Have you ever ran a pulp style campaign? What was the story?

Have you ever ran a pulp style campaign? What was the story?

We did the standard "nazi scientists in your city" plot . It was cool because I had floorplans for the building and let my players plan out a way to get into it. At one point they visited the city records and looked for permits for the building to see what all the construction was about.

why is david tennant crashing this nazi sex party

Damn Nazi eugenics! OP's image looks like ants to my inferior Amerikan eyes.

Currently in a campaign I'd classify as pseudo-pulp. Basic plot

>Typical high fantasy setting discovers a way to store magic in batteries
>Industrial revolution happens, setting now looks like the modern world only with monsters and spellcasting
>Some scientists discover they can use magic to build impossible science-fiction devices.
>Use it to found the not-SCP, capturing and locking up strange magical beings, artifacts, and other things they cannot explain.

The PCs are a super-scientist with a massive boner for retro-future [ray-guns, square robots, flying cars, etc] and who enthusiastically believes in the World of Tomorrow!

A noire-style police detective in the setting's equivalent of New York, complete with revolver and brown trench coat. He likes country music.

A black guy from !Africa whose a self-styled 'professor of the Occult', specializing in necromancy and weird magic.

And an electronics repair worker specializing in time magic who keeps referrencing horror movie cliches every time something bad happens.

God I want to. Pulp is so underrated.

...

I'm in the process of writing a pulp campaign of Pathfinder at the moment. Victorian Era style game with an abundance of firearms, the party will be chasing a devil guided alchemist experimenting on a uranium statue unearthed from a crashed alien starship all the way to his Dagon worshiping master, and getting wrapped up in a larger quest to build atomic weaponry to fight aliens with.

Because Colin Baker wasn't around to shoot them all.

The usual rescue the professor and his daughter from nasty weird native in their hidden South American city. Additional problems included the Chaco War going on all around, the natives having psionic/magic powers, and an alien entity wanting to go home.

Oddly enough, this was a couple years before the 2nd Raiders film let alone the last one!

...

Are serial killers pulp?

Ran a short Mage the Ascension game where the party was sent into Germany at the end of WW2 in order to find Nephandi influence. Lots of pulp, a knock off super soldier, and the hollow earth with a whole lot of nazi's to shoot.

Players loved it.

I ran a short campaign where an unfrozen caveman, the archaeologist what found him, his lovely assistant (sister?), and a leather jacket punk with a hot car fought Nazis, robots, and Nazi-robots.

We were pretty baked for all of the sessions.

high-lights include:

unfrozen caveman charging a machine-gun nest and beating the gunners to death with their own machine-gun

leather jacket punk talking trash to a Nazi commander before the sidecar-motorcycle race that resulted in a glorious explosion

the lovely assistant and Nazi femme fatale (think Baroness from GIJoe) having a seduction duel

I found an old notebook full of old notes. Hooray for OCD!!!

Once.

The plot was the group was following some rogue nazis who were apparently on the trail of the real fountain of youth.

I forget a lot of the details but the game concluded in Egypt with them fighting a immortal nazi general who had just used the fountain. I remember that one guy planted bombs in the room while the rest of the group kept the guy busy (mostly with lots of gunfire) and ended with them burying the guy alive along with 2 pcs.

Also someone was a big game hunter and had a pet tiger that was more dangerous than he was. Shit was funny that tiger had a impressive kill count by the end

Danke

It was set in a homebrew fantasy world, so no Nazis or anything like that, but the gist of the campaign was still very much Indiana Jones--airships, ancient ruins, mysterious relics, etc. The party were a ragtag bunch of mercs hired by a rich collector to hunt down various artifacts, using means both legal and illicit.

Some highlights:

>A steal-and-replace heist of one of a national museum's chief exhibits, and the accidental theft of the curator's cat.
>A race to an ancient relic through a Greco-Roman Machu Picchu against a rival party.
>Running a blockade of warships (in a zeppelin) thanks to the cunning use of dragons and aerial acrobatics.
>Following the trail of a lost military expedition, going full Heart of Darkness and necessitating escape via armored car.
>Getting caught between government forces and insurgents duking it out for control of a capital city, playing both sides off one another.

It depends how you run it. If it's like 50s trashy story magazine, then it's pulp.

Do you shove the bodies in a juicer? If so there will be pulp.

Also makes a fine drink.

Oh doctor, you're such a cutup.

RPG's are by their very nature pulp. Science fiction and fantasy and noir are all pulp genres

...Is that meant to be Winters from Band of Brothers? Because I must've missed that episode.

>not julep
You had one job, dammit.

I ran a pulpy champions campagn, kind of like Invaders. The story was thus:
>Something is amiss in the Mediterranean.
>Scout teams have not reported back, it's like Bremuda.
>Decision is made to send in the PCs, since they're supers.
>Infiltrate island, discover the Nazis have a classic Nazi Fortress on site.
>They use the rest of the island as a testing facility, including the initial scout teams.
>Fight dem Nazis, including enemy superteam.
>Discover large freight elevator. Goes down quite a ways.
>Nazi Super Science is going on down there. This is where their supers are tested and made.
>Also, robots.
>Fighting trough Wolfenstien like catacombs, Nazi speedster escapes through fargate.
>Going thought the gate leads to a floating NAZI SKY FORTRESS.
>Here is where the real science is, everything up to this point was testing and observation, including the island itself.
>Why bother with all that superhero nonsense when you can launch Luftwaffe strikes on the east coast from complete safety?
>It's gotta go. It's powered by psychics, but be careful killing them since the whole fortress shudders when you do that.
>Bad mufugguhs up here, including nazi powered armor.
>When the head scientist figures that the jig is up, he pulls all the psychics into the chapel and ritually sacrifices them.
>Uses this to make his supersoldier project go.
>Said project caused fused ribcages, increased bone and muscle density, ect. This kills the subject.
>Put a demon in that puppy and you're set to go though.
>Let the PCs deal with that monstrosity, attempts escape via Zepllin, as is tradition.
>PCs split between "Catch Nazi Bastard", "Destroy unholy union of science and magic", and "Escape falling fortress"

That's longer than I wanted it to be, but that was it. I had a blast running it.

He prefers Chianti.

Sort of true. Genre fiction has roots in the pulp era but the paperback boom of the 50s and 60s was a step along the way that also developed genre fiction as we know it today. Thusly it has a greater influence than pulps do by virtue of being more recent.

The difference has to work business models. Pulps were short, cheap thrills meant to entertain you for a sitting or two. Authors cranked them out and were paid by the word. This model would eventually be outmoded by comic books.

Paperbacks take more time to read. Authors are paid based on sales and take more time to write. Where a single pulp author might write novels on a monthly basis a paperback author might write one, longer, deeper novel in a year at best.

Proper pulp roleplaying requires shallow characters getting into brief, exciting adventure one after another. This differs from the more decompressed style we're used to.

Velociraptors were crossing through desert cave time streams and becoming serial killers.

...

Kinda.

Ended up going from basic serial killer to serial killer accidentally invoking eldritch presence to purposefully invoking eldritch presence.

Shit got fun when one or two of the PCs got captured by him and had limbs replaced for funsies.

If you have any kin of write up for your world I'd love to read it.

Used Fate Core to run a Not Spirit of the Century game. Because I wasn't using the Century Baby conceit I ended up with a weird Martian Manhunter slash inverse John Carter Alien so I took the alien ball and ran with it. Lizard Aliens were going uo saboutage an experimental airship and spore the US breadbowl with alien fungus that would feed their colonists. They would get the American continent in return for assisting the Nazi's technological warmachine. Cue Weird War 2.

I really want to run a pulp campaign. I have two ideas so far

>early masked heroes in Depression-era Chicago. Art Deco, gangsters and anarchists.

>Weird Tales: Hollywood edition. Occult dealings in the making of an epic film about the Tower of Babel by not-Cecil B. DeMille.

Nightclub dancing is an insidious communist plot

Anyone have any recommendations for good pulpy movies to watch for inspiration?

>Players enter the hollow earth
>Discover Nazi secret bases
>Nazis are using Tesla technology to mind control dinosaurs
>Rescue Tesla and some of his super weapons
>Nazis invade London with dinosaur army
>Grand finale is players blowing up zeppelins containing psychic crystals to turn off the mind control
>One PC rides King Kong into battle to fight a T rex goddess controlled by a Nazi high commander outside Buckingham Palace
>Pic related

It was a fun campaign.