Tropes of Pulp 1: What is Pulp?

Hi, everyone, Jason Vey, here. I'm the author of Amazing Adventures, and I'm thrilled to be contributing to the Troll Dens!

I was thinking about what to post for my inaugural blog, and it occurred to me I should address a question I get all the time when I'm giving people the schtick about AA.

"A pulp RPG is all well and good," they say, "But what exactly constitutes pulp?"

That's a better question than people realize, and it's a much harder question to answer than people realize. You see, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian is pulp, as is H.P. Lovecraft's Randolph Carter. Philip Marlowe, P.I., the creation of Raymond Chandler, is also pulp. Tarzan and John Carter also apply. So does Fu Manchu.

The term "Pulp," as many know, really was just applied to the cheap paper on which the genre fiction magazines of the early- to mid-20th century were printed. So to tell the truth, "pulp" applies to any sort of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, or adventure story that has its roots in that tradition. In the modern sense, the term has been expanded to include such figures as Indiana Jones, and retconned to include heroes like Allan Quatermain. In an ultra-modern sense, the films of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez champion many elements that are in the pulp tradition.

So where does that leave Amazing Adventures? Well, there are certainly tropes that people generally associate more with pulp than others. Lost cities to explore, two-fisted heroes (be those fists armed or empty), wisecracking archaeologists, hard-boiled investigators, femme fatales, and a distinctly 1920's to 1940's setting full of stereotypes and cliches. If you can deliver a Bogart speech, or convincingly utter the phrase "trust me," you've probably got a handle on what it takes to do pulp.With a very little work, AA can handle just about any type of pulp you can imagine, all 99% compatible with Castles & Crusades. In fact, next time I'm going to talk a bit about how you can adapt C&C to serve your AA game.

I don't want to get too longwinded with this, so I'll leave that little introduction to hopefully whet your whistle, and know there's much more to come!  For now, here's a gem that should occupy hours of time--I know it did for me....

The PULP-O-MIZER custom pulp cover generator! If you're ever at a loss for an adventure idea, play around with this for awhile--it'll come to you!