Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Power Up with Pulp!
19 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of Tabletop Tune Up, learn how to borrow the key elements of pulp storytelling to add thrills and chills to your games. Pulp is a style of storytelling distinct from the 1930's time period it is often associated with. Pulp stories tend to feature powerful, virtuous heroes, dastardly villains, exotic locales, and high octane over the top action. As a storytelling approach, pulp influences go beyond the 1930's adventure and detective fiction to include the science fiction of Flash Gordon (which inspired Star Wars) and the fantasy adventures of Conan the Barbarian. So try a little pulp in your next game and let us know how it turns out! You can reach us with Tune Up ideas at tabletoptuneup@gmail.com. To learn more about the Lester Dent Storytelling formula, click here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Opening Banter
00:00:01
Speaker
are Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows.
00:00:53
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Tabletop Tuna. I'm your host, Mark. I'm joined here by my buddy Ben. How you doing, Ben? I'm good. How are you guys doing out there in Radio Land? They can't answer, Ben. okay They're out there and we're here. Well, I'm doing well. How are you doing, Mark? Not too bad.
The Allure of Pulp RPGs
00:01:11
Speaker
Hey, that music just made me think of like ah a classic 1930s, 1940s club where we're kind of pulp pop has begun. Pulp had its heyday. and We're going to be talking about pulp today. Yeah. As you can guess, Mark, it's one of my favorite genres to play in. I think it's
00:01:29
Speaker
a great kind of setting for a RPG. That's exactly why I'm going to pick your brain a little bit, because I honestly haven't played a whole lot of pulp. I think i played ah we played a pickup game, didn't we, back at Gen Con a few years ago? We did. That might have been my first, I mean, kind of, I mean, that was my first legit, like, this is a pulp game. Yeah. Here's what I'm going to say, though. I think that you're underrating the pulpiness of other games you have played.
00:01:56
Speaker
I would agree. Back in the day, we played, what was that? Playgame games. Oh, Beyond the Supernatural. There we go, yep. And we definitely played that very pulpy. Yeah, that could have just as easily come out of the pages of Weird Tales or Tales from the Crypt or any of those other splat magazines from way back when.
00:02:14
Speaker
So I guess i I've played it, but i didn't at the time I didn't recognize its classification. But we're go
Pulp's Influence on Popular Media
00:02:21
Speaker
we're going to talk about pulp RPGs and what makes them special. And we're goingnna we're going to talk about the genre. And Ben, you're going to be our expert on this. OK. Excellent.
00:02:32
Speaker
Well, you're kind of the aficionado on this, dude. You've been running these games for- I love pulp. Yeah, you've been running these games for a bit. Not for me, but- We'll fix that. Well, let's start with the beginning. Why? Why would we want to play pulp? What makes this genre interesting or unique? Why should people give a crap?
00:02:56
Speaker
Well, first of all, I think it's a really great natural genre for RPG players to get into. And I think, as I was hinting at a moment ago, the bones of pulp are in all of our favorite stuff. So just to give you an example, like Star Wars, that's basically what George Lucas made when he couldn't get ah Flash Gordon. And Flash Gordon is sci-fi pulp from the 1930s and 40s.
00:03:22
Speaker
Yeah, it really kind of hits all those pulpy kind of things, doesn't it? Yeah. So when you think about what pulp is though, I don't want to get it confused with period science fiction or period stuff in a certain sense, right? Normally what happens is you say, Hey, you want to play a pulp game? Everybody goes, Oh, we're going to be in the 1930s.
00:03:41
Speaker
i Often, yeah, that's where a lot of those initial pulp magazines really get popular. But think about it differently. If you think about the kind of game that you're going to play, it's going to be one with high action. It's going to be one with desperately villains. It's going to be one with amazing locations and nonstop action, right? And those
Characteristics of Pulp Heroes
00:04:00
Speaker
are the kinds of things that make for a great game.
