...and what games do you hope to see next decade?

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A pulp or superhero game that people will actually buy.

JG


I would like to see a pulp game that I can get behind. Nothing has really scratched that particular itch for me since Justice Inc. (which I bloody loved).

Also, still waiting for the perfect Supers game...

(FYI: Your favourite Supers game is not it :tongue:)
 
I would like to see a pulp game that I can get behind. Nothing has really scratched that particular itch for me since Justice Inc. (which I bloody loved).

Also, still waiting for the perfect Supers game...

(FYI: Your favourite Supers game is not it :tongue:)

It always kills me to hear that pulp doesn't do well for publishers. It's one of my favorite genres. I actually think I have more pulp games than fantasy. Even when I'm not playing 1920's pulp straight, there's pretty much always a bit of two-fisted action hero in any game I play.
 
I wonder if it's no audience for "pulp" RPGs or more that most of the pulp RPGs are just not very good.

Justice Inc. sold well enough to have multiple printings with different artwork and, to me, is the best of them to date.

Daredevils is also pretty good and still available from Fantasy Games Unlimited: https://www.fantasygamesunlimited.net/fgu/daredevils/
They're even putting out new adventure modules for it these days.

I tend to believe it's the lack of quality that has made most pulp RPGs fail in the market: some recent ones I have seen made it quite obvious that the only "pulps" the creators were familiar with were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and The Rocketeer, all of which are actually inspired by movie serials, not pulp magazine stories. Let us not forget that one of the most popular and best-reviewed RPGs ever is a pulp RPG: Call of Cthulhu.
 
If you want to run a pulp campaign, I'd suggest getting Justice Inc., Daredevils, or GURPS Cliffhangers for the source material and run it with whatever game system you prefer. Or just use Call of Cthulhu, though I like pulp in the 1930's so you can include Nazis as the bad guys.

BTW, speaking of pulp reminds me of the Buckaroo Banzai RPG that has never happened. At this point, it would be interesting whether you set it back in the 80's or modern times.
 
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Two-Fisted Tales aims to emulate the actual pulps, not merely contemporary pulp adventure cinema.

In the "a girl can dream" category, a proper Hellboy/BPRD game with a ruleset actually designed for pulpy adventures.
I'm still of the opinion that Eden Studios' Angel RPG would be very fitting and very easy to run Hellboy with.
 
Two-Fisted Tales aims to emulate the actual pulps, not merely contemporary pulp adventure cinema.


I'm still of the opinion that Eden Studios' Angel RPG would be very fitting and very easy to run Hellboy with.
My GM actually DID use the Angel RPG for BPRG. I think the campaign itself was eh, but the mechanics and character design worked well enough.

JG
 
I wonder if it's no audience for "pulp" RPGs or more that most of the pulp RPGs are just not very good.

Justice Inc. sold well enough to have multiple printings with different artwork and, to me, is the best of them to date.

Daredevils is also pretty good and still available from Fantasy Games Unlimited: https://www.fantasygamesunlimited.net/fgu/daredevils/
They're even putting out new adventure modules for it these days.

I tend to believe it's the lack of quality that has made most pulp RPGs fail in the market: some recent ones I have seen made it quite obvious that the only "pulps" the creators were familiar with were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and The Rocketeer, all of which are actually inspired by movie serials, not pulp magazine stories. Let us not forget that one of the most popular and best-reviewed RPGs ever is a pulp RPG: Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu also has a best selling supplement and adventures for Pulp Cthulhu.
 
Sometime soon I'd like to play a pulpy game of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World crossed with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar, H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Land of the Lost: scientists, explorers, fast-talking gal reporters, big game hunters, dinosaurs, Pleistocene creatures, lost civilizations, apemen, lizard people, cavemen, lost Roman legions, who the heck knows what else...system to be determined.
 
Call of Cthulhu also has a best selling supplement and adventures for Pulp Cthulhu.
I don't know that one, but Chaosium's Astounding Adventures for BRP was godawful. I mean really, really bad through and through, from art to editing to lack of knowledge of the subject. I felt utterly ripped off and kicked myself for wasting money on it. Don't be taken in by the fairly good cover:
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My 1st edition copy of Vampire tells me that White Wolf plans to do a series of games based around horror archetypes. Werewolf is out; I expect we'll see Ghost and Fairy soon
 
I'd love to see Xenozoic made into a game. Complete with a full spread of Mark Schultz's art, of course. Bonus points if panels from the comics make their way into the rules as seen in Atomic Robo.

I can, of course, do all this on my own (I'd use PDQ or possibly Traveller as my core engine) but since we're dreaming big and all...

I'm assuming you have seen the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs RPG that came out previously?
 
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs (Game Designers Workshop, copyright 1990) did a great job incorporating appropriate art from the comics into the rulebook.
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The system works very well and is not too fussy/fiddly. It uses 6-siders and 10-siders and you roll under or equal to an attribute or skill to succeed a task. You have the option of random generation or point-buy for generating your PC's six attributes (STR, AGL, CON, CHA, INT, and EDU), and then you get most of your skills from your career history. (A few skills you get just from growing up.) Somewhat like Traveller, you need a prerequisite atrribute score to qualify for a particular career, then you roll 3d6 to see how many years' experience you have when the game starts. You add that to 17, so your PC's age will be from 20 to 35 at the beginning. You also gain contacts as a result of your career. (There is also an option to start at 17 if you want, but you'll end up without many useful skills or contacts.)
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The character examples give a good idea of how simple it is:
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Over a third of the rulebook is setting material (background, vehicles, weapons, bestiary, maps, NPCs) and a brief adventure ("Lurkers in the Swamp") to start off your campaign.
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I really appreciated the use of a silhouetted human (looks like Hannah Dundee to me) beside each animal to make it easier for referee and player to picture the scene:
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The soft cover is unfortunate as mine has torn a bit--a nice hard cover like West End Games' Star Wars had would have been nice. Unfortunately I've only gotten to run one relatively brief Cadillacs & Dinosaurs campaign. Now I want to re-read the comics and play it again.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions about Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, I can look up the answers thanks to good organization of the rulebook, a clear table of contents, and a useful index. Very good game.
 
I don't know that one, but Chaosium's Astounding Adventures for BRP was godawful. I mean really, really bad through and through, from art to editing to lack of knowledge of the subject. I felt utterly ripped off and kicked myself for wasting money on it.
If one likes Pulp and Chaosium/BRP, then what's wrong with this game?

JG
 
I don't know that one, but Chaosium's Astounding Adventures for BRP was godawful. I mean really, really bad through and through, from art to editing to lack of knowledge of the subject. I felt utterly ripped off and kicked myself for wasting money on it. Don't be taken in by the fairly good cover:
Yep, anticipation was high, and hopes were completely dashed.
This was far from Chaosium's finest moment :worried:
 
If one likes Pulp and Chaosium/BRP, then what's wrong with this game?

JG
It was a great concept, but it felt half-finished, and many BRP GMs were already doing better house-rulings for Pulp Adventure.
BRP Astounding Adventures just needed more cooking. It seemed half-baked, or even quarter-baked. Maybe not even in the oven :worried:
 
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It was a great concept, but it felt half-finished, and many BRP GMs were already doing better house-rulings for Pulp Adventure.

BRP Astounding Adventures just needed more cooking. It seemed half-baked, or even quarter-baked. Maybe not even in the oven :worried:
My question would be...
"If I already own the BRP Gold Book, which I do, why do I need a supplement for pulp? Just adding the "cinematic" rules should be enough, IMO!"

It also helps that I ran an Ancient China game using BRP. Only used supplements for the mystical martial arts, and in retrospect, I didn't need them.
 
I'm totally with you on Cepheus Engine. I, however, would like to see people experiment with it more and go further afield with the engine rather than see "just another Not-Traveller space opera" setting. Zaibatsu was really great for this, for example. And I hear there's a CE-powered sword and sorcery game coming out next year. Those are the kinds of things I like to see people do with ye olde Traveller's chassis.
Traveller was pretty good for a number of reasons, but I'm not convinced the system itself is anything special. It's OK, has its interesting quirks and does the job - and with Cepheus there's finally a version that allows third parties to freely publish material for it. Most of the stuff I've seen for Cepheus has been somebody's 'verse with a greater or lesser Traveller influence (e.g. Clement Sector), although various Traveller editions have had other settings produced as fan productions - For example, Mercator is set in the Roman empire.

I would potentially support Cepheus with the world building work I'm doing, although if I had to pick a single system and commit to it, I don't think Cepheus would be my first choice. I'm quite happy to see folks using Cepheus for different settings, although IMO in many cases there are better options available.
 
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Oh, well it checks a few of your boxes, Chock full of Schultz artwork. Not sure how rare it is these days, might be available in PDF?

View attachment 14404


Edit: oh, looks like Amazon has a copy for under $40


Thanks for pointing me at it. And thank you, too Dumarest Dumarest. I already have impulse control issues when it comes to buying gaming stuff, so of course I couldn't resist nabbing that. Even being loosely based on the Traveller engine means I'll likely have no trouble getting it to the table for a test run.
 
Rifts with a new edition or an properly edited and cleaned up edition of the current system. Given how the fanbase is very resistant to change and loves making excuses for Kevin failures I might as well as for the Moon.
 
My question would be...
"If I already own the BRP Gold Book, which I do, why do I need a supplement for pulp? Just adding the "cinematic" rules should be enough, IMO!"

It also helps that I ran an Ancient China game using BRP. Only used supplements for the mystical martial arts, and in retrospect, I didn't need them.
I personally don't think BRP is all that fitting for generic adventure pulp. Apart from making it less deadly, which the cinematic rules take care of, it would need fewer skills and broader ones IMHO.
 
Rifts with a new edition or an properly edited and cleaned up edition of the current system. Given how the fanbase is very resistant to change and loves making excuses for Kevin failures I might as well as for the Moon.
Savage Worlds Rifts does exist.
 
I personally don't think BRP is all that fitting for generic adventure pulp. Apart from making it less deadly, which the cinematic rules take care of, it would need fewer skills and broader ones IMHO.
Clearly, opinions would vary, here!
 
Now I'm eyeballing Symbaroum... HMMMM....
 
Careful, it’s one of those “players roll everything” systems. I’d definitely read before you buy with that one.

Yeah I noticed that. It's a big turnoff for me... but I'm digging the setting. This might be a "conversion" job for later.
 
Sometimes that's easily fixed, like Dungeonworld
 
Yeah I noticed that. It's a big turnoff for me... but I'm digging the setting. This might be a "conversion" job for later.
what do you like about the setting?
 
Caveat - I'm not professing any deep knowledge of Symbaroum, I'm only speaking about my impressions of it with a cursory glance (it was gifted to me) and having read some reviews and watched some in-depth video reviews...

What I like...

1) Barebones exposition that speaks of *many* open-ended possibilities. It immediately hearkens me back to the Greybox era of Forgotten Realms but with a much darker tone. The "history" is simple, but intriguing. Everyone is a refugee, fleeing from the "Dark Lords" and you've established a fiefdom with duchies with minimal description, with local "barbarians" (that defy the typical us vs. them trope) and the main setpiece of the region - the big forest full of ancient and dark things. There's just enough exposition for everyone to immediately get a firm foothold and go for it.

2) It clearly is "pro-exploration", which I feel is given short-shrift in many modern games. This is closely married to #3 which I think synergizes it well to older even OSR designs (though not the system itself).

3) Limited sandbox. The setting is just a region - albeit a very large and dangerous region to explore and full of mystery. Much like D&D of old, even Dark Sun. The setting is to be explored and experienced and going back to places you visited before might hold new and different things given the conceits of the setting. The Fae in the forest are scary.

4) Gritty but playable magic. I like my magic to have consequences. It's one of the turn-offs of D&D-style magic where it's just a mechanical light-show that requires nothing from the characters to bend reality. I don't want magic to be so dangerous that it's unusable in play (per se) but I want it to be risky, even if it's only slightly so.

What I DON'T like...

This system where the GM doesn't make any rolls... I do not like it. Nope Nope Nope. GM dice-rolling adjudication is *feature* not a bug to be removed. The internal nuances of a GM using even an off-the-cuff roll to help make a determination of something cleanly without having to debate nuances with players cannot be underestimated. I think it's bad design when it's removed entirely from the GM's hands.
 
thanks! i love settings that leave a lot of stuff for you to define. I get it's not for everyone, and particularly nowadays where they want a set world with set players and set rules many times. But RPGs are a creative outlet for me, and having hooks means more creativity, and everything being defined means my creativity is constrained in some ways.

seems like something i should pick up and read through.
 
thanks! i love settings that leave a lot of stuff for you to define. I get it's not for everyone, and particularly nowadays where they want a set world with set players and set rules many times. But RPGs are a creative outlet for me, and having hooks means more creativity, and everything being defined means my creativity is constrained in some ways.

seems like something i should pick up and read through.
Yeah! I suspect it will intrigue you. I'm definitely intrigued. I may even give it a whirl with its native system just to test my suspicions. I love being pleasantly wrong.
 
This system where the GM doesn't make any rolls... I do not like it. Nope Nope Nope. GM dice-rolling adjudication is *feature* not a bug to be removed. The internal nuances of a GM using even an off-the-cuff roll to help make a determination of something cleanly without having to debate nuances with players cannot be underestimated. I think it's bad design when it's removed entirely from the GM's hands.

100% with you on this (though I don't know the game in question). In addition to what you stated here, I'd add that as GM I show to play the game the same as any other player does. The absolute last thing I want is the game being removed from my side of the table.
 
Tales From the Loop was the first RPG I ran where the GM does no rolling of the dice. You ask the players to roll and set the success level needed to defeat an enemy or use a skill. It was odd at first, but it works fine and success or failure is all up to the rolls of the players. You are still very involved in how the adventure unfolds.
 
IIRC in Symbaroum players deal variable damage and NPCs don't, because they don't get to roll. That ended up not feeling right, as a player.
 
That bothers me generally as the players are tempted to use the certainty; e.g., no fear taking three hits if the damage is known and acceptable.
 
That bothers me generally as the players are tempted to use the certainty; e.g., no fear taking three hits if the damage is known and acceptable.

I agree, although it's not a horrible tool if you are running a game where mooks are a thing - fixed damage on things that are not really supposed to kill protagonists is pretty decent. I use it on my rabble in mythras games. Of course, they also have the ability to mob up on someone, pin them down, and then can dispatch a PC immediately :smile:
 
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