He was Pâwang Ali, free-lance investigator, and mortally feared by criminals because he closed cases by submitting a report which inevitably read, “Killed while resisting arrest.”
‘The Dragon’s Shadow’ (1935)
The trouble with homebrews is that – however satisfying – they can’t make any sense beyond one’s own immediate gaming circle. That makes them impossible to use as lingua franca. 180Homebrew is definitely bastardised BRP and, because it is roll under blackjack, in the Mythras lineage.
An experiment has been to try and back Mythras stat blocks into 180Homebrew. Since our current interest is Pulp, this proved to be a somewhat quixotic mission; Mythras does not deal with classic era Pulp in a coherent fashion (neither does it pretend to, it’s RuneQuest 6) and there are few easily useable statblocks for the genre.
Which is a long-winded way of saying a bit of work was required. The method was to take stat blocks of NPCs featured in official Design Mechanism publications and re-skin them as lightly as possible.
To further demonstrate that this blog is a creature of caprice, the archetypes are keyed to the encounter generator in James Bond 007. Thus we have:
Beautiful Foil
Privileged Henchman
Shady Contact
Fellow Agent
Guard
Technician
Civilian
The main mechanical lesson of the exercise is that Mythras characters need to be at Pâwang Ali, El Borak or even Doc Savage level to survive in Pulp World. The Privileged Henchman backed by a few Guards would be a recipe for slaughter otherwise. Or Traveller levels of caution – which isn’t really the vibe.
*Erratum
When I came to use the stat block for Privileged Henchman I spotted a mistake in the damage done by HTH weapons. This is amended above.
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