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Adventure! RPG - Non-pulp insparations for Adventure!


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Well all know that the biggest source of inspiration for a A! serial is the pulp genre. But what about other genre's and other mediums? Do you get inspired by anything that doesn't exactly qualify as pulp.

Personally , one of the most inspiring movies I have seen for A! is the anime flick "Spriggan". The film is a melting pot of insane fast pasted action , superhuman ( and sometimes supernatural) elements and exploration ; many of the elements that make Adventure! so great. The movie's plot is simple: " Arcam is a secret organization that studies and prevents relics from falling into the wrong hands. Arcam recently found Noah's Ark , but the US goverment's secret Mechanized Corps wants it for their own agenda.To defend the relic , Arcam uses it's top agents the "Spriggan ,a group of "altered humans" to defend the powerful item . Now the Spriggan's main man , Yu Ominae must battle to save humanity from a mad man.

Spriggan is a modern sci-fi action flick, like I said before it is not to deep in story line , but the mix of stylish violence and superhuman powers really inspires when composing a great action sequence for Adventure!

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It's one of the better manga's out there, I'm just getting sick of all the biblical stuff they keep throwing into the stories, and as for him catching that falchun... sorry went into my rant phase, the good thing about spriggan is that it's a fresh idea and unlike alot of manga's/anime's it doesn't have any sex/rape/bestiality, just action and some weird ideas that we come to expect from the Japanese cartoon sweatshops.

By the way welcome abourd {Vicious} ::smiley5 .

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Comics -- everything from DC's Terminal City to Mighty Marvel's own Moon Knight. Remember how he went to some back-arse-water South American country and fought off a guy who was harvesting opium and turning people into zombies?

Okay, I didn't thnk so. But he did.

TV -- "MacGuyver" is on TV Land every night. If that doesn't give you an idea or two per episode...

Literature -- Track down some Robert Erwin Howard and some Howard Phillips Lovecraft at the very least, and tell me if the former's "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" and the later's "The Horror At Red Hook" don't fire off a few pulp cyllinders.

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Kung Fu movies.

Really. Granted, it may be a little more suited for, say, Feng Shui (which I'll someday be running an all-out chronicle of, if I'm lucky) but there's still a lot to be had there. Flicks like 'Iron Monkey' or 'Once Upon a Time in China' are great if you wanna run a chronicle in the east- especially if there's a certain Dragon-type fellow poking his nose in...

In more modern fare, the 'Operation Condor' films are absolutely wonderful, with Jackie chan as a strange mix of James bond and Indiana Jones, hot-rodding across the globe, fighting cultists and Nazis and lots of other folks. Very fun.

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Literature -- Track down some Robert Erwin Howard and some Howard Phillips Lovecraft at the very least, and tell me if the former's \"The Fire of Asshurbanipal\" and the later's \"The Horror At Red Hook\" don't fire off a few pulp cyllinders.

Now that'd be because Howard & Lovecraft were pulp writers then, wouldn't it? ::confused

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Now that'd be because Howard & Lovecraft were pulp writers then, wouldn't it? ::confused

Indeed! That was my hurried effort at saying "Don't forget the written stuff".

I was running late for work.

Anyway, there are a couple of points that I wanted to make with that statement. One was the aforementioned (check out the writ); the other was this:

While those two stories are, indeed, written in the pulp/weird fiction era BY pulp/weird fiction authors of great pulp/weird fiction renown, they're both rather different and yet very similar.

Exotic locales, capable men daunted, danger abounds, scary stuff happens. Sure, one's about tomb-robbers in Egypt (I think) and the other's about a guy investigating cult-related kidnappings, but they both share those pulp tropes.

So!

Look for those pulp tropes...and there, inspiration shalt thou find.

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A source of atmospheric inspiration for me is the movie "Road to Perdition". It has nothing to do with pulp , or with supernatural powers , but it really lets you know what the world that surrounds the players feels like.

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you can track it down, there was a series of Shadow comics put out by DC in the '90s called 'The Shadow Strikes!' which, had a lot of other 1930s stuff tied to the pulp elements of the Shadow and his agents. There's stuff about Hollywood, the Depresion, jazz, world politics and so on. There are guest apperances from people as diverse as Frank Nitti, Groucho Marx and Mao Zedong. There are unnamed but obvious guest stars from newspaper comic strips of the era. At one point, the Shadow meets a man called 'Grover Mills', (who is very clearly based on Orson Welles) who is the star of a 'Shadow' radio serial! All in all, it has some great ways to add some non-pulp elements to a pulp story, without distracting from the biffo.

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  • 1 month later...

As I have suggested on the White Wolf Forum, I find reality to be the best source for inspiration and story ideas. Look into your own city or town's history. No matter where you live, it took great people, willfull visionaries to build the foundations of what you call home. Use that. Found out what was going on in the 1920's. You might be surprised with what you find.

Another inspiration for 1920's Adventure stories is Egypt. Egyptology was very big during that time. Hell, I remember reading about these crazy fools thinking they could capture the power of the ancients by consuming mummy flesh. No ****. Actually, all they did after was vomit and ****.

If those two ideas seem too gauche, how about catching any of those old In Search of.. episodes hosted by Leonard Nimoy. I mention them because I'm currently working on a Trinity/Adventure Story centered in the Bermuda Triangle. Another source I could recommend is GURPS, specifically the Old West, Places of Mystery and Warehouse 23 supplement books.

If I had more time and was sitting home, I'm sure I could give more sources. Again, in my opinion, reality is your best source.

Kurt

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