept of an oil shortage, and environmental concerns are nonexistant or simply a matter of “cleanup” afterwards.

None of that is perceived as true by a pulp society. All problems and difficulties exist in isolation, frequently out-of-sight and out-of-mind. The authorities can be, and are trusted. Corporations act in the public interest, and exist to service their customers. Anyone who wants one can have a job. Health care is not expected to be universally available. Since there’s work for everyone, the poor can take care of themselves with just the occasional helping hand – besides, they are often happier living a simple life. The American middle-class defines the ideals, and moral guidance is the job of the church. There’s plenty of every raw material, it just needs brave men to goout and find it. Man has conquered nature and is lord and master of all he surveys.

Modern characters tend to focus on the tragedies that a character has experienced; they are expressions of the unqiue angst of the life that has led the character to this point. Positive influances are generally present only to provide context and highlight.

Pulp-game characters have to be very different. They are not defined by the disasters and personal calamities that have been experienced and the tragedies that have been endured; they are, characterised by their successes and achievements. That does not mean that the society that produces a character for a pulp game has to be flawless; like an oil painting, it is the small flaws that create the illusion of reality.

As a result, Pulp Societies embody an idealism that makes the Pulp Game a perfect vehicle for Progressive Social Commentary. There are things that can be said by analagy and metaphor that are utterly intolerable if stated directly. The most obvious application of this vehicle is to address the social problems that have become publicly aparrant in the years since – equality, civil rights, class distinction, corporate greed, and the like; but a lot of GMs don’t seem to realise that you can go further, and examine modern issues without the heat of current events: terrorism, privacy, censorship, access to data, government corruption, pollution, medical ethics, and more; all that must be remembered is that each problem exists in isolation, because – in general – society is perfect. And Pulp characters are exemplars of that idealism.

Morality Is Black And White

A reflection of the idealism and social simplicity of the setting that directly affects characters is that for a Pulp Character, morality is black and white. There is always a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do. You can be a Good Person or a Bad Person, a hero or a villain. The former are lionised, and accepted; the latter are condemned.

In general, there isn’t even room for angsty hand-wringing about what the right thing to do IS. The choice will be obvious, even if the price is not fully known. That makes a pulp environment a great setting in which to explore difficult moral questions, because players, characters, and GM can’t equivocate – they have to commit to an ideal and live with the consequences.

The concept of someone who prays devoutly, donates his time to charity, is generous and warm-hearted and friends with everyone, but who cheats on his taxes and is having a secret affair on the side is unthinkable for a pulp game. In a modern game, it works perfectly well. The moment a pulp character succumbed to the temptation to cheat on his wife, or lie on his tax return, he has crossed over to the dark side; either he confesses and performs an appropriate penance, or the virtuous qualities will erode as the character progressively succumbs to evil. Should the infidelity become known, his piety would be considered false, his friends would desert him, and his charitable associations would distance themselves. He would be considered cold and calculating, deceiptful and untrustworthy. He might well lose his job, and certainly he would be considered of dubious character.

It follows that if a character is morally upright in a pulp game, he would not permit himself to commit an infidelity. Consequently, all Pulp characters are expected to conform to an appropriate moral code, not only in play, but in their character’s backgrounds.

Enforcement

This poses a tricky challenge for the GM. How does he enforce this principle? Players who violate it weaken the game by weakening the conncetion between genre and campaign, but having the world react to this behaviour in the way they would if an NPC commited the offence would damage the game even more. Its also unfair to punish those players who did not commit the offence by restricting the group’s capabilities and limiting their fun. So there’s one line of arguement that the punishment should be in-game, and another that it should be completely metagame – a reduction in the XP the character receives, for example.

It’s a stramge thing, but players find it easier to tolerate and accept any in-game penalty than they do a comparatively minor metagame penalty. Perhaps they feel like the latter is criticism of them personally while the former is more impersonal. For that reason, I reserve metagame penalties for severe violations of acceptable game behaviour. A PC deliberately killing a bystander might – almost – qualify; nothing less is serious enough to risk someone being so irate that they might consider walking out of the game (and make no mistake, I have seen that reaction in other people’s games). That leaves an in-house penalty.

Depending on the severity of the offence, that might be anything from a slap on the wrist through to an in-game disadvantage of indefinite duration. The more extensive the penalty, the greater the need to put some sort of limitation on it – it might be duration (so many sessions in real life or so many days or weeks in-game), or it might be until some trigger condition is achieved. I might also follow it with some sort of probation, depending on what the player had done.

Parity Of Weapons Use

In most RPGs its entirely acceptable to use the biggest weapon you can get your hands on. Pulp is entirely different; it follows the principle of The Conservation Of Weapons Parity. If the other side uses non-lethal force, you can’t use lethal force. If the other side uses knives or swords, you can’t use guns. If the other side uses pistols and small-calibre weapons, you can’t use submachine guns, and so on. Or, if you do use them, you can’t aim them at the enemy.

Of course, the opposition in a pulp game rarely pay more than lip service to this principle, which is why it is the bad guys (read: NPCs controlled by the GM) who set the parameters for each combat. But in general, violations of this genre convention are not considered “cricket” (refer “it’s just not cricket” if the expression is unfamiliar).

Enforcement

This is another of those tricky ones to enforce. The best approach, once again, is in-game – one or more NPCs deciding that they can no longer trust the PC who violated the principle. The second time, he or she becomes unwelcome, and the third time, they get treated as a pariah, a villain-in-waiting. This approach uses peer pressure as a corrective mechanism. If the character persists beyond the pariah stage, it obviously isn’t working; at that point, more severe punishments may be in order.

Motives Are Simple

Most game sites – including Campaign Mastery – encourage players to give PCs rich and complex motivations, as these are lead to depth of character. Pulp games are different. In a pulp game, character motivations are simple, and can usually be stated in just three or four words. “To get justice.” “To beat the Nazis.” “To advance science.” “To discover the truth.” “To keep us safe.” “Protecting My Family”. “To Protect And Serve.” “Mom and Apple Pie.” Even “I Like French Fries” could be acceptable, if presented properly (I forget the movie, TV show, or book that I got that idea from, but it was a discussion over Baked Potatoes vs Fried as a reflection of freedom of choice).

But more than just motives, immediate goals are also straightforward. No-one worries about the long view, because tomorrow will take care of itself – it’s all one problem at a time. These facts should always be in the back of your mind when working on a character for a Pulp game.

Simple Motives and Black-&-White morality do not have to translate into simple characters, however. It’s surprising how quickly simple choices can aggregate into a complex personality. Ten yes/no questions gives two to the tenth power (minus 1) combinations – that’s 1023. And if half of those are about which 5 questions from a list of twenty actually matter to the character, you get an exponential increase. It can even be argued that by keeping the motives simple and the morality straightforward, you are (effectively) removing those elements that can distract from the characterisation, enabling greater depth and focus on the remaining areas of the character.

Chutzpah Beats Expertise, Every Time

In most games, a lack of expertise is a sure-fire recipe for trouble – but Luck Favours The Active Hero, so flipping switches and dials at random can be more useful than taking a lot of time to think about a problem. If there’s a bomb, cut the red wire. Or the black wire. Or the green wire. It will either be the right one, or it will increase the dramatic tension to the point where the next one that you cut HAS to be the right one!

But this Genre Convention goes further. Many of the villains are acknowledged experts, even geniuses – Fu Manchu, for example. But they never succeed, because the hero goes in and kicks down the delicate sandcastles their plots have been built apon.

Experts are Boffins. Their undoubted brilliance in their chosen fields of expertise gets in the way of an understanding of the real world; that understanding can be replaced, but only at the price of overwhelming hubris and megalomania – the traits of the villain of the week, in other words.

Everyone’s Jack

This is a consequence of the previous Genre Convention. When was the last time a pulp character said “I don’t know how to do that?” I can’t think of an occasion, myself. Everyone has the expertise necessary to succeed at the last possible minute – somehow. In other words, everyone’s a Jack Of All Trades – unless it’s important to the plot that they can’t do whatever it is that needs doing.

This has to be modified somewhat to work in a group situation, and hence in a roleplaying situation. Anyone can do it, unless there is a PC in the party with that particular expertise, or unless it’s important to the plot that the characters not be able to perform whatever act they are attempting.

Gamemastering A Jack

Very little of what’s been written so far in this article has been easy for the GM, and this is yet another point of difficulty that must be contended with (and people wonder why Pulp is such a hard genre to run, and run Well!). Here, the GMs have to maintain the fine balance between handing the PCs a blank cheque to do as they wish, and adhering to this genre convention, between maintaining tension and uncertainty, advancing the plot, and putting it on railroad tracks.

I can’t speak for anyone else (and didn’t think to quiz my co-referee on the question) but here’s the mental process that I use to dance on the head of that particular grenade pin.

• Rate the importance of the question or action to the plot on a 1-to-5 scale (high is more important).
• Adjust up or down for the current level of player frustration (up = more frustrated).
• Adjust up or down for the degree of time-criticality (up means the clock’s counted down to ‘2’…tick….’1’…).
• Adjust up or down for the appropriateness of the action (up is ‘exactly the right thing to do’).
• Adjust up or down for the current level of GM frustration (up = ‘let’s get this party started’).
• If the result is really low, I’ll consider being an obstructionist, or at least, taking a hard line on my interpretations of the game mechanics.
• If the result is in the mid-range, the characters can stand or fail on their abilities and let the dice fall where they may. I’ll neither help nor hinder as GM.
• The higher the result, the more willing to bend the rules – in fashions permitted by the genre – to permit the character to succeed.
• But before I announce the results, I have a couple more questions to flash through my mind. Will the action advance the plot – or derail it? Will it be more fun for the character to succeed – or fail? These considerations can override the previous decision.

Note that I’m usually not this methodolical – at most, I’ll spend a second or two with these thoughts flashing through my mind before I make a ruling and get on with the game. Occasionally I’ll take a couple of extra seconds to contemplate the implications; about half the time when I do so, my co-GM will take the initiative in resolving the question, and take the lead GM role for a little while. His judgement’s usually pretty good.

Smart Characters Are Still Smart

A superficial reading of these genre conventions might suggest that this means that Intelligence is a less important attribute in a Pulp game than in other genres.

That is absolutely not the case. Brain vs Brawn is a recurring theme in the pulps, and brain always wins – if it’s the hero who’s smart. If anything, smart characters are even more ingenious than they would be in real life. Genius is far more common – and often far more costly – a character trait, allied as it is to other character defects. Can anyone doubt the mad genius of many of the pulp Villains?

Inexplicable Lapses

And yet, many of the smartest characters have inexplicable lapses in intellect – an expression of plot overriding the internal reality of the game. A supergenius will still leave a hole in his plot for world domination, and a pulp hero will eventually put his finger on the weak spot – usually followed by his fist.

Villains

I don’t know whether or not it started in KODT or if it simply reached a mass audiance in an early issue of that magazine, but there are a number of Evil Overlord lists. The explanatory information provided at the start of the web-page that I’ve linked to suggests that it predated that appearance, as does this wikipedia page. Pulp Villains will fall foul of many if not all of these in the course of any campaign – not all at the same time, of course.

Heroes

The same is true for Pulp Heroes. If it would ruin the plot for them to see the elephant in the room, they see no elephants – or decide that the elephant is really a disguised zebra or a red herring. They make no allowances – ever – for a character going bad, or making a mistake.

Once again, this raises some thorny issues for GMs and players to grapple with. Should players ignore the obvious? How do they know the GMs aren’t playing on the greater sophistication of the modern audiance, and intend for the players to “see the elephant”? Are the GMs justified in deliberately misleading or outright *gasp* lying to the players in order to simulate this genre convention?

Our answer to these questions is NO, it doesn’t matter, and both yes and no, respectively.

If the players see through the GMs plot, they are fully entitled to act on that insight unless it derives from non-character knowledge. The GMs should simply remember the genre convention that I described in the previous part under the heading of “Straight Lines Always Twist”: If the players ever work out what the plot twist is going to be, it should be immediately replaced with something even more bizzare and unexpected.

That principle absolved both sides of the need to concern themselves with the modern-vs-genre issue raised by the second question. The defining parameters on the plot are no longer the characters, but the players. You don’t give each character a chance to shine, you give each player a moment in the spotlight in which to feature his character.

Does that justify attempting to mislead the players? Absolutely – so long as they can invoke a plot twist of some sort to justify it. Like the Science Fiction Mystery writer, discussed in “The Asimov Connection” within the previous part of this series, the GM can and should do everything in his power to obfuscate, downplay, and/or conceal the key detail or line of thought – short of being dishonest. And if that’s not enough, throw a plot twist at them.

In other words, try to make the elephant seem unimportant – and if you fail, assume that the real villain wanted the Heroes to waste time on the Elephant, and rework the rest of your plotline accordingly.

Whoops! I’m out of time, and still only 1/3 of the way through character conventions. So I guess I’ll have to get back to the list next time…

What forces govern your city?

Popularity

Being popular earns a government a lot of power, though it is always a fragile thing. Think of popularity as a form of temporary affiliation. Popularity is often restricted to a subset of urban society – you can’t please everyone.

Strengths

With a large amount of consent, a government can rule with fewer objections and roadblocks. The will of the people can drown out the voice of opposition. In addition, popularity can be manufactured, so it’s a renewable, though finite, resource and power base.

Popularity is primarily a matter of opinion and perception, and does not need to be based on fact or truth. An official can maintain a public face that enhances his popularity while making decisions, choices and deals that would prove to be unpopular, if they were to become publicly known.

Weaknesses

Public opinion is fickle and usually doesn’t require full disclosure, truth or accountability, at least in the short term. This means good and lawfully aligned politicians aren’t necessarily popular, despite having pure intentions and taking actions beneficial to the society they govern. Evil governments might be more popular if they are skilled at manipulating public opinion.

Popularity can also unexpectedly change. Opponents might be fuelling dissent, sudden events such as drought or victory at war could occur, or an unpopular but highly publicized ruling or government order could swiftly turn a populace’s opinion.

As popularity is a somewhat manageable resource, it must be constantly supervised and groomed. This makes it a complex, expensive or resource-intensive power base to rely upon. Different governments will permit varying levels of voiced opposition, as well, thus potentially reducing the power level and value of popularity as a power base. In some regimes, for example, it doesn’t matter how unpopular an official or decree might be, royal guards and fear might keep the public in check and popular rivals in the dungeons.

Flavor

You can wield popularity like a graceful rapier or as a clumsy club. Politicians and governments who utilize popularity will have established networks of varying sophistication to help measure and influence popularity.

The networks might consist of:

• Public offices for constituents to voice their opinions
• Publicity agents
• Special events coordinators
• Bards for gathering and sowing information
• Rogues for the same
• Agents to sabotage foes

These networks, operations and activities are perfect fodder for PC adventures and encounters.

In addition, in a city where popularity has power, be sure to color notable events and news with the slanted politicking and spin doctoring of the various political groups and individuals. The primary weapons you can have your NPCs employ, regardless of the truth, are:

1. Taking credit
2. Self-praise
3. Criticism
4. Casting blame

For example, if the PCs enter the city gates with the slain giant in tow, political networks will immediately set to work. The Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Mayor’s Aide, the Mercenaries’ Guild, and several private citizens might all claim to have hired the PCs to kill the giant for the city’s protection. Each faction might try to blame the others for a lack of action and for letting the problem get out of hand to the point where it required a group of strangers to do the job. Two separate celebration parties might be quickly assembled and a scuffle over which one the PCs and dead giant will attend erupts.

