Hard Boiled Pulp Fiction

A simple retooling of your Cyberpunk/USR rule set hack for pulp era equipment, and weapons should get your eager adventurers out into the campaign world quickly. For your Pulp Fiction option on your genre tree I have decided to make Miami '38 the PC's opening sandbox. Any warm blooded GM should be able to take such an exotic, new urbane locale and create story hooks aplenty promising to hit tried and true high notes of pulp adventure. Colorful villains, bizarre crimes and mystery, weird science, etc.

In some ways, the story of Greater Miami is a classic American tale of displacement, entrepreneurship, refugee hopes and desperate innovation. But don’t forget the footnotes: corruption, neglect, and bloody community divisions. The end product is hardly perfect. But it’s also continuously resurrecting itself, as new immigrants push into low-rise tenements, and the nouveau riche reinvent the glittering Miami skyline.

Using the intriguing Abulafia Random Generators for this exercise I get a cocky reporter needing to make his parents proud, a silver tongued mobster with an unrequited love, and a humble archaeologist bent on thwarting a sinister secret cult. I used the USR system to flesh out these characters with their stats, abilities, and gear. From there it would be time to pitch your players with the eternal GM question, "What do you do?"