Tag Archives: pulp

A Classic Lost World Image

Via x-ray delta one on Flickr, this image (no source is given) is a classic “Lost World” illustration!

... garden tour gone bad!

I want a 28mm miniature of the guy on the left in the front, with bandaged head and machete! (I have lots of mighty hunter types with guns, but a shortage of assisstants, helpers, native guides and flunkies to fill out the rest of the safari party…)

Click through to Flickr for larger verisons. Lots of other neat pulpish and 20s/30s images on x-ray delta one’s photostream, too. Well worth checking out! Posted under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

One Week Until GottaCon & “Amulet of Fire”!

Next Friday GottaCon 2011 opens here in Victoria, and a week today, Saturday the 5th, is my pulp adventure game, “The Amulet of Fire”.

I’ve just finished the Encounter Cards for both Acts of Amulet. Here’s a few of the possible Encounters for Act One, “The Missionary Position”:
AoF Act One cards
Continue reading One Week Until GottaCon & “Amulet of Fire”!

Mesa we will see you again?

Climbing up the side of the mesaLarge terrain pieces are the lifeblood of any good gaming table and in a fit of boredom late one night at my old job (after my work was done for the day, honest), I set out to create such a piece.

Enter the mesa. Like many such projects, there was absolutely no prior design, just some scribblings on a pad before I set off to construct it. I knew I wanted a stone arch with a pathway up and over for characters to fight on, and I wanted a winding road up to a plateau, but everything else came as I hacked and sawed.

Continue reading Mesa we will see you again?

Old Signs for your Pulp Gaming

Old Signs for Pulp Gaming
Old Signs for Pulp Gaming

Inspired by my brother’s Fake Pulp Adverts post, I thought I would share one of my projects. Over the past few weeks I have been working on a series of old signs for pulp-era 28mm gaming. Designed for any era from the 1900’s to the 1940’s and in any part of the English-speaking world, these signs are fairly versatile.

You can also download the PDF version (Old Signs for Pulp Gaming) if you want a vectorized copy for scaling. As usual, these are designed in the superlative Inkscape, an Open Source vector editing program. The fonts used largely come from DaFont, which has a large set of free and Open Source fonts for use.

Where did the idea come from? The initial inspiration was this image of a locksmith shop in Winnipeg by one of my Flickr contacts:

Old locksmith shop in Winnipeg. Picture by rpaterso
Old locksmith shop in Winnipeg. Picture by rpaterso

After that I started to dive into the Shorpy image archive and came up with some gold. Images such as the one below are great for mining for re-creation:

Old Corner Bookstore: 1900 on Shorpy
Old Corner Bookstore: 1900 on Shorpy

The files are currently licensed for non-commercial, personal use, largely because not all the fonts used allow commercial publication.

Random Pulp Fake Adverts.

I’ve posted these on various forums, but never collected them into one place before. For your amusement, a batch of fake 1930s ads – grab the full size versions off Flickr to reproduce for your personal use on the sides of buildings, on billboards, or whatever!
Continue reading Random Pulp Fake Adverts.

The Amulet of Fire

Fighting Tales: The Amulet Of Fire

After running last year’s .45 Adventures convention scenario at least six times, it was time to retire it. Few things worse than a bored gamemaster, trust me.

So this year’s convention scenario is going to be a two-act thing (two smaller scenarios instead of one larger one), and because my mind works in strange ways sometimes, the first thing I’ve finished is another “Fighting Tales” faux cover. (First three together here)

The rest of the scenario should be finished, first draft at least, this weekend, then it’s a playtest and on to it’s first public showing at GottaCon 2011, 4-6 Feb.

Building A 28mm Tent

There’s been previous versions of this tutorial posted on Lead Adventure and the Speakeasy, but I figured it’s worth reposting here.

After killing a dress shirt (black ink leaking does that to white cotton) I realized it would work nicely as material for a large safari/expedition tent. I used a CD as the base, with small blobs of milliput holding long toothpicks vertically as the poles — three on the front, three on the back. After the putty holding the poles was dry (and reinforced with a bit of superglue) I wrapped thick sewing thread around the tips of the poles, with a dab of superglue holding it in place and a bit more superglue stiffening the thread after it was secured.

Model Tent
(click through to Flickr for a full-size image)

The fabric was cut twice as tall as it needed to be, and draped over the thread at the tops of each wall, with a generous layer of white glue on the inside of each piece. The walls were folded over, squeezed together and held whilst drying by clothspegs.

Two layers of shirt-weight cotton plus white glue makes for very solid walls!

Loitering Within Tent
(click through to Flickr for a full-size image)

The removable roof was made by first draping a piece of plastic wrap over the tent walls, then carefully folding and pinning the piece of glue-soaked cotton into position. I folded the eves up and trimmed them after the first coat of glue was dry, and it fits well; between the glue and the folding it’s more than rigid enough to hold it’s shape.

There’s an extra piece of cotton to form the floor, and most of the interior furniture is made of offcuts of basswood and styrene, with putty for the blanket and pillow. The maps were found on the internet, shrunk to appropriate tiny sizes, and printed out. The red coffee mug in the centre of the large map is a scrap of round styrene.

I’ve still got a good sized piece of this shirt; eventually more of it will live again as smaller tents to accompany this one. Recycling — it doesn’t just involve a blue bin, you know. Not for wargamers, anyway!

The Seagull

Seagull Boat
The 1933 PopMech “Seagull” boat.

In 1933, according to Popular Mechanics, there was the Seagull, which “…skims water at seventy miles an hour.”

In 28mm resin, in the present day, we have this:

28mm Seagull
28mm Seagull

Painted and lightly modified back in 2009 by myself, produced by the eccentric and excellent Tobsen77 from Germany. The paintjob is inspired equally by classic wood-and-white yachts and the gleaming metal of The Spirit of Saint Louis and other 20s/30s projects.

It still hasn’t appeared in a game, actually. One of these days it will, possibly as the one-man escape craft of a dashing-but-dastardly Leader of the Evil Conspiracy. Can’t you just picture it zooming away from a dock, leaving hapless minions and frustrated pursuers equally behind?

(My take on the Seagull has previously appeared on Lead Adventure and elsewhere, but heck, it deserves another moment to itself.)