Encounter Hooks

• The PCs are hired to spread the good word about a politician and they discover an evil act the government official is about to perform.
• The PCs witness a moment of weakness. The official wants all “loose ends” tied up.
• The PCs return to the city victorious heroes and politicians vie to align themselves with the popular adventurers. Now the PCs must be concerned about maintaining popularity else their new found friends and resources will turn on them.
• A character has a good friend trying to break into politics. The friend asks the group to help him increase his popularity. However, the friend’s rigid code of honour makes this task difficult as events arise and the friend makes honourable – but unpopular – decisions.
• A young politician offers to pay the PCs a lot of money if the group says publicly he is part of the party, joins the PCs on all their adventures, and he takes the same risks and performs the same heroic deeds as the other party members. When the PCs are adventuring, the politician simply lays low in his hideout and governs his growing base through agents. When the PCs return from adventures, they do so through a secret tunnel into the city so the politician may publicly emerge with the group and take credit for the group’s latest heroics.

However, the politician pays the PCs with stolen money, and his enemies come after the PCs before long in lethal force to recover it. This will not only cause the PCs to lose the patron, plus get robbed of wealth and equipment, but it will also reveal them to be frauds along with the politician. A cunning GM might also rule at the meta-level the politician is truly part of the party and adjust challenge ratings accordingly, even though the politician is in absentia during adventure encounters.

Charisma, Social Skills, and Social Feats

It’s powerful to be able to bluff, intimidate, or talk one’s way out of a social conflict or to wield those skills to get what one wants. Governments face social conflict on a daily, even hourly basis, as they settle disputes between citizens, justify the new room tax to angry innkeepers, negotiate a treaty with another city and wrangle over budgets with various divisions. Having officials skilled at influencing others is key.

Strengths

Social skills can be taught and learned, making this an accessible power base to many. It’s also a personal power base, meaning it cannot be easily taken away, making this a good backbone for any political career or endeavor.

In addition, the ability to influence others and get them to work on your behalf makes this a scalable power base. A charismatic leader can motivate thousands of citizens with a single speech, for example, while the surly blacksmith can barely motivate his son to put in a full day’s work.

Weaknesses

Wielding social skill does require some level of natural ability however, so this power base is forever barred to many. Often, this is out of choice, whether the individual makes it consciously or not, and not due to physical limitation, as they declare they don’t like “head games”, mistrust the learned, refuse to smile and be friendly, and so on.

The use of social ability often has only temporary effects. This might be all a government official needs most of the time, but some goals such as creating loyalty or building a political career require ongoing presence and influence, thus somewhat limiting the scalability of this power base.

In addition, using skills, charisma and social abilities to get what one wants without creating a win/win or mutually beneficial arrangements can backfire if the other party realizes to what extent they’ve been manipulated. If a government official does this often enough, he can burn many bridges, so it’s often not enough to just have a trusting smile and good people skills – the solutions to social conflicts and arrangements need some substance as well.

Flavor

Campaign flavor from this power base will mostly come from NPC interaction. Suave and fast-talking officials make great foes, and charismatic leaders can be wonderful villains. NPCs who can easily influence others will most likely have servants, followers, and henchman as well. Important politicians with charisma will often have large entourages and groupies to flesh out or spawn encounters with the PCs.

Loyal Followers and Supporters

Loyalty is one of the most valuable, yet hard to come by political power bases. Loyalty transcends alignment and is available to any citizen in the city who can cultivate it.

Strengths

One of the most difficult parts of being a government official with various duties and responsibilities is trust. Except for the most basic jobs, an official won’t be able to do everything themselves. They’ll need to delegate, and they’ll have to trust in the individual(s) who have been given important tasks to perform.

There is more involved with trust than competence, however. Government is often about compromise. In the many conflicts in which a government must act as mediator, it’s unlikely there’s a solution that would make both sides happy that would also serve the best interests of the city.

Many officials also have ambition, and this creates more bias and pressure on their decision-making. During these stressful situations then, an official is going to have to delegate someone they can trust to make an unpopular decision, a tough decision, or a difficult action.

For officials and governments of dubious ethics and morals, trust, ironically, becomes an even more valued commodity. An agency needs to trust its agents to perform evil or damaging actions, because, as already stated, an evil despot cannot do everything himself. Therefore, the loyalty of others so one can rely upon them in times of need and during difficult situations is a valuable asset indeed.

Loyalty can be fostered in several ways, making this a flexible power base for officials of all alignments. The evil politician can use greed, ambition, blackmail and fear to garner a surprising quantity of loyalty. A good aligned official can earn loyalty through trust, hope, lawfulness, faith and acting for the good of the city.

Weaknesses

Loyalty lost is hard to gain back. In the realm of politics, with its inherent nature of shifting alliances, raw ambitions, and temporary causes, loyalty can be the first victim and is easy to lose. Ironically, loyalty driven by evil devices, such as blackmail, can be the strongest kind, as idealism, faith and trust can be easily broken by the mortal failings of doubt, suspicion, worry and fear. Evil loyalty also tends to be the shortest however, as it’s gone the instant the leverage to garner the loyalty is weakened or removed.

