Dec 13, 2023
THE PHANTOM CREEPS (Universal, 1939)
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from Sweden
seen from Bulgaria
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from China
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Italy
seen from Tajikistan
seen from Netherlands
seen from Japan
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Bulgaria
seen from Bulgaria
THE PHANTOM CREEPS (Universal, 1939)
hi tumblr i'm struggling to figure out what to post here bc twitter hasn't quite imploded yet BUT!!! i ran a playtest one-shot of 194X! today and it went great!!
my players made a phenomenal crew of pulp heroes, even with none of them having a ton of genre familiarity:
Flannory "Flan" de Lèche (they/she), a veteran of the Continental War who's tall and tough - there's nothing she can't fix with her fists, shotgun, and trusty toolbox!
Hahn Von Vabel (He/Him), antisocial genius and defector from the world-dominating ranks of NACHT, equipped with an incredible brain and an array of unstable, hand-made machines
Roseline Lachance (they/she), heiress of the once-great Lachance family, has wasted away their fortune and her years chasing immortality and other scraps of occult lore
Siobhan Darkholm (She/It), "the Fox Hunter," a quick-handed historian with a heart of gold, beloved by attractive older women the world over
i explicitly did 0 prep for this session, and simply rolled on the game's random roll tables to create a Serial on the fly...
...sending our Heroes to a wandering iceberg, where a vicious blizzard hides an ancient temple full of vampires! To add a little more texture (and because punching Nazis is a genre staple), I had NACHT troopers beat them to the scene, with the over-the-top Dark Kommandant leading an excavation alongside a number of goons.
Pulp action ensued, with NACHT troopers slain in a variety of fun ways and a spear-wielding vampire bested in a bloody duel - and other than a couple minor tweaks, I'm very happy calling the game a success. 24XX stuff is just an absolute joy for throwing a fun evening of play together on short notice like this: just under 4 hours, for a no-prep session that included character creation.
If that sounds fun to you, check out the alpha version here!
No, it’s not Tony Stark in his Mark 1 armor. Nor is it an early attempt at filming Tetsujin 28 (Ironman 28 aka Gigantor); that would be some trick, as this film is from 1936 - twenty years before the Tetsujin 28 manga was published! And it’s definitely not the legendary lost Japanese film Robots Need Love, Too.
This is instead the first installment of a 3-part serial, Kai-Denpa Satsujin Kosen Dai Ichi-Hen - Ningen Tanku Shutsugen (Strange Electric Death Ray 1: Human Tank Emergence).
Not to be outdone by other countries that had pulp serials featuring robots on the loose, Japan’s Daito Eiga studio released their own version, replete with the usual suspects: a mad scientist, a damsel in distress, disfigured henchmen, a masked man, and the “human tank.”
The other two parts of the serial, Kai-Denpa Satsujin Kosen Dai Ni-Hen - Tenku Ko Kyoi (Strange Electric Death Ray 2: Deadly Sky), and Kai-Denpa Satsujin Kosen San-Hen - Seiun Kaiketsu-Hen (Strange Electric Death Ray 3: Clear Resolution) were released later the same year.
lo-fi pulp adventure
howdy, folks - i'm back at it again with yet another 24XX microgame! in 194X, you play as two-fisted pulp heroes of a radio-age Earth that never was, crossing the globe to tangle with all sorts of monsters and menaces! it's currently in a pre-layout alpha version, but i'm super proud of what's there 😊