Gruntfuttock wrote:

I've actually not seen either film, which is surprising as Alison loves Tom Selleck! Lassiter is just up my street, particularly as it features the sadly missed Bob Hoskins (playing a copper for a change). I'm sure I'd like it.

Yeah, as soon as Hoskins appeared on screen I got a bit melancholy. 

Not that I have anything against globe-trotting adventure. I ran a series of games about investigators working for a ficitious criminal investigation unit of the League of Nations where characters roamed the world bringing criminals to justice. Nations who were part of the League could request help with cases, and if a crime crossed borders and it wasn't clear who had jurisdiction, the unit would also investigate. Sometimes however they did go to non-League countries undercover if the clues led there. J.Edgar Hoover hated the unit and would arrest any caught on US soil. A great appeal of the game for the players was that they would never know where the next case would send them.

That sounds like a fun setting! 

I'm a firm favourite of not having magic or the supernatural in 'modern day' games. Although I also run modern day monster hunters from time to time. Our Hollywood Pulse games are usually all about monster hunting or mad mages, and Ze Ze Bastide does come across the supernatural in 1930s South America from time to time. However with Ze Ze I use the 'Indy Rule' - one supernatural maguffin only per game.

I've done a few modern day Monster Hunter games and there's usually some kind of magic in the superhero games I run. I really like reading C.J. Carella's Witchcraft game, though I don't know that I'd have wanted to play it. I'm not crazy for Urban Fantasy, but I do love The Dresden Files. Also Buffy, Angel, and Supernatural. The latter, in particular, because it's mostly about plain old humans kicking monster ass. 

The one supernatural MacGuffin rule is usually a good one for keeping things grounded but leaving mysteries to uncover. 

Gruntfuttock wrote:

When it comes to 'neo-pulp' films I have a great affection for the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy films. They both move at a rattling pulp speed, and while the first one is the best the second has some lovely scenes. They really capture the pulp flavour, just as well as Raiders did.

The less said about the third film the better. 

I don't actually hate the third film, though it does suffer from the absence of Rachel Weisz. (I say this despite being a Maria Bello fan.) 

But the first movie is definitely on par with Raiders for me. I wish there were more movies in that vein. (I know there are plenty of not-very-good films like them, but many of them aren't even so-bad-they're-good flicks.)

(This reminds me, and forgive me if I've mentioned this here before, of how people accused The Phantom of "ripping off Raiders" when it came out. They had no clue that the character was from that era, and thus was probably an inspiration for Raiders.)

Gruntfuttock wrote:

That's the sort of sneaky thief writers and directors put into sword and sorcery films as comic relief - and they are generally the most irritating characters in the film. Devito did it right in Romansing the Stone, and I always wanted to see him in tunic and sandles standing next to Arnold's Conan, figuring out when to double cross the stupid barbarian and make off with the loot.

So DeVito should have played a much more interesting Malak in Conan the Destroyer? 

(No offense to Tracey Walter. They didn't give him much to do in that film.)
 

Gruntfuttock wrote:

Would I be right in assuming that you are planning a 1920s/30s globe trotting game? If so, there are two ways to do this that work well, in my opinion. One is like my League of Nations 'Cops from Geneva' game - a new locale every week. As I said above, the players really liked not knowing where they were going to go from case to case.

Starting to look like it may be less of a Pulp Adventure game and more of a Pulp Crimefighters/Golden Age Supers game. Am thinking of something along the lines of your "Cops from Geneva" set up. Possibly mixed with a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen angle, where a patron (possibly a Victorian Era hero) assembles these disparate heroes because the League of Nations isn't exactly knocking it out of the park in terms of combating the rising tide of fascists and evil masterminds. Unlike the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, their patron [SPOILERS FOLLOW] won't betray them and be revealed as a secret villain. I'm a little tired of the Patron-Is-Evil trope.

The other way was suggested in an afterthought in the GURPS 3rd edition supplement 'Places of Power' (if you want some kind of magical focus to the game). PoP was a list of many (probably too many as they were all covered quite lightly) sites across the world with places with some supernatural myth attached to them - Stonehenge, for example. They also included Atlantis. In suggestions at the back of the book it proposed linking all of the sites together in a single campaign. This is the basic thread of many classic Call of Cthulhu campaigns of course.

That reminds me, in some ways, of the set up for Robin D. Laws' Feng Shui. Though without the time travel aspect. I'm thinking that there will be some of the travel the world thwarting the machinations of an evil conspiracy. Likely one that's helping the various and sundry political baddies further their plans. I also plan to incorporate some eldritch horrors into the mix, so the CoC reference is fairly apt..

But obviously, you can mix and match this. In my League game the investigators 'followed the money' trying to track down evidence that a noted German industrialist was actually the master criminal known as The Cardinal. So they travelled to Italy, France, the UK, Germany, the USA, and finally back to France where they arrested the villain - job done. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, and the team moved on to other cases for a year of playing time. And then he escaped and returned to Europe bent on revenge!

Nice! I'm thinking along those lines, though not quite the same. Years back I created a superhero for a Mutants & Masterminds game whose background included an Evil Mastermind who posed as a philanthropic type running a massive organization dedicated to global "order." Probably going to retool him as a Pulp Era villain (won't take a lot of tweaking).

One of the investigators was a retired jewel thief, blackmailed into working for the law to avoid jail. Which makes me think of Lassiter. The Saint is the classic reformed (sort of) thief in the original source material.

I ran a Shadows of the Century game ('80s Action Hero supplement for Evil Hat's Spirit of the Century) a few years back where we had a gentleman thief (at least he thought so) strong armed into working for an aging Centurion who put together a team consisting of the thief, a hacker, a cyborg from an alternate timeline, and a weird tech gadgeteer. That one was a challenge, because only one of the players took to heart my exhortation that this was an '80s Action Movie/TV show campaign, so everyone should be combat capable. I think three of the four thought, "Well, if I'm not, everyone else will be!"