#pulp adventure

[spacenoirdetective]

Frank Frazetta, cover art for "Tarzan the Invincible", 1962

[chernobog13]

Dr. Totenkopf's giant robots attack New York City in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004).

GIFs by me

[manyworldspress]

Frank Frazetta, original painting for Luana, 1972. Oil on canvas-wrapped board, 24 x 30 inches. From top: the original artwork; the movie poster; Alan Dean Foster’s novelization (Ballantine Books, 1974); and the cover of Vampirella #31 (Warren, March 1974).

__________________________________________________ Our shop: https://bookshop.org/shop/manyworldspress

[dericbindel]

The Core - A Setting Guide

The Core is a place deep, deep underground. Some might say impossibly deep.

While its societies may look familiar, dig a little deeper and one will find they differ greatly. Every person here is part of a rich tapestry, a blending of many species and constructs and their cultures.

Hey there, as part of the Tiny Worlds TTRPG Jam, I've assembled some of my worldbuilding into a 7 page setting guide! Get down to the Core for some pulpy retro-future sci-fi adventure and intrigue!

Within, you'll find information on:

The Core overall

DownTown, a place of tinkering and adventure

The Haydrian Mass Foundries, a city-factory of industry and spirituality

The Shattered Pillar, a place where reality itself has fallen apart

The Nexus, a secluded machine hivemind

The Core - A Setting Guide by Deric Bindel

A pulpy retro-future sci-fi setting for action, mystery, and adventure!

I had a lot of fun working on this, and making the section marker art! Here are all five collected together:

[oldschoolfrp]

"Meet me on Pier 32 tonight at 11:00. You've got something I want, and I've got something you want. I propose we make a trade." Spoiler: The cultist contact is not alone, but has a Formless Spawn of Tsathogghua waiting to greet the party. Steve Purcell illustrated Darren Tschida's Call of Cthulhu adventure "The Eye of Sitar," set in San Francisco in 1922, in Different Worlds #38, Chaosium, Jan/Feb 1985.

[user24709]

[beyonddarknessintolight]

I've worked on a few movies in my time, so far. This one, however, is a fantastic blend of so many things I vibe with: pulpy adventure stories, magical relics, post-apocalyptic/dystopian elements, creative and clever action set-pieces, memorably eccentric characters (both in the main cast and supporting), a story with a strong heart and themes about self-growth and reconciliation, and above all, the scrappy spirit of independent filmmaking.

My friends Jarrod Crooks and Erin Crooks are cooking up a fabulous new addition to the adventure movie genre, and I feel so proud to be on the creative team in any way. This is the kind of project I truly believe in, deep in my gut, and that I want to look back on someday and say 'this one really really mattered.'

But now it needs help from YOU. Any donation, however small, is going to get this one over the finish line. Having seen a lot of what they've done so far, I cannot state enough how special and unique this movie will be, and if you want to do 'anything' for me during these crazy times, help my friends pull this off.

Welcome to the pantheon, Vexx Torn!

Donate to Help Bring Our Post-Apocalyptic Adventure to Life, organized by Jarrod Crooks

Ever since I was 12 years old, I’ve been making movies and dreaming up… Jarrod Crooks needs your support for Help Bring Our Post-Apocalyptic

[jadegretz]

Sheena: Queen of Vines ANIMATION

River of Hungry Teeth

Not every river forgives. Some remember, and memory in water is an appetite.

They called the place Onomo—an elbow of the great river where the mangroves bowed their knotted heads like old women at prayer and fishing canoes lay like sleepwalkers, painted in flaking blues and reds. In the mornings the river gave: fish silver as coins, tubers washed to shore, the slow, reliable life of trade and gossip. In the evenings it kept its counsel. And once, in a night that tasted of iron and jasmine, that counsel turned to a kind of hungry sermon.

Sheena came like a predator of other reckonings. She wore the jungle as a second skin: dark hair braided with vine, a leathered skirt that fluttered like shadowed leaves when she moved. Her eyes could read the patterns the river made; she could tell from a ripple how many fins skimmed beneath. To the villagers she was queen in the language of myth and muscle—beautiful, yes, but also a blade and a promise. She had saved Onomo once before, when fever cut through its children like a thin blade. She had been the cold remedy then; now the village looked to her and watched the far water like mourners waiting for an explained absence.

The first thing the villagers noticed was a silence: there were no gulls at dawn, only a thick, clinging fog that smelled faintly of iron and of something else—old blood, maybe, or our teeth. Men went fishing and came back with nets empty and hunched; women drew water and found it full of small, gnawed bones. Then the dogs began to whisper their fears in small stages: a fish splayed on the bank with a second row of teeth; a child’s paddle bitten clean in half, the wood chewed to splinters like cartilage.

At dusk a fisherman named Tano came staggering into the village with a patch of skin torn from his calf and an animal’s breath hissing at the back of his neck. He could only gasp two words.

“Crocodiles…wrong.”

Sheena met them by the lamps in the central square. The lamplight made her a dark, definite silhouette. She pressed her palm to the river’s bank; mud and riverweed clung to her hand as if recognizing an old kin. “Tell me everything,” she said. Her voice had the slow authority of someone naming things before the world could beat them down.

An elder woman, Amaka, whose hair was as white as the teeth the river spat, told what Tano could not. “They come with the moon like a second moon. Eyes like button-coals. They hum, Sheena. Those that go missing—sometimes we hear them speaking from the water afterward. Not our tongues. Something beneath.”

Sheena listened until she had the map of movement in her head: the places the animals avoided, the time of tide when the river went quiet like a mouth closing. She sent out boys to watch the banks, but there were no fires; the crocodiles moved without the clumsy clatter of teeth in the sand. They were streamlined wrong, scales glistening but a sick, oily black like a patch of engine grease. And there was a stench in their wake—a metallic scent that tasted of factories and other people’s hands.

That night the river offered a woman.

She appeared at the edge of the mangrove, a silhouette half in water and half in steam. She wore a dress that seemed cut from the river itself: thin, filmy, clinging. Her hair was long and slick as an eel. Her skin shone like damp stone under the moon.

“You are Sheena,” she said, voice like a bell under water. It was a phrase that was not a question but a recognition.

“Sheena,” repeated the villagers, naming the visitor like a thing that might be conjured or chased away. But Sheena stepped forward with the certainty of someone who understands trickery. “Who are you?” she asked.

The woman smiled, and in the curve of her lips something old and animal blinked. “Call me Liala,” she said. “Call me the river’s sister. Call me what you want. I come to offer a bargain.”

“Bargains from rivers come cheap and bite,” Sheena said. The villagers laughed nervously. Seduction arrived not with lust alone but with the promise of easy solutions. Liala’s eyes were the color of wet pebbles; they looked at Sheena with a warmth that might be kindness or might be the slow planning of a predator.

“What price?” Sheena asked.

“Only a memory. A night. The river wants someone to remember it wholly.” Liala’s voice smoothed the word as if it were a caress. “In exchange, I will gather the teeth and spit them from her mouth. …(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai). For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)