‘Adventure!’ is another table-top role-playing game from storied publisher The Onyx Path (who used to be known as White Wolf back in the day), another game that uses the ‘Trinity Continuum’ rules that ‘Aberrant’ (Superhero RPG) and ‘Aether’ (Steampunk RPG) run on.
Adventure! is all about the 1930s ‘pulp adventures’ of lantern-jawed. good-old boys landing their seaplanes in pirate lagoons next to steaming jungles to go and raid temples, deliver swift right hooks to evil professors and so on, similar to Indiana Jones, The Phantom, Doc Savage, Uncharted, Broken Sword and a whole bunch of other stuff. The core book these illustrations are from is out now.
No action-packed pulp adventure is complete without a car chase to an airstrip, where the baddies’ plane / zeppllin is about to take off, and here’s this book’s version, complete with Tommy guns, shot-up jalopy cars, downed mooks and duffel bags of money flying about. This is the part where I should be able to tell you exactly what kind of period-correct plane that is, but I’ve gone and lost the name of it. Ding it. It does have those cool engines that don’t have shrouds around them though.
Shady members of a shadowy orginisation called ‘The Order of Murder’, congratulating themselves at killing someone, stealing their face and fingerprints and transferring them to one of their number, the woman on the right of the picture. The missing face bit could have been super gory, so I put it towards the back.
Harbourside tug-boatin’ fun! This is some sailors in Korea, towing the salvaged hulk of a Japanese warship across the entrance to a harbour to try and block the group of other Japanese warships that’re approaching. All part of the those high stakes action set-pieces ‘the pulps’ are known for. And it’s a world-wide thing. This was for a part of the book about adventuresome opportunities for adventurers in different parts of the globe. Referencing the boats (particularly the cute tugboat) was fun, I’ve not really done much nautical themed stuff in the past. I didn’t find quite as much material about the 1930s Japanese warships as I suspected I would, but never mind.
Weird science plane fiddling in Canada. This is also from the chapter about the exotic destinations in far-flung places. The plane is (wait for it) a North American Harvard T-6 training plane belonging to the Royal Canadian Air Force and they actually were a thing, complete with the striking colour scheme, in a lot of air forces.
Head-twistingly-good double-teaming on a hired goon, taking place in Indiana Jones style warehouses with majority female beatdowns being administered to wiseguys who’re big, but out of shape… For no Adventure! adventurer should adventure alone, they will have their stalwart buddies with them too. The art brief mentioned a low sweep kick, and I got all excited about how maybe it look a bit like a capoeira move. (Capoeira being the Afro-Brazilian martial art involving music, singing, play-fighting, break-dancing and kick-boxing all at once. I did it for years and really need to get back into it…)
Anyway, all this and much more derring do in the form of art and words from diverse hands is available in the Trinity Continuum: Adventure! Core Book, out now.