New PULP! Rules
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I do like a bit of "Pulp Era" gaming and was VERY excited when I saw that Osprey would be releasing a new ruleset in their little "blue book" range, so happily pre-ordered...
I don't know if anyone else has this too now, but I have to admit being a little underwhelmed... okay, there's a few unique little twists in the mix, and as usual the book is beautifully presented, but it's left me feeling I wanted a little... more...
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a neat little ruleset, and at the price I'm not complaining, but other than Bob Murch's excellent rules I'm interested to find out what is everyone else using for this "era"?
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@Bill ThomasDo you think that in main stream print will go leaving only degital. I`m reading the Primordial Earth books at the moment now on book 2, gone for kindle, sadly due to the price of Nine books in print,They are not a bad series but gone are the days when I`d buy nine paper backs. Kindles not bad, but I really wish I`d got the chance to buy print .This series is very Primevil or Terra Nova on steroids. nice to see a world of Humans droped into dinnos.
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I keep reading these rules and picking out choice morsels; obviously with a new movie on the way (yay!) I thought it time to create this wee chap... Resistance body and head, "whip" cut down from the Cannon Fodder 2 grapple, and bread bag from the Panzer Lehr... the only thing not WGA is the pistol arm which came from the GEG "Gunfighters 2" set 😁 Now, does anyone have a spare Resistance sprue that needs a home...
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This is a legit site. I've ordered a grip of books from them.
At this price it's easier to give the rules a try. Or pick up a second copy to get someone else into it.
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I mostly make things up or inprovise, but haven't done any gaming in a while so recently I haven't even done that much.
The Stargrave rules are fairly easy to adapt to a "traditional" mid-war pulp setting, and I expect Frostgrave, Dead Man's Hand, and Chicago Way are, too. By default, Stargrave should be just fine for pulp sci-fi in the style of Buck Rogers, Commander Cody, Flash Godon, and so on, while Dead Man's Hand has a default grounded in pulp westerns. These sorts of games could probably also be easy to adapt to a "modern" setting using Wargames Atlantic's "Pulp Adventure" zombies, survivors, agents, operators, etc., covering a wealth of pulp-style settings from the '60s onward into the near future (e.g. cberpunk, Shadowrun, Vampire: the Masquerade, etc.) Shouldn't be hard to do war-themed pulp subjects (GI Joe, Sergeant Rock, etc.), spies, probably superheroes as well (especially the more self-made superhero types like Doc Savage or the Shadow, the A-Team, etc.)
02-Hundred Hours might lend itself nicely to a broader pulp genre, and seems well-suited by default for infantry-focused World War and even Cold War themed games.
Seems like "The Last War" ruleset might work just fine, as might the related Mork Borg and Forbidden Psalm rules et, with a little tweaking. The Last War's rule set certainly seems simple and nicely suited for short skirmish games with new players.
RPG rules might also work, to at least some degree. I bought a copy of Deadlands for Savage Worlds a few years ago but never played it, I don't remember the rules much now, but have a vague impression that Savage Worlds' rules seemed skirmish-game-friendly.
Chaosium released a Pulp Cthulhu rulebook several years ago, which I've got some mixed feelings about. It IS a beautiful book, and the writers clearly produced the book as a labor of love, filled with a great deal of documentary and "fluff" content aimed toward the sort of pulp literature produced from the 1930s to the early 1940s or so. Not a lot of "crunch" in the book, though, with the understanding that it's more of a setting for the core Call of Cthulhu rules than a stand-alone RPG. The default Call of Cthulhu rules MIGHT not be very hard to adapt to skirmish game purposes, but I never really thought they invited such a conversion; the "pulp Cthulhu" additions to the base rule set are optional rules that mostly just make characters a little harder to kill, which really didn't do much to capture any distinct genre feeling. I'd give it a 5/5 for "fluff" and documentary style, but maybe a 2/5 for crunch "substance" as long as I feel generous. For conversion to skirmish purposes, I kinda feel like the default Call of Cthulhu/BRP could probably benefit from a more stripped-down set of gun and other combat rules, and possibly a more formalized set of movement rules, but the default Call of Cthulhu fules set seems like it shines more for investigation and theatre-of-the-mind roleplaying than it does miniatures combat. The background information on pulp literature and general setting content, however, is fine stuff.
I spent a week a couple years ago adapting 5th Edition D&D rules for a Weird West setting, and it seemed to me very easy to do and likely just as easy to run into Cthulhu-style Jazz Age or traditional mid-war pulp territory; "vanilla" D&D is pretty solidly pulp fantasy in the vein of Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, Pellucidar, Lost World, and other classic fantasy settings. The D&D rules since 3rd Edition seem to have aiming pretty squarely into board-game and skirmish territory, in any event, so I don't see any reason why 5th Edition D&D couldn't be used as-is for a more-or-less pulp-style game.
So, my conclusion: of these options, my dark-horse favorite now might end up being 5th Edition D&D, of all the damned things: I've come to loathe Dungeons & Dragons in its modern incarnations, I've grown disenchanted with its emphasis on miniatures-and-mapgrids gaming over the theatre-of-the-mind use of imagination for roleplaying in general, so I wouldn't expect to enjoy the ruleset itself for homebrewing games outside the "kitchen sink fantasy" genre that D&D has effectively codified as the default "new normal" for modern fantasy. But, it seems like a surprisingly easy ruleset to work with, and easier to appreciate once the usual D&D setting cliches are moved out of the way.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why any popular skrimish game rules couldn't be adapted with minimal effort, and I might be inclined toward trying The Last War or maybe Stargrave as the base game for this purpose.