00:04:02
Speaker
And that action isn't just, there's something about pulp serials that the action is very dynamic. I was thinking of the, um, how what was that? What was that film? The Pirates of the Caribbean. I think there was this one where he's like fighting on this rolling thing that's going down a hill. it's right Like like the the inside of a water wheel or something. Yeah. It's so goofy. It's so off off the charts, but it's like, Oh, this is just straight out of a pulp magazine. Yeah.
00:04:31
Speaker
yeah I mean, if you think about it, like one of my very, very favorite ever sequences in any movie is the truck chase in Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oh yeah. The Ark is on this truck and our hero, he's got to chase this truck. He starts on a horse and then he jumps onto the side of the truck and he climbs over and he does all these things. He's got to fight all the Nazis off it. and then One of these guys actually shoots him in the arm and then tosses him out the front of the truck and he does one of these classic Western stage coach ah gets dragged along under, has to climb back up over the truck. It's so amazing. I mean, by the time you're done with the sequence, you're exhausted. It's incredible.
00:05:09
Speaker
Spielberg is, he's just ah just i underrated, if you can believe anybody can say he's underrated. He's just amazing. But let's let's let's talk about that real quick. I want to touch on Raiders because like you know the golden era of pulp, you had like Tarzan, Flash Gordon,
00:05:28
Speaker
in the shadow. And that DNA kind of continued throughout the the time. And then it kind of got into Raiders of the Lost Ark, the mummy, the rocketeer. And Star Wars, as we said, yeah. Yeah, but you're going to notice a lot of these films are pretty old. huh Like is pulp just kind of like, is it in decline or is it just hidden in plain view?
00:05:53
Speaker
That's a great question, I think. Look, I want to say it's hidden in plain view. You know, some more recent things that would be an example of pulp would be like Jumanji. That made a lot of money. People like seeing that movie. Oh, yeah. I think you could also probably think about, frankly, any of the more recent Star Wars stuff. ah That is not science fiction properly speaking in the kind of mid-century, old-school sense. There's not really a lot of science to it. It's a kind of a futuristic fantasy. And those pulp roots are in that.
00:06:22
Speaker
Yeah, i guess I guess you could say that. I mean, ah the Star Wars, the original ones definitely felt pulpy. Maybe it's the low budget nature the the lower budget nature of them ah that made it feel a little bit more pulp. And the newer ones, maybe they're so glossy and expensive that it's it's like, maybe it loses some of that shine. But I was also thinking of, i I'd mentioned that Fury Road. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh.
00:06:47
Speaker
it felt kind of pulpy like the the villains and they were kind of over cranked they're kind of goofy they got their side henchmen there's kind of like something you see in a lot of these pulp shows like dick tracy it's not just dick tracy he's got this pantheon of like ridiculous villains hammerhead yeah you know whatever the It's certainly true that the pulp genre was intended to excite readers immediately. It's almost hyperbole, all the stuff that goes on in the pulp thing. is we We were talking about the action a moment ago with the truck chase and the waterwheel sword fight. like The same is true of the villains. The villains are not at all subtle. These are not people who are bureaucrats pushing pencils and stuff. These are mad scientists. These are guys who are bent on taking over the world. Yeah.
00:07:32
Speaker
Interestingly, too, I think you make a mistake if you make them really scary, realistic serial killers. You know, this is not like an episode of Dexter. That's not fun. that's not plans Yeah, like it should feel fun. Your character should feel over the top. We've been talking about villains. Your heroes also should feel over the top. And that very much is in the spirit of a lot of RPGs people play where you know there's rpgs that we've played i'm sure where all the characters are very realistic you mentioned rb on the supernatural game that we once played and to make the horror commitment that we've talked about in the past we really had to kind of underpower our characters in that game and and be really vulnerable
00:08:09
Speaker
not true of a pulp game. In a pulp game, your characters are capable of jumping into a group of mooks and beating them all up and then moving on to the next thing yeah and swinging from the chandeliers and doing all the crazy stuff that but you want your heroes to do.
00:08:24
Speaker
The funny thing is they only seem vulnerable in between scenes. Like, you know, Indiana Jones, he's got the, you know, he hurts, he's sore. yeah But that never affects him when it counts. Right. When the next fistfight comes on, the adrenaline starts up and Yeah. So as you can see, readers, pulp has a lot of things. It's a lot of, uh, encompasses a lot of stuff, but the main thing is like high adventure. That's what I'm
Crafting Pulp RPG Campaigns
00:08:50
Speaker
getting at at you. That's right. So like if if a player said Ben, you're in a pulp game. Yeah.
00:08:56
Speaker
there's There's another plane chasing us. I need to get up on top of that the roof of this plane and set up my Gatling gun so I could shoot at it. would As a GM, what would you say? Of course you can do that. Yeah.
00:09:13
Speaker
but That's a great part. So here's the thing. What's fun about this is unlike a very realistic game where you'd say, I'm sorry, you would be immediately swept off of the wing because there's a lot of air resistance and you'd start telling some story that would absolutely be true in real life. No, this is a pulp game.
00:09:29
Speaker
So you're gonna get up there. We're gonna say yeah, you you you brace your feet in the stretch of the wing and you get your Gatling gun up and set up and And then yeah your fedora stays in your head the whole time. It does it does You know, so yeah, no look it's it's big bold colors. It's big not subtle moves. It's high adventure It's clear good guys and bad guys That's the feel that you want and what's kind of fun about this if you kind of go back and Hope is the thing that just precedes the real comic book era that starts in the 40s and gives us our first generation of superheroes. Yeah, I mean Batman kind of is... He's absolutely a pulp hero. He's got a foot in both worlds, right? He does. Yeah, Batman is a pulp hero. He was very much a part of the same generation of characters as the Shadow, for example. And when you look at a character like Doc Savage, Doc is good at everything. He's kind of like the way that we talk about Batman now. People kind of complain sometimes about Batman being
00:10:24
Speaker
you know He can fight, and he can outthink everybody, and he's got all the gadgets, and he can do all these different things. i mean In a certain sense, that was the same thing that Duck Savage would do. is He was just super trained on every possible thing, ideal body, ideal mind, everything else. Yeah, he had his group of, I think they called them Magnificent Seven or something like that. Yeah. and They were just there to like say, you're awesome.
00:10:47
Speaker
They were there bringing an extra pair of hands, but how often did that really happen? Not often, friends. Not often. So like these these are kind of the characters that translate um to the table. though like Do they translate well? like what you Of these pulp kind of characters, you can't have a Doc Savage in a game with four or five other players. So you've got to tone some of those aspects down.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, if you're thinking about a pulp game, the best thing to do is to really focus on, as we've talked about recently, balancing your party and making sure that not one person can do everything, but that people go deep into those specialties. And you can still do that big, bold, i'm you know, I am the best mechanic in the world at this, or I'm the best martial arts fighter in the world or the best detective in the world. And my heavens, what would happen if you've got such amazing characters all in one party?
00:11:37
Speaker
what crime could stand against them and not be revealed by the light of justice. You know, you can hear the moves here. Yeah, there was that, um, is it, was it, uh, I think about the league of extraordinary gentlemen. Yes. That's Alan Moore. Yeah. That's Alan Moore. Okay. yeah So Alan Moore had that and that was kind of his take on like a pulp assembly of these ridiculous characters altogether. Well, and that's a great reason why I don't think pulp and period stories are the same thing because those characters are all Victorian era. That's late 19th century British.
00:12:08
Speaker
But they were kind of brought in in a very pulp movie. No, that's that's exactly my point, is they are prime pulp, right? It's just in the Victorian era, they were in penny dreadfuls. But penny dreadfuls were basically the Victorian equivalent of the pulp magazines that we sell later in the 30s and through about the 50s and 60s, I want to say. So yeah you have the same kind of storytelling going on at different periods of time. And you can find that even today. So just the same way that we're saying, yeah pulp is is now, you could also say, well, it's also prior to the 30s.
