Category Archives: Pulp

Posts about 28mm 1920s-30s pulp gaming using .45 Adventure rules from Rattrap Productions and other rules.

Lead Painters League 7, Round Four

Posted on by
2

Last week’s LPL entry moves from the Lost Worlds of Round Three to the mysterious corners of the Indian subcontinent with some 28mm Thuggee cultists, also from Pulp Figures.

lpl7r4

The Dread Thuggee. Click to view larger.

These murderous chaps come from three different Pulp Figures packs. The three right-hand figures – the leader, acolyte and sword-bearing bodyguard – are all from PBT-24 The Mad Guru. The swordsman is from PBT-21 Thuggee w/ separate assorted Weapons & Picks, and finally the rifleman is from PBT 23 Thuggee Fighters w/Martini Rifles. I’ve got another six or so figures to finish, as well as a couple of neat scenery bits that come in the Mad Guru pack.

Most of the skin tone comes from W&N Burnt Umber acrylic artist’s ink, applied nearly full-strength over a basecoat of Reaper Intense Brown with a quick highlight (before the ink goes on) of Reaper Oiled Leather. The hair is mostly Reaper Walnut Brown, which is a very-nearly-black dark brown.

Unfortunately for them, these skulking murderers ran straight into a really spectacular group of cavalry from one of the best painters in the contest, and got soundly thrashed, although lots of people said nice things about them! Luck of the draw; I’m a pretty solidly middle-of-the-road painter so a lot of how well I do in LPL sometimes comes down to who the random matchup for a given round is!

Round Five of LPL7 is running over on Lead Adventure as you read this. Round Five is one of the Theme Bonus Point rounds, with this round’s theme being “Historical Civil Wars”. That’s right up my alley, so go see how my Russian Civil War figures are faring this week!

Lead Painters League 7, Round Three

Posted on by
Reply

More Pulp Figures goodness from last week’s LPL round. This crew of underdressed primitives was started sometime last year, finished over the winter, and have finally gotten their moment of glory, beating a very nice little regiment of 15mm Napoleonic figures in the third round of LPL7.

lpl7r3

The Shaman’s Crew, all from Pulp Figures. Click to view full-size.

Round Four is going on as you read this, and can be viewed over on Lead Adventure. Alas, the Thuggee figures I’ve fielded in Round Four aren’t doing as well as the Neanderthals did. Perhaps they’re overdressed?

Awesome Junkers Aircraft Poster

Posted on by
Reply

Via the excellent Dieselpunk, an great 1919 poster from Germany, advertising civilian air travel with Junkers aircraft.

“Air Transport With Junkers Aircraft”, 1919. Click to see larger over on Flickr.

This would have been part of the effort by the German aviation industry to “civilianize” as rapidly as they could, to try to salvage something from the post-Great War wreckage, and the restrictions the Allies were imposing on military aviation in Germany. It’s also a fantastic poster, in a style I really, really like and occasionally attempt to emulate.

Lead Painters League 7, Round Two

Posted on by
3

Round Two of the ten-week Lead Painters League over on Lead Adventure Forum didn’t go so well for me, but at least the Blood Bowl dwarf team my reporters lost to was full of unique figures well painted!

lpl7r2

LPL7 Round Two – Reporters from Pulp Figures. Click for full size.

The reporters are from Pulp Figures, of course.

The 7th Lead Painters League contest continues for another eight weeks over on LAF. It’s a fantastic contest on a great forum; I compete to force myself to push my painting up a notch and get stuff painted and finished! My Round Three entry is in already and will go up over on LAF Sunday morning; Rounds Four and Six are done except for basework and photography; Round Five is going to take most of the time before it’s deadline to complete, as it’s a bonus round with a big crowd of figures to finish off! Beyond that I have enough figures in progress to cover Rounds Seven through Ten, although I’m still debating what to do for bonus points and a spectacular finish in Round Ten… wish me luck!

Chinese Warlord Cards & Blinds

Posted on by
Reply

Corey recently started painting up a Chinese Warlord force from Copplestone 28mm figures to extend our Russian Civil War gaming in a more Back of Beyond direction, and he’s actually getting units painted and ready for the tabletop (normally I bug him about being the world’s slowest painter…) so I sat down with Inkscape and created a basic set of cards so his Chinese Warlord forces can run in our Through the Mud & the Blood-powered games.

This isn’t quite the full set I made for the Red & White Russian forces; it’s currently missing a LOT of the cards needed for a full M&B game. It works just fine for a Chinese force allied with a White Russian force, though, which is how they’ll be appearing in the next while, until the force gets bigger.

The PDF is four pages long. The first two pages are the cards, set up to match the earlier Russian cards. Page three has the basic graphic needed for colourful markers for a Warlord force – we use these to mark units that are activated or units that are on overwatch (what M&B calls “Wait For It”). The last page is a pair of blinds.

RCW_Warlord_complete_24March2013 — PDF, 349Kb — this file is Copyright 2013 Wirelizard Design/Brian Burger; permission granted to copy or print for personal use.

I’ll do up a full set of Warlord Chinese cards eventually. When I redid all my Russian cards in January I reconfigured the SVG file in Inkscape to make it a LOT easier to edit and create new versions. I’ll also be producing a set of British cards, so my long-neglected Brits in tropical kit can join the Back of Beyond madness in proper style.

28mm Pulp Baggage Review

Posted on by
Reply

Phil of Slug Industries (and Adventures in Wargaming, his personal blog) has recently released a set of 28mm pulp luggage. Cast in resin, you get six steamer trunks, four suitcases and three hatboxes, a nice selection to dress up any pulpish scene, provide objectives for your skulking players to try to locate, or just provide cover on a dock or train station platform!

This plethora of options is especially broad when you decide, as I did, to order three full sets of this luggage! Counting the three miscasts Phil threw into my order, I now have 42 individual pieces of baggage. Douglas Adams would have approved of this number, and so do I.

baggage

Thirteen pieces of baggage from 6mmPhil/Slug Industries. Scale provided by a Copplestone Bolshevik on the left and a Pulp Figures US Navy sailor on the right. The grid on the cutting mat is half-inch. Click for larger.

The baggage pieces are all cleanly cast in a light grey resin, and I didn’t see a single air bubble or miscast on my sets. The largest of the steamer trunks is just over waist high on a 28mm figure; the smallest hat box just slightly bigger than a typical 28mm figure’s head. Most of the flash rubbed off with my thumbnail; a couple of the smaller pieces had a bit of more solid flash around the bottom edge that needed a moment’s work with knife and sandpaper to deal with. Even two of the three “miscasts” I got with my order are perfectly usable, with just a bubble or two around the handles on the sides marking them as “miscasts” – I’ve paid full price for resin pieces with bigger casting flaws in the past!

The largest of the steamer trunks is 1.5″ long, 7/8″ wide and 3/4″ tall (37mm x 23mm x20mm); the smallest trunk on the far right of the photo above is 5/8″ x 1/2″ x 7/16″ (16mm x 12mm x 12mm).

I’m busy getting ready for the Trumpeter Salute convention in two weeks and contemplating a run at LAF’s Lead Painter’s League 7 which starts just after that, so I can’t promise I’ll have painted examples of this baggage to show off terribly soon, but I will get some of it done after Trumpeter and post pictures here. It should be fun to paint, the details are nice and crisp. Metal steamer trunks can come in a wide variety of colours, and battered, worn leather for most of the suitcases is also easy and fun to paint.

I should add, in closing, that Phil doesn’t currently have the luggage listed on his Slug Industries website, but purchase details can be found at this thread on LAF’s Bazaar forum. Everyone needs more baggage to haul around!

A Pulp Alley Game

Posted on by
2

We’ve been playing a lot of Pulp Alley recently; this photo is actually from ten days ago, not our most recent game, but it’s better than any of my snapshots from the more recent game!

pa1

Russians & others crowd around a Plot Point Marker in a backwoods jungle hamlet! Click to view larger over on Flickr.

I’ve whipped up half a dozen teams (Pulp Alley refers to them as Leagues) that we’re swapping back and forth between actual players as the spirit moves us. Being pulp, we’re well off into stereotypes, I’m afraid! There’s the stiff-upper-lip Sir Charles, who denies being an agent of the British Crown; the Teutonic schemer Stahlmaske, as dangerous to his underlings as he is to his enemies; the sinister but intoxicated General Vodkanovich, White Russian exile; the mercenary Captain B., and various other gangs of pulpish skulkers.