Loyalty is difficult to measure, making this a risky power base for some. One never knows when an underling, fueled by ambition or a hidden ulterior motive, decides to make their move. Officials must be ever aware of potential backstabbing and traitorous staff. Detect Alignment spells and similar magical investigation can mitigate much of this risk, but even lawful and good citizens can succumb to temporary conditions, weak moments or difficult circumstances.

Flavor

Due to the valuable, yet fluctuating nature of loyalty, officials and governments might be inclined to occasionally test the loyalty of their most important staff and followers. These tests might be short and quick, or they might be extravagant affairs involving a number of staged elements.

For example, a treasurer might be tested with a mock kidnapping, a fake ultimatum and a concocted situation to determine how willingly he’d surrender the vault keys. These situations are great opportunities to get the PCs involved as (unwitting) accomplices.

You can also build a government that is rife with the covert activities of officials trying to gain leverage on each other and their staff to capture and ensure loyalty.

This article is being co-written by Blair Ramage, with whom I co-referee a Pulp Hero campaign. Although it started as a single item, it has grown so substantially that it has become necessary to split it into multiple parts. The first part dealt with the relationship of genre to other aspects of a roleplaying game, and furnished a context for the whole series. The second part covered Pulp environmental and game world conventions. Last time we got half-way through discussing plot and story conventions; so let’s pick up right where we left off…

The KO

Last time, I made a big deal of how cheap death is in a pulp environment, and yet the leading characters never die. In truth, they are never seriously hurt, either. This is a serious problem when it comes to maintaining any sort of tension within a pulp game.

There are two primary solutions to this dilemma.

Humiliation

The first is to ensure that the price of survival is so high that the characters and their players would almost prefer to die. The campaign world expects a certain level of success and achievement from its heroes, and can and should be cruel to those who fail to measure up to an almost-impossible standard of perfection.

When the PCs succeed, they should be lionized; they should be taken to the head of every queue, their opinions should be sought out and respected, they should be invited to every soirée and event. No party should be complete without them, and their name alone should be enough to get them through doors into the inner chambours of power (under normal circumstances). The public will recognise them wherever they go, will want to shake hands and slap them on the back, and so on (exceptions apply). The police will take the character’s word over the evidence before them, and violate procedure on their say-so. Villains will prepare for their intervention and may even revise plans completely in a (necessarily doomed) attempt to take the heroes into account.

With failure, all that goes away. With repeated or severe failure, it should be inverted. They will be kept waiting for every appointment, no-one will listen to their opinions, there will be newspaper stories about them being ‘all washed up’, they get invited to nothing and turned away if they have the temerity to show up anyway. Public officials will give them the cold shoulder and the police will view them with suspicion. Villains will dismiss them as irrelevant and the public will decry them or worse still, pity them.

Spreading these effects out and making them less all-or-nothing permits a graduated response to failure-without-death that is sure to have your players eager to regain their respect.

Throw in personal consequences such as investors withdrawing money from deals involving the PC, and the deaths of NPCs around the characters or in their place, and you have ample sources of motivation for the characters. So much so that the second solution is over the top – but it’s a pulp genre convention anyway, and so is being over the top, so that’s no reason not to do it.

Serial Cliffhangers

Players, over time, grow attached to their characters. I’m not sure that’s 100% universal, but it would be my bet that it would come close to it. The implication is that the threat of a character death is enough, you don’t actually need to carry it out. The closer you can bring the characters to death (or some other hopeless situation), more closely you can graze the ultimate penalty without inflicting it, the more keenly the players will feel the threat.

My co-referee and I have a rule: we always end a game session on a moment of high drama, imminant disaster, or extreme danger, except at the very end of an adventure. We will deliberately emphasise the danger and grimness, painting the blackest picture possible at such times. It works.

In The Nick Of Time

A cliffhanger implies that the characters will escape from their dire situation in the nick of time, every time. But more than that, the same is true of everything that takes place in a pulp story. A new weapon is needed? All efforts to create one will fail, until what seems like the 13th hour. Everything will happen at the last possible minute.

In game terms, that means that the task of the GMs is to lay foundation while delaying or blocking all attempts to solve problems until it is almost too late for the solution to be helpful. Everything should be a struggle, and the fates should conspire against the PCs.

This puts the GMs in a difficult position of a different kind – doing everything they can to make life difficult for the heroes while at the same time ensuring that they will ultimately have the opportunity to succeed and that luck favours them. But this is merely a more extreme form of the dilemma all GMs face all the time; the only significant difference is that instead of a strict neutrality, the pulp genre requires the GM to balance extremes of partisan support for both sides.

Ninety Miles An Hour

Laying foundation is left a little trickier, as is characterisation, by another genre convention – that everything should happen at Warp Factor 12. The only reason for a lull in the action is to put a full stop between the drama that has just occurred and the drame that is about to begin.

With less scope for the establishment of any sort of depth of characterisation, it is a good thing that the pulp game world conventions require most of the people encountered to be stereotyped. But even so, the successful pulp referee has to utilise every shorthand trick he can find to convey personality. Everything that the NPC posesses, says, or touches, has to serve a double or even triple purpose.