00:12:39
Speaker
So when you've got your pulp characters, particularly well we'll use that film that we're just mentioning, these characters are very unique and they have their very set of skills. You know what I mean? right They still need to like lean on each other to fulfill this the story, which is the campaign, which is what we're talking about. So like, let's talk about the game. Really, what kind of systems would you recommend? I wouldn't say all game systems are built for this type of thing.
00:13:05
Speaker
I think you're right. Remember that point about there being high action in a lot of it. One of the things you want to do is you want to play a game that won't get bogged down in pace. There's a lot of games that can do that. You also want the game to feel, I think, very impactful, very tactile, very, in some ways, um I want to say, also a little bit grounded so that when there is a big impact because a player did something amazing, or when they managed to actually like hit that guy super hard, like you kind of feel that too. I realize that might sound
Pulp Storytelling Techniques
00:13:33
Speaker
a little contradictory, but The pace is the main thing. And I think when you think about systems that can do that,
00:13:39
Speaker
Currently, I'm gearing up for a campaign with a system called Broken Compass, which I'm really looking forward to. And that's very rules-like. The mechanics in that one, just to give you a sense of this, are almost like Yahtzee. You're rolling dice, not to get to a sum of a number, but just to see how many of your dice in your pool matched each other, like you would get two or three of a kind. I could say that'd be pretty exciting once you get a couple matches. Yeah. well and And also, they've got a mechanic for like if you didn't get it, you can re-roll.
00:14:06
Speaker
but you also could fail harder too. So the escalation risk as you get through is really fascinating. It feels like failure is part of the genre. And who was it that said like in Star Wars, every failure is just a success in a different way. Bob might have been mentioned something like that. We were talking with him and it's so true. Like, you know, it's that thing where you miss with your blaster, but you hit the door and the door shuts and hits the person.
00:14:34
Speaker
Right. There's a lot of games out there that now will give you a kind of dice mechanic that lets you succeed with complications or fail, but with some advantages. And I think that's very much in the spirit of pulp storytelling. you know Yes, Indiana Jones does manage to make the leap onto the truck, or maybe he makes the leap into the truck, but then He loses his gun along the way as it gets jostled free of his tools. Yeah, and that just only heightens the adventure, you know, at that point. Yeah. So at those complications in a sense become either so another thing for him to overcome because it's the hero has to overcome these things, right? Yeah, I think for people that aren't familiar with this or may wonder like, how do these stories kind of come together?
00:15:16
Speaker
One of the best things that you could do for a pulp story is read the Lester Dent formula. the lester dent formula is the guy Lester Dent was the guy who wrote all the shadow stories in the pulps. He had a story. He could say, I've got this formula that I use. Every time I'm writing a story like this, it will give you short stories of about 6,000 words.
00:15:37
Speaker
And he'd say, all right, in the first 1,500 words, here's what you're going to do. You're going to get the heroine to a heap of trouble. Get him right in there on the first line of the story. Don't waste time. Jump into the action. Bring in some allies. Give him a plot twist, right? OK. In the next 1,500 words of the story. And he would kind of go through and say, these are the kinds of things you want to have happen. And it's all about that escalating conflict. It's all about ramping the action up. It's all about yeah new locations, new plot twists.
00:16:03
Speaker
And folks, if you're thinking about this, some of these stories were written back in the, you know, the 1930s, 1920s even. And they were in these magazines and they didn't have a lot of pages. Like they were, they had to fill them quick. So they didn't have time for, for anything other than just getting right into it. Yeah. They had to do it immediately because their editor was going to say, this is losing my attention. These kids are going to be picking up these books and they don't want to be bogged down with the a long drawn out intro. No, they,
00:16:32
Speaker
right off the gate, you know, the shadows can be punching somebody. Yeah. And that's the thing is it's immediately engaging. You know, we've talked about engaging your players and making sure that they were are aware of the stakes of the story and so on. A good pulp writer in the very first scene is going to probably try to find some way to threaten your life of your PC or threaten the lives of your PCs, projects and fortunes, threaten the PCs, city and so on. So the system you're kind of thinking of just kind of going back to that system, it sounds like it needs to be kind of dynamic, like it needs to have a little some energy to it. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. And definitely a skill system. You want to have a decent skill system. The skills have to be broad enough that you can have all those different specialties that we talked about early. It doesn't mean that you have to have an especially crunchy system like, for example, fate.