I’ve even brought back crowd favourite Red Lily, International Women of Mystery, although she and her crew haven’t yet appeared in a game.

We’re having a lot of fun with Pulp Alley, as should be obvious. The printed, softcover book has just been published, along with the Fortune/Challenge cards in playing-card style. I’ve got copies of both enroute, and I’ll do a proper review here on the Warbard of both when they arrive!

First Game of Pulp Alley

Posted on by
Reply

I picked up a copy of the recently published pulp skirmish rules Pulp Alley sometime last month, and we finally got a game of it in today.

Pulp Alley is published by the father & daughter team of Dave & Mila Phipps; the $10 45-page PDF has all the basic rules for pulp mayhem, designed around teams (“Leagues” in PA) of about 5-8 Heroes, Sidekicks, Allies and Followers. I’ll likely do a full review of PA soon, but the basic rules are well-written and well-edited, with nice pulpy graphic touches throughout.

For this game I copied the sample League provided in the book, hacked together a second League quickly, then assembled two more Leagues by getting players to play mix-and-match between the two existing Leagues. This left a lot of rules and features unexplored, but as a quick-and-dirty method of assembling four not-quite-identical teams it worked OK. We got out my underused tropical buildings and a few bits of jungle terrain and got to it.

pulpalley1

Early in the game. Air Pirates in the foreground, Sailors barely visible bottom-right, Russians in a clump top-right. Cultists are off-camera top-left. Click to view on Flickr.

pulpalley2

Fairly late in the game. My Air Pirates are mostly down, the Cultists have forted up in the lefthand building, and the Russians and Sailors are brawling in the street to the right. Click to view on Flickr.

I’ll be writing up a proper review of Pulp Alley sometime soon, probably in a few weeks after we have another couple of games. The initiative system is different and interesting, with initiative changing hands based on winning fights or capturing objectives. The Fortune Card deck is a great idea and added quite a lot to the game, especially a few turns into the scenario when we were all a bit more comfortable with the rules. The combat system is elegant, although I can tell I need to stop at my FLGS to get a few more d8s before our next game. Before next weeks game I want to properly build several Leagues to get a better idea of the character and League creation rules; there’s also several questions I’ll need to ask over on the Pulp Alley forums, mostly to do with wounding and recovery from wounding, which we got slightly confused by!

It was great to get back to pulp gaming again, and I’m looking forward to getting more familiar with the Pulp Alley rules.

GottaCon 2013, Friday

Posted on by
1

Spent the morning doing a few bits of last minute prep for my Russian Civil War game, mostly putting the finishing touches on the field gun and crew. Headed up to the convention site a few hours before it opened so I could get my pass ahead of time and avoid the 45 minute wait at the official doors time, then loitered in a coffee shop until just before the doors opened.

Going to the will-call pre-con ticketing turned out to be a good plan, as the lines were fairly long at the ticket door!

The evening session was taken up with a fairly quick, highly entertaining game of pulp racing run by Corey; the rules are super light, less than a page, and consist mostly of “roll something and make sh*t up, then everyone crashes!”. Scatter dice, FUDGE dice, card-based activation and possibly averaging dice are involved. Corey claims to have been sober when he wrote the rules, but I have my doubts. I ran over a skunk, an escaped circus elephant narrowly avoided being very large roadkill, one or two sheep weren’t so fortunate, and ultimately Our Hero crashed, his car nudged from behind by a Comically Evil Henchperson, and was unable to prevent the Dastardly Villain from marrying the Tragically Brainwashed Heroine. Pulp silliness ensued, in other words.

I even remembered to take photos, and one or two of them even turned out OK!

pulprace1

Early in the pulp racing game. The oncoming lane is blocked, there’s sheep in the middle of the road, a fuel truck has just pulled out to try to get around the obstacle, and here we come, driving idiotically fast! Standard pulp nonsense, in other words!

See the full GottaCon 2013 photo set on Flickr.