[Insert Your PCs Name Here] Vs. The Red Madness!

Here's the original pitch for my space pulp Red Madness game, described here.

[Insert Your PCs Name Here] Vs. The Red Madness! will be a tale of thrilling pulp adventure, but set in the Amazing Stories future rather than the Doc Savage past. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow! Ether zeppelins and rocket planes traverse the solar system! Jetpacks and heli-cars whiz around the gleaming cities of tomorrow! Exo-archaeologists race to find the secrets of the Exploded Planet! Bug-eyed monsters plot their conquest of the Earth! Exclamation points are outrageously over-used! Think Indiana Jones in space. Think Gernsback with Nazis. Think Phantom Menace without Jar Jar. Now grab your turbo-pistols, snap on your big bubble space helmet, and rocket to adventure in the Astounding year of 1963!

Huh? This game is set in 1963? Well, yes, the year is 1963, but this is 1963 as imagined in the science fiction of, say, 1936. So even though there are rayguns and bug-eyed monsters, the feel should very much be “classic” pulp. The technology is all weird science World of Tomorrow stuff, but socio-culturally, this world still looks and feels like the 1920s and 1930s. And all the character types that would work for a classic pulp game should translate handily. The dashing young aviatrix becomes a dashing young rocket-plane pilot (a rocketrix?). The two-fisted archaeologist becomes a two-fisted exo-archaeologist. The English lord raised by apes in Africa becomes an English lord raised by blue-skinned savages in the jungles of Venus. The giggling mad scientist becomes—well, she's still a giggling mad scientist, but she has a lot more to giggle about now...

We’ll be using the new Adventure! RPG system for our game. Despite the shift in setting, the rules and the tone and “feel” of the game will be very much the same. I’ll come up with stats for ray-guns and space vehicles, but other than that, I don’t foresee having to change any of the rules.

What follows is a short handout describing the world of tomorrow, what I’m calling the Astounding! Age of Adventure. It describes the recent history of the world we’ll be gaming in and then has a brief discussion of science in the Astounding Age. You don’t need to study it at great length, but if you like this sort of thing (I do, that’s why I wrote it!) it should help you to imagine your character and get into the spirit of the game.

( The Astounding! Age of Adventure! )

I find your lack of faith disturbing... fool.

You're right, Marge. It's just like the time I could have met Mr. T at the mall. The entire day, I kept saying, "I'll go a little later, I'll go a little later..." And when I got there, they told me he just left. And when I asked the mall guy if he'd ever come back again, he said... he didn't know.

A friend of mine grew up in Chicago. One of the things he liked about living there, he says, was very occasionally running into Mr. T. You'd be walking downtown, and there he'd be, Clubber Lang himself, crossing the street or eating a hot dog. Haircut, gold chains and all. (This would have been in the late 1980s and early 1990s—well after Mr. T's first fifteen minutes of fame, well before his 1-800-COLLECT and inane WWW renaissance.) You'd see him and say, "Hey! That's Mr. T!" and he'd always wave and say, "Hi, kids! Stay in school!" or something similar. And that would be that. You might go home and tell your Mom, "I saw Mr. T today!" "That's nice," your Mom would say.

What delights me about this story (and I should probably spell it out, since I'm sure it's not coming across in the telling), is both the good-naturedness of it and the mundanity. It was a good thing to run into Mr. T, but really not that big a deal. No bigger than seeing, say, a fire truck, or some ducks, or a lady walking a funny-looking dog. "I saw a funny-looking dog, today, Mom!" "That's nice, dear." I wonder if this is how citizens of Metropolis react when they see Aquaman.

Anyway, besides being an excuse to link to lots of Mr. T pages, all this jibber-jabber is just prelude to a story I had to share (with the small number of you reading this who aren't also reading bryant). It's MUCH funnier than the one I just told you about Mr. T: Darth Vader Made Me Cry. I'll link to it again, so it doesn't get lost in the forest of Mr. T pages: Darth Vader Made Me Cry. Go read it. Hee hee hee. It has a nice symmetry with the classic Alec Guinness story, too.