00:17:22
Speaker
has a
Exploring Pulp's Limitations
00:17:23
Speaker
really great pulp supplement called Spirit of the Century, which I highly encourage people to read and check out. yeah And in that system, you can create the description of what your character is good at just from language. it's you know My character is a an archaeologist or my character is a detective. The idea is you don't necessarily have to have like a pre-written skill system that's got 50 skills in it or something like that.
00:17:45
Speaker
Sounds like a little bit more of an aesthetic. And it sounds like you can apply it to other games. Yeah. Coney on the Barbarian is... That is a pulp fantasy. If you're wanting to run a D and&D game in and the pulp genre, what kind of things would you emphasize? if you're Let's say you're going to Ben, I want you to run me a pulp D and&D game.
00:18:02
Speaker
What are the things that you would kind of like focus on? The funny thing is I think a lot of the stuff he needs are already there. I think usually what I would do though is I'd pick up the pace a bit. I would make the villains as kind of crazy and interesting as I could. I would make sure that there were quick ways for us to get from place to place so that we could have ah really interesting locations. You and I, as we've been playing a Path of Exile recently online, one of the things we've been commenting on is how creative some of those maps are.
00:18:29
Speaker
If we're playing a role-playing game, those environments would be so exciting to just explore and fight in. So I think that's what I would do with D&D is just find ways to kind of pick up the pace, put people in exotic kinds of situations, locations, enemies. Crank up those villains, man. Crank them up. like They need to be WWF characters. The heroes are already kind of pulpy, right? They are more powerful than average commoners. It's not like they're going to run into some bandits on the road and feel like, oh, hey, there's more of them than there are of us. We'd better you know do what they say. No, they're going to engage fists and swords and everything flying.
00:19:06
Speaker
I think we got a pretty good overview of what pulp is. And like we kind of have some ideas about how we can utilize pulp in our games. And honestly, I think a little bit of pulp in just about any game could could enhance your game, even if you're not going to jump fully into the genre. I do think villains in particular are best when they're just turned up a little notch.
00:19:27
Speaker
Maybe it's worth talking for a moment though about where pulp doesn't fit as well or where you've got to do some work to kind of make it fit or maybe where there's some friction. i I have a kind of a gripe that my friends know about when it comes to like pulp Cthulhu. Okay. So think about what that Lovecraft mythos is, right? It's a situation where you're going up against these monstrous, unworldly things that are gonna defeat human beings ultimately. Like, there's no chance that we've got any way to deal with this stuff. It's set in the same kind of time period, right? So actually, I've actually found that a lot of the maps that I like to use for pulp, I basically borrowed from the Call of Cthulhu game, which is kind of better supported than I think any one pulp system is. And there's certainly a place for pulp horror, right? So I think you can do that. but
00:20:11
Speaker
In general, think back to what we we're saying a moment ago about how your heroes are super capable. Not in a Lovecraft game, you know what I mean? Not in Call of Cthulhu. They may try to amp them up, but then there's this kind of, for me, a kind of an intrinsic tension between, well, wait a minute, are these are these guys, the guys that are going to kind of win and be over the top and all that kind of stuff? Well, in that case, how scary is the mythos that they're going to run into, actually?
00:20:32
Speaker
I mean, in some sense it's it's pulp and in one aspect in in that it's got some of the tropes, but it also seems to turn it on its head. The heroes just, they this fail. They're not supposed to succeed in Cthulhu, right? yeah ah You're doomed. Yeah. And that's, so that's the things I think, I think you can still square that circle. You can still play that game and have a great time doing it.
00:20:56
Speaker
Maybe you're going to beat up the cultists a bunch and and maybe you're going to win for today but not forever. So there's things you can do. But I think that's a there's a little bit of a tension in there. I feel like it in that type of game, the long-term prognosis should never be in doubt.
00:21:10
Speaker
in a pulp game or in a Cthulhu game? In a Cthulhu slash pulp game. Like you could have that exciting adventure but as the game goes on that that outcome, inevitable outcome, is inevitable. Yeah, I think that's right and I think that's kind of the tension that I feel in that pairing of those two. The other one I'll say too is Anything where you're doing like a really science grounded thing like a science fiction game. I don't think that's gonna lend itself well to pull because the more into reality you are the more you're gonna kind of dull some of those bright colors.
00:21:42
Speaker
I would say a good rule of thumb is to imagine the soundtrack you want for your game. It's a great idea.
Gen Con Experiences and Anticipation
00:21:50
Speaker
And if it's a Cthulhu game and that soundtrack is dark and morbid, that ain't pulp. Pulp is bright. It's colorful. That's right. It's bombastic. I mean, it's just exciting. That's right. And I think something that's different too is when you think about the difference between pulp and other stuff around it, it's also not noir.
00:22:11
Speaker
Noir is a different kind of a thing. In Noir, these are those black and white detective movies and stories of the 40s, Raymond Chandler stuff, and it's ah Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon, right? And in those cases, the good guys are never really that great. They're alcoholic often. and They're people with failures. they're These guys are not your best guys, but they're the guys that happened to be there that day, you know? The morality of those stories is gray. Pulp.
00:22:38
Speaker
Justice is clear, you know what I mean? Since Citi kind of merged those two into a nice balance, I would say, in that you had that noir, but you also, it was definitely a pulp film. These ridiculous villains had the exciting fight scenes, exotic locations, but it did have that film noir kind of detective gloss to it. I think it can be done. and Well, so here's what we'll say about that is I think you're right that Frank Miller did kind of merge those in interesting ways.
00:23:09
Speaker
I do think, though, that detective stories and G-Man stories are part of the pulp era as well. OK. You can find gangster stories and detective stories and things like that. and And for example, that's exactly what the shadow is, right? The shadow is a guy who's fighting crime and gangsters and and those kinds of villains. So think about the difference between what you see in a shadow story versus Sin City or versus a different kind of Jimmy Cagney movie, let's say.
00:23:35
Speaker
Or even Dick Tracy versus those kind of things, right? In all those cases, you're looking at and the difference between kind of a very brightly defined moral world. There's a lot of heroes and villains that are very clearly heroes and villains. In no Noir, by contrast, it's shades of gray. It's anti-heroes. It's people who don't necessarily have that kind of clear definition and are certainly not hyperbolic.
00:24:00
Speaker
Well, all interesting stuff. It actually gets me excited to play a pulp game. Ben, when are you running it? I'll make it the next thing we do. That sounds like a really fun thing to do and you know I'm always up for it. I think next time you go to GenCon, maybe maybe we have a good pulp adventure. Yeah, I will say, ah Mark, I think you and I, when we played that one pulp game at GenCon a couple years back, we were not super satisfied with it. You know,
Incorporating Holidays in RPGs
00:24:25
Speaker
sometimes when you don't get what you want, you just gotta do it yourself.
00:24:35
Speaker
All right, welcome to the tune-up segment. We got a question from one of our listeners. I like this one. They say, I've mapped my land. I've thought through its history. I've named its gods, formed its mythologies.
00:24:48
Speaker
How do I figure out what holidays to add to the annual calendar to give my players something to celebrate or navigate as they make their way through the world? That is a good question. It's great, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, ah we definitely have, I didn't realize, but we do have quite a few little holidays that we've added into our realm. Yeah. And I was thinking about that just as this question comes across my ah my eyes here.
00:25:12
Speaker
You want to think of a couple things. One is you've got the history. That's your first go to start looking at the events in that history. Yeah. What kinds of things would people celebrate? Was there the liberation of a people or the day they first founded a city or the day that the dark powers finally were put back in their box, whatever kinds of things there might be. That's a great place to start.
00:25:36
Speaker
I could think of a couple more. I mean, history is one, but I also think ah religious is one. So if you have your different religions, they should all have... I think every one of your religions in the thing should have some sort of significant day or days or weeks or months. I mean, a holiday literally is a holy day, right?
00:25:55
Speaker
Yep. in And then also, um you got historical events, things that have happened in history. And then regional, regional could be, I think of like when I grew up in Spokane, Spokane, Washington, we had the cherry pickers trot.
00:26:11
Speaker
What is the cherry picker's trot? Man, come on, man. You lived up there. I did. The cherry picker's trot, they, they celebrated the cherry picking season. And so they would go up to and we'd all be up at the green bluff and they would have contests. So you could spit the cherry seed the furthest and and all these types of things. They had a, they had a race to go with it, but that's a regional holiday. You know, what's cool about that too, right? Is that's a regional example of a holiday that a lot of different regions celebrate. So you could even find ways to vary by local culture or setting.
00:26:40
Speaker
but kind of holidays that you have in that case around like a harvest festival? Oh yeah absolutely and one of our games I had a a holiday that came up every few years and it was a they celebrate the Everflame games which was a celebration of heroes of the past and people would gather to to do contests And that was a way to kick off a story. Holidays can be brought in and in that kind of fashion to either kick off a story or maybe maybe have a place where people gather and things can happen at those events. So think about culture, think about history, think about the influence of regions and cultures on what are conventional cycles. you know The other thing you can do too is you can use the absence of holidays. So I work with people internationally on different
00:27:30
Speaker
countries in the globe. And if you come from say a Catholic country, you probably have a lot more holidays because they had a lot more ah feast days in their historical calendar. so there's more holidays in some of those calendars than there were ah in, say, Protestant countries. Yeah, I just and i can also just imagine a yeah ah deity who might worship cats and have an excessive amount of holidays that involve sleeping in. and yeah Yeah, I like that, right? like Find the thing that reflects the particulars of that thing. If it's a historical event based on
00:28:04
Speaker
you know, like our 4th of July, right? That's a, in certain sense, it celebrates the winning of awards. So we pop off fireworks, but Thanksgiving's an eating holiday, you know? And also just for like, imagine a science fiction game. What a great way to punctuate a historical event that might have some importance to the campaign. I think about like, you know, I think Star Trek had like the first meeting where they, the Klingons and the, or not Klingons. Yeah, they don't celebrate the Klingons first meeting. importantly The Vulcans, the Vulcans, the people with the 20 years. right The logical guys. They had that first first meeting day, I can't remember what they called it, but that was ah that was a thing. But what's nice about that in the context of a game is a holiday day might punctuate a story element that you want to kind of have them focus on, and it's a good backdrop. If that's going to be something pertinent to your later story,
00:29:02
Speaker
and they've celebrated that holiday, they're going to remember that. And it's a good way to kind of like squeeze that little bit of backstory in. Well, and also think about the opportunity that a holiday is for a villain to enact a plot. It's been 10 years since the armistice, but this villain wasn't satisfied with the piece that broke out. And so they're going to reignite the war on the 10th anniversary of like, that's such a great opportunity for villains to do big flashy things.
00:29:29
Speaker
that's good That's a good point. So to our our our reader, our listener who sent in that question, I hope those give you some good ideas and where you can kind of start and how you can flesh out your world, make it feel real, make it feel exciting and bright or dark and dangerous.
00:29:47
Speaker
Well, Mark, I think that's all we've got to say about holidays. I think it's time to go celebrate the weekend. And friends, I hope you
Conclusion and Encouragement
00:29:54
Speaker
enjoyed this episode about pulp. Stay tuned. We have more action around the corner next week at this time. For now, I'm just going to play some Path of Exile 2. I'm out of here. That's right. All right, you guys. We'll catch you soon. Until we do, keep those dice rolling.
00:32:11
Speaker
Tuna.
00:32:44
Speaker
Tuna! Tuna! Level up your fun!