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September 1st, 2006

11:30 am - A Question and Some Tunes.... OK, folks -- Quick question for you, as posed by jim_hague in the comments of the last entry: Should Heroes of the New Wave be set in the "real" 1980s, or should I go for the Streets of Fire/The Warriors route and make the setting an idealized amalgam: "Another Time, Another Place"..... I mean, at the most extreme end of that tactic would be a fantasy world which would read a bit like a New Wave version of Stephen King's Dark Tower, mixing things from every age... What are your thoughts? In thanks for your input, I direct you over to my personal journal, where this week's installment of my usual Friday Music post is all about New Wave.

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August 30th, 2006

05:11 pm - Another Time, Another Place.... Those are the words that open the film Streets of Fire, and they'll probably open the rulebook of Heroes of the New Wave as well. It's appropriate, after all. I'm returning to this design idea after 3 years of it sitting neglected on the back burner of my mind. The combination of 1980s culture and the tropes of the Pulp genre in an RPG first began to occur to me when I was trying to figure out why Pulp games historically have never sold too well. In my opinion, the biggest problem was the distance between today's gamer and not only the original source material, but the time period in general. Not only does a Pulp game have to familiarize the audience with the tropes of the genre, but also with how those tropes fit into an era that is 70 years gone. During a visit to the Brooklyn Museum of Art to view a collection of Pulp cover art in 2003, the solution solidified. It occurred to me that the pulp magazines weren't publishing period pieces -- they were publishing contemporary tales of adventure, for the most part. It should be possible to tell Pulp tales in the modern day. I quickly dismissed the idea of using the modern-day setting, simply because the 21st century has no mystery left. Every inch of our globe can be brought under the scrutiny of sattelites, and instantaneous global communications is a reality. This makes it hard to convey the sense of the exotic that is a neccessary part of the genre. So, I decided to roll the clock back a bit--and my "thirty-something" nostalgia had me focused pretty quickly on the 1980s. This would allow me to set the game in the "modern" era, but still make it a period piece, of sorts. The more I thought about it, the more it made for a perfect fit. I started to think about the films and TV shows of the 80s that so many of us loved -- The A-Team, The Wizard, Magnum P.I., Big Trouble in Little China, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Remo Williams, The Goonies, etc. All of them were, at their core, Pulp. You could have set any of them in the 1930s and not lost a bit of the feel or the story. So I had my genre. 1980s neo-pulp. Which brings us to here, and now. I've been researching (game-designer-ese for watching movies, and reading books, comics and games), and taking notes as I go. I'm ready to kick-start the design process, and I've decided to return to the format that I first tried out with my Game Design: Step By Step column over at RPGnet 7 years ago. I'll use this Livejournal to chronicle my design process, answer questions, and generally talk about what's going on with the game. To kick things off, here are a couple of treats for you: First, here's a look at the cover art for Heroes of the New Wave, by UK artist David Hancock: Second, every time I post an entry here, I'll try to leave you with some New Wave, to keep you in the right frame of mind. Here you go: Missing Persons - "Words." So, we'll be getting started soon. Hop on.

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