Use family crests on personal property to provide identity. Use objects like cigarette holders as affections to articulate personalities. Use accents. If it takes longer than thirty seconds to get your characterisation across, completely, cut something out and reveal it in a subsequent encounter. Take your pacing cues from the Indiana Jones movies and Under Seige and the Die Hard series.

The Improbable Is Probable

Another convention of pulp genre stories is the level of coincidence. Frankly, it’s so high that it’s unbelievable. And that’s a problem.

Throughout these discussions, we’ve been careful to distinguish between genuine genre conventions and bad writing, but let’s be honest – there was some awful writing in the pulps. Up until this point, that process had proceeded smoothly, but now we struck a point of mild disagreement: is this extraordinary, improbable, implausble level of coincidence a consequence of bad writing or a legitimate genre convention?

What decided the issue in Blair’s favour is that even the better pulp writers resorted to this plot device at regular intervals. He brought up Doc Savage, I conceded with EE ‘Doc’ Smith. But that leaves another problem for GMs: how to maintain plausibility in the face of this genre convention.

We batted that one around a bit, and ultimately came to only half a solution: the GM has to pick his coincidences. A coincidence that advances the plot is good. A coincidence that is the result of PC luck, because they have acted instead of debating, is fine. A coincidence that heightens the drama or even the melodrama is fine. Anything else is to be approached with skepticims and wariness. But this is a guideline, and not a complete solution; it took very little effort for us to think of exceptions on both sides of the question. So this is less than completely satisfactory, but it’s the best and most consistent answer we could come up with.

The Villain Will Return

This is something that the various pulp-inspired movies don’t seem to have caught onto, Star Wars being the possible exception. It doesn’t matter what happens to the villain or how inescapable his death is, he will always come back sooner or later, either directly or in the form of a son or brother or father or admirer or flunky who steps up.

It used to be said amongst our players that no-one’s dead in comics or roleplaying games unless you see the body, but there have been too many ways found by GMs to get around this requirement for it to hold much weight any more. The first villain of my superhero campaign had this as one of his central stikhs!

The Villains are protected by a variation of the same immunity from harm that protects the PCs. They will face consequences of failure, of course; they may lose the entire organisation they had built up, they will lose access to resources and finances and favours. About the only advantage they will retain is anonymity, and that only because they have to be presumed dead until proven otherwise. But the villain will always return – eventually.

Story Trumps Reality

Another point that was emphasised in the discussion of genre in general is that plot supercedes any simulation of reality, but it’s sufficiently important to the pulp genre to reiterate. Physics in a pulp game works like it does in a warner brothers cartoon – it only matters when you notice it, and sometimes not even then.

A Foolish Consistency

This is an implication of the previous point that is often overlooked. It states that just because something works one way in one adventure, that doesn’t mean that it will work the same way the next time around. Weird Science may work, but it only does so through the power of Plot.

This genre convention derives from the few examples of multiple stories featuring the same characters within the pulps, and it’s something that I made a special point of in the discussion of Weird Science. I’m bringing it up again at this time because there is a need to discuss some plot implications.

Just because you can do something does not always make it wise to do that thing. Thus, while you can change the way anything post-1930s works in terms of technology or science, and even a few things that were accepted scientific canon of the era, you should not do so nilly-willy. Before you change the game physics, make darned sure that its an essential plot point to do so.

The Asimov Connection

The rules of science-fiction detective stories, as elucidated by Isaac Asimov in the introduction to Asimov’s Mysteries, are the golden rules in this respect. He wrote,

“Clues might be obscured, but not omitted. Essential lines of thought might be thrown out casually, but they were thrown out. The reader was remorselessly misdirected, misled, and mystified, but he was not cheated.

“…You don’t spring new devices on the reader and solve the mystery with them. You don’t take advantage of future history to introduce ad hoc phenomena. In fact, you carefully explain all facets of the future background well in advance so the reader may have a decent chance to see the solution. The fictional detective can make use only of facts known to the reader in the present or of ‘facts’ of the fictional future, which will be carefully explained beforehand. Even some of the real facts of our present ought to be mentioned if they are to be used – just to make the reader is aware…”

Interpreting Asimov for Pulp

To interpret this recipe for a pulp campaign, all you need do is replace the word ‘present’ with ‘1930s’ and the word ‘future’ with the phrase ‘weird science’ (or, if you prefer, ‘pulp science’).

It’s really that simple. If a weird science gadget is going to factor heavily into the plot, or a change in science, make sure that you establish the change and its ramifications and consequences before it becomes critical to the plot. So long as you do this each and every time you institute a change, there is no absolute need to be consistent from one adventure to the next.

It is of course preferable for the physics to be consistent from session to session, adventure to adventure. We use two techniques in combination to achieve this while still leaving the ‘playing field’ of physics wide open: the Baseline and the Unusual Condition. Note that we don’t go out of our way to tell the players what the situation is unless they are in a position to find out about it, and unless the knowledge will make a critical difference to the scenario – most of the time we simply get on with the adventure.

The Baseline

This principle simply states that the first game physics we use, unless discounted by an Unusual Condition, will be the de-facto game physics from that point on. So, if an NPC invents a flying car that ends up in a PCs posession, the vast likelyhood is that it will work in the next adventure, and the one after that, and so on.

Unusual Conditions

You can get away with just about anything if you allow for the premise that unusual conditions modify or tweak the game physics as necessary. This is a ramification of the premise that plot overrules genre. What it means is that if a PC has a flying car and it’s important to the plot that no-one has flying cars, we can posit early on that unusual conditions make it impossible to fly. Maybe the sun has moved into an unusual region of space-time in which the antigravity whammistat doesn’t finagle the gravitons. Maybe the big greebly who is the main opponant of this adventure has cast a spell to stop cars from flying, or which has the side effect of stopping cars from flying.

What you pay for, you keep

A key point in this example is that the car was ‘inherited’ by the PC, it’s not something the character has actually paid character construction points or game $$$$ for. In other words, it’s an ongoing plot device that the GMs can take away at will. Things would be entirely different if the character had paid character construction points for the flying car, or the equivalent.

Taking something away once a character has invested part of his or her capability into is something that can be done only temporarily, and is a big deal. It’s something that the player needs to know about, and to know that it will be only a short-term exception to the general rule of it’s being available, and to be compensated in some way for the reduction. And they need to agree that the compensation is fair, ahead of time.

Anything else risks disgruntling the player concerned, who would have quite a legitimate grievance.

One of our players has invested points in a ship, the Antares. Another has invested points in an aircraft (as yet, unnamed). Both fall into the category of things that we will take away only briefly; otherwise, they are part of the resources that are available to the characters for use within the adventure.

Can they never be taken away?

Of course not. Nothing is forever, and if the character chooses to sail the Antares into a known minefield, we make no guarantees beyond offering fair warning – either in advance, or when a lookout shouts “Minefield, dead ahead!” to the PC.

If, however, the character survives the experience, we DO guarantee that either he will get his investment back, or we will replace the Antares within a reasonable timespan (one or two adventures at most).

Silencers Are Golden

Silencers are rare in pulp, but when they appear, they are typical hollywood – both more effective than the real thing, and good for unlimited shots. In the real world, one shot is about all they are good for, and they don’t reduce the sound of a gunshot to a soft “phut”.

Which brings up a related issue, while we’re in the vicinity:

Use Detail where it doesn’t matter

One of the two of us (and it isn’t me) is something of an anarak when it comes to weapons and weapons technology. We use this as colour text, and one of the perpetual struggles we face is to confine it to that role. In practical terms, it shouldn’t matter if the villain is armed with a Webley 9mm or a golf club, only the game mechanics used to describe the weapon should matter. If we lose the descriptive patter, it should make no difference to the course of the adventure.

And yet, it makes all the difference in the world, because his encyclopedic knowledge is a touchstone into the game world. Being able to describe minutely the differences between a Smith&Wesson and a Luger (or whatever) makes the game world feel all the more tangible to the players.

We could spend weeks inventing this stuff, but it’s better to take the real world info and use it as colour – then spend that time on other things. Pulp stories swarm with this stuff, everything from the performance of cars to aircraft routes and makes to weapons. The more that you can bring the era to life through details, the better the game will be.

Super-men And Elite Forces

Most traditional pulp plots revolve around a single character, a Super-man if you will. This doesn’t work very well for a pulp game because it forces one character into a dominant position over the others, which is generally not a lot of fun for the subordinate characters’ players.

Some groups are experienced enough to be able to distinguish between one character being subordinate to another and the player of a subordinate character being subordinate to the player of the superior character, so it’s possible to craft a completely acceptable game using the traditional pulp model – but it imposes an extra burdon of difficulty on the players, and there are better solutions out there, even if they aren’ traditional Pulp.

The Elite Force

The most functional solution that we have found is the concept of “The Elite Force”. This is the one that we have chosen as the foundation of our Pulp campaign. The concept runs like this:

Originally, there were a whole mess of Lone Wolves out there having solo adventures. The most prominant amongst them formed a club to permit him to associate with others of similar interests. Those who joined treat the club as a gathering place, and visits to it as a social event; they still persue their adventures Solo, and come back to the club after each to boast a little, to relax, and to recharge their batteries.

As time went by (a couple of years), a new generation of adventurers was recruited to club membership at the very beginning of their careers. With the club already in existance, they treated it as a shared resource, and the senior members as advisors and consultants. In part, this was a fulfillment of the original purpose of the establishment. They also tended to adventure in small groups, usually composed of the same people. As this group grew in prominance, so did the organisation in back of them, and so the Adventurer’s Club became popularly known.

The PCs represent the third “generation” of members, recruited four or five years after the club was founded. As the “new kids” they tended to stick together, socially, and it was natural for them to adventure together as well. They never developed the “Lone Wolf” mentality. The Adventurer’s Club to these characters is the glue that binds them together. They are the first generation to take its presence as a given, and the generation who have to come to terms with its fame. Together, they – and the rest of the club – have found that they are stronger than the sum of their parts.

There are analagies to be drawn between these generations and the different approaches of pulp genre campaigns. The Super-man with a group of associates and assistants is one of the most common approaches, and its one with some shortcomings, as already noted.

The second generation, in which something acts as a unifying factor between groups of characters, is where a lot of groups end up. This unifying factor can be anything from a common heritage to a common enemy. It works, but it’s limited in scope.

The third generation, which is established along the lines of an elite force within which each character has his own speciality, and hence his own turn at dominance according to the circumstances at hand, is the best answer of all. It has the benefits of all the previous answers and none of the drawbacks. Again, the key is a unifying factor, but it’s something that persists beyond a single adventure, and can attract characters from a number of different backgrounds. The biggest distinction in terms of campaign background and plot is that this unifying factor has been established before the characters start their adventuring careers, so that it becomes a framework around which the campaign can be constructed.

As an aside, I find it interesting that this also parallels the path that I took in creating my superhero campaign: the super-man was a solo campaign (with myself as both GM and player) which I used to teach myself the rules, and to develop house rules that reflected the style of campaign that I wanted to achieve; the loose-group stage was a short-lived campaign in which there was a husband-and-wife pairing and the villain of the campaign bound them with a third character for mutual defence and with the occasional passerby; and the Elite Force was the commencement of the main campaign, and still serves as the central focus of the campaign to this day, almost thirty years later – a longevity that reveals the strength of this campaign structure.

The effects on plot

This part of the series is supposed to be all about plot conventions in pulp, character conventions are for next time. So it behooves me to show how these concepts affect plot within a pulp campaign, or to remove this entire section until next time.

Having multiple story vectors to persue permits a diversity of plot that breathes new life into a campaign. You can have a spy yarn this week and a cthulhoid incursion next week and a Nazi Plot the week after that; you can go from Voodoo and Zombies to Space Opera to Archeology to The Land Of Dinosaurs with complete equinimity.

All the other approaches to character relationships described mean that anything that falls outside the pervue of the central lead character quickly feels forced, or irrellevant. Neither is conducive to player involvement, and hence weaken the campaign.

What’s more, you can mix it up. A Voodoo plot which centres around a Weird Science gadget? no problem. An ancient sorceror who is vulnerable to modern technology? great! The elite forces approach not only encourages and facilitates variety in character types, it facilitates variety in adventure types.

Inadequate Authorities

A truism of the Pukp Genre is that whatever is going on, the authorities are inadequate to the problem. It requires one or more individuals to step forward, or be thrust forward, before the problem can be solved. In the case of an individual, that step beyond the typical ability standard inevitably produces a super-man who is never at a loss for very long, can look death in the eye and spit, and can solve any problem with his superior morality and abilities. In the case of a group of similar characters, this is a ‘second-generation’ collection of characters. In the case of a disparate group, this is inevitably an Elite Force.

The phrasing of the description of the authorities is very deliberate. The original draft of this section was titled “Incompetant Authorities”, but that is not correct; they can be quite competant, but unable to go beyond the limitations of the established parameters of their world, whether that be a military unit, a police station, or a starship command. They are Starfleet to the Enterprise.

They sure sound like PCs to me.

Once a group is established as “problem solvers”, the wider group will go out of their way to present them with the most difficult, most critical, most dangerous problems. The problem-solvers will also discover problems on their own behalf, and solve them, long before the general authorities even know that a problem exists.

And that sounds like a campaign.

Straight Lines Always Twist

We’re almost at the end of the list. The penultimate plot convention is something that has become almost universal in RPGs – the plot twist. There should ALWAYS be a plot twist – or several – in any pulp adventure. To paraphrase The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, if the players ever work out what a plot twist is going to be, it should immediatly be replaced with something even more bizarre and unexpected.

The real trick is making these twists seem logical and not imposed for the sake of having a plot twist. This requires the construction of a story infrastructure around the twist. The GMs should go back over everything that has been revealed to the PCs, examine how the new plot twist would have affected each event and decision, and what needs to be done to ensure that when it comes, the plot twist seems logical and inevitable.

One way of looking at a Pulp Campaign is adventure-by-adventure. A more rewarding perspective may be from plot twist to plot twist, with the conclusion of one adventure, the awarding of XP, and so on, occurring in the middle of each:

That permits the GM to plant the seeds of the next adventure, and the next plot-twist, in the current one, or even the one before that, when the player’s minds are on other things. It does require a change of mindset on the part of the GM; it certainly does not come naturally. But it’s something that every GM of a pulp campaign should at least attempt.

The Bluff Twist

Adding to the tools in the GMs repetoir is what we call the Bluff Twist. This is a plot twist that seems obvious and inevitable to the players, that the GMs have made obvious even while (aparrantly) doing everything they can to conceal it. This requires the GMs to walk a very fine line, but when it works, it yields big results: at the critical moment, instead of the “expected” plot twist, the GMs ring in something completely unexpected.

Optimism Trumps Cynicism (Again)

The last of our Plot Conventions should be familiar, we made a big thing of it in the section on World Conventions. But this principle is not just a general state of mind within the campaign world, it is a driving point within every pulp adventure. The only reason not to do something should only ever be “It won’t work”.

“It’s too dangerous”, “It’s foolhardy”, “it’s won’t last” – these should never be mentioned, never mind being considered unacceptable. They just don’t exist in a pulp world.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. “That’s a problem for tomorrow”. “One Thing At A Time”. Those should be the bywords of everyone in a Pulp campaign – players, PCs, NPCs, governments, Arch-villains, GMs – the lot.

In a pulp campaign, there’s always time for another sequel!

That brings the discussion of Plot Conventions of the Pulp Genre to an end. Next time, Character Conventions!