For Out of Character Discussion.

So it looks like the pulp rules are different to the B movie ones. What are stunt points and talents?

From the rules it looks like they can be spent to do something amazing.  There's a laundry list of options in the rules: succeeding at a non-combat task no matter the difficulty, avoiding damage, etc.

You start each session with 6 stunt points.  Our GM will have to tell us what constitutes a session here, since there's no benefit to having points left at the end of the session.

Talents are extra bonuses.  For example, Monkey Climb gives Andrei a +2 bonus to climb rolls.  Grit lets him, once per session, recover HP when reduced to 0 health in a fight.  There's a list in the rules, about half of which are +1/+2 to one of your abilities (+1 for the basic talent, if you already have that the advanced talent gets you +2).

Like I said I only have the B movie rules and there isnt anything like that in there. Could someone please post a list of talents so I can choose one?

You can buy the Pulp Rules in .pdf form for only $8.

Yes but I can't justify the purchase to my family.

If its a problem then I'll either continue without talents or bug out if you are requiring me to buy the rules to play.

I'll PM you.

How ready are you to start playing?

Born ready, sir!

I'll be ready on Monday.

Also ready Monday.  I'm involved in a 24-hour gaming marathon tonight and Sunday, and likely won't recover until Monday.

OK, I'm going to get the first post up now, since it is almost Monday my time...

Hi all.

Before I post. How well do we know each other?

Presumably Mrs Taylor knows us all otherwise she wouldn't have telegraphed us but how does she know us all? What would make us meet her at the station?

You've worked together on something before - I'll let you decide which. She's offered you an interesting assignment that will pay well to boot.

I'm trying to give Jock a Scots flavour without going all-out dialect. Let me know if it's a PITA to read, and I'll dial it back.

Im trying to alter Daniel's speach, too, but its hard to know how to mix Welsh and Cockeny into a single sentence :->

I'd just throw in the odd 'boyo', 'isn't it?' and occasional rhyming slang. We can't represent the Welsh or Scottish accent directly.

I threw my character together pretty quickly last night. What, if anything, are we doing about possessions? Nobody has them on their profile.

That's a good point. I recon Daniel doesn't have that much in the way of possessions as he's been scrimping and saving for quite a while.

How about "Hey, boyo! Like the sirrup. Give me a sec I'll be there now inna minute" ?

Something like that. :)

A weapon or two amongst us might be useful if we're facing down the entire SS.

Oh, and we don't appear to have a medic on the team. I hope nobody stubs their toe behind enemy lines...

Edit: Nor do any of us speak German, so we won't have a clue what's going on, and we'll put our foot in it as soon as we open our mouths.

We'd better hope one of Georgia's NPC contacts is a bi-lingual medic who has a weakness for adventure.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:39, Thu 04 Apr 2019.

Roll a d6 and multiply by 20, that's your starting cash for equipment. Equipment can be found on Pages 38-41 of the rulebook.

I can certainly create a medic NPC.
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:02, Thu 04 Apr 2019.

We could do with an ancient languages expert too to see if the odd writing matches any kind or hieroglyphics (Call of Cthulhu head on today).

I was just wondering, have we an established posting order? I don't want to throw in Daniel's 2c without others having a chance to say something first.

In reply to Daniel Blakeman (msg # 23):

No established posting order. We'll deal with combat when it comes to it.

In reply to Georgia Taylor (msg # 22):

As to assets/belongings, the rules say

Can we stretch that to include some already-owned, background appropriate personal equipment? For example, Jock might still have his service revolver and a wee dirk, Alexei would have the throwing knives from his circus act, Georgia might have a pistol, etc.

In reply to Dick Dixon (msg # 25):

Does that mean I get to provide the beer? :->

In reply to Daniel Blakeman (msg # 26):

I dunno. What makes Daniel a pulp hero?

Sounds a good idea to me. Taylor doesn't have a pistol herself, but she can acquire one. She's a private detective operating in an country where criminals tend to not use firearms; they stick with razors and coshes, because a firearm runs a very high risk of killing someone and at this time, murder carried the death penalty in Great Britain.

He's not the hero. He is supposed to be the comic relief but I'm still trying to find my feet in the game before making an attempt at the comedy aspect.

Please find linked a map of Germany's 1935 borders with the post-war changes shown:

https://www.gifex.com/images/0.../Germany_in_1937.jpg

Breslau would become the Polish city of Wroclaw, n. The bit in the top right is now the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

As a further note, you're going to need to hire a car when you get to Breslau; driving across Europe would take too long for one thing compared with the train... or flying.

I've updated Jock's profile with a few freebie possessions, courtesy of the GM.

Conversation on the train seems to have stalled now that everyone has made suggestions. Where should we take it from here? Summary? Plan of Action? Queries about the camp? I'm happy to make more contributions, but I'm not sure where to take it. What is expected of Chapter 1?

Andrei's happy to plan, but is assuming that Georgia already has a plan in place for getting them to the destination (since she seems to be very organized).

What no small talk between us?

Lol.

I'm just gonna follow everyone's lead for now.

Actually I dont want to slow the game down but we might want to estabish a posting order. Charlotte's player seems slower than the rest of us as they have only posted twice. We may need to slow down to give her time to catch up.

Also, I can't usually post weekends.

I don't want to exclude anyone, but slowing a game down to the pace of the slowest poster is usually a shortcut to game failure. Likewise, strict posting order is often a death-knell, as the game grinds to a halt waiting for Player X to post.

The pace of PbP games is so slow generally, that anything that slows them down even more is to be avoided at all costs, IMO.

Because of that inherent slowness, an absence of a few hours, or even a day or two, is not likely to leave anyone irrevocably behind, and the GM can always retcon if a player's absence leads to some game-changing anomaly.

Let's keep the momentum going while we have it.

I'm going to make a further post tomorrow.

Fair enough on the post rate but please lets not rush. I enjoy roleplaying social interaction just as much (sometimes more) as I do action scenes.

In reply to Daniel Blakeman (msg # 37):

We're on the same page there. I'm easy in either scenario, once the GM has pointed us in the right direction. :)

Incidentally, I included a piccy of Jock's house. It will probably just remain chrome, but if the GM ever feels the need to go there, I also found more pics and a floorplan. Again, easy either way, I don't want to hog the game. It's just characterization I can draw on.

Nice house. Georgia's office is located above the recently opened Quadrant Arcade in Romford, but her accommodation is a upper storey flat on the road out of town.

Jock probably used his army pension and some returns on 'odd jobs' to pay for it.

I added a sentence to my previous post when I saw what Georgia had posted ahead of me.

I'm starting to like your plan. You'll probably need to backstop it with your paper though.

In reply to The Whip Cracker (msg # 42):

Ah, well, any inquiries will have to go through Glynis, the publisher's secretary. She and I have a certain...hm...understanding. I can get her to cover for me. I think.

As soon as I wrote that post, I got an urge to eat some cream crackers.

I would imagine, that close to the supposed end of the Depression, there would be a lot of pawn shops in towns all over the country. There would be brass balls everywhere, whatever the weather...

I'm not sure when they fizzled out, but they're back now! :(

Second-hand shops have remained with us throughout, but the business of pawning and redeeming fell out of favour for a long while - possibly post-war, when we 'never had it so good'?

Going to wait a bit to see if anyone else want to post.

Im good at the moment. Don't feel I can add much yet until someone else posts. ;-)

Im a bit dissapointed that Charlotte disappeared after just a few posts though.

Well, at least I can write her out here if she's leaving at this point. I have mailed her player.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:15, Wed 17 Apr 2019.

Plan to resolve the combat here tomorrow.

I'll be out of town and mostly out of Internet access for the week, until Monday the 17th. Feel free to have Andrei look menacing as needed.

Thanks for letting me know.

Just checking to see who is still here.

Present.

Back, and mostly over the con crud.

Where's Jock's player?
This message was last edited by the player at 19:06, Sun 30 June 2019.

In reply to The Whip Cracker (msg # 55):

Since Jock hasn't checked in for 6 weeks, he may have left the game.

That puts us down to three players then... I'm starting to wonder if it might be best to call this a bust.

Hi folks, sorry for my prolonged absence. I haven’t died, but my computer did. Then the new computer wouldn’t run my old software, then I had to find something that would run, and how to run it. It’s been a nightmare.

<rant>
It seems that Micros***, in its wonderful and beneficent wisdom, has decided to replace BIOS - the basic system that all computers use to understand their surroundings - the drivers that tell the computer how to recognize drivers...

It looks like Billy Gates’s people have made the computer companies an offer they can’t refuse, and all new computers are now using Micros***'s UEFI instead of the independent BIOS. Which is supposed to be great for Windows users, but if, like me, you use Linux: tough luck! “We’re takin’ over this neck o’ the woods, an’ you ain’t welcome round here no more." The new computer couldn’t even see my old software, let alone load it.

Eventually, I found a version of Linux that would run on the new computer, and managed to get it all set up and working, but it’s taken weeks!
</rant>

I’ll come clean and say that this is not the only thing that’s kept me away from Rpol over the past few weeks, but it’s the biggest thing and it provides the best excuse, so I’m sticking to it. :)

Anyhow, if the game's still running, I'm here and willing to continue.

Welcome back! I'm definitely willing to continue if you are.

Shall we skip ahead a bit?

In reply to Georgia Taylor (msg # 59):

Yes, let's.

Suits me. We've lost Daniel's player, then? Pity.

Maybe it's not too late for further recruitment? Linguist, medic, etc? Worst case, if they drop out, we're back to NPCing those roles, but we may attract other long-term players with them.

Skipping ahead is fine with me.

Yes, that's a good idea. I'll post an advert. I've got an NPC linguist/medic lined up, but we might need two.

Hello, I've taken up Caroline Silk.

I'll be reading up to the present, and figuring out a good jumping-on point.

In reply to Caroline Silk (msg # 64):

Welcome, Caroline.

Welcome to the party. :)

I'm planning to have us all meet up in Georgia's office and discuss from there.

Sounds good.

Are we using 'Charlotte' or 'Caroline'?

The character was originally Charlotte, and has been so named in Georgia's latest post, but is displayed in the Cast List, and mentioned in the OOC thread by the new player, as Caroline.

I'm easy either way, but we should probably be consistent.

Yep, it should be Charlotte. I'll change it.

Please let us see what you look like, Charlotte. :)

Quick question: do I do "What my PC would know" sorts of questions in OOC or IC in a different color?

OOC, in Orange please.

Hi! Bit of a delay- tornado KOd power and the repair estimate has been moved to Friday.

I'm going for a medical procedure this morning. Hope to be fully recovered tomorrow.

Take care of yourself!

Hope everything goes well.

Indeed, same from me!

Procedure went well, but left me a bit washed out. Will catch up and post soon.

Glad to hear it.

Who is around at the moment?

In reply to The Whip Cracker (msg # 81):

yyyellow

Yo!

Here

Right. I'll make an IC post tomorrow then.

I'm going to start the next chapter on Friday or Saturday.

Who is still here?

Yo.

Here

present

Can you post in the Chapter 2 thread please?

I am intending to delete this game as it is clearly long dead.