I contributed some material to the upcoming (GenCon release, I
think) "Pulp Hero" sourcebook for Hero Games, including some stuff on
evoking the 1930s in gameplay, the elements of pulp, villain
conception and adventure design. Not a _lot_ of material; I'm just a
cameo in a Steve Long epic in that case (I'm retired from
freelancing, so I only do small special-interest gigs), but a good
time, and worth mentioning here on the Fly From Evil list for a few
good reasons:

First, It had a tremendously energizing effect on related work I'm
writing for FFE :) And not just energizing, either; I went over word-
count by so much that a lot of the sections that didn't fit might
_become_ part of FFE ... eek. A lot of the energy, too, came from the
fun I had discussing things with Steve ... There are, obviously, a
few points of overlap between Fly From Evil (a hardboiled-specific
pulp RPG) and a book like PH, which emphasizes hero-pulp and
adventure-pulp gaming, but that still takes in portions of the whole
pulp enchilada. It was a beneficial process, since we traded some
juicy resources and historical tidbits we'd discovered ... That
alone, as they say, was worth the price of admission.

Second, it just got me really excited about Pulp Hero as a useful
resource for Fly From Evil gamers. There are a few good general-pulp
sourcebooks in gaming already, of course (Iron Crown's "Pulp
Adventures," SJ Games' "GURPS Cliffhangers," and West End Games' "The
World of Indiana Jones" for three examples), but if you've been
following the recent output of Hero Games, you'll know that they're
been putting out some BEEFY genre sourcebooks, and that most of the
beef is honest-to-betsy source material, not stat-blocks and rules
references.

While Fly From Evil will provide, hands-down, the most thorough one-
book exploration of the pulp-era United States in gaming (let alone
the San Francisco specific material), FFE's section on the exotic fun
of the globe beyond is more limited (it's be comparable in scope to
the three general pulp sourcebooks I mentioned above, which is still
above and beyond the call for a detective game, I guess, but I'm
something of a loon). That's where FFE and Pulp Hero dovetail nicely,
because the exotic fun of the globe is very much a central concern
for PH, and Steve Long has been doing a ton of research and has a
very encouraging amount of enthusiasm for the subject matter. And
beyond just chatting about it, Steve and I are having a kind of
exchange of services, providing a critical eye to one another's
manuscripts for matters of history, pulp-scholarship and more (a
relief to me, because while I'm very happy with how the FFE section
on the law is shaping up, it'll be nice to have Steve - an
experienced lawyer - give it the double-oh).

So anyway, Pulp Hero. Groovy. Drop on over to
http://www.herogames.com/ to see what good stuff they're up to!
There's also a Pulp Hero-specific portion of the Hero System message
boards, where Steve offers the occasional peek of what's to come
http://www.herogames.com/forums/


